Scriptnotes Transcript

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

**John August:** Bonjour et bienvenue. Je m’appelle John August.

**Craig Mazin:** Je m’appelle Craig Mazin.

**John:** [French language]. Craig, we’re back. You’re back from Calgary. I’m back from France. We are back in our native home city of Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Correct. We were both in countries where things on wrappers are printed in French.

**John:** That’s true, yes, and French rappers rap in French.

**Craig:** French rappers are the best. I assume you were there for fun.

**John:** For fun, yes.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Spent some time touring the UK, looking at some schools for our daughter. Then we were just back in France for the first time since the pandemic. Longtime listeners will know that I used to live there. It was nice to be back and seeing my old haunts. The boulangerie which was our favorite place to get pastries every day was still there, but slightly less good than it was before.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** Something happened.

**Craig:** Life happens, John. Life happens. It must’ve been nice to return there. It must’ve been nice to be overseas and not working. I can’t say I was overseas. I was over-border. I was over over-border.

**John:** You were over-border, yeah. I did no Scriptnotes work at all.

**Craig:** That’s wonderful. That’s great. Look, wasn’t it nice?

**John:** It was so nice.

**Craig:** Let’s just say, without freaking anyone out, I will simply say sometimes it’s nice to not do Scriptnotes.

**John:** It really is.

**Craig:** It really is.

**John:** [inaudible 00:01:23] not be thinking about it.

**Craig:** If you don’t realize that you’ve got… Oh, it’s not a big deal. It’s just that there’s this splinter. It doesn’t hurt. Then one day 10 years later they take the splinter out and you’re like, “Oh, wow. It’s actually way better without that splinter.” Nobody should get nervous or anxious.

**John:** Don’t worry.

**Craig:** Don’t get anxious.

**John:** Everything’s fine.

**Megana Rao:** I am really anxious.

**Craig:** No no no. Megana, sleep.

**Megana:** I don’t like where this conversation is going.

**Craig:** Sleep.

**John:** Let’s get to today’s episode so that Megana gets less nervous. Today on the show, effing magnets, how do they work? More specifically, how do you create characters who both pull in the viewer and pull themselves through the story? We’ll look at techniques for adjusting the magnetic fields. We’ll also catch up on a lot of news on animation writing, the CW, and more. There’ll be no Bonus Segment at the end for Premium Members, because instead, they just get a whole Bonus Episode we just created, where we talk with the creator of Wordle and the author of 50 Years of Text Games about ways to use words for fun and profit. It was a good conversation, yes, Craig?

**Craig:** It was fantastic. I think everybody will enjoy it. Naturally, the two of us make sure that it is of interest to everyone, including people that don’t play word games, because there’s universal things that need to be examined, and they were.

**John:** Craig, I think we had one text exchange during my entire vacation, which was Craig writing, “Hell froze over.” I had no idea what the context was. We can now say that hell froze over because Craig Mazin was invited to join the Motion Picture Academy.

**Craig:** If you’re a longtime listener, you know that was something that was never going to happen, and it happened. I was invited to join the Motion Picture Academy. I am now in the Motion Picture Academy. I’m a part of a very exciting and interesting freshman class.

**John:** Craig, you are now an Academy member. I’m so excited to be attending Academy events with you and such and making fun of speakers and-

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** …doing all the Academy business.

**Craig:** I will say that the number of emails that I receive per day has shot up dramatically. I guess I’ll have to figure out how to manage the email influx from the Academy. It’s nice. I am excited to vote for the Oscars. That sounds like it would be a fun thing to do.

**John:** It’s fun to do. It’s actually a really well-designed voting system. Of course, you’ll be a part of the Academy app, which is where you’ll see all the screeners, which is actually really well-designed.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** It’s good stuff.

**Craig:** I think it’s wonderful. I think it was our own Aline Brosh McKenna, the living Joan Rivers of Scriptnotes, who may have put my name forward. I should thank her for that. It was also gratifying because you can become a member of the Academy simply by being nominated for something or you can become a member because people think you ought to be. In my case, it was the latter. That was nice. It’s always nice to be wanted. Yay, Academy.

**John:** Hooray. A bunch of news happened, Craig, while you were getting your Academy membership and I was overseas. The Animation Guild ratified their new three-year contract. We’ve talked about animation writing many times on the show. Animation Guild represents all folks who work in animation in different fields, a lot of artists, a lot of different people. They also represent some writers who work in animation.

There was a long and vocal campaign to try to improve the conditions of writers working under Animation Guild contracts. This contract did some things better. It established new job tiers for promotion. There’s a Level 1, Level 2, a supervising animation writer, all who got some pay bumps. There’s a new more junior level called associate animation writer, which is lower paid. It looks like some progress. It also looks like not very close to what an equivalent writer would be getting under a live-action WGA deal. It can both be significant progress and not what these writers should be receiving.

**Craig:** That’s right, nor will it ever be. Because of the circumstances surrounding the Animation Guild, specifically that it is part of IATSE and not a writer’s guild, they will not ever have the kind of bargaining power we do. They don’t have as many members by far. Also, their strike threat is essentially de minimis, because IATSE’s not striking so that animation writers do better. They will always struggle to do the best they can. They do, I honestly think, do the best they can. The people who work there care a lot. They are not defensive about the fact that their collective bargaining agreement is not as good as ours. They are aware of it. They don’t deny it. They do the best they can. That’s the most important thing. They did get a pretty decent turnout, which I think is really important. Member turnout apparently tripled compared to the last vote.

If there’s one thing that I guess we could look at as a decent thing, it’s just additional codification of what IATSE got, which was an enshrined 3% minimum wage increases annually over the course of the contract. That used to be the standard across the industry, and then suddenly it went down to two and a half. Hopefully, we can all return to the 3%. Anyway, I think all in all a successful negotiation for Animation Guild. Well done to the folks who run it and all the folks who voted.

**John:** I also just want to commend the animation writers who kept speaking up very vocally about how important it was and how their jobs are different than other folks who are working in the Animation Guild. They’re the first people on board in a project. They have very specific needs that are different from other folks. I think it’s great that they spoke up and were so insistent throughout this. This is not the last we’ve heard about animation writing and making sure that animation writers are paid what they should be paid.

**Craig:** I expect that we’ll be hearing about this every three years, as well we should.

**John:** Other news, so Craig, you and I have not talked very much about the CW, but we should probably explain for international listeners, because the CW is just a weird situation. Way back in the day, we had two different networks called the WB and UPN. Shows on the WB that were so famous were Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel.

**Craig:** The Buffyverse.

**John:** All the Buffyverse, but also Dawson’s Creek was a WB show. My own show, which lasted seven episodes, only four of which aired, called DC, was a WB show.

**Craig:** Great four episodes though.

**John:** It was really just a phenomenal four episodes. UPN, which was another Paramount-based network-

**Craig:** United Paramount Network.

**John:** Yeah, which had a bunch of shows. Those two merged, and they became the CW. The CW is the home to things like Supernatural, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. It’s owned jointly by Warner Bros and CBS. It’s always been a strange partnership. They are trying to sell the CW now. It looks like it’s going to be bought out by a group called Nexstar, which represents a bunch of the stations that actually broadcast CW shows.

**Craig:** This is the I guess natural fallout of the move to streaming, because basically Warner Bros is all in on HBO Max, and CBS is all in on Paramount Plus. Then the question is what exactly will the… By the way, what is with the the?

**John:** The CW?

**Craig:** Yeah. We don’t say the NBC, the CBS, the ABC, the HBO Max.

**John:** We don’t say the CBS.

**Craig:** It’s just there for whatever reason, the CW. I guess they started with the WB, because it wasn’t WB. It was the WB.

**John:** I guess, yeah.

**Craig:** The weirdly named the CW will try and fit into this forgotten, perhaps neglected spot, which is the independent network. It’s possible that it could work. I just don’t know what their programming exactly will be, because all the programming they had is owned by these other entities. They’re not buying the programs. They’re just buying the name.

**John:** They’re buying the name. They’re buying the network and the ability of the network to brand shows. Warner Bros and Paramount will still own a part of it. I think the reason why I want to talk about this on Scriptnotes is that the CW shows were an important birthplace for a lot of writers. They were shows that ran 20 episodes a season or 22 episodes a season. There was a lot of work there. The CW canceled a bunch of their shows. That’s a bunch of writers who don’t have jobs suddenly.

I think we forget about the nature of seasonal employment. These were shows that would start early fall and go through into the spring. In this streaming era, we see much less of that. Those were really good jobs for a bunch of people. I’m concerned that whatever this new network becomes, it’s not going to have scripted shows to the same degree. We’re going to lose out on a great training ground for a lot of writers.

**Craig:** It won’t be. Don’t be concerned. Just deal with it as reality, because they will not be making scripted television the way that the CW or the WB or UPN even did, because it’s too expensive and because you can make a lot of money with unscripted programming at lower margins. That’s how you compete. Look, ultimately, all of the networks are going to go away. They’ve been around forever or what we imagine forever to be. They’re going away. We’re not going to have NBC, CBS, and ABC at some point. They’re just going.

**John:** I agree with it.

**Craig:** Then it’s just going to be Disney Plus and Paramount Plus and Peacock and then all the other streamers we know, HBO Max and Apple TV and Amazon and so on and so forth, Hulu and etc. There’s not going to be network television anymore. There’s a redundancy there that everybody can see. Everybody. We all know it. At some point, I think NBC… Honestly, Derek Haas is keeping NBC on, as far as I can tell.

**John:** The Chicago shows?

**Craig:** Yes. When the Chicago shows run their run, which probably will be 40 years from now, then and only then will NBC finally be like, “Okay, we’ll just be Peacock.”

**John:** Some follow-up. On our bonus topic a couple weeks ago, we talked about adulting, basically what are the things that made you realize that you are now an adult and what those felt like. I proposed on Twitter, “Hey, what are some useful markers you found of adulthood?” Our listeners sent through some really good suggestions. I thought we would read through some of the listener suggestions for things that mark you as possibly an adult. “Getting excited about water filter speed.”

**Craig:** What? Water filter speed.

**John:** Yeah, like getting a home water filter or how fast your Brita pitcher filters.

**Craig:** I see. Yeah.

**John:** “Throwing out plastic cups and replacing them with glass.” Yeah, so getting permanent things rather than temporary things.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** “Hiring professional movers.” That is a real mark of it, when you’re not relying on your friends to drag you through. My friend Andrew Lippa said, “A mark of adulthood is initiating conversations that will likely invite conflict.” Recognizing I’m going to say this thing, I know this is going to make you mad, but I’m not going to actually avoid saying it because I know it’s going to make you mad.

**Craig:** I’d consider that also part of my adolescenting, to be honest, but that was me.

**John:** That was being provocative though.

**Craig:** I think that’s what “initiating conversations that likely invite conflict” is.

**John:** I think it’s recognizing that it’s not being afraid of conflict.

**Craig:** Oh, I see. You’re not starting something, but you’re not avoiding it either.

**John:** Yeah, exactly.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** That’s how I took Andrew Lippa’s-

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** Knowing Andrew the way I do, that’s how I read that. Chuck Wendig, who’s a very smart writer, he said, “Being excited about things like showers and bedtime.”

**Craig:** Bedtime in particular has really become… I used to really dread it, and now lately I’m like, “Can I just get into bed? Can I get into bed now? Oh my god, no, it’s 8:15. I can’t.”

**John:** Along those lines, “Being excited when you have no plans for the weekend.” So good. “Wanting a low-key birthday.” “Seeking empty beaches.”

**Craig:** Empty beaches. I never wanted full beaches.

**John:** I never want to go to the beach. I hate the sun.

**Craig:** You really should not ever-

**John:** I should not be in the sun.

**Craig:** No. When you were an Eagle Scout, were you just in a full beekeeper costume?

**John:** For a variety of reason, I’ve pretty much always worn hats, which has helped a lot. I would say my one advice to people is just put on a hat, because it’ll help you out so much. I do remember on a horseback trip wearing a ball cap and having my ears get incredibly badly sunburned. That’s not a fun thing when you’re just peeling dead skin off your ears.

**Craig:** You need a brimmed hat.

**John:** I need a brimmed hat. That’s what I need.

**Craig:** For sure. That’s why I’m saying beekeeper. If you look into beekeeper costumes, I think you will-

**John:** I think I’ll be happy. We have some follow-up on our discussion about gun violence. Megana, do you want to help us out with this?

**Megana:** Nikolai brought up, “In Donald Glover’s brilliant show Atlanta, LaKeith Stanfield’s character Darius is at a shooting range. Around him, Second Amendment enthusiasts are shooting at human targets, which Darius shoots at a target of a dog. He’s approached, and the men tell him, ‘You can’t shoot dogs,’ to which Darius replies, ‘Why would I shoot a human target?’ I’m certainly not doing the scene justice, but I think the point still holds.”

**John:** I haven’t seen Atlanta, so I haven’t seen this beat. I think that’s a really clever idea for a moment. It’s also an interesting way to bring up the ideas of why are we using guns and what’s okay about guns and what’s not okay about guns.

**Craig:** It’s pretty setuppish. That’s my favorite word. I got that word from Hannibal Buress, setuppish.

**John:** Setuppish.

**Craig:** Isn’t that a great word?

**John:** It is. It’s pejorative but not dismissive completely.

**Craig:** It’s just saying you’re luring me into something. It’s setuppish. It is clever.

**John:** It is clever. I like it. Follow-up on remote writers’ rooms. Help us out.

**Megana:** Allison wrote in and said, “A follow-up to that great question about remote writers’ rooms. Why must writers’ rooms be in LA when so much production is remote? Wouldn’t it make sense for Disney to have writers’ rooms in Atlanta, for instance? I live and work in Portland, Oregon, where we have a thriving TV and film scene. The productions may hire local camera operators, directors, actors, etc, but the writers’ rooms are always based in LA. This above the line/below the line divide never made sense to me. Making writers’ rooms local to the locations could go a long way to bridging this divide.”

**Craig:** Interesting point.

**John:** I think I remember some anecdotes of a show that did actually put its writing staff in the place where it was shooting. It’s so unusual that I think it just stuck out because I’d never heard of that before.

**Craig:** There’s a really simple reason for this, Allison. Money. When you take people from where they live and ask them to live somewhere else, it costs money. You have to pay them a per diem. There’s a weekly fee that they get just for living expenses. You have to put them up somewhere. You have to feed them. You have to take care of their travel back and forth and all of that stuff. It’s just money. Now if it were me and I had a writers’ room, which I don’t, but if I did, yeah, I probably would’ve wanted them with me. Then I’m sure HBO would’ve said, “No, we’re not spending all this money for people to be up there and be there when you need them during production, but when they’re not needed during production, then… ”

Ideally, a lot of this stuff is written before you get into production. We do hire below-the-line folks and then bring them places and put them up and pay for them, because sometimes we need specific people. Cinematographers, camera operators are a good example, and obviously actors. Basically, bottom line, Allison, dough.

**John:** Yeah, dough. Also, I think it’s understanding the timeline of when you’re shooting these things. Craig’s right to say ideally you’ve written all the episodes before you start shooting, or you’re getting close to that. The exception would be if you were doing a traditional network show like one of the Baltimore shows like Homicide. I think Homicide may have actually had its writers’ room there in Baltimore, because they were right there on set doing all the stuff. You basically needed to have those writers be right there on set to do the things. It was great. That is a possibility there for a network show where you’re not writing so far ahead of what production is. For most shows, it’s not going to work. I think Allison also may be thinking that they’ll hire local writers to do that thing. No, they won’t. No showrunner’s going to find the six writers they want for that show in Portland. They’re just not going to find that. It’s not going to be a thing that works out.

**Craig:** Even if they were there, it doesn’t matter, because you need writers where you are before you get to Portland. You can’t get to Portland unless you’ve written a lot.

**John:** When we had Liz Meriwether and Liz Hannah on the show talking about their productions, they did have writers on set, but they had to bring in one writer at a time, because that’s what they can afford to bring. That was great and helpful for them. That’s what they could actually do.

**Craig:** That is industry standard.

**John:** We have some follow-up on disclaimers. Megana.

**Megana:** Frank from LA wrote in and said, “I wrote a pilot that’s a Real Housewives style reality show spoof about plus-size male models. When I was first taking it out, execs who read it blind without meeting me or without seeing the web series it was based on thought I was making fun of fat people. It was so frustrating, because I was doing the exact opposite. The feedback was largely tepid and/or cautionary, until I added a second page that said, ‘The author is loud, queer, and overweight. In their head they could be Naomi Campbell if only the world would let them.'”

**John:** Here’s an example of a preface page or an epigraph, still debating what those are going to be, that was helpful for Frank in getting his script read because people did not understand the context of who their writer was and how they should be reading the script without some sort of introduction there. Craig, what do you think?

**Craig:** It’s everything, so well done, Frank. The fact that maybe you didn’t think about doing that initially is not your fault. What I love is that you then thought of doing it. There’s nothing questionable about this. To me, context in the course of humor is incredibly important. We’re all grown up enough, especially now, to understand that some things are funny when certain people say them, and some things are not funny when certain people say them. You could boil it all down to the punch up/punch down thing, but I tend to think of it more as self-criticism versus outward criticism, self-awareness versus otherness.

If I write a comedy, and I suspect this is going to come up later when we get to our One Cool Things, and I am criticizing American Jewish culture, I’m doing it from inside my group, and that is different than if somebody else does it from outside. It just is. We don’t have to even get into why. We all know and understand this inherently. I think it’s actually brilliant and puts people at ease. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to like the script. What they can’t do is say, “Oh, I don’t feel comfortable here, because I think somebody’s just teeing off on other people.”

**John:** Well done. I agree. I think it’s a good use of that preface page or epigraph. You can use either term.

**Craig:** Prologue, whatever.

**John:** Prologue.

**Craig:** Epigraph, I think that’s what we’ve settled on.

**John:** I think we settled on preface page. Let’s get to our marquee-

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** …topic here. It’s been a while since we’ve had a marquee topic. Craig, while I was on this vacation, I read a book. I read Jason Kander’s new book, Invisible Storm. If you don’t remember Jason Kander, he was a candidate for Senate in Missouri who lost but came really, really close and was just a phenomenon in Missouri. He was also then going to be running for president. He decided not to run for president, ran for mayor of Kansas City, pulled out of that to announce that he basically needed to stop because he had tremendous PTSD and basically could not function as a candidate. The book does a really good job of talking about those decisions and what he was trying to suppress but ultimately couldn’t suppress.

It got me thinking about, so often on Scriptnotes we’re talking about what characters want, what they’re driving towards, what they’re aspiring to become. That always feels like a pull. We’re being pulled in one direction. In the case of Jason Kander, he was really being pushed away from something. He was basically trying to escape from this PTSD. So much of his success was actually a fear-avoidance mechanism, trying to get away from this thing. Basically, as long as he was running really fast, it couldn’t catch up. He believed it couldn’t catch up. I like that push-pull dynamic that a magnet both can be drawing towards something but also repelling away from something else. I thought we might talk about what characters are trying to do looking at both what they’re being pulled towards but what they’re pushing against.

**Craig:** The pushing against part is probably a universal thing. I think everybody is afraid of something. Fear is a huge part of what it means to be human and therefore a huge part of writing human characters. What we find is if we simply write somebody as being afraid of something and moving away from something, the story isn’t very interesting, because they’re just hiding, and they’re hiding overtly, and we just are waiting for them to stop. It’s more interesting when we think what we’re seeing is the story of somebody driven toward something positive. It’s only then that we realize that their positive motion forward is really in lieu of what they’re afraid of doing.

**John:** As we look back to some of our deep dive discussions on Clueless or on Little Mermaid, these characters will express their wish, the thing that they’re trying to go towards. They’re also leaving home. Sometimes that leaving home is being pushed away from that too. Sometimes they are pushing off against the wall as they’re swimming away. Figuring out what that wall is can be really, really important. Figuring out what it is that they don’t want themselves to become, what it is that they are afraid of becoming, what it is that they are loathe to face again, can be what’s driving them. In really successful stories, and I think Kander’s real life story is successful in its way, it’s finally having to confront that monster, confront that thing that you were trying to escape, is part of the journey that gets you through to the end. It gets you into your third act. It’s finally facing this thing that you’ve been trying to avoid the whole time.

**Craig:** Exactly. This is very simpatico with the whole how do you write a movie podcast that we did. The revelation of what it is that terrifies you is something that should happen. It’s almost like a little horror movie inside of every movie, whether it’s a comedy or an adventure. There’s this daunting realization that the problem, the thing that you were not looking at is the following. You weren’t even aware of it necessarily. What a lot of first acts do well is give you all the clues as to what might be the problem. We notice early on in our stories that our characters are not merely pulling towards something, but they’re good at it. They’re often competent at it. It’s much more interesting if the thing you’re pulling towards is something that you’re good at, because then theoretically you can just keep going.

**John:** That’s a thing that we see with Jason Kander, who’s very good at being a politician and raising the money and doing the things and being on the phone constantly and doing all the things it took to be successful as that and was using those things to have this vision of where he was going to end up. Really, he was distracting himself from the work he needed to do. It reminds me of when we had Phoebe Waller-Bridge on the show. We talked about Fleabag. Fleabag is a character who is… Her forward momentum really comes from constantly pushing people away and basically building a distance between herself and other people. You don’t see her going after a thing as much as pushing people away and using the conventions of talking to the audience and other things to create a space around her. It’s only when she’s finally confronted about this that she can make the progress and growth she goes through at the end of the series.

**Craig:** It’s one of the ways that we connect with the quote unquote unlikable character, which is why this character isn’t likable is the worst note that anyone can get. Shame on everybody who gives it. Their unlikability is often about how they are pushing things away, and doing so in a way that allows them to get through life. It’s often very funny. Pushing people away is probably better presented through comedy than through drama. It gets very heavy very quickly when you’re just like, “Screw off,” constantly. The notion of, it was just misanthropy, I guess, it’s funny. They’re funny people, because we’re like, “Yeah, everybody does stink. That is stupid.” Then you realize, wait, that’s the part of me that is a bit afraid of things. I think it’s really important that we get to see people being repellent.

**John:** I think back to Melissa McCarthy’s character in Can You Ever Forgive Me. We had Marielle Heller on the show talking about that. That is a miscreant character. She does not like the outside world. She does not trust the outside world. We see her doing specific things to protect herself from exposing any vulnerability. Of course, for the movie to succeed, it has to introduce characters who can break through that armor and give her things that she actually wants to see and make her step outside of her comfort zone to let some people in. Of course, her whole scheme falls apart in the process. That’s an example of a movie that’s not a comedy and yet does do that job of I have a strong magnetic field that is pushing everyone away from me and succeeds.

**Craig:** There are obviously comic moments in that movie. Melissa McCarthy is a fascinating example, because I think basically every character she plays, with rare exception, is somebody that is pushing people away. Zach Galifianakis, also very, very famous for this. What makes them so good at it is more than just their talent, which is exceptional. They also just have this interesting humanity in their eyes. I’ve always said among comic character actors, or just comic actors I guess you’d call them, that some of them are a little scary, and some of them you want to just take home and hug. Jim Carrey, I think his characters always have this mania that’s a bit terrifying, and so it’s exciting.

**John:** You would not want to give him a sharp knife. I would not be comfortable.

**Craig:** Exactly. You don’t want to give him a sharp knife. There’s a danger about his… Sacha Baron Cohen, there’s a danger there. Then when you look at Steve Carrell or Zach or Melissa, it’s like… For whatever reason, there’s just something about Steve Carrell where I just want to take him home and hug him. Those characters tend to do really well when they’re pushing people away, because you know inherently they’re not being mean or cruel. They’re just hurt.

**John:** When you get the note about likability, I think the corollary note to that is relatability. Sometimes those characters who might seem unlikable, as long as they’re relatable, as long as we can see aspects of things we would ourselves do and protective mechanisms and defense shields they’re putting up in our own lives, we can relate to them, even if they’re not classically likable human beings, they’re not picking up and hugging puppies. We can see ourselves in them. I think that’s an example of something Melissa does so well is that in the characters she’s playing, you can see why she’s doing what she’s doing. You can understand she’s trying to push you away and she’s still letting you in.

**Craig:** I think that relatability is ultimately essential for every single character that is ever… The only characters that you can get away with being not relatable are I guess dispensable ones and very broad ones, so James Bond. The classic template for James Bond movies is that there’s a main villain who usually is somewhat relatable, but then that main villain has an interesting sidekick, so Oddjob or Jaws, Nick Nack. They are always very thin characters. By and large, everybody, villains, second bananas, leads, everyone at some point or another must be relatable, even in ways that are seemingly incompatible with their circumstances. For instance, Thor is a god, and yet really all those movies are asking us to relate to him on a very not godlike level.

**John:** I would say the most successful Thor movies are the ones that pierce the Thor character the most and reveal his inner flaws and his humor and his dissatisfaction with himself and his own situation. It’s not the ones where he’s awesome, it’s the ones where he’s flawed are the ones where you’re going to be most curious to follow along.

**Craig:** If you were Chris Hemsworth, do you think you would ever wake up in the morning being like, “Pretty flawed here.”

**John:** I think the success of one of these films though is showing beautiful people who are still flawed in relatable ways. That’s obviously one of the great challenges we face as writers is to have characters who are compelling and driven and feel like a movie can center around them, and yet we’re still seeing through to some of their vulnerability. I think the Iron Man character that Robert Downey Jr plays is a very good example of this, because he is an asshole. He’s fundamentally not a sympathetic character, and yet he is written with a specificity and with a vulnerability that lets you see behind the surface. He could be both. He could be pushing you away, literally pushing you away with his little magnetic jet hands, and at the same time letting you in to see what’s there.

**Craig:** We’re going to get so many angry emails. “Those are not jet hands. Those are Propulsors.”

**John:** Repulsors, yes, I’m sorry.

**Craig:** I don’t know what the hell they are. It’s really interesting. Separate topic we should talk about one day is the unfortunate phenomenon that no matter how much representation we talk about and the improvement of representation on film, the one area where human beings just seem to really struggle with is we want good-looking people on screen. We want them. Black, white, disabled, doesn’t matter, but all we ask is that their faces have symmetry. We are fascinated with the lives of people who have symmetrical faces. It is so weird to think of. When you really boil it down, it’s like, what is happening there? There’s not a chance that people’s facial symmetry is a statistical reflection of their actual interest value as humans. What are we doing? What is happening? Anyway, I just find that fascinating.

**John:** Yet facial symmetry doesn’t make you a movie star. Tom Cruise is a good-looking person and was a good-looking person growing up, but it was his actual charisma, which is not his physical body, that made him the star.

**Craig:** Yes. Really, what it comes down to is if you have this much talent and your face is this symmetrical, you can be a movie star. If you have even more talent than that, but your face is terribly not symmetrical-

**John:** You can be a voice actor.

**Craig:** You’re not going to be a movie star, because people just don’t… They don’t care. That’s what so strange. It’s so strange, because there are some incredible actors out there who don’t have whatever that is that’s the facial symmetry that we all demand. Then we miss them somehow. Then there are actors who we all know are famous because they’re very good-looking. A lot of the people who are now famous for being famous, I think a lot of that is just… Anyway, side topic. We’ll come back around to that on Episode 730.

**John:** The last little point I will make here, which we’ll reference again when we come back to this topic, is it reminds me of… There’s this phenomenon of hockey players who are born in a certain month are much more successful. I think it’s probably because of that. It’s because this actor was so beautiful and was so handsome and was cast in these roles, they learned how to become a much better film actor, and they kept getting the work. They improved as an actor because they kept getting more chances to play and more chances in front of the screen.

**Craig:** There is no question that… I can’t remember the comedian who said the secret to happiness is be good-looking. You laugh, and then he starts talking about it, and you realize, oh my god, yes. Yes, apparently, that is the secret. Everything gets a lot easier. Everything. Everything. All of your successes are over-praised. Your failures are ignored. Everybody is interested in you and wants to be around you and are attracted to you. It’s this interesting magnetic thing we’re talking about.

**John:** Last bit on magnetism I would just say is a lesson I learned as I’ve been thinking about this over the last few weeks is that obviously, always be looking for what a character wants, because what a character wants is going to be driving them in a lot of cases. Just never forget the corollary question is what are they trying to get away from. What are they pushing against? What are they trying to push away from themselves? You’ll find some really interesting details and maybe some interesting characters and situations by looking about what it is that they are repelled by and see whether that can be additional driving force for you in figuring out your story and basically your protagonist’s journey.

Cool. Let’s go into our One Cool Things. I have two recommendations for you, both things you can see on streaming. First off is Fire Island, written by Joel Kim Booster, which is a delightful retelling of Pride and Prejudice but all told on Fire Island. Really, really nicely done. Delightful. You can find it on Hulu. It matches very well with our Clueless episode, which we just aired last week, which is a retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma. This is Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, all set on Fire Island. Very much recommend you see that.

Also, if you’ve not seen Heartstopper, which is a really well-reviewed and popular show on Netflix, I would recommend it. It is a small gay British high school show that is just really smartly done. It’s weirdly chaste and based on these great graphic novels by Alice Oseman. If you are in the mood for something just light and delightful, I would recommend Heartstopper for you.

**Craig:** I have to watch the show. Bella Ramsey, who plays Ellie in The Last of Us, and a guy named Steve Oben, who is one of our costume department geniuses, they were obsessed with this and would talk about it all the time. I have to watch Heartstopper. In a lovely way. They just said it puts a smile on your face.

**John:** I was describing it to Megana as being like M and M’s, where you eat an M and M and suddenly you’ve ate the whole bag. You’re like, “Wait, where’d the show go?” They’re very short episodes. It’s just delightfully done.

**Craig:** I’m in. How could my One Cool Thing this week not be the James Webb Space Telescope?

**John:** Pretty amazing images.

**Craig:** You and I are old enough to remember when Hubble blew our minds. By the way, I feel bad for Hubble. Hubble’s been out there killing it for decades, and then James Webb shows up. It’s not enough that James Webb is so much better than Hubble. Now it’s supposed to be like, “Look at this shit from Hubble. Look at this shit photo from Hubble. Now look how much better it is from James Webb.” It’s so mean.

Anyway, it is kind of incredible. The images that we’re seeing are startling. They are not of stars, but of galaxies. They are closeups of galaxies. They are sections of sky that show dozens or hundreds of galaxies, each of which, of course, contain countless stars and planets. All of this is just mind-blowing. Interestingly, most of them do look a little bit like… Remember when we were kids, John, you would go to the store and there were those little vending machines where you’d put a quarter in and you’d turn the dial and you’d get a little plastic egg?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Inside the egg was candy or a toy. One of the toys was this clear, super bouncy… The Super Ball. A super bouncy ball.

**John:** Super bouncy ball, yeah.

**Craig:** Inside a lot of them was a billion sparkly things.

**John:** It’s glitter. It’s glitter inside a rubber ball.

**Craig:** That’s what the universe is. It’s a glittery Super Ball. It’s mind-blowing, portrays a kind of vastness that our brains are simply incapable of processing fully. My One Cool Thing this week, James Webb Space Telescope, and you know what, also the Hubble. Hey, Hubble.

**John:** Hubble’s doing great.

**Craig:** You are the OG, Hubble.

**John:** 100%. I got to see the James Webb Space Telescope before it launched. We went down to Northrop Grumman and got to do a tour. I’ll talk through how you get to see it. You are going up three stories, up to this glass observation bay, and looking down at a bunch of people in beekeeper suits basically, that Craig would be happy with, just completely vacuum-sealed, because this whole thing, which has this giant gold mirror, a speck of dust on it could ruin everything. Years of years of construction for this. It felt impressive. I could not even imagine launching it into space. To see the results that they’re able to get off of it is just incredible.

**Craig:** NASA has been, I won’t say quietly, but not noisily, being amazing for a really long time, and particularly I think for the last 10 years or so, in terms of what they’ve been able to do with Mars and now with this telescope. I have to say the reorientation away from man space travel towards investigative space engineering is great.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** It’s great. I don’t need a guy on Mars. What’s he going to do? He’s going to walk around. Who cares? Show me more of it and analyze it.

**John:** Put some more robots there. Let them dig around and pull stuff up.

**Craig:** How about this? HD cameras are preferable to putting a person there, so that that person can be like, “Oh my god, I did it.” We’re like, “You did it.”

**John:** You look at this telescope or even the rovers we have on Mars, they can work for 10 years-

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** …and keep doing stuff, versus a guy who can be there for a week and you got to fly him back.

**Craig:** We get excited because we can watch it, and he’s walking on Mars. We’re like, “Oh my god, it happened.” Now what? The cost and the danger is extraordinary, and for not a great amount of information, not as much as you can get from diagnostic and investigative equipment like this. Hooray, NASA is what I’m saying.

**John:** There’s things that we’re able to do on the space station with humans there which seem great. We’re able to run experiments and really do stuff on the fly. Fantastic. I don’t feel a pressing need to send people back to the moon or back onto Mars. We’re good. We’re good.

**Craig:** We’re good.

**John:** We can focus on some things on Earth here that can be much more useful.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Agreed. Like making Scriptnotes, which is a-

**Craig:** Podcast.

**John:** … podcast produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Yay.

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

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Adam Pineless. Thank you to everyone who sent in outros. I put out a call for them, and now we have a whole bunch of new ones in, and they’re so, so good. We’re stocked, but we’re always looking for new outros. 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. We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You’ll 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. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you’ll get all the back-episodes, Bonus Segments, and Bonus Episodes, like the one we’re putting out this week on word games. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun show.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

Links:

* [Animation Guild Members Ratify New Three-Year Contract](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/animation-guild-ratifies-three-year-contract-1235174906/)
* [As Nexstar Deal For Control Of The CW Nears Finish, Ownership Structure Comes Into Focus](https://deadline.com/2022/06/nexstar-deal-to-acquire-control-of-the-cw-nears-finish-line-1235054433/)
* [John’s Adulting Twitter Thread](https://twitter.com/johnaugust/status/1544347536366108673?s=21&t=gkZVGb4zyQhdj41RFy-4Cg)
* [Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/invisible-storm-jason-kander?variant=39935556911138) by Jason Kander
* [Fire Island](https://www.hulu.com/movie/fire-island-c2abb64a-bf06-48fa-8465-c0958e2b8ecd) by Joel Kim Booster on Hulu
* [Heartstopper Series on Netflix](https://www.netflix.com/title/81059939) and [Graphic Novel](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/heartstopper-alice-oseman/1133594836) by Alice Osman
* [James Webb Space Telescope](https://webb.nasa.gov/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://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 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

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/558standard.mp3).

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

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 557 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, what happened before this moment, and how do we take the audience there? We’ll be discussing flashbacks, or maybe we already did.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** We’ll also be answering listener continues about managers, writing partners, and remote rooms. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, what makes a person an adult? We’ll discuss the markers and behaviors that indicate that someone is no longer a child.

**Craig:** That sounds lovely. Maybe I’ll find out if I’m a child finally, because I don’t know.

**John:** I don’t know either.

**Craig:** I feel like a child with a really poorly functioning spine.

**John:** I do feel like I’m the youngest person in the room a lot of times, which I’m generally not anymore.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** There’s a lot there.

**Craig:** You know what we are?

**John:** What?

**Craig:** You and I are ex-wunderkinds.

**John:** That’s what we are.

**Craig:** Now we’re just old people.

**John:** I think we should be up front and clear with our listeners that we are recording this on June 20th, but this episode will probably come out in July at some point. We are living in a world where we don’t even know what Break My Soul sounds like.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** That’s how far back we are, because Beyonce’s song is dropping at midnight tonight. We don’t know what it sounds like. We don’t know what the world looks like post Beyonce’s new song after so much time.

**Craig:** I want to reiterate again that I’m old. I had no idea. I didn’t know what you were talking about at all, even remotely.

**John:** There’s a new song by Beyonce. For all we know, the world could be completely transformed, and everything we’re saying in this podcast could be irrelevant, because she is a goddess who will transform everything.

**Craig:** No. It’s a song. It’s a song.

**John:** More likely, things will go on the same. My question is will her new single make it so that Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush does not achieve number one status.

**Craig:** Is it because of Stranger Things?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Is it on its way to number one again?

**John:** It’s on its way to number one again.

**Craig:** Was it number one the first time? Probably not.

**John:** Nope. It was top 40, but not number one.

**Craig:** (sings)

**John:** Exciting times.

**Craig:** It’s cool that now, speaking of flashbacks, these songs that were perfectly contemporary for us are these ancient things that can be unearthed for Megana.

**John:** Megana knew the song before Stranger Things.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** Is that correct, Megana?

**Megana Rao:** I did.

**Craig:** Yay.

**Megana:** I feel like Kate Bush is a good rite of passage for young goth girls.

**Craig:** Or young not-goth girls.

**John:** How goth were you, Megana?

**Megana:** Goth on the inside, normal on the outside.

**John:** Fully see that.

**Craig:** My daughter has a nose ring now.

**John:** My daughter does too.

**Craig:** She does too?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Wow. How about that?

**John:** It’s been a while since you’ve seen her.

**Craig:** Just side note, since our podcast is about things that are interesting to screenwriters and people with nose piercings. When she asked, was there a difference between you and Mike in terms of acceptance?

**John:** Publicly, no. We present a completely united front to our daughter at all times.

**Craig:** Right, but privately-

**John:** Privately, a little bit.

**Craig:** Who was pro and who was con?

**John:** Neither of us were strongly pro. What I will say is, when it became clear that it was a piercing on the side rather than a piercing in the middle, a septum piercing, then we were better with that.

**Craig:** We were septum. We’re septum over here.

**John:** Team septum.

**Craig:** Team septum. I’m team septum. The way it goes over in my place is Jessica’s like, “Hey, can I pierce my septum?” I’m like, “Sure. What do I care?” Then Melissa’s like, “Um, but,” and then asks a thousand questions. Jessie generally asks me first on those things.

**John:** We save these things for holidays or birthday presents, basically. It’s a big thing she can do on one of the once-a-year gift situations. We go to the really expensive but really good place on Melrose that actually knows what they’re doing.

**Craig:** My feeling is that once my daughter turns 18, which is nigh, December, she’s going to do whatever she wants anyway. The tattoos are coming. More piercings are coming. Should I care? I don’t care. Am I a cool dad, or am I just an apathetic dad?

**John:** Or a checked-out dad?

**Craig:** No, I’m not checked out. I actually think I’m cool in the sense that I’m into it. I think it’s fun. Anyway, happy Father’s Day to me.

**John:** Happy Father’s Day, belatedly.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** A month later for all the people listening to this episode. Let’s get into some screenwriter things. I’m going to start with a fun little thread that popped up in my timeline today from Twitter. This is by Jeremiah Lewis. The theme of this thread was ruin a screenwriter’s day in three words.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** He started the thread off with “really well told.”

**Craig:** Oh, “really well told,” that is a classic brushoff.

**John:** I’ve heard that a couple times. I’ve heard that after pitches. I genuinely think in most cases they were trying to sound positive but noncommittal because they hadn’t talked amongst themselves on Zoom, but I don’t know. Now I’m second guessing myself.

**Craig:** I don’t think it ever is a good sign. I don’t think I’ve ever once heard that and thought to myself, “Nailed it.” Really well told. That was really good. Terrific. Good for you. “Really well told” means I’m not buying that, but you did a good job trying to make that sound not bad. That’s basically what that means to me.

**John:** Oy.

**Craig:** Oy.

**John:** Let’s go through some of the other contenders here. Maybe we’ll just alternate turns here. I’m going to go with “really good start.”

**Craig:** That’s also rough. “Lots of potential.”

**John:** Basically, what you did shows us that there could potentially be a movie there, but you were not the one to deliver it. There’s still potential.

**Craig:** That’s not exciting. Jeez, this is depressing. Why did Jeremiah Lewis do this?

**John:** I’ll serve back with a “found it charming.”

**Craig:** I’ve never heard that one, maybe because I’ve never been charming.

**John:** Something feels diminutive about charming. It’s not good, but it’s charming.

**Craig:** This next one is really weird. “Congratulations, you finished.” What? That’s terrible.

**John:** I could tell it was a slog, but you got through it. That’s not so good.

**Craig:** I have one that isn’t on here.

**John:** What’s this?

**Craig:** “It’s a script.”

**John:** “It’s a script. Wow, it’s fully a script.”

**Craig:** You wrote all of a thing. It’s started and finished. It is script-sized. Congratulations on your script.

**John:** No one can say this is not a script.

**Craig:** That’s right. It’s a script.

**John:** “There’s something here.”

**Craig:** “There’s something here.” Wow. There’s so many layers to that one. There’s something here, but you’ve drowned it in nonsense, and you’re not the thing, clearly.

**John:** Here’s the thing. “There’s something here” is a useful note if it’s talking about a scene or a moment. It’s like, okay, this is not fully explored, but if it’s applied to in overall script, that’s not an encouraging sign.

**Craig:** No, not at all.

**John:** “Lots of fun.”

**Craig:** That’s right up there with “this is cute.” You don’t want that.

**John:** Cute and charming, no. “Some good stuff.”

**Craig:** There’s some good stuff. It’s not a complete zero. I feel like if they say, “There’s some good stuff,” what they’re really saying is there’s no good stuff.

**John:** Not enough stuff to string together to make a movie that they will actually want to make.

**Craig:** No. This one I think is not going to ruin your day. It’ll make you bummed out, but it’s honest. “Not for us.” I’d rather get “not for us” than “some good stuff.”

**John:** I agree with you. “Not for us” makes it clear we’re not even talking about the merits of the thing you’re discussing. It’s just really like, this is not a movie that we can make. I get that. “Promising first draft.”

**Craig:** That’s not terrible.

**John:** That’s not the worst. Not going to ruin your day, as opposed to “enjoyed the premise” would.

**Craig:** You didn’t need a script to enjoy the premise, did you?

**John:** No. You could’ve written this on a napkin, and I would’ve enjoyed it as much.

**Craig:** Exactly. This could’ve been a text.

**John:** “We like a lot of this,” Craig.

**Craig:** “We like a lot of this.” If you hear “we,” start running, because everybody’s going to try and hide as part of a group. Look, hundreds of us really had a problem, as opposed to like, okay, this is awesome. Good news I think is always very focused. Bad news is vague and comes from some hive mind. I don’t blame them. I don’t think that they’re being cowards. I think they’re being human. Nobody wants to be that guy. I don’t want to be that guy. I don’t want to be the person who delivers bad news and says, “You submitted this with dreams that I would love it, and in fact, not only do I not love it, I hate it.” That’s upsetting to everybody. I don’t blame them.

**John:** I don’t blame them at all. Let’s try to pull some joy out of this. What is good things you would hear in one of these meetings? When I’m on one of these calls, it’s like, “Okay, let’s have business affairs get into this.” That’s the sign. Business affairs means it’s real.

**Craig:** Business affairs means you’re getting paid. That’s always a good sign. If they say something along the lines of, “You’re the right person for this,” that means it’s not even about what you’re saying. They are now auditioning for you. They want you to do it. It’s really up to you. They’re trying to convince you to do it at this point.

**John:** If they’re asking about your availability, that’s a good sign.

**Craig:** Availability is always a good sign. If they want you to get on the phone with an actor or a director, always a good sign.

**John:** Always a good sign. Previously on the show we talked about main character energy. We have a corollary to this. This is side character energy. This is Lola Okola on TikTok talking us through what side character energy is.

**Lola Okola:** Personally, I’m actually off main character energy. The vibe is beloved side character with great outfits and funny one-liners. No, I will not undergo any character development, nor will I grow as a person. I’m here to be funny and sexy.

**John:** I really support side character energy. I think also it gets back to this thing we talked about on the show before, why side characters often steal movies.

**Craig:** She does land on something important, which is that side characters are not here to change, which means theoretically that side characters aren’t beset by fatal flaws that they have to overcome. Side characters are loyal and they’re funny and they’re supportive. They’re there for you. In the end, when you finally change and succeed and win, they applaud you or hug you. They are very warm, loving, supportive people. I have to tip my hat to one of the great beloved side characters of all time, Jon Cryer, who did such a good job of it back in the day, although now that I think of it, that was a very tragic sort of thing.

**John:** What are you talking about, Sixteen Candles?

**Craig:** Pretty in Pink.

**John:** Pretty in Pink.

**Craig:** I was talking about Pretty in Pink.

**John:** [inaudible 00:11:15].

**Craig:** I take it back. He was actually tragic. You know who was a beloved side character back in the day? Robert Downey Jr. Robert Downey Jr back in the day was a fun, wacky… In Back to School, he was a wacky, beloved side character.

**John:** I always think of Donkey in Shrek as being a side character who’s just there to do Donkey things and not be… I guess Donkey’s worried about Shrek to some degree, but Donkey can do Donkey things. There’s an animated movie I’ve been working on that I really love my side character. She’s just tremendously fun throughout the whole range of it. She does actually protagonate at the end. Some of the fun of it is that I think she does not want to change at all. She has no desire. She does not identify any fatal flaw in herself, and yet she finds herself changing despite herself, which is a joy.

**Craig:** That’s the Dory evolution. Dory was a wonderful, beloved side character, and then Dory got to do her own thing, which is fun. Listen, Lola Okola, I’m with you. I feel like I’m a beloved side character. I don’t like being involved in drama. I don’t want my life to be swirling about in drama. I like to be next to people who are having drama and listen to them and then tell them it’s going to be okay. That’s what I prefer. I don’t always get it.

**John:** Hey Megana, can you help us out with our main topic here? I think we have a question that can set us up well.

**Megana:** Yes. We got an email in from Sky Jones, who asked, “I suppose the topic isn’t strictly a screenwriting topic, but instead relates to all types of fiction. Lately, I’ve been watching some shows on HBO, specifically The Staircase and Station Eleven. Both of them heavily use flashbacks. In fact, they jump around in time quite a lot. I think the use of flashbacks made the storytelling more compelling than if the story had been told completely linearly. I’m wondering if there are any tips and/or strategies for heavily using flashbacks in a script, especially a TV series, which is obviously longer than a feature script. For instance, are there obvious reasons for deciding to heavily use flashbacks? At what point in the writing process is that usually decided? Are there any specific strategies for keeping track of the story in the outlining and writing process when flashbacks are heavily used?”

**John:** Great. Sky, you really set us up well there. In volleyball, that would be the set getting ready for the spike, just like it’s putting it properly in position for us to answer.

**Craig:** Plus Sky Jones.

**John:** Is Sky Jones main character energy or beloved side character energy?

**Craig:** Sky Jones feels like main character energy.

**John:** It does.

**Craig:** Sky Jones.

**John:** Stormy is the sidekick who is also just a lot of fun.

**Craig:** We have a problem. Who can we bring in? Sky Jones.

**John:** Sky Jones is the only one who can do this.

**Craig:** Sky Jones is here to ask this question. Sky Jones has asked an excellent question, and very specific. Maybe the premise, Sky, is that there’s a more specific way of approaching this, and I think there is, because I think a lot of it is to taste. You have to feel your way through these things. If I know John, and I know him well, before we discuss what to do, he’s going to want to define flashbacks.

**John:** I think we’re going to want to define our terms, make sure we’re talking about the right same thing. A flashback in a general sense is any moment that is set in time earlier than the main story. Of course, that implies that there really is a main story and a main timeline and that you’re not hopping around freely between all these things. Station Eleven is an example of a show. I would say those aren’t really flashbacks, because it’s set in multiple simultaneous timelines. You can’t say that’s a flashback so much. They tend to be briefer.

Another thing I would distinguish is that yes, novels could have flashbacks, a comic book could have a flashback, but really it feels like mostly a cinematic and a TV invention, because in a novel, I can be halfway through a paragraph and talk about something that happened before and bring us back to that moment and bring us back to the present time. You’re not really at one place in a book the same way that you are in a movie. We really know as an audience if we’re in a flashback or not, whereas opposed to a novel, it’s just a constantly churning stew of information that’s surrounding us.

**Craig:** Flashbacks exist in connection with the present. They don’t exist on their own. You’re right to say that there are shows where the narrative exists in multiple timelines. Those aren’t flashbacks, because ideally they’re commenting on each other in some important way, but not specifically. To me, a lot of good flashbacks are there very specifically latched to either the thing that came right before them or the thing that’s coming right after them.

**John:** There’s a reason why we’re moving from this present time to that flashback thing. Either it’s to provide some piece of information, some piece of context, something that makes it clear why this is happening. That to me feels like a flashback as opposed to now this next 10 minutes is going to be set in this other time period for just storytelling reasons. Now, we’ve talked about flashbacks before. I did a Google search. We actually talked about them in Episode 10, way back in Episode 10.

**Craig:** I’m sure we did a great job of it.

**John:** We did a great job there. I’ve also talked about it on the blog. One thing I want to make sure we don’t get out of this thing without talking about is how you indicate flashbacks in this script, because it can just be like you cut to this thing, you say it’s a different time, but I find, and tell me if you’re doing the same thing, after the day or night, I will tend to write, in brackets, “flashback,” just to make it clear, super clear on the page that this is a flashback, this is not cutting to something else in the present day timeline. What do you do?

**Craig:** I don’t think I write the word “flashback,” because for me at least, it feels a bit artificial, meaning it’s defining it in a way that I may not want the feeling to have. Typically, I will say something and then what the time is, five years ago, eight months ago, yesterday, because the word “flashback” I think is maybe too loosey-goosey, and there is a vague whiff of cheese about the word. That’s not our fault. It’s just that there’s been a lot of cheesy flashbacks. When you and I were kids growing up, the sitcoms would flash back all the time. It would be like (mystical sound effects). It was really cheese ball. To avoid that and to help tie in some specificity to the timeline, I’ll usually just use the time.

**John:** That’s fair. I think I probably will do that in the script if I’m moving to something we’ve not seen before in the movie. I think I’m saying the brackets “flashback” is to a moment that happened before in the movie that we’ve actually been watching, to make it clear that it’s connected to this thing.

**Craig:** Like a repeat.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ah. Then I would probably say “flash to.”

**John:** “Flash to” as a transition rather than as a-

**Craig:** I think so.

**John:** It’s whatever feels right on the page.

**Craig:** As you and I have made clear, hopefully. None of that stuff matters. I’m sure that other people will now dedicate hundreds of Reddit threads to the orthodoxy of flashing back.

**John:** Let’s get into some of the orthodoxy, because they have a stink to them. It’s not a blanket prohibition on them, but people have issues with flashbacks. We have a question here from Francoise. Megana, maybe that can set us up for this part.

**Megana:** Francoise says, “I recently received coverage on a feature script that noted a first flashback appearing on Page 26 was too late to be throwing this sort of device in the audience. The note went on to read that a flashback needs to happen much sooner so the audience isn’t thrown off or confused. I haven’t heard this before and would appreciate your thoughts to set me straight.”

**John:** We haven’t read Francoise’s script, but I kind of get what the reader might be saying, is that as an audience, we are approaching a movie, and we have a certain set of expectations about how the movie is going to work. If we’re 26 minutes into the movie and suddenly it’s doing a very different conceptual thing than we’ve seen before, that could be jarring in a bad way. I think you can absolutely have a movie that works really, really well, where the first flashback is on Page 26, but if it’s a thing you’re going to be doing a lot, it feels a little bit late to be introducing that as a device, to me.

**Craig:** It depends. I think where the reader goes awry, as they so often do, is by trying to create a general rule out of an individual reaction. The general rule is a flashback needs to happen much sooner so the audience isn’t thrown off or confused. Half the time you’re writing flashbacks to throw the audience off or to confuse them, disorient them. Audiences enjoy some disorientation as long as it pays off. What may be is that whatever the flashback contained was information that felt out of place there. That doesn’t mean the flashback is the problem. That means the stuff inside the flashback is the problem, if you get my drift. The mechanism, they say this sort of device, the device of a flashback, can work anywhere if the stuff you’re flashing back to feels correct in that spot.

**John:** I think that the problem with flashbacks is that often you’re flashing to things that don’t feel correct or they don’t feel like they are necessary or you’re illustrating something that you don’t need to illustrate. Here’s an example of something that Megana found that we’ll link to. It reads, “Flashbacks interrupt the narrative flow. Consequently, they should be used only when it is not possible to tell the story chronologically. Don’t use the flashback to merely illustrate what a character is relating verbally. It is often more effective to remain focused on that character who’s recalling them to the event, so as to gauge what the memory means to them.”

Here what I think they’re saying is a bad use of flashbacks is I am telling you a story and then we’re going to flash back to the events that I’m telling you there. That’s probably not a great use. What tends to be a more effective use is if we’re on a character, and then we flash back to the experience was meaningful for them and come back to them at the present time. Just having it be an illustration to go along with a person’s narration, that doesn’t feel great.

**Craig:** As is so often the case with what we discuss, there are all of these potential rules and pitfalls and ways to do these things, but if you write something well, then the mechanism will be just fine. No one will complain about a… Just as no one will complain about a Stuart Special. What was the Megana one?

**John:** What did we call that, the Raoveal?

**Craig:** The Raoveal? No one will complain about a Raoveal. Everything will be fine because they enjoy it. If they don’t enjoy it, then so much of what… I wonder if so much of the Sturm und Drang of screenwriting orthodoxy comes down to the fact that a lot of people will blame a misuse of technical things to avoid saying to somebody, “Your writing is bad,” especially when their job is to evaluate the writing and give a critique, because that’s a useless critique, but oftentimes it’s the only true, essential critique, “Your writing is bad. Sorry.” They can’t do that, so they say, “Oh, this flashback shouldn’t be here.” If the writing were good, then yeah, I think there wouldn’t be a problem.

**John:** I think there are also cases where something is not working in the script, and it could be that they are getting lost or confused about what it is they’re supposed to be following. I think sometimes poorly done flashbacks or nonlinear storytelling can be a contributing factor here. I’ve lost the thread. I don’t understand what it is I’m supposed to be following. I’m getting confused in a bad way. I don’t feel confident that you are going to be able to lure me there. Yes, maybe it’s bad writing, but it’s also there’s a thing you’re doing on the page that is confusing to them, something that is not working great for them about how you’re choosing to convey this information or get it out there.

A thing I will also say is that sometimes we have… I’m just thinking back to the whiteboard scenarios of complicated shows with complicated structures. There’s a real question about how many different timelines an audience can be expected to maintain. If you are in a two-timeline story and then you have a flashback within one of those timelines, how much can the audience put up with there. I think that’s a thing you’re only going to discover on the page, but maybe in the editing room as well.

**Craig:** Things have become far more complicated. The audience has become far more sophisticated when it comes to these things. That doesn’t mean that your job is to provide a timeline Olympics for them. Sometimes the story just wants to be simple and clean, and you should respect that. When you’re talking about whether or not to use a flashback, ask yourself, am I doing this simply because I’m bored with the way things are going in the current timeline or the current structure or the current narrative unfolding, or am I doing it because it would make this all much, much better? It has to be the latter. It can’t be the former. Don’t do it just because it’s something to do.

To answer the specific question from Sky Jones about at what point in the writing process is it decided to use a flashback, for me it’s in the outline process. I don’t capriciously go, “Oh, I’m going to fling myself backwards in time here.” It is as structured in and outlined in and prepared for as any other scene. In terms of keeping track of the story, you should be able to keep track of the story. If you’re having trouble keeping track of your timelines, the audience will have no chance. If you feel like you need multiple color-coded tabs to control multiple timelines, either you’re writing Inception and you’re aware that you’re basically creating a puzzle box for everybody or you’re getting too complicated.

**John:** I think it has to come from an overall Inception point of view. Am I writing the kind of movie or kind of show that will have flashbacks? If you are, great, but you’re going to be planning for those. If you’re not that kind of show, then how are you going to deliver the information you need to deliver to the audience about things that happened before. I don’t know if they explicitly said it, but it feels like the Game of Thrones guys said, “We are going to have no flashbacks on our show at all.” When they did need to go back in time to show a crucial point of family history, they had to do some Wargy time travel stuff to go back there, to make an excuse for why we were showing the audience this thing, because the show has no flashbacks otherwise.

**Craig:** That’s not quite true. For instance, they showed how the Night King was created.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** This is a personal opinion of mine. For episodic television, getting in and out of flashbacks is easier than for movies because every time you start an episode, you have an opportunity to start in one timeline and then go ahead. I do that all the time. It helps to ground people, essentially. You could have a series where every single cold open is something that takes place in an earlier timeline to create an ironic context, hopefully, for what you’re about to see.

**John:** Absolutely true. Megana, you have a question.

**Megana:** Yeah, I have a question or maybe a theory. I think for newer writers, maybe what doesn’t work about flashbacks is the impulse to deliver exposition through flashbacks. I think what you guys are saying is that if you use a flashback to emotionally inform the story or complicate things, then it works, but if you are using it as a shortcut to explain something, there could be a better, more effective way of doing that.

**Craig:** Exposition, we’ve talked about quite a few times, is either a burden or an opportunity. We’ve talked about interesting ways to deliver exposition, for instance through a relationship or personal drama, or if there’s a flashback and there is exposition, but it is presented in that flashback in the context of something that is interesting or moving or startling, then I think it’s fine. It keeps coming back to a very simple thing. Do you do it well or not? This is why for all the episodes that we’ve done, we could probably just do one mega, meta Scriptnotes episode, and it is be a good writer. It really does solve just about everything.

**John:** I do wonder if there’s a certain kind of… We could give somebody the outline and say, okay, here’s all the things that need to happen. You go to seven different writers. If there are seven different really good writers, they could make something that seems impossible on the page actually work, because they know the tricks and know how to get through it and know how to arrange the stuff, whereas opposed to a new writer would really struggle to get that stuff to work, just because they don’t have the tools in their toolbox to make it possible.

**Craig:** That’s right. We can certainly say things like, hey, avoid doing this. Whatever it is that they move toward, if they’re not good at that, it doesn’t really matter that they avoided this. Similarly, there are times where it may be better for them to just follow their instincts. If there’s one takeaway, at least for me, it’s that you just make sure that the flashback is earned and is not simply something you’re doing as a trick. It’s got to be something you are compelled to do, because it’s going to make things richer.

**John:** Let’s get on to some other listener questions. Megana, start us off.

**Megana:** Great. To Ampersand or Not To Ampersand asks, “How should I tell my writing partner I want to write my own scripts? That’s a lie. How do I tell my writing partner I’ve secretly written multiple drafts of an original-”

**Craig:** Oh, damn.

**Megana:** “… feature behind their back and am about to start a new one? Neither of us are working writers yet, but we have written two decent, at least we think so, pilots together. We’re great friends outside of writing, but for the future I see myself enjoying being a solo writer more. What’s the best way to break up with my writing partner? What on earth do I do on the off-chance one of our pilots actually sells?”

**John:** Craig, how do I break up with my girlfriend? Tell me how to break up with my girlfriend. That’s the same kinds of stuff. It’s like, “I really want to see other people. I really want to not be in this-”

**Craig:** “I have been seeing other people.”

**John:** Serial monogamist here. Listen, Ampersand.

**Craig:** Ampersand knows what we’re going to say, right?

**John:** You don’t want to be in this relationship, and therefore you need to have a grownup sit-down adult talk with this person who’s also a friend and say, “Listen, I’ve enjoyed working on these things together, but I really want to write some stuff on my own. I’m sorry this may hurt. You may want to write stuff on your own too. I really think this is going to be what’s best for me. Let’s have a chat.”

**Craig:** Without question, that’s what has to happen. It doesn’t have to be tragic. The way I would put it… I had this conversation many years ago with a writing partner, who’s a wonderful guy. I told him the truth. The truth was, “I think I’m supposed to be writing on my own.” It had nothing to do with our writing process or whatever was going on with our career, because we were getting movies made. It was just, “I think I’m supposed to be writing on my own, and so I should probably be writing on my own. I think we’ll all be happier.” He is more of a writer partner guy. He has a new writing partner. They’ve been working together for many years. It’s fine.

That’s really what it comes down to is some of us are solo writers and some of us aren’t. We don’t know when we start out. I think it’s perfectly fair to sit your partner down and say, “Okay, you know what? This is how it is.” As far as the shared custody of the pilots, just say, “Look, if somebody is into those pilots, let’s cross that bridge when we get there. We’ll figure it out.”

**John:** I have friends who wrote stuff together. They were married, wrote stuff together, got divorced. Now some of the stuff’s getting produced, and they’re figuring it out. They have joint custody of stuff, and it’s fine. The other piece of advice I would give to Ampersand is I don’t think this first conversation is the time to say, “Oh, and I also already wrote this other script.” That’s irrelevant to hear. Basically, going forward, you want to work by yourself.

**Craig:** The whole “I’ve secretly written multiple drafts of an original feature behind their back,” was there some sort of arrangement or agreement or understanding that you could not write things on your own? Unless there was. Either way, I think that just doesn’t need to be an issue. I just think you can simply say, “Here’s the way it is,” and that’s it. Don’t get too caught up in how they’re going to feel. They will feel their feelings, and they will process it, and then they will move on as well.

**John:** Also, I’ll say if this person is a friend, you want to maintain them as a friend, make sure you make some plans in the upcoming couple of weeks to do things that are fun together, because you don’t want this person to just disappear out of your life.

**Craig:** Yeah, like writing a script.

**John:** Go see a movie together. Just do some stuff so you don’t lose this person.

**Craig:** I’m so glad Megana’s here, because usually I’ll say something like that and then there’s just silence and then John moves on.

**John:** [inaudible 00:31:41] silence.

**Craig:** Thank you, Megana. God.

**Megana:** Are you guys ready for a manager question?

**Craig:** So ready for a… I woke up this morning ready for a manager question.

**John:** Let’s do it.

**Megana:** Tim from DC asks, “I think my manager is pretty ineffectual, and I need to leave them.”

**Craig:** Yes.

**Megana:** “I’m questioning the time of when to leave.”

**Craig:** Right now.

**Megana:** “I’m working on two projects to which my rep already has a claim, one that my rep says they’re going to take out as soon as I send them the next draft, for which they’ve already set up several generals and supposedly have dozens of people waiting for, and another project that I’ve been working on for months that may soon be sent out to the town. I guess I’m wondering, since my current rep is going to get 10% regardless, if I solicit a new rep with other projects already in progress, will a new rep want to fight as hard for me, given the fact that my two most active projects are both tied to my old rep? Might my new rep resent having to push ahead with my current projects without being entitled to that 10%? How does one handle this kind of situation?”

**Craig:** Aha, Tim.

**John:** Aha.

**Craig:** These are good questions.

**John:** These are good questions. I think Tim may also be making some mis-assumptions about what that manager owns or controls.

**Craig:** Unquestionably, there is a premise issue here. Managers are not agents. Agents represent clients and procure employment for them, and in doing say, they are essentially attached to the deal and make 10%. Managers do not do that. They are not allowed to do it by law. They break the law all the time, but they’re not allowed to. Managers are service providers. They make 10% as long as they’re providing a service to you. If you fire them, they don’t get 10%. There is a concept called on the wheel, off the wheel. They are off the wheel when you fire them. The new manager can work it out with the old manager. That’s their problem. You let them figure that out. I assume you have an attorney. An attorney can also advise on this. You need to leave them? Leave them. You’re questioning the timing of when to leave? There’s no time like the present.

When you say, “I’m working on two projects to which my rep already has a claim,” this is where my hair goes on fire. These people have claims to nothing. Nothing. They convince you they do, but they do not. Considering that your manager is pretty ineffectual, I wouldn’t be worried about repercussions, since obviously they’re not good at stuff, including, I would imagine, repercussions.

**Megana:** What if the manager has been sending them notes and giving them creative feedback?

**Craig:** Great. Thanks. Look, here’s the thing. They paid them. Let’s say I write something, and my manager represents me, and then it gets sold somewhere, and my manager gets 10%. That 10% is the service fee that they have to continue to service me. It doesn’t matter if they give me notes or not. Everybody can give me notes. Why do we think that we owe these people anything for the notes that they give us, when we can get notes from friends or we can pay $100 for notes? Notes are nothing. Most manager notes are terrible. If the manager’s notes were great, this person wouldn’t be considering leaving. Tim would be thrilled, because the manager would be making the scripts better. That’s my point. Good managers who actually are able to give good comments and help connect you in rooms of good people and be effective, they don’t have this issue because their clients don’t leave.

**John:** I agree with most of what Craig has said here. I think that realistically, that first project which they are aware of, which they have been exposed to, which they have given notes on, they’re going to try to hold that over you like they control it or that you owe them something for the work they’ve done on it and they’ve meaningfully set up for it. I agree with Craig, it’s not your problem. It’s your new manager’s problem. That’ll be taken up by them. This thing that you’re writing right now that they don’t seem to be aware of, don’t worry about that. That doesn’t matter. Use that new thing to get you your next rep, because they would love to see something new and show what it is you’re working on right now. You do need to leave. This is a great time to leave. It’s a great time to be looking for a different manager, a better manager, one who gets it and gets what you want to do.

**Craig:** Tim, to specifically answer this question about how will the new rep feel… I’m guessing that you’re early on in your career. It sounds like it, at least. I don’t think a manager is concerned too much with the 10% right now. They’re playing a longer game where hopefully they forge a great relationship with you, your career advances, you start to become a big shot, and then that 10% means a lot. Right now I don’t think their motivation is going to be particularly tied to any single instance of a commission of what you’re going.

**John:** Agreed. Megana, another question we can answer?

**Megana:** Moe asks, “I’m a mid-level TV writer, and I’m curious about the WGA stance on remote writers’ rooms. The union and many studios/production companies have publicly stated a need for diversity and inclusion in writers’ rooms. I love the big speeches, but in regards to action, the best way to bring more diverse voices into a writers’ room is not to force them to move to one of the most economically inaccessible cities in the country. I’m a writer of color and do not live in Los Angeles for this reason. I know several others who are in the same boat. They either cannot afford to move to LA or are responsible for a larger, sometimes multi-generational family unit, not to mention people who are pregnant and parents with young kids benefit greatly from the flexibility of remote rooms. My personal experience has been that older writers higher up the food chain are now pushing to be in person. Almost all of the writers I know are very happy staying remote. We’re at a point in the pandemic where remote rooms have become incredibly normalized. The kinks have been worked out. If the WGA is truly interested in supporting its nonwhite, economically diverse writers, shouldn’t they push to standardize remote and hybrid writers’ rooms?”

**John:** Great. We can talk about whether this is a WGA issue or not. Let’s just talk about remote rooms and hybrid rooms versus the standard where everyone just is around one big table and there’s a lunch order every day. Over the past couple of months, I’ve had a bunch of showrunners on Scriptnotes, and we’ve talked about how they were working, how they’re working in person, how they’re working remotely, hybrid stuff. A lot of them do miss being in the rooms with their writers. They feel like there’s things that happen when people are together that just don’t happen in the Zoom rooms. That said, a lot of really good shows have been made with Zoom rooms over the course of the pandemic. It is possible.

I definitely hear what Moe is saying though about having to be there in person is really challenging for some people just because of the cost of Los Angeles, and being fully remote is a good choice for some writers. I think you’re going to see both of these things moving forward. I think you’re going to see fully remote rooms moving forward. I think you’re going to see more hybrid rooms. I think there will be some fully in-person rooms. I think they could be less and less common, just because it’s better for people’s quality of life to not always be trucking into the office. Craig, you’ve not worked in a writers’ room, but what’s your instinct and what are you hearing from other people?

**Craig:** I spent some time briefly in the Mythic Quest room.

**John:** Oh, that’s right.

**Craig:** I don’t use a writers’ room myself. Personally, I am okay with certain kinds of remote collaboration. As Moe says, some of the older people, that would be me, “Some of the older writers higher up on the food chain are now pushing to be in person.” There’s a reason for that, Moe. It’s not capricious. It’s not because they can’t work the newfangled Zoom. Of course they can. There is a kind of magic that happens when people are together. It’s different. The question of how to balance that against access is a good one.

As far as the Writers Guild is concerned, the thing that the Writers Guild can do to help this is to get writers paid more, so that they can afford to live in Los Angeles. The Writers Guild is almost certainly not capable of dictating how writers’ rooms should be structured, be it in person or hybrid. It’s just not something that their own members would want. I don’t think their members would all agree with you. Sometimes when people write these things, I think they think that they are standing on firmer ground than they are. I get the premise of what you’re saying, Moe. I don’t disagree, but others will. Even if the Guild did agree, the studios would have zero interest in mandating that there could never be an in-person room. It’s just not something they would do. It is a weird limitation of our creative freedom to collaborate as we wish.

As far as I’m concerned, the answer here is get writers paid more, particularly writers on the lower end of the spectrum, the income spectrum, or as you put it, on the food chain, lower down on the food chain. Then they can afford to live somewhere in LA. By the way, it’s never easy. These are jobs that a lot of people want. Maybe you’ll have to drive in 30 or 40 minutes each day, which means that you live about a mile away from the office. In all seriousness, there will be some hardships and there will be some difficulties. The way we get around some of the structural inequities, I think, the fastest is through money.

**John:** I agree with you. I think the WGA was in a position to force remote writers’ rooms when it was an actual matter of safety. That made sense. There were a lot of studios that basically refused to allow any in-person writers’ rooms because of safety and because they didn’t want the liability of having a bunch of writers sitting around who didn’t absolutely have to be sitting around, but they could do their job remotely, made it possible.

It’s easy to think about writers together in a room, because we see it and they’re all ganged together and there’s a lunch order. We know what that is. There’s a lot of other jobs in the industry that have been remote, that are now going back to in-person, but it’s a real question job by job, person by person, how you’re going to do it. I think about editors. I think about color correction. I think about a lot of the other… Craig, you’re recording this right now at your post facility. During the pandemic, that post facility was not open. They were figuring out other ways to do it other places. I’m guessing now most of the post is happening kind of in person and kind of in a place. Is that true?

**Craig:** Certainly for us it is. We follow the ever-evolving rules that come down from the corporation. The rules from the corporation are rules that take into account the union rules. We are cross-sectioning with the Writers Guild, the Directors Guild, and IATSE. All of those unions have their own positions on what they mandate. Basically, we follow the most strict set of rules. Boy, am I tested a lot. Oh, am I tested.

**John:** It’s a thing I think people outside the industry don’t have a sense of just how often folks in the industry are tested, as opposed to any other industry, probably even more than professional sports. You’re just constantly tested here, because it’s worthwhile to keep sets healthy.

**Craig:** First of all, it’s a union mandate thing. You have to. A lot of it was driven primarily by the Screen Actors Guild or SAG-AFTRA because they had the only employees that could not wear masks all the time. Because actors must take their masks off, everybody around them then had to follow a bunch of procedures for SAG-AFTRA to essentially say, “Yes, our members can work for you.” We’ve been very careful about all that stuff. As far as writers’ rooms go, Moe, there’s no chance that the Writers Guild is going to be taking this up as a cri de couer. I think the best we can do is try and get people paid more so that they can afford to live in the city where these things happen.

**John:** Agreed. I think over the next several weeks, Craig and I will informally ask a bunch of our showrunner friends about what they’re doing on their shows and where things are headed and get a sense of what’s really happening out there.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I bet if we did survey all working members, the split would not be what you would think it would be. I think it’s going to be widely divergent about who wants to be in person and who wants to be fully remote.

**Craig:** Then the question is who are you asking, because ultimately the showrunners are the ones deciding. One of the weird things about our union is that it includes a lot of management in it, which I think we’ll maintain as massively problematic.

**John:** Let’s do our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing… Craig, click through that link. I think this is right up your alley. It’s a subreddit called cutaway porn. It’s all the images you remember from books growing up, but where you have an image and then it cuts away a piece of it, and so you can look inside.

**Craig:** This is David Macaulay stuff.

**John:** Yes. Let’s look inside a Bronze Age roundhouse. It cuts away the roof or shows how parts of a castle function and how things go together. I just found it delightful, nostalgic, really informative, just how stuff actually works. I don’t know who was the first person to… I guess da Vinci probably had cutaway stuff like this. It’s really showing the inner workings of buildings and systems and machines. I think it’s delightful.

**Craig:** There was a big book I had called Castle. I believe it was Castle.

**John:** Oh yeah, I remember Castle. Castle’s great.

**Craig:** It was just medieval castles, cutaways. Spectacular. Learned so much. Still think about those things occasionally from time to time as we’re playing D and D.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** That brings me to my one cool thing.

**John:** Segue man.

**Craig:** Segue man. This is fairly narrow, but if you are playing D and D or any role-playing game on Roll20 the way that we are… We had a nice in-person session.

**John:** We did. We did. Our first in-person session since the pandemic.

**Craig:** Lovely. You know what? I have to say, side note, a little worried that going from a bunch of guys sitting around a table with pen and paper and dice and maps and dry erase markers, it would just feel too clinical and sterile if we showed up with our laptops instead. Nope, it was great.

**John:** It was fine.

**Craig:** Perfectly fine. Turns out we are what we needed. We.

**John:** That’s what it is.

**Megana:** Aw.

**Craig:** I know, right? Every now and then, I will plug a plugin, which on Roll20 they’re called APIs. There’s one called SmartAoE that has been written by a fellow named David M. I don’t know his full name, because that’s how he goes on the forum. AoE stands for area of effect. Megana, why would you need an area of effect spell?

**Megana:** To affect a certain area?

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Well discerned there.

**Craig:** In fantasy warfare, there are lots of things that target an individual person, and then there are spells and things that target an area, that could hit lots of people at once. It’s annoying figuring out like, okay, I cast fireball, and it’s going to cover this much space. Then you got to draw the shape out, drag it over, make it resized, move it around. SmartAoE makes it so much simpler to do. It’s more fun. I got to say, these people are brilliant. These men and women who write these things… Is it Java, I guess?

**John:** It’s good stuff. It’s all the stuff of geometry and math, but applied to… It’s trying to apply cones and circles to a grid. You can look [inaudible 00:47:39] supposed to do it, but it’s inevitably an argument between Craig and Kevin about who’s covered and who’s not covered. This just does it so much better.

**Craig:** It just does it better and saves me from arguing with Kevin, which is really why I install everything.

**John:** A very good plugin. Thank you for doing that. It was also really nice to see everyone in person again playing D and D. That was in person, and also I took a Peloton class that had other riders in the studio with the instructor for the first time. It felt like, oh, the pandemic’s over.

**Craig:** We’re back.

**John:** We’re back.

**Craig:** We’re back.

**John:** That is our show for this week.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Sam Brady. 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. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on adulting. Craig, Megana, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**Megana:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Hey, Craig, when did you become an adult?

**Craig:** Oh, me, probably around seven.

**John:** Same with Mike. Mike became an adult very, very young. I did not become an adult very young. Megana, how about you? When did you become an adult?

**Megana:** Today.

**John:** Today. Now you’re an adult.

**Craig:** Today I learned I’m an adult.

**Megana:** I don’t think I’m an adult quite yet, because I’m bad at putting myself to sleep.

**Craig:** Who puts you to sleep?

**Megana:** Me, but I feel like to me, that is the definition of adulthood, being able to go to bed at a reasonable hour.

**Craig:** Then no, I’m not an adult either.

**John:** It’s not a matter of literally rocking yourself to sleep. It’s a matter of telling Megana, “Hey, Megana, go to bed.”

**Craig:** It’s not like somebody needs to read you a story.

**Megana:** No one’s patting my back as I go to bed.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Somebody should be.

**John:** Somebody should be.

**Craig:** We’ll get Bo over there.

**John:** Here’s what I’ll say. I think Megana’s bringing up a general case that’s a good marker for adulthood is recognition of consequences and avoiding consequences. If I don’t go to sleep at this time, I’m going to be a zombie tomorrow, or if I have an extra beer, I will suffer for it. That’s a thing which as you rise up through your teenagehood and into your 20s, eventually at some point you realize, okay, the consequence of this is not worth it for me, and therefore I will do a responsible, mature thing and not do that dumb thing.

**Craig:** I think a lot of maturity and adulting comes down to self-denial of basic pleasure, in part because you’ve enjoyed it before and you don’t need to feel it all the time, and also because you and your pleasure are not necessarily the most important thing. You may have a partner. You may a child. You may have employees. You may have work that you’re doing, your vocation, customers, clients. There are people for whom you are accountable. You begin to put other people ahead of your own base interests. That feels like a very adulty thing to me.

**John:** It’s accountability, but it’s also just responsibility. I remember when I first got my pug, Jake, I was responsible for it. This little being would not stay alive if I didn’t feed and care for him every day. That was a maturity thing. It was my mid-20s that I finally had my own dog. It was a form of growing up, because now this thing was fully my responsibility in a way that nothing else in my life had been. Paying rent is a responsibility. Just making sure the bills get paid every month was responsibility.

**Craig:** God, I remember paying off my student loans, getting a credit card, making those payments, making sure I made the payment every month, making sure I had enough money for rent, doing a budget, a lot of money stuff, simple, basic money stuff. I think also what helped me adult maybe faster than other people is that when I came to Los Angeles, I was 3,000 miles away from my parents. I had zero interest in relying on them for anything. When I say anything, I mean anything. No kind of support whatsoever, neither emotional nor financial. Nothing. There’s no net. There’s very real consequences for failure. That urgency definitely led to a fast adulting, because the alternative to fast adulting was a pretty dismal kind of failure.

**John:** The thing about moving out here without the safety net is it could lead to more ambitious choices, it could lead to many things, but it could also lead a person to be cautious and paralyzed. It wasn’t for you. You were always probably cautious, but you were still pursuing what you wanted to pursue. Recently, people were talking about how whenever they do a profile of 30 under 30, super successful people in their 30s, it should also show what do their parents do and what was their background that let them do those things. People who have these billion dollar valuations, there’s something about the history that got them there that’s probably a common thread behind them and what allowed them to take the chances that they took.

**Craig:** No, I think sometimes it’s just some people are like that, and some people aren’t.

**John:** Now Megana, are you an adult? Do you consider yourself fully adult or are you still a kid in many ways?

**Megana:** Aside from the sleep thing?

**John:** The sleep thing.

**Megana:** I think I’m an adult. I think another big part of being an adult is taking responsibility for yourself, being able to apologize and have self-awareness. I hope that I have those things. I think that qualifies me as an adult.

**John:** Apologizing, standing up on your principles, and not always doing what situationally is the easiest, recognizing the shades of gray and that things aren’t perfect. I remember my daughter and I have this argument about… She was saying there’s never been a truly communist system, but a truly communist system would be fantastic. I’m like, sigh. I fully get that that’s where she’s at in the understanding of it all, but also recognizing the world doesn’t match up to our utopian expectations and that you have to adapt with the world you actually have.

**Craig:** That’s a pretty adult thing to say.

**Megana:** I do think also, just to tie it back to side character energy, I think that not thinking of yourself as the main character to me feels like it signifies adulthood.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** I like that.

**Craig:** It’s a version I think of what I was saying earlier, which is you’re not the most important thing anymore. Other things are the most important thing. You becoming whatever it is that you’re aiming for… You have things or people or friends or stuff that you’re trying to get done, and it’s no longer about… Children are narcissistic, as well they should be. They’re trying to figure out who they are. At some point, you’re you, let’s get on with it.

**John:** Becoming an adult doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily old, that you’re suddenly giving up all your youth. One of the things I’ve done over the course of my career is always trying some new things, because I feel really young in those new things, because I’m inexperienced. I’m doing all the first-timer mistakes and figuring stuff out. Whether it’s doing the Broadway musical or doing the book series, there are chances to feel young again, even though I’m a full-grown adult. I’m young in doing those things. That is an opportunity not to feel put out to pasture, a sense that you are newly exploring some things with the same enthusiasm I did in my 20s for screenwriting.

**Craig:** I always say I really do feel like I’m just maybe 10 or 11 but in an older body. I mean that in that I’m still that person. Everything that I do that’s new is scary and exciting. All the fears that I had then, I probably still have quite a few of them now, despite all the therapy. I think I’m just better at managing it. Part of I guess being an adult is realizing you’re not really an adult. What you are is a child who is capable of doing more and who has different values I guess is what it comes down to.

**Megana:** I would say though that although the two of you are very much so adults, you’re both very curious, and you have a lot of optimism and excitement about new things.

**John:** I hope so. The other thing that I would say is a marker is that when people start coming to you for advice, that is some sign of being an adult. When people come to you as being the wise person who knows some things, it’s one marker. When hopefully, you’re still going out to get advice, but people come to you for advice, it’s the rest of the world recognizing, oh, you seem mature and like you know what you’re doing.

**Craig:** I feel that way. It’s not an age thing, because I meet people from time to time who are much older than I am, and they feel like the least wise people.

**John:** That’s a thing. I don’t think it’s necessarily a function of age, but it’s a function of adulting.

**Craig:** It’s weird. Then there are these people. Bella Ramsey is 18, and she has this weird, Yoda-like wisdom. I’ve never encountered it quite like the way it is in her. So wise, like when they say old soul. I don’t think old soul is the right term. It’s an adult soul. She has adult soul.

**John:** Megana, Craig, you’re some of my favorite adults.

**Craig:** Aw.

**Megana:** Aw.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Enjoy. Have a great week.

**Craig:** You too, guys.

**Megana:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp43OdtAAkM) reaching [number one on the pop charts](https://www.billboard.com/music/chart-beat/kate-bush-reclaims-uk-chart-running-up-that-hill-1235104046/)
* Beyonce’s [Break My Soul](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjki-9Pthh0)
* [Side Character Summer](https://www.instagram.com/reel/Ce6zOHKqxgW/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link) by Lolaokola on IG
* Jeremiah Lewis’s tweet @fringeblog [Ruin A Screenwriter’s Day in Three Words](https://twitter.com/fringeblog/status/1538582676076220419?s=21&t=sJtLfzZYwV9-3UIB4DF_IA)
* [Scriptnotes Ep. 10: Good Actors and Bad Writing Partners](https://johnaugust.com/2011/scriptnotes-ep-10-good-actors-and-bad-writing-partners-transcript)
* [Flashbacks and dreams](https://johnaugust.com/2003/flashbacks-and-dreams) on the blog
* [Reddit’s Cutaway Porn](https://www.reddit.com/r/Cutawayporn/)
* [Smart AoE](https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/10485883/script-smartaoe-graphical-interface-for-implementing-aoes-on-gridded-maps/?pagenum=1)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Sam Brady ([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/557standard.mp3).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Standards and Practices has informed us that we have violated a certain number of rules, including use of bad language that may be inappropriate, in fact is inappropriate for your children, so earmuffs, guys, or just listen to it when they’re not around.

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name’s John August.

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

**John:** This is Episode 556 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, Craig is back, literally back, not edited together from episodes dating back 10 years.

**Craig:** Amazing.

**John:** We have so much to talk about, from movies to gun to created by credits. We’ll also answer listener questions that have been stacking up for months.

**Craig:** Yes, please. I apologize, I’m a bit raspy. Hopefully, this comes across as maybe perhaps-

**John:** No, it doesn’t at all.

**Craig:** … compatible with Sexy Craig.

**John:** Mildly ill, yeah.

**Craig:** John, you’re not ill. There’s nothing wrong with this. Don’t kink-shame my voice.

**John:** Oh yeah, so that’s how you’re going to spin it around.

**Craig:** I’m going to spin it around. Sexy Craig loves to spin it around. Sexy Craig had to come back because my voice is a little shot. We’ve gone through whatever was nearly a year of production. I’m back home. I am whatever beyond exhausted is, whatever that state of mind is, but ready to reengage my number one pursuit, podcast making-

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** … because I love podcasts.

**John:** We’re going to get through all those topics. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’re going to discuss penmanship apparently, because this topic was chosen by our producer, Megana Rao, who I suspect just-

**Craig:** Has excellent penmanship.

**John:** I’m also making fun of you.

**Craig:** She can make fun of both of us, my friend.

**John:** At times I can write very neatly, but it just doesn’t stick.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Nope. Craig, while you’ve been gone, actually an update, the Scriptnotes book is actually going really well.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We’ve actually done a lot of work on it these past couple weeks. We’ve done a deep dive, which we sent out to all those folks who subscribed to get the updates on things. We did a deep dive on Frozen, which was an episode that Aline and I had done.

**Craig:** Oh yes, I remember it, with Jennifer Lee.

**John:** It turned out great. It was our first time testing what a deep dive chapter would feel like.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** A bunch of the interview ones done. Megana, you’re working on a chapter right now for group dynamics?

**Megana Rao:** Yes, on relationships in team movies and two-handers.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** That was actually based on… Two weeks ago our episode was a clip show that we put together. It ended up being a really good clip show with the two of us. That’s basically a chapter right there.

**Craig:** Honestly, we could probably put together 400 clip shows from the 500 shows we’ve done.

**John:** We’ve done a few while you’ve been gone.

**Craig:** You know what? Mix and match. There’s nothing wrong with that. When we were young, television would occasionally just-

**John:** Happens all the time.

**Craig:** You know what? It’s not new tonight. It’s a show that literally aired three months ago. Everyone was excited.

**John:** Also had the literal clip shows where it was like, remember that time we went and did this thing? That was a great time.

**Craig:** Yep, you get stuck in an elevator, you start remembering stuff.

**John:** You remember just a little bit. The Clerks animated TV show did not last for very long, but the first episode was a clip show, which I did respect.

**Craig:** Cute.

**John:** It was a good, fun idea. Updates on the book. I had said originally 2022. That’s not going to happen. We have a proposal that’s out now to our agent. We’re going to try to find a good publisher for the book.

**Craig:** What would you say the price is? Are we going to charge $300, $400 for this thing?

**John:** I think so, based on all of the work going into it. Each one is hand sewn. It’s going to be-

**Craig:** Big margins.

**John:** Big margins. Big margins for this book.

**Craig:** We’ve arrived.

**John:** It’s going to be good. Craig, not only are you back, movies are back.

**Craig:** Movies are back.

**John:** Movies are back.

**Craig:** They are back.

**John:** Big box office this past couple weeks.

**Craig:** It’s interesting. They’re back-ish. When Top Gun: Maverick comes out, it’s like the old days. It’s smashing Memorial Day weekend records. There have been big movies that have been coming out, but they are a very specific kind of movie, and there are not a lot of them. It used to be that on Memorial Day there would be two or three of these mega airliners smashing into each other and competing for this crazy week. It would go on for a few weeks. Now it’s like, oh my god, a movie. Then everybody goes, “Remember that?” I guess Jurassic Park, sort of.

**John:** Jurassic Park was probably the best example of… Top Gun was still able to hold on, while Jurassic Park did huge numbers as well. We’ll see whether we’re getting back into that groove. It’s also been nice to see Everything Everywhere All at Once doing great and just keeps trucking along.

**Craig:** That movie.

**John:** Delightful.

**Craig:** I can’t wait.

**John:** We’ve tried to get Daniels on to join us, and it’s just been a scheduling-

**Craig:** We’re going to get at least a Daniel. I don’t care. It has to happen.

**John:** Either one.

**Craig:** I love that movie so much.

**John:** So, so good. Craig, let’s talk about guns in Hollywood. This past week, a bunch of Hollywood creators signed a petition. I saw Shonda Rhimes. I saw Judd Apatow. Some of their statement with this open letter says, “As American storytellers, our goal is primarily to entertain. We also acknowledge that stories have a power to affect change. Cultural attitudes towards smoking, drunk driving, seat belts, and marriage equality have all evolved due in large part to movies’ and TV’s influence. It’s time to take on gun safety. We’re not asking anyone to stop showing guns on screen. We’re asking writers, directors, producers to be mindful of on-screen gun violence and model gun safety best practices. Let’s use our collective power for good.” An open letter. Craig, what’s your first instinct on this?

**Craig:** They solved it. We’re saved.

**John:** I have mixed feelings. I will say that going back to the episode we did about the Sideways effect and cigarette smoking, I do think stopping showing cigarette smoking on screen did have some impact in what people are doing to smoke cigarettes. The counter-example I have with guns though is that American movies are seen all over the world, and no one has the same gun violence problem that we do. It’s not the movies. It’s the guns.

**Craig:** In fact, I think it’s a very dangerous thing to suggest that it’s the movies. The issue with smoking is millions of Americans smoke. Millions of Americans do not murder each other with guns, although sometimes it feels like it. It’s a very rare and random thing that happens from time to time. When it does, the presence of a gun exacerbates someone’s terrible state of mind, and we have this awful violence. This is a uniquely American phenomenon, because for instance, certain states let 18-year-olds have assault rifles, which is insane.

We can’t impact millions of Americans with this, because millions of Americans happily are not murdering each other in the street with guns. Gun violence is not a function of movies. Nobody who shoots up a school or shoots up a supermarket or shoots up a post office is doing so because they watched a movie and got excited. No one. The premise is actually quite dangerous, I think. I think it feeds into this terrible narrative that we’ve always struggled to grasp at. You know what used to cause gun violence and things like that? Heavy metal. Then it was video games. Now it’s movies. It’s none of that.

You’re absolutely right to point out… In the UK for instance, there was a terrible school shooting in the ’80s in Scotland. The United Kingdom’s response, so, so sane, was to ban guns. There has not been such a school shooting since. They have all the same movies that we have. There’s plenty of gun violence there. I think that drama is always going to show extreme things. We’re allowed to murder people. Apparently, we can cut their throats. We can stab them in the head. We can have Jason walk around and hatchet teenagers.

This is a bit like… In reaction to the emergence of the AIDS crisis in the ’80s, the porn industry was like, “Maybe everyone wear condoms.” Everyone was like, “We don’t want to watch that so much,” and then they didn’t, because movies are not reality. We actually understand that. We didn’t start wearing seat belts because of movies. We started wearing seat belts because there was a law, and we’d get a pretty sizeable ticket. Plus, it also made sense.

**John:** I want to make sure we’re not straw manning them here, because they’re not saying as a factor of gun violence. It’s a cultural attitude towards guns. I do think that there is a possibility that the way we portray guns in movies and television has an influence in how Americans perceive guns and the problems of guns and the utility of guns to solve problems.

I’ll give you an example. On the first Charlie’s Angels movie, one of the things Drew and I discussed from the very start is the Angels don’t use guns. There just are no guns. There are no guns in our movie. An Angel will never touch a gun. That was an important distinction at the start. Therefore, we’re going to have to find other ways to do the things you would otherwise do with a gun. That was helpful for that movie. Is it going to work for all movies? No, but I think sometimes asking that question from the start, of does a gun need to be in this scene or in this moment could lead to some good, better solutions.

**Craig:** It’s always a creative question. Putting the gun debate aside, it’s a very important creative question. What sort of violence does this character commit? Very famously, Batman doesn’t use guns. What Batman does do is severely beat his victims, to the point where they are probably likely going to be permanently brain damaged, whereas perhaps just shooting them in the shin would’ve helped, made their life a little bit better afterwards. That’s a Batman thing, doesn’t use guns. Superman doesn’t need to use guns because he can throw a meteorite at your face. Other characters do.

I don’t think that the discussion should be within the context of actual gun violence in the street, because if I think about a movie that glorifies gun use, John Wick comes to mind. John Wick is fun, and it’s insane. It’s crazy, posits a world where there is a hotel for hit men, where they have hit men tailors and whatever they do in there. Nobody’s John Wicking around. I can’t think of something that glorifies gun use more. There’s all sorts of things that are… You know what’s glorious on film? Drinking. We show people drinking all the time on film. Drinking is a poison that kills a lot of people. More people die every year from drinking than from gun violence, but we love it because it’s fun and because it’s the movies. It’s fake. It’s fiction.

**John:** Again, I want to make sure that we’re not escaping what they’re actually trying to do here, because they’re also talking about gun safety culture, like showing characters who do have guns actually locking them up or doing them safely. There are small things I think that could help.

**Craig:** I don’t see how that helps. I don’t see watching a movie where a guy puts a gun in a safe and closes it is going to make anybody else in the world think, “Oh, I should get a safe for this.” We all know. It’s like with smoking. Prior to smoking being removed from a lot of movies, there were warnings on every single pack of cigarettes for as long as you and I have been alive that said, “Don’t do this. It’s going to kill you.” We all know it’s going to kill us. Any reasonable person understands that you should keep guns out of the hands of children or people who should not have guns in their hands. Every reasonable person knows that they should be locked up. What I do think is good is to show people… For instance, when you show people using guns in shows or movies, and they are somebody that has picked up a gun before, they should hold it correctly. Keep your finger off the trigger. Keep the barrel down. Don’t do stupid things like pointing it sideways. Then again, some characters are knuckleheads and that’s what they do. That’s part of the stupidity of it. Have you seen Barry?

**John:** I’ve seen Barry, yeah.

**Craig:** This year, there was a moment-

**John:** There was a moment where two characters who decided they were going to use a gun to do violence should never have been sold a gun.

**Craig:** Correct. That was an interesting commentary on gun violence, because they are having a discussion about taking revenge and murdering somebody, and then it is revealed they are having that discussion right in front of a gun salesman, who says, “So are you taking it?” They say, “Yes.” He’s like, “Great.” He gives them the gun. Somewhat predictably, they end up injuring themselves, because they’re bad at gun use. That is an interesting commentary on guns. That’s within a show where a guy is constantly killing people with guns and never locks it up. I think it felt to me like its heart was in the right place. We all want to do something. I think Hollywood tends to believe that it is more culturally powerful than it is when it comes to certain things. We are more of a mirror than a projector.

**John:** Here’s as far as I’ll meet you is that I do worry that sometimes making the statement or saying we’re going to do this thing on our side is taking the pressure off of the actual people who need to affect the changes, which are lawmakers, because it was not just cigarettes not being shown in movies that affected the change. It was you can’t smoke in restaurants. We made it much harder to smoke.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** If we make it much harder to-

**Craig:** Get guns.

**John:** …own a gun, get a gun, use it improperly, yes.

**Craig:** From the beginning, one of the most popular Hollywood genres was the Western. In the Western, people shot each other constantly. That was the thing. There was rifles and handguns. They would swing the guns around. They would bring them in places and shoot each other in the streets. There were not mass shooting incidences in the ’50s and ’60s. One notorious one in Texas, and we still talk about it. If that happened today, it would be news for about an hour. The presence of the gun in our culture has always been there. The availability of guns for anyone, including the mentally ill or the angry or the young and brain not completed, therein is clearly, without question, the 99.9% contributing factor to our situation today.

**John:** We will not solve the problem of gun violence in America, but I think you and I may actually be able to achieve some closures or some real consensus on this next thing, which is a piece of follow-up. We talked about what is that page after the cover page before the script starts. It’s an interstitial page. Interstitial may be a good word for it. We asked our listeners for submissions about what they think that page should be called. I am going to read these aloud. I want your honest feeling about each of them. We may ultimately do a poll or something, but I want to hear you react first. Prescript.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Page 0.

**Craig:** Terrible.

**John:** Declaration page.

**Craig:** Outrageous.

**John:** Ancillary page.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Preface page.

**Craig:** Uck.

**John:** Epigraph page.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Dedication page.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Notes page.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Dramatis personae.

**Craig:** Get out of here.

**John:** Front matter.

**Craig:** Front matter just sounds disgusting.

**John:** This is from Icelandic. Sourbla [ph].

**Craig:** Perhaps in Iceland.

**John:** Elias sent that through for us. You liked epigraph most. I like preface most. Talk to me about why epigraph.

**Craig:** That’s what it is. That was the word-

**John:** In a book, it was.

**Craig:** That’s what I was trying to remember and I couldn’t. It was somewhere way back in my head. Epigraph is exactly the description that we have for that is the graph on top of epi. That is a perfect description of that page. Preface, it’s true. The problem is preface has its own meaning, which is a full chapter that is an introductory forward or something like that.

**John:** I get that. I feel like most people don’t know what an epigraph is.

**Craig:** Let’s teach them.

**John:** Otherwise, everyone gets the sense a preface comes before the thing starts.

**Craig:** Sure. I think we have the power, as we just know. That’s what I want to do. Let’s just put out our own competing thing, get as many of our friends to sign it, saying this thing really should be called the epigraph. Let’s stop calling it that weird page between the cover and the next thing. Let’s see if we can change the world.

**John:** After this episode comes out, we will officially poll the world and see if we can get people to come on board with one of these things. I feel like it’s going to be probably preface or epigraph. I also kind of like Page 0, but it also makes it feel like you’re going to number that Page 0.

**Craig:** Page 0 sounds pretty intense. That sounds like it could be a title of a movie. Look, I’ll accept any of them except front matter. That just sounds dirty.

**John:** Yeah, or it sounds like a brain thing. It’s like, oh, he has damage to his front matter.

**Craig:** Right, or it just implies that there’s back matter. I don’t want it.

**John:** A notes page feels like it comes at the end of a script to me.

**Craig:** Yes, or put notes on it. These aren’t notes.

**John:** No, they’re not notes. We have a question from Mark about Obi-Wan Kenobi’s created by credit. Megana, can you help us out with that?

**Megana:** Mark writes, “In Episode 552, you talked about the writing credits on Elvis and everything that went into the decisions to credit it the way that they did. In a similar vein, I wanted to ask why there’s no created by credit on the Disney Plus series Obi-Wan Kenobi. It’s my understanding that the writer of the first episode is usually considered the creator, but both of the first two episodes have story by and teleplay by credits in addition to the based on Star Wars by George Lucas credit, which has become standard since Disney bought Lucasfilm, and no creator credit. Is this more common than I think it is or is there some kind of weird possible IP-based reason why there isn’t a creator credit?”

**Craig:** There may very well be. My understanding is that when you’re talking about an adaptation, created by is in play if the adaptation is sufficiently different from the source material, if you’re directly adapting a preexisting storyline. I haven’t seen the Obi-Wan Kenobi show.

**John:** It’s based on things that exist, but there’s a whole new storyline. It’s not a remake of a thing.

**Craig:** It’s not from, for instance, a comic or a novelization or something like that. If you’re adapting something in a very close manner to what was there before, then there may be a rule about created by not being in play. My personal opinion is that the Writers Guild shouldn’t be in the business of taking created by away from anybody. I think it should be always available. It should always be there. I don’t really see what’s the point of limiting it, particularly if there’s not an argument about it. I ran into a weird thing with that on Chernobyl. Originally, HBO submitted the credits and said created by Craig Mazin, and the Writers Guild initially came back and said you can’t have created by because you’re only five episodes.

**John:** That’s right, you told me that.

**Craig:** Created by requires you to have six episodes. I was like, “Guys, it’s just me.”

**John:** No one else.

**Craig:** There’s no other writer that has been hired on this show. One writer is employed: me. You’re just taking away from me. It was going to be six episodes. We just collapsed it during production into five. They were like, “No, sorry, that’s the rule.” I was like, “Now I have to try and get a waiver.” I think at that point they were like, “Just give it to him.”

**John:** I just looked it up. Obi-Wan Kenobi has six credits, so that, it wasn’t the issue. I do wonder if there’s a thing about… There were multiple writers on it. I think there may have been multiple writers doing different things at different times. It may have been an arbitration credit to get to where we even were for the pilot credits. That makes it harder to get a created by credit.

**Craig:** I readily admit that when we get questions about feature credits, I have 100% confidence that I know what I’m talking about. Television credits, weird, but again, I don’t have a writers’ room, so it doesn’t come up, but I have 70% confidence in my answer.

**John:** The related credit you’ll often see in television is developed by, which is when it’s coming off of a piece of IP, but you don’t get a created by credit. We’re going to be comfortable in our not knowing the full answer here. You are doing more TV. I’m going to be doing more TV. We’re going to learn this. Check in in 10 years and we’ll be experts on these credits.

**Craig:** Or even a month.

**John:** Even a month. Let’s get to some listener questions. Megana, I hope you have your voice rested, because there’s a lot of questions to get through.

**Megana:** I do. We have Nile from Hong Kong, who asks, “How do you handle repetitive actions such as a military character enters and stands to attention? My current screenplay has quite a few ‘stands to attentions.’ I’ve tried variations, starting the scene later, adding a distraction, and even hanging a lantern on it, but I still have three more ‘stands to attentions’ than I want.”

**John:** I suspect you don’t actually need to have those “stands to attentions,” because at a certain point, we just get when a character comes into the scene, they’re going to have to do that. You don’t need to call it out every time. That’s my guess.

**Craig:** I’m a little concerned that you have that many soldiers entering and standing to attention period.

**John:** That’s a lot of walking in rooms.

**Craig:** It may be a sign that there’s just a lot of times where somebody walks into a room and goes wah. Are they saluting? Are they just bah? You can also get away sometimes with assuming that they’re standing to attention for the same person, like let’s say General Smith. You could say, “So-and-so enters the room, stands to attention in front of General Smith, as everyone always does,” and then you know this generally is going to happen.

**John:** Yeah, just because if you have people doing the kinds of stuff that they’re going to be doing in the world of your movie, you just don’t have to call it out all the time. In Top Gun, they’re not talking about how they’re doing stuff on the plane each time. Probably the first time in the script it’s mentioned, you’re seeing it, but then you’re not acknowledging it every other time.

**Craig:** Yeah. You can establish your routine as a routine, let us know that it is a routine, and then move along.

**Megana:** I think this is an interesting followup. Jonathan asks, “In your recent episode on entrances and exits, you mention that we don’t need to see people enter and exit places, yet in the show Severance it shows the subjects walking from place to place throughout a large portion of the show. Why do you think this works?”

**John:** I think it works really well in Severance. My guess is why it works so well in Severance is this is a show about characters being trapped in a place they cannot get out of. They’re in a very small environment. It works for them to always be walking from one point to another point. They’re always under surveillance. It feels right in the continuity of that show. My guess is that you see a lot more entrances and exits in an office world than you do outside, is that you’re seeing characters enter into spaces more down there than outside. I think there’s probably a good contrast there.

**Craig:** All we were saying is you don’t need to. We weren’t saying you shouldn’t or that it’s bad. It’s just that you don’t feel that you are obligated to show people enter or exit spaces. If there’s a purpose, whether it’s thematic or because the space is really interesting, do it. I write entrances and exits all the time.

**John:** I would say that show also has a lot of things that are happening in doorways, because you’re always in between two different spaces. It feels really natural that you’re just going to show somebody coming in and going out of that space. I would say definitely not trying to have a blanket prohibition on entrances and exits, but always look at a scene and say, wait, do I actually need to have this character walk in here, because I think so often, especially new screenwriters are treating it like a play, where everyone has to enter into the scene, do the work of the scene, and then leave the scene. The magic of movies is you don’t.

**Craig:** Exactly. We’re just saying ask the question.

**John:** Cool.

**Megana:** Alex from Manchester asks, “I’m in the middle of planning a short screenplay set in early 19th century Wales. While I’m happy with the overall premise, I can’t help but feel I’m damaging the integrity of the story by writing the film in English, as during this time, little to no one would’ve spoken English. Should this be a genuine worry or shall I plow on, incorporating the Welsh language where possible and in small doses to help hold up its overall integrity?”

**John:** I don’t know what I would do.

**Craig:** I know what I did.

**John:** Absolutely. People, they spoke, quote unquote, Russian.

**Craig:** Yes. People spoke English. They spoke English just like Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in not Danish but English. Alex is perfectly free to write this story not in Welsh, a beautiful but notoriously difficult language to speak, and very few people understand it. You’d right away be limiting your actor pool quite significantly. Again, it’s for an audience. The language to me is not where all of the beautiful detail is. If you get the clothing and the hair and the places and the props right, if you get the attitude, if you get the philosophy and the history correct, the language is just part of the regular artifice of recreating life through art. I don’t see any reason why you should feel obligated to try and write this in a language that I doubt you speak. Don’t make them sound like they’re from Manchester, because that would be hysterical but wrong.

**John:** A thing Alex may run into is that if everyone is, they’re speaking English, but we know they’re actually really supposed to be speaking Welsh, and he has to have a scene where some English speaker comes into that situation, that can be complicated. That’s the Hunt for Red October problem.

**Craig:** Exactly. England and the English language gives you such a great gift here. There is a Welsh accent in English. Lots of ells. It’s lovely. It would be good if the actors spoke English with a Welsh accent. Similarly, when the king is discussing how to put down the rebellion in Wales, he should be rather posh and kingly in his speech, RP and all that. There are wonderful regional accents that they can always pull from, especially if you’re making a film in the UK about a section of the UK. Try and get that accent right. Then again, they made Braveheart.

**John:** I was going to say Braveheart, that’s in English.

**Craig:** Everyone’s all over the place. Half of them are Irish. One of them’s American, so you know.

**John:** You know. I would say also, Alex, watch House of Gucci.

**Craig:** Don’t do that.

**John:** Watch House of Gucci, because those characters, they are Italian, but they’re speaking English. Sometimes they speak Italian. Sometimes they’ll say things like… In English they’ll say, “What’s the word for… ” It’s like, you’re speaking Italian right now.

**Craig:** Plus, they also vaguely sounded like vampires. It did not help that story. I agree with you. I really struggle when they just try too hard with the language. I do feel like well-trained actors from the United Kingdom will be able to do a Welsh accent with some training. There are wonderful dialect coaches that work with folks in the UK all the time.

**John:** Cool.

**Megana:** This is a quick question for Craig. Cuber Dad asks, “Do you like Rubik’s cubes? Where do they rank on your puzzle solving scale? I got one for my son and finally learned how to solve it in my 40s. Am I wrong to think that cubing and writing share some similarities? Trying to crack an algorithm on a cube feels like working through a difficult part of a script, turning a scene one way, then sideways, then back on itself, or perhaps I’m straining this metaphor.”

**Craig:** You are straining this metaphor.

**John:** You are definitely.

**Craig:** Writing is like a Rubik’s cube with so many pieces that no one can learn the algorithm, and it’s constantly changing anyway, because what you consider to be success with the Rubik’s cube, which is finite, is not success with writing. Nobody knows what success is with writing until you get there. No, they are not related. I do not know how to solve a Rubik’s cube. My script supervisor, Chris Roofs [ph], excellent Rubik’s cube solver. Bella Ramsey, excellent Rubik’s cube solver. The two of them would solve it, and then I would come and mix it up. That was my job. Could I learn? Yes. There is a method. You can learn it. That is the very reason I don’t want to, because once you learn it, you can pick up any Rubik’s cube that has been scrambled to any extent and within a few minutes, solve it, because you are essentially being a robot. That said, I do like watching them solve it.

**John:** It’s fun to watch. My daughter learned how to solve a Rubik’s cube while we were in Paris. For two or three years, she was solving it. Now it sits on a shelf. She’s never going to solve it again. It was useful in its time. There is a good Rubik’s cube movie. We’ll put a link in the show notes.

**Craig:** A documentary.

**John:** A documentary.

**Craig:** It’s lovely.

**John:** Great, but it’s not really about Rubik’s cubes. It’s about this relationship between these solvers and this one kid.

**Craig:** It’s about the autism spectrum more than anything. I think it’s gorgeous. Beautiful movie. I will say that level of solving is astonishing to me, where it’s not about solving your Rubik’s cube, it’s about seeing just how fast can the brain go, not only to know what should be done, but also to make the fingers do it. For these kids to blindfold themselves and solve a Rubik’s cube in 30 seconds is just astonishing to watch.

**Megana:** Ray in the Midwest asks, “I’m the main writer on a genre indie film coming out later this year with an Academy Award actor as one of the leads. On top of that, my representation is currently shopping three to four different genre scripts of mine that are getting interest. I parlayed this writing momentum into finally getting permission to adapt one of my dream projects after pursuing it for more than a decade. It’s a comic book property. I took it to my representation, thinking it could be a game-changer, which it was for a bit. Suddenly, they now have a major studio screenwriter who’s shown interest in the property and pitching it as a major studio tent pole, which means that I would not be the screenwriter on my dream project. However, I would still be on board as a producer, which my reps told me would be far more valuable than me writing my dream project at the indie level. I’ve dreamt about writing this movie for over 12 years, and I’m wrestling with what is the best approach here. I’m obviously in no position to get this made as a major studio tent pole like the other writer, but the project is incredibly important to me. I always want to be a team player, because this industry’s all about collaboration. My question is, is it more valuable to my career moving forward to write and maintain creative involvement even if the movie is at the indie level like 2 million or below, or to be a producer with very little input on the potential $50 million or more?”

**Craig:** There’s a girl you’ve been chasing for years. You finally get that chance, and then your best friend says, “You know what would be even better than sleeping with her? That guy sleeping with her.”

**John:** I feel really bad for Ray. I have had similar conversations with friends who have been in situations like this, where they had the take, they had the thing, and they were about to get the job, and then some big screenwriter, not me… There have been conversations where I’ve been the person who’s come in to be that big screenwriter. I feel bad for the Rays who I didn’t even know about who were involved in things. My hunch is that so far you have an indie coming out, which is great. You have this other thing you want to adapt. You want to do it as an indie. If it really wants to be a bigger property and you’re not going to be able to swing it, take the producer credit, learn how a big movie gets made. Learn how all the gears go together and grind things down into frustrating pulps. Then focus on doing other stuff, because you have other projects, other irons in the fire, as you said in the first paragraph, different genre scripts. Use those to be your indie calling cards. Use this to be a lesson about how to make a big movie.

**Craig:** You’re implying that you have a choice. I’m not quite sure how that is. If you do have a choice, then my feeling is write it. You know how to do it at a certain level. You believe you do. You should do it. If there is no choice, I’m not really sure what the question is anyway. This is happening.

**John:** Yeah, because he doesn’t control the IP it doesn’t look like.

**Craig:** What I would say is make your peace with it. John’s absolutely right. It’s a great chance to see something big get put together. It’s a wonderful opportunity to see something destroyed that you love, which everybody should experience in Hollywood at least-

**John:** I’ve had a few of those.

**Craig:** … 7 or 18 times. One thing I just want to be clear about, your reps are absolutely full of shit. This is not good. That producing credit will mean zero. There is in movies one producing credit that means something, and it is produced by. The rest aren’t going to mean anything. They’re going to give you co-producer or, God forbid, associate producer. Do not settle for that. Even if it’s executive producer, it doesn’t matter, because everybody will know who produced the movie, and everybody will know who wrote the movie. We all know. Don’t get swayed by that. It will accrue to a zero benefit for you.

**John:** Last week on the show we had Michael Waldron on. He was talking about he went to Pepperdine for film school. I was trying to drill him. I tried to be Craig here and say, “What did you really get out of it? Was it worth your time? Was it worth your money?” It was clear that he treated it as like, “I’m going to treat every day like it’s my job. I’m going to absolutely kill everything that comes my way. I’m just going to really approach it like that.” If this could be Ray’s film school, where it’s like, “Listen, I know that my producer credit’s not going to mean anything, just like my screenwriting degree is not going to mean anything, but I am going to learn the shit out of things every day on this process and I’m going to stay involved on those conversations,” that’s going to be really helpful for you.

**Craig:** You’ll have to fight your way into it.

**John:** You will.

**Craig:** You may think that, “Oh, I’m a producer on this.” They’re like, “No, you’re not.”

**John:** Craig and I have been producers on things we’ve barely touched.

**Craig:** Enjoy your two tickets to the premier, sitting way, way in the back.

**John:** Ray, congratulations that you have a movie coming out with good people. It sounds like things are going pretty well here. Just don’t take the negative of this one thing not going quite the way you hoped as a sign that everything is doom.

**Craig:** Lay in wait, because that big screenwriter may fall on his or her face. Happens all the time. Then you can step up and be like, “I know what to do.”

**Megana:** Nathan in Nashville asks, “I’ve been stumped for a few weeks on a new spec I’m writing. I have the gist of the story worked out in a broad outline. I know all the major set pieces, including the ending. However, something feels off with the logic. I feel like I’m trying to force a puzzle piece into a hole that’s a 95% match. It might even seem to fit to the untrained eye, but doesn’t lock perfectly into place. For context, it’s a sci-fi script, but if Michel Gondry and the Muppets had total creative control. In other words, the rigorous logic needed for audience buy-in is much closer to the Swedish chef cooking with singing food than it is to Anthony Rapp navigating a star ship through a multidimensional network of interstellar fungi. Even still, I feel stuck. Do you have any tips for working yourself out of this predicament? I keep trying to write around the problem and solve it in a second draft, but the fact that the story logic isn’t perfect keeps niggling around in my brain and stopping that progress. I just can’t find that perfect fit.”

**Craig:** You got to pay attention to that.

**John:** Something’s wrong.

**Craig:** There is no piece fitting 95%.

**John:** I can tell you as a person who solves jigsaw puzzles, there’s no such thing as a 95% piece.

**Craig:** Not a puzzle.

**John:** I am the person who’s qualified to answer this thing talking about puzzle pieces. I’m going to say if it’s a near fit, it is a misfit. It’s not actually going to work. You’re going to bend the edges of that puzzle piece. Only pain is going to follow.

**Craig:** You will not be able to reassemble your broken picture. I will say that you need to solve this problem. You cannot write your way around it. You can’t cover it with words. You can’t pour structure over it, all that stuff. You think that the untrained eye might not notice it. Everyone will notice it. It will be glaring the whole time. Think of how many times you walked out of a movie complaining that something didn’t make sense. You have to solve it. This is very hard. This is a hard, hard thing to do.

I always think of this line, I’m sure I said this before, from Searching for Bobby Fischer, where this little kid is sitting there, eight-year-old chess prodigy, but he’s learning from a grandmaster played by Ben Kingsley. He’s laid out this arrangement of pieces for the kid. He says, “You can get to checkmate in 10 moves. How?” The kid’s just staring. He goes, “I don’t see it.” He says, “Don’t move until you see it.” “I don’t see it.” “Don’t move until you see it.” “I don’t see it.” Then he whacks all the pieces away, and the chessboard is empty. Then the kid looks at it. Then he has it in his mind. Then he sees it. Then it’s glorious.

I would say to you, in terms of writing, don’t move until you see it. Solve the problem in your head. It’s often way more elegant than you think. You will go through all these, and I do this all the time, these torturous machinations, because you think you’re hunting for this elusive, complicated formula. You’re not. You’re looking for E equals MC squared. You’re looking for something so fundamentally simple that when you see it, you’ll know.

**John:** My hunch is that you’re going to find the solution is not by adding something, but by taking some things away, and probably by taking away some things earlier on, because you’re trying to stack things up to fit a certain way. If you just take that piece out, oh, that was the thing that was causing the wrinkle in the carpet. It’s that thing that you can’t solve. Once you take that thing out, you’re there. It may also be a piece of just logic you’re giving us early on or emotional logic that you’re giving us early on makes us feel like this is how it’s going to work. These are the rules of the world that I’m setting up. Within the rules of the world I’m setting up, this makes perfect sense. Maybe don’t move until you see it. Also, the other choice is to take a step back and don’t try to solve this problem right in front of you. Look at the whole thing, and see, if I take some other things away, does that problem disappear.

**Craig:** Look at what you have, and ask yourself if maybe the answer’s just sitting there, because just what happens if everybody relaxes? What happens if all the characters that are currently tormenting themselves into your plot, what if it just relaxes? What if it simplifies?

**John:** The language you’re using, you’re trying to force something. You’re trying to jam something. Nope, actually just got to ease back and just let it flow and let it go to the next thing. It can feel lazy. It can feel like, I’m not doing work to jam this thing. No. Actually, it’s much more natural. If you’re doing a great job of writing this, it’s going to feel both natural and surprising to the audience, I think, because one of the things I loved so much about the third act of Top Gun movie is that a bunch of stuff happens, that I’m not surprised that all happens, but it actually feels natural to how the movie is set up.

**Craig:** Great.

**Megana:** DJ from Palmdale asks, “I’m writing a script in which the main characters are introduced in the opening scene, but as younger versions of themselves. Later the story jumps forward to the time period where the rest of the movie takes place when they’re older. My question is should I do my in-depth character introductions in that opening scene when they’re younger versions of themselves or should I wait until a few scenes later when the main characters are reintroduced as their older versions? The characters haven’t changed much fundamentally since the time period in the opening scene and act pretty much the same, but their older versions are what the audience sees for most of the film.”

**John:** Interesting. I don’t think we’ve actually addressed this before. When you have younger and older versions of characters, if you’re saying here that they’re actually not fundamentally vastly different, personality-wise. They’re still going to look different. They’re still going to feel different in their space. Make sure you’re giving us a visual and a way to identify those characters, keep them straight, when we first see them, with the older version or the younger version. You get a sense of who they are. When we see the older or the younger version of them, you can use some similar language to remind us of the personality things or other defining characteristics so we completely connect them in our heads, because it’s one thing in a movie when we’re watching that we can see these characters, be like, “Oh, that looks like the young version of Bill Hader.” On the page, we don’t have that. All we have is these names, and hopefully, we’re going to match to be the same person. We can get lost in terms of what’s changed and what’s the same.

**Craig:** You’re asking should I do this or that. My answer is yes, because you want to introduce the characters as they’re young, the way you should introduce any character. I want to know what they look like, what their hair is like, their clothes, wardrobe, hair, and makeup. If there’s anything specific, are they missing teeth, are they skinny, are they heavy, are they goofy, are they handsome, whatever it is, tell us. If you’re telling me that when they’re older they’re basically the same, I’m telling you, you haven’t done it right, because age is the thing that changes us the most, and not just because there’s physical changes, but there are mental changes and emotional changes. If you’re telling me a story where I see them as children and then I see them as an adult, for the love of god, something must’ve happened when they were children to earn my way into now jumping ahead and seeing them as adults. It’s really important that you do it again. If all you do is say 15 years older but more worried, 15 years older, still boyish, but somehow has lost their charm, or the goofy one is now more possessed, whatever it is, you got to give me something. Otherwise, why are you jumping ahead in time? Something must’ve happened.

**John:** The other thing I’d ask you to really look at, DJ, is how important is the younger and the older version of these characters. It says here that you were mostly with the older versions of these characters. Really ask yourself what happens if we don’t have these younger versions. It may be absolutely essential to your story that we see these younger versions, but maybe it’s not. Maybe you’re trying to do a thing that won’t actually be benefiting you in the movie. Maybe the question you’re asking is really should you be doing this at all. Maybe you should. Just ask yourself could you get by without this.

**Megana:** Justin asks, “My name’s Justin, and I’m in Canada, and I’m dyslexic. I’m currently writing my first screenplay roughly 20 years after being told by a high school English teacher that I should give up writing. That moment shattered my confidence, but as spell check and grammar checkers became more and more reliable, I slowly began to write again. I will always have to take a final ultra-slow pass reading through my script, but I will still miss mistakes that may seem fundamental to other screenwriters. Generally, the mistakes are not so severe that it would ruin the reading experience. I’m really confident in my storytelling skills. Should I be informing people before they read my script that I’m dyslexic and that there may be a few grammar errors? I worry that they may not want to read it at all if I do this. If I don’t, I worry they may wonder how I could make some fundamental mistakes.”

**Craig:** Good question. For starters, you can ask somebody to proofread it for you. There are people who will read scripts, and they will check for both spelling and grammar issues. My guess is that there are probably some pretty good resources for you in Canada, Canada, my home away from home last year and some, a socialist country with a lot of resources. I would imagine that there’s probably some decent resources for people with dyslexia there. There may be something. I don’t know if you live in a major city or not, but perhaps at a university library or at the university setting, there may be somebody willing to just do that to help you out. If not, then I think it’s fair to let people know that you’re dyslexic. The way I would put it is, “If you see any errors that would make you think, why would a person like this make that error, now you know why.” I wouldn’t get into grammar or spelling per se. I would just say, “If you see an error that seems funky, just flag it for me. I’m dyslexic. This will happen from time to time.”

**John:** I think before you need to do that, you’re going to be able to find resources for getting that last set of eyes on them, because you talk about needing to read through slowly and carefully, so you do have a sense of the kinds of things you’re struggling with. It may be a public resource, but it may also just be the person you’re paying 50 bucks to do that last pass on a script before you send it in. I think we’ve talked about this on previous episodes where there are people who will just read your script and there are people who can help you out on that. Finding the college student who can do that may be one of the best resources there for that.

I would also say that I think one of the good things that’s happened in the 20 years that you weren’t writing is that we’ve recognized that dyslexia is a set of challenges for people to read and to write, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have the ability to express themselves or tell stories and do all these things. I’m just really happy that you’ve realized that you have the ability to do all these things, and just like a person who… Ryan Knighton is blind and can write a hell of a script. It’s a small obstacle on the way that you can deal with and address.

**Craig:** 100%. With that in mind, if you do find somebody that you’re going to pay $50 to, $50 Canadian-

**John:** Which is less than it would be in the US. It’s a bargain in Canada.

**Craig:** John doesn’t understand money. Anyway, the point is make sure that they know why they’re reading it. Everybody that you give a script to is going to be like, “I did have some things. I wasn’t sure if this… When she said that, would she really say that?” Just be real clear up front, “I don’t want any creative notes from you whatsoever. I just want spelling, grammar.”

**John:** I will say there’s a writer director I know, who I think she’s talked about her dyslexia, but I don’t want to say her name in case she hasn’t talked about it. She is dyslexic, and she has a very successful writing directing career. She just has people help her with those issues. Is it a thing you’re going to have to address? For sure. Can you still be perfectly successful? Yes, because she is.

**Craig:** There you.

**John:** Craig, it’s come time for our One Cool Things. Do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us? We’ve missed you for so long, so I bet you’ll have a cool thing.

**Craig:** I do have a cool thing. It’s free, which I can’t believe. Like most shows that shoot on digital, which is most shows, we used an ARRI. One of the primary tools that have been around for directors and cinematographers for many, many years when we were shooting films was a viewfinder. The idea when you’re shooting on the ARRI or a film camera is you’re constantly switching lenses. The lenses are fixed focal lengths, so 50 millimeters, 35, 32, 27. When you’re trying to frame up the scene, when you’re blocking it out and you want to know what lens should we be using, we used to just get the lens on a stick. It was a viewfinder on a stick. You’d look through it, and you could turn a dial. That was a variable lens, so you could roughly see what it would look like. We don’t have to do that anymore.

**John:** You’ve got your phone out, so I bet it involves your phone.

**Craig:** It is. There’s an app called the Magic ARRI Viewfinder. It is free. There are a few extra doodads you can unlock on it if you buy… I don’t know, it’s like $4 for the little upgrade. It’s wonderful. Basically, you hold it out, and you just dial in with your finger what focal length. It’ll take any focal length, including lenses that don’t exist. Nobody uses a 68. If you want to look at it in 68, you can. When I was directing, I found it incredibly useful to be able to just take my phone, especially when I was scouting, to look around, just see, okay, I’m just going to roughly go in my mind. I know what a wide is. I know what a medium is. I know what a long is. Let me just take some pictures using the bright lens. Very helpful. Super free and/or cheap. If you are ever contemplating using a viewfinder for anything, that thing did pretty well.

**John:** I’ve seen viewfinder things on the iPhone for a long time, but it sounds like this one is deliberately an ARRI thing that is going to give you exactly what you’d expect from this camera, which is great.

**Craig:** Especially with this iPhone, it’s saying, look, this is what-

**John:** This is what you’re going to get.

**Craig:** This is what you’re going to get with a general lens, because the ARRI is not lenses. The ARRI is just-

**John:** It’s a box.

**Craig:** It’s a box. The lenses are the lenses. It’s saying if you were to stand here and look through a real lens on a 35, this is what you would see.

**John:** Craig, when you’re out scouting at location and you’re pulling out this app doing this stuff, are you just setting location manager, AD, stand there, stand there, to see relative framing?

**Craig:** I will occasionally do that. The last time I used it, I asked my production designer to stand here. I was like, “No, move to your left. Take one step forward. Stop.” Then you can tap on your area of focus. If I want to see the back of his head sharp but in the distance things blown out-

**John:** That’ll give you a sense of like, okay, if I was on this long of a lens, how quickly would I lose that, could I keep both of them in focus, if you wanted to.

**Craig:** Right, or if I want the background to be out of focus, how much out of focus will it be with this lens. Then I find the one, like, okay, this is basically what I’m thinking, take a picture. Then I can share that with my DP. I always say, “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. This is just for a vague sense of my… You will make it look great. Maybe this lens is wrong and all that. This was just kind of a thought.”

**John:** Whenever I’m Slacking something through to Dustin, our designer, and I’ve just done something up in PhotoShop really quick, generally I’ll say, “A thousand apologies, this is terrible, because I’m stepping into your domain. This is what’s in my head.”

**Craig:** You know what I did? There was a note. I was talking to Franny Orsi, who runs HBO Drama. She was saying there was just something in a scene she wanted. She described it in the kind of way that executives do. I knew I had 50% of what she was asking for, but not 100%. I said, “Okay, Frannie, write dialog for me. Don’t worry. It doesn’t have to be good. It’s going to feel weird. I’m not going to use it word for word or even any of it. I just need to know what’s in your head. It will help me write something that will probably look completely different but maybe get to.” She did it, and she was so sweet about it. She’s like, “This is a first for me.” She’s like, “This was hard and weird and uncomfortable, but here it is.” It was incredibly helpful. It helped me. Like I said, I didn’t use that, but I did this, and it achieved hopefully the thing that she was asking for.

**John:** That’s great. My One Cool Thing actually comes from Megana. This is a tweet by Alex Hirsch, who was going through some of the emails he got from Disney’s Standards and Practices on his show Gravity Falls. Did you see this today?

**Craig:** I was just talking about this with our editor, Tim Goode, an hour ago. It’s really funny.

**John:** Let me play a little clip here from it.

**Alex Hirsch:** Page 492. It has come to our attention that hoo ha is a slang term for vagina. Please revise.

It is a proper word meaning excitement or hullabaloo, and that is clearly its meaning here. The context is an owl-themed restaurant called Hoo Ha’s Jamboree. Not changing it.

Page 14. Please revise chub pup on T-shirt. Chub has a sexual connotation.

This is silly. It’s an image of a fat dog. On the context, there’s no reason to think chub means anything other than that.

We have ran this phrase up the line, and unfortunately the concern surrounding it still remains. If you’d like to send me some alternate phrases, I can run those and let you know what becomes of it.

Alternate phrases: chubby pup, tub pup, chubbity pup pup. I can’t believe I have to do this.

**John:** Standards and Practices, for people who aren’t familiar with it, international listeners, particularly on the broadcast networks but also on some of the cable networks-

**Craig:** Censors.

**John:** Censors. They are censors. They’re going through and saying this is appropriate or not appropriate for our audience, for our network, not in a legal sense, but basically so that people won’t come after us and say that we are corrupting the youth of America, things that we are being asked to change.

**Craig:** Standards and Practices is notorious for being… It’s like they found the most fuddy-duddy people on the planet and then gave them an audience and said, “Suck the life out of things,” because we generally are smart enough to know where the line is that’s hard. If you’re writing for network, you’re not dropping F-bombs on that show. That’s not allowed by the FCC. You can’t do it. Then there are those weird things that are in the middle. You know, okay, look, I was dancing around… You might say, “Oh, did you get a handy?” Now, handy in that context clearly means hand job. You’re going to get flagged by S and P. You got to take the L on that one. Okay, fine. If, look, it’s called chub pug because it’s a fat pug, and we heard that you could also say I got a chub meaning an erection, no. No, I’m going to fight that all day long. That’s crazy. Who is going to misinterpret that? Certainly not the nine-year-old kids watching it.

**John:** The frustration with all of it is that it’s anticipating an adult responding in a way that a kid would never actually do it and taking offense on behalf of an imaginary child.

**Craig:** I love those videos when some outraged mom somewhere is like, “I got this animal, stuffed animal, and if you pull the string, it says words. Listen to what it says. It’s saying go fuck Santa.” Then they play it for you, and it’s like, no, it’s not. It’s saying, “Oh, I forgive you.” It didn’t say fuck Santa at all.

**John:** It says, “I’m fun Santa.”

**Craig:** You’re like, lady, you’re crazy. Then they get attention. Then a hundred articles are written. Anyway, now we have to put a language warning on this.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Lachlan Marks. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. The Dropbox folder that has all of our listener outros is getting a little bit bare.

**Craig:** Uh-oh.

**John:** Maybe send those in now. If you’ve been holding onto one, we need it. Ask@johnaugust.com is also where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today, but for short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You could 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 penmanship.

**Craig:** Penmanship.

**John:** Craig, it’s nice to have you back.

**Craig:** It’s so good to be back.

**John:** Craig, what is your handwriting like? I don’t think I’ve actually seen your handwriting ever.

**Craig:** I’m happy to do it for you right now.

**John:** Let’s find a pen here. I would like you to write instructions for heating up dinner.

**Megana:** I’m pulling up an article that says what does your handwriting say about you.

**John:** We’re going to trade.

**Craig:** Trading.

**John:** Mine has things I legitimately just wrote for myself and one thing I just wrote now for this. Craig wrote, “First, put the food on a plate. Second, place the plate in a microwave. Third, hit start three times.” It’s clearly readable. I can see what you’re going for here.

**Craig:** It’s not going so well over here, John. I’m taking a look at what you wrote. This says, “Magical pollution.”

**John:** Magical pollution.

**Craig:** “At end of… ” I think you meant to say pilot, but it is spelled pidut. “L?”

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** “Her?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “Hope?”

**John:** Hope, yeah.

**Craig:** “L her hope?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “He, um, loody, huh, owl, M,” music note, “didn’t,” two marks that mean nothing, and then another M. Then on the back it says, “This is my normal… ” You meant to say handwriting, but what this is is… I got hand, and then it just went bad.

**John:** It’s the difference between… I tend to just write for myself, because I can read everything that’s on this. I can get it all back. Then I won’t think about, oh, I’m actually writing this for somebody else who has to read my handwriting, and it becomes really bad. The exception is I used to do my first drafts all by hand, and so I would send them through to Dana. I would fax them through to Dana.

**Craig:** Fax.

**John:** Because I would be bunkered down someplace, I would hand-write the pages, send them through. I would be very deliberate about my handwriting when I send them through to Dana. This is my scribble.

**Craig:** That’s very bad. That’s way worse than I thought it would be, because I think of you as a precision machine, but not-

**John:** No, I’m full chaos.

**Craig:** You know what? Every machine has some weakness. This is yours.

**John:** I would say on this [inaudible 00:55:07] this is my normal handwriting. I will tend to focus on the first bits of a word that actually are important, and then I’ll just… I’ll get the rest of-

**Craig:** It’s gone.

**John:** I’ll remember what the rest of the word must be.

**Craig:** My handwriting, it’s good to see that it’s legible. That’s great.

**John:** I’m holding this up so Megana can see it on Zoom.

**Craig:** Let’s see what Megana thinks.

**Megana:** Yeah, that is legible. You both have very creative handwriting.

**Craig:** It’s bad. Don’t get me wrong. It’s bad. Your handwriting is probably outstanding.

**Megana:** Yeah, it’s pretty good.

**Craig:** This is an experience I think almost every boy has had, being in 5th grade and you’re writing your little thing, and then you look in the seat next to you, there is a girl who is calligraphying it as far as… Or her hand is a font maker, every letter, the kerning, the fact that the lines are straight, the precision of it all. You’re like duh, duh, der. You just feel so bad.

**John:** Megana, I’m trying to think what your normal handwriting is. Are you printing or are you writing cursive for your normal, just daily writing?

**Megana:** I do a combination. It’s like Spanglish between cursive and print.

**John:** Does your handwriting vary based on whether it’s something just for you? I don’t know if you do morning pages, but if you’re writing just for yourself, is it any different than what people are writing for other people?

**Megana:** I’m looking at my morning pages.

**Craig:** What are morning pages?

**John:** It’s a whole thing that, Craig, you missed out on, because it’s this idea of… Megana, you do it, so describe them.

**Craig:** What is it?

**Megana:** I don’t really do it. I just journal but call it that facetiously. It is from this popular book called The Artist’s Way. The idea is that you wake up every morning and you write three pages without thinking. It’s supposed to clear you for the day.

**Craig:** I’d rather light myself on fire.

**John:** I tried it for two weeks. It was weird, because it’s just stream of consciousness going to your pen.

**Craig:** Oh god, no. No, because I know it. Every morning, I don’t want to do this, which makes me bad. I never want to do things that are good for me. I’m a bad person. I’m no good. I’m hungry. I eat too much. I eat too much. I want to eat something that’s bad for me. I should stop. You know what? I’m going to have a breakfast salad. No, I’m not, lol, you fat bastard. Then I would do another two pages like that. Then I would weep. Then I would go ahead and have myself one of those nice eggwiches.

**John:** Eggwiches are delicious.

**Craig:** Love an eggwich.

**John:** Egg sandwich, so good.

**Craig:** Anyway, I’m not doing that, Megana. I don’t care.

**Megana:** I’m not telling you to.

**John:** Can you hold it up to the camera? We want to see what your handwriting looks like.

**Megana:** Let me find something that-

**John:** That’s not your private journal?

**Megana:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s like, please hold up your private journal to Zoom.

**Craig:** She’s like, “I hate John so much.”

**Megana:** You know what? This is actually Craig level. These are old notes from a couple of years ago that my writers’ group gave me.

**John:** I would describe these… It’s mostly printed, but some letters do connect together. I would say it’s written fairly big. There’s a lot of open space within letters. It’s really easy to read that.

**Craig:** Yes. It’s also evident that a woman wrote it. That is female handwriting.

**Megana:** I feel like boys are socialized to play, and I spent so much time just writing boys’ names in doodly hearts.

**Craig:** Boys don’t think that way.

**John:** Megana, how many different boys’ last names did you practice with on your Trapper Keeper growing up?

**Megana:** Oh my god, so many. I don’t understand on the Trapper Keeper, because then the boy would see it. It’s on loose-leaf at home.

**John:** Perfect. Which was the best last name you aspired to?

**Megana:** Gosh, this is so embarrassing. I think Barton and then using a lot of changing the vowels to be hearts.

**Craig:** Of course. Of course.

**John:** Perfect.

**Craig:** What is the deal with that A? It’s pretty common. I guess writing is vaguely gendered. It can be. My A is like a very normal A. The lowercase A is just a circle with then a little leg coming off the right. Then there’s what I think of as the girl A, which is this curlicue and then a little… It’s like a pregnant backwards R. Exactly. Where did that come from?

**John:** What it comes from, in print, in actual typeset print, that is an A.

**Craig:** We’re doing it wrong.

**John:** No, but what I think is it came from typeset print and some people just started doing it in actual normal writing. I don’t think it was a handwritten thing at first.

**Craig:** I think it’s just a cultural thing where girls will copy each other doing it.

**Megana:** I do remember seeing it and being like, “That’s beautiful,” and then a little voice in my head-

**Craig:** See, there you go.

**Megana:** … being like, “You can do that too.”

**Craig:** Or bubble writing.

**Megana:** There we go.

**Craig:** Oh, the bubble writing. I think that Megana Mazin is the best last name you could’ve played with, because think about it, you sound like Megan Amazin’.

**John:** Amazin’.

**Megana:** Megana Mazin.

**Craig:** It’s so good.

**Megana:** That is true.

**John:** Amazin’.

**Craig:** Megana Mazin.

**Megana:** The nice thing about Mazin is there’s an I, which gives you the opportunity for a heart above the I.

**Craig:** The heart dot.

**Megana:** Or a flower.

**Craig:** The heart dot or a flower. The flower is the friendship version. It’s the blue heart of red hearts.

**John:** Megana, when you were in school, did they still teach cursive?

**Megana:** They did teach cursive.

**John:** In Ohio?

**Megana:** Yes. I feel like I might’ve been one of the last people to learn cursive.

**John:** They’ve basically given up on it.

**Craig:** I don’t even know why they should be teaching handwriting at all. It’s gone. It’s over.

**John:** [inaudible 01:00:38].

**Megana:** Wait, when you guys were in school, did you learn how to make a cool S?

**John:** Yeah, you’re talking the super bad ass, looks like a rock star kind of thing?

**Megana:** Yeah.

**John:** The interconnected, the geometric-

**Craig:** Yes, the up, back, down, back, back, up.

**John:** That clearly is going to be the next Scriptnotes shirt.

**Craig:** It’s the Kiss S.

**John:** Yeah. The next Scriptnotes shirt will have to be-

**Craig:** Scriptnotes should have that. It should feel like that.

**John:** I learned cursive. For a while, my signature was the cursive J, which is that weird loop on top of a loop.

**Craig:** I like that J.

**John:** Then my friend Jason started doing this J that was just, “That’s cool. I’m going to steal that.”

**Craig:** Stealing it.

**John:** That’s now my signature.

**Craig:** My signature is cursive, but it’s evolved. If I do my name in proper cursive, so that’s my proper cursive name, which hopefully looks like-

**John:** Yeah, that looks like a Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Now here’s the actual signature. It’s like every hard bit has been removed. All that’s left is C, G, and Z. You know what?

**John:** It works.

**Craig:** When we go to the Austin screenwriting thing and then they’re like, “Sign 400 of these.”

**John:** Wah wah wah, wah wah wah.

**Craig:** I watch somebody doing their very beautiful signature. I’m like, “You got to let that go.”

**John:** I have two different signatures. The top one here, which is the stolen J, is how I sign checks. It’s my legal signature. The other one looks Disney-like. It’s printy.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, look at that.

**John:** That’s what I sign for Arlo Finch books and everything else.

**Craig:** I’ll do my first name. When you do John and I’ll do Craig, it’s sort of print.

**John:** When we send out-

**Craig:** Like that.

**John:** … emails from the Scriptnotes account, which Craig never reads, we’ll send them out-

**Craig:** I didn’t even know that we did that.

**John:** We’ll send out to our Premium Members to say… Premium Members are the folks listening to this segment. We’ll say, “Hey, we’re doing a Three Page Challenge. Do you want to send stuff in?” It’s signed John and Craig. You wrote that eight years ago.

**Craig:** That’s like the version of when you listen to a TV show and you hear a laugh track and all those people are dead.

**John:** Exactly, that’s what it is. I think we originally did that for the USB drives. We used to have the episodes on the USB drives way back in the day.

**Craig:** You can probably sign checks using that with me. I think you’re allowed, just Craig.

**John:** Craig. Craig.

**Craig:** Who’s this from? Craig.

**Megana:** I do have to say I had a really nice experience recently. I got notes from John back, and he had made the notes on a pdf on your iPad. Is that right, John?

**John:** Yeah.

**Megana:** As I was scrolling through, I was like, “What is this circle that he’s made on the paper, or is this parentheses? Do I need parentheses in this place?” Then I realized it was a little heart.

**John:** I wrote little hearts in there.

**Megana:** It was so sweet.

**Craig:** Your hearts look like circles.

**John:** I think if I did it quickly it could look like a-

**Megana:** Some quick hearts.

**John:** Sloppy.

**Megana:** Then I had to go back, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, there’s hearts all over the place.”

**Craig:** There’s hearts all over the place.

**John:** There were hearts all over. It was a very good draft. There were things in there I really loved.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**Megana:** My heart exploded. I was so happy.

**Craig:** That’s great. Aw.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** I had a similar experience. You were there, Megana, when we talked through Bo’s script, which I really liked. What I do is I will just highlight using… I’ll do it in Notability. I’ll just use my highlighter and just make them green. It’s maybe not as emotional as a heart, but if there’s a lot of green, that’s good.

**John:** Good stuff. Good topic.

**Craig:** Great topic.

**John:** That pulled it out.

**Craig:** Fun.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**John:** Thanks, all.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

**Megana:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* Sign up for [updates on the Scriptnotes Book](https://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Box Office Balancing Test: How Many Tentpoles Can Share a Weekend?](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/box-office-balancing-test-how-many-tentpoles-can-share-a-weekend-1235166404/)
* [Judd Apatow, Shonda Rhimes and other Hollywood creators sign gun petition](https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/celebrity/judd-apatow-shonda-rhimes-hollywood-creators-sign-gun-petition-rcna33509)
* [Magic ARRI ViewFinder](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magic-arri-viewfinder/id1347132361) on the App store!
* [Alex Hirsch’s Gravity Falls Tweet](https://twitter.com/_AlexHirsch/status/1537314312926003201)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Lachlan Marks ([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/556standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/marveling-with-michael-waldron).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 555 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, I’m talking with the Emmy Award-winning writer behind Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and the Emmy Award-winning writer of Marvel’s Loki series, who happened to be the very same person. Welcome to the show, Michael Waldron.

**Michael Waldron:** Thanks for having me. Five hundred and how many?

**John:** Five hundred and fifty-five episodes.

**Michael:** Wow.

**John:** That’s a lot.

**Michael:** You brought me on for this milestone episode. Thank you so much.

**John:** This is the milestone, yes. Chris McCoy we always bring on every 200 episodes, to celebrate our bicentennial or whatever. You’re every whatever 555 is. That’s what you are.

**Michael:** I’ll see you the 1,010th episode.

**John:** That’s when we’ll bring you back on. By that point, we’ll have even more to talk about, but what I want to talk with you about today is the mushy boundaries between TV and movies and the role of writer and this weird transition and convergence that we’re facing. We’ll also have some listener questions that I think you’re especially well suited to answer. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I want to talk with you about Atlanta, because you’re from Atlanta. You live in Atlanta now while you’re shooting some stuff. It feels like all of Hollywood will eventually live in Atlanta. I’m hoping that maybe you can give our listeners your writer’s guide to Atlanta.

**Michael:** Cool, sounds great.

**John:** Let’s get into it. I’m just for the first time meeting you on this Zoom. I really have no idea about your backstory and how you became a writer. What is the quick Michael Waldron origin story?

**Michael:** Yes, I’m from Atlanta. I went to University of Georgia. I guess I graduated from college in 2010, which was a time that… It was before the whole movie industry had moved out here. It felt like being a screenwriter was an impossible thing to do. I had not grown up really writing scripts or anything. I just loved movies. I was going to go to law school, and at the last second was like, “I don’t want to be a lawyer. I just like watching Jeff Winger on Community. I like lawyers in movies and on TV.” I bailed on that, and I went out to California, which is the first time I’d even been. I’d never even seen the Pacific Ocean until I got out there.

I went to Pepperdine. They have a screenwriting MFA program, which was great for me. I fell under the tutelage of some really amazing mentors, a guy named Chris Chluess, who was the showrunner of Night Court for a long time, Emmy-winning writer and just a genius, and Sheryl Anderson, who’s the creator/showrunner, Sweet Magnolias on Netflix. I had some great professors. Before, I just knew how to write some jokes and some funny, stupid stuff. They really taught me how to write scripts. From there, I was fortunate enough to land an internship on the first season of Rick and Morty. That was really, really lucky. I was a huge fan of Dan Harmon, because I love Community, even when I was back in Georgia.

**John:** Before we get on there, I want to talk to you about film school here, because we get a lot of questions about like, “Oh, should I go to film school?” It sounds like for you, you were growing up in Atlanta, you were going to school in Atlanta, you were interested in film, so you just applied to film school and had no other plan or exposure to the film industry, other than like this is how you were going to get started, right?

**Michael:** Yeah. To me, it was the way I could wrap my head around getting out to LA, because I had no connections, knew nobody in the industry, had no way of getting a job. I was like, “I’ll just go into debt. I’ll just take on a lot of student loan debt.”

**John:** I want to get more, because we don’t have a lot of guests who actually went through film school. I went through film school for grad school. You show up. Is it a two-year program or a three-year program?

**Michael:** It’s a two-year program. I think you could take your time. I did it in two years because I wanted to get out and start working. The cool thing about Pepperdine was it was very practical. It was based on just writing pilots, specs. Each semester, you were creating an original piece of work. I had that very difficult process demystified for me very early on, where I was like, “Okay, I know how to write a pilot and create a world.”

Chris Chluess, my professor, did a great thing, where at the end of the semester, I took a half-hour comedy pilot writing class with him, where at the end you had to come in and pitch the show to him and an agent that he brought in. Only at the end did we learn that the agent was actually a real estate agent who was a neighbor of his in the Palisades. It was an incredible simulation of the pressure that I would go on to feel later in my career in some rooms where there’s some real skin in the game. I benefited from a couple of really fantastic professors.

**John:** You have good professors, but you obviously did something right while you were in that program. Imagine you’re a listener listening to this right now who is in a film program, is in a screenwriting program. What are things you could do in a screenwriting class to get the most out of it? What are the practical steps a student could take if you’re in one of those classes right now, to really dig the most out?

**Michael:** It’s the time. You’re paying a lot of money to be focused on writing. Now is the time. When I went there, I was still a lazy undergrad college kid. I had to shift out of that mentality and start learning how to be a professional writer, treat deadlines like real deadlines.

The other thing that was actually really helpful for me was the process of reading classmates’ stuff and giving notes on that, because that’s what you’re doing as a writer, especially in a writers’ room, all the time, is you’re reading stuff, you’re pitching, you’re giving feedback.

I was there with Eric Martin, a guy who became a close friend of mine and wrote on Loki with me, went on to work with me on Loki. He and I, we just said we’re going to treat each class like a writers’ room, and every script is a professional script that we want to try and get made with our feedback and everything. I think you just take it seriously. It really is one of those things that you get out of it what you put into it.

**John:** Yeah, because it’s not like going through a law program or a medical program where there’s clearly like, these are the things you’re going to learn, and you’re going to be tested on these things. It’s not that, because you could probably graduate that program and not really have learned a lot or not really have grown that much, correct?

**Michael:** A thousand percent. Also, your degree-

**John:** Has anyone ever asked for your degree?

**Michael:** Nobody cares. It’s worthless. You’re only there to learn, to make connections, and to hopefully come out of there with original material. That’s the other thing, samples that you can show to potential collaborators, people that are going to help you on your way up in the industry. I wrote the first draft of Heels, my show on Starz, in a class at Pepperdine. It was very, very helpful for me, because I was just finishing stuff.

**John:** Now, the other thing you got out of this program, apparently, was connections that got you an internship. You got an internship with Dan Harmon’s company. That was set up through the school?

**Michael:** It was set up through a buddy of mine who was a classmate, who was working on the first season of Rick and Morty. I had a chance to go on and be an intern on the first season, which was a blast.

**John:** We had Drew Goddard on the show, we’ve had Damon Lindelof on the show, who both said that working on a first season of the show was incredibly hard or being on the ground in a first season of the show was hard because everything was chaos and was constantly falling apart. Sometimes, because of the chaos, you could really learn a lot and you could see how it’s all being put together and be useful. Were you able to be helpful on that first season?

**Michael:** I think so. I think I totally benefited from the fact that it was a first season show. Nobody knew what it was going to be, at a little fledgling animation studio that Dan had just started with a couple of friends. I came in as the intern. The thing that I did is I made sure everybody knew from the beginning that I wanted to be a writer. That was who I was. Any time there was a hole that could be plugged with an intern who knew how to write, I was the first one to raise my hand.

The other thing that I did while I was there, weirdly, was I started a softball team, I guess as a stealth way to get to know Dan and Dino Stamatopoulos, one of the other owners. They played on the team. I was the coach. It worked out for me, because I went from being the intern to the coach. In that sense, I became a friend and a peer. That friendship led to my first real job as a writer’s PA on Season 5 of Community.

**John:** You talk about being an intern and offering to write anything they needed to have written. What are some examples of things you would’ve written as an intern on that show?

**Michael:** It wasn’t even necessarily Rick and Morty specific. It was just as simple as somebody’s got to make a sign to wash your hands or to wash the dishes in the kitchen. It’s like, that’s a chance to be creative. At some point, one of these great writers that’s working here you hope is going to see this stuff and say, “This is actually funny. Who’s doing this stuff?” You’re just trying to put yourself out there. Then writing coverage and just treating everything, every assignment like your life depends on it from a writing standpoint, because as far as I was concerned, it did.

**John:** You’re working there. You’re writing there on small things. When are you letting them or asking them to read the stuff you’ve been writing for Pepperdine? When are you asking if someone’s willing to read your samples?

**Michael:** A long time, if ever. I don’t know if I ever did. That was another great piece of advice I got from my mentor, Chris Chluess. He said, “Think of it. You’re sitting at a card table. You only get to cash in those chips, your equity with these guys, one time. You have to be really, really shrewd with where you asked for something, essentially.” It’s a political game. In fact, I think earlier in your career… Obviously, it’s harder now because not everything’s in person. You’re almost, I found, better off selling people on your personality as a colleague and as a collaborator, and then let them be blown away down the line when you’re actually a really good writer. I can’t remember how long it took for me to ask Dan to read something. It was years and years down from our relationship.

**John:** You’re starting off in Rick and Morty land. Then you’re going over to Community. You said you’re a writers’ room assistant?

**Michael:** I was the writer’s PA.

**John:** What was your job like doing that?

**Michael:** It was a nightmare. It was a nightmare.

**John:** Were you getting the lunch order?

**Michael:** Oh my god, the lunch, the dinner, the snack, the coffees, the midnight stack. It really was a blast, but that was a grind. I don’t know, there were like 13 writers that season. It was Season 5 of a network show, 13 or 14 writers. They had assistants. Each coffee order was a double decker, two boxes. I just remember trudging across Paramount with all that. I was getting lunches, getting meals and everything, but I asked Dan if when I wasn’t doing that, if I could sit in the writers’ room and just listen and learn. He was great, and he let me. Then I got to know all the other great writers there and suddenly had a whole new network of great mentors, which included Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, who’d written all the Spider-Man movies. I would show up early to sit in Erik Sommers’s office and just ask him, “What does a manager do vs an agent? What does your attorney… ” I really benefited from there just being so many good folks who wanted to help me learn.

After a certain amount of time, I had I guess earned enough trust to open my mouth and start pitching bad jokes. I got to feel that feeling of, oh, I just pitched a joke that crashed and burned. It was no good. Then I got to feel the feeling of, the world didn’t end. Nobody cares, because everybody’s pitching stuff all day, and a lot of it dies. Then the next thing you know, you pitch something that makes it into the show, and you can tell your wife, “Hey, look, I wrote that joke.” I think that was 2014. We worked from June until January. It was crazy. The hours were insane. In a lot of ways, I feel like I learned everything there.

**John:** Now, there was an amazing chance to learn things there. We’ve been talking with support staff over the last couple years about those jobs and how underpaid they are and how hard it is for some people to make a living or even keep a roof over their head doing those jobs. Was that your experience? Was the pay low, the hours long? How were you surviving during that time?

**Michael:** You’re certainly not handsomely paid. On that show, we worked such insane hours that I was actually making a decent amount from overtime. I got some checks that I was like, “Holy crap.” I was lucky in that sense. The food budget was so astronomical. I was in charge of the food. There was always an extra pizza or a tray of sushi coming home with me. I figured out how to scrounge my way through life. Of course, it’s a grind. Everybody, all the support staff is working just as hard as the writers and as everybody else. We’ve got to take better care of those folks, because you can’t do the job without them.

**John:** Now, what is your transition from you’re sort of in the room on Community, you’re now a repped writer who’s making things? What was that transition? 2014 or so when you’re in this writers’ room. When do you start getting some stuff that is Michael Waldron as a writer in himself?

**Michael:** That was on the end of Community. I got an email from a guy on the support staff, another assistant, who said that a young agent was looking to discover talent on the support staff, which I know now, an absolute lie. I said, “Wow, this is my big shot.” I sent this supposed young agent the pilot for Heels. They responded. This guy named Harry turned out to just be the assistant to a manager, who was a guy my age, but wanted to meet me.

Long story short, the guy’s my manager until today. We met. We went to The Den in West Hollywood or something. I had my first experience of, oh wow, here’s a guy who feels like a real gatekeeper talking to me about an original script I wrote, giving me feedback but also talking like he wants to be an advocate for me, and he was. I did some revisions on that script based on his feedback and some other folks he introduced me to.

That kicked off I guess that first general meeting tour. You’re meeting the people your age. Everybody’s climbing the ladder at the same pace. You’re meeting young creative executives or assistants and people that are looking to be somebody who discovered someone. Through that, I guess I legitimized the project enough, and there was enough interest in it, that my manager’s company LBI actually took me on as a client. They called me in to their big office, and I sat on the giant table for network. I was like, “Oh my god.” It was like, “We want to rep you.” That felt like wow, I did it. Then of course, you didn’t do it. You didn’t do anything.

Shortly after that, I met a guy who was working at Paramount television who would go on to become one of my best friends. He really championed the show over there. In about 2015, 2016, Paramount Television optioned Heels. It was funny how it happened. He called me and he was like, “Yeah, we want to have a general with you. Some of my bosses read it.” Then on the way over, called me and was like, “No, this is a pitch. We’re really interested.”

**John:** Oh my god.

**Michael:** It’s like, I don’t know what happens in this show. This is a sample. There was a lot of tap dancing and making it up as I went, but they got it. I got really lucky to just get into development on something original of my own very young. I was just learning and getting to go through that process. You learn so, so much.

**John:** If we were to watch the pilot of Heels today, the series that exists, and the sample that you wrote in film school, how close are they?

**Michael:** The one that I wrote in film school was markedly worse. I actually can look and realize that my writing took a genuine professional leap after going through Community, working on Community, and then suddenly finding myself in real professional situations where the stakes are higher. That actually made me raise my game. It’s not just a homework assignment anymore. You realize that this is something I’m trying to get on television and change my life. I have to put everything I have into this. It’s a hell of a lot better.

**John:** At this stage, you’re working on Heels. It’s great to have development. This is actually getting money coming in the door, which is fantastic and probably much needed. Were you thinking, okay, now I should try to staff on TV, now I should try to write a feature? What were the other things you were thinking about doing? Obviously, it’s never just one job. You need to keep it going.

**Michael:** Money coming in the door was insane. I thought about staffing. I guess in my mind, I was like, “I’m a showrunner. I’m a creator. I’m a showrunner. I’m going to get this show made.” So naïve. So stupid. I was like 26. That was I was determined to do. I had the good fortune of I was continuing to work with Dan in a more producorial, executive context. I had some other money coming in the door. I was helping Dan develop some stuff as a producer, which I only knew anything about that because I was just going through it on my own on the other side. I hadn’t written a feature.

**John:** That’s crazy you had not written a feature, throughout the whole time in film school that you never finished one feature.

**Michael:** I thought I was going to be a comedy writer. I was mostly focused on that. Then I fell in love with the one-hour world. Like I said, I got lucky, and then Heels caught fire. People really responded to it. It always felt like it had so much momentum. I was like, “I don’t want to step away from this thing. I want to always be able to run it.” Now, I remember I applied for the WGA Showrunner Training Program. In my interview, they were like, “Why are you applying for… Why don’t you go get a staff job? What are you doing?” I was like, “I don’t know, I’m a writer.”

**John:** I had the experience where I had a very hot script go that was getting a lot of attention. I was able to sell a TV show and make a TV show, a one-hour TV show for the WB. I was a showrunner who had no business being a showrunner. I think the WGA folks would’ve looked at me as well and said, “Why the hell are you doing… You should not be doing this.” I wish someone had pulled me aside to tell me that.

**Michael:** I needed it, yeah, jeez, because eventually, I would get into that position a year later and have no clue what I was doing.

**John:** It was just rough. Jump us forward a little bit in time to… Was Heels the first thing of yours that was wholly yours that got made?

**Michael:** No, the first thing that was wholly mine that got made was Loki.

**John:** Did Loki come out before Heels?

**Michael:** Yeah, Loki came out last June, and Heels came out in August. Long story short, what happened was Heels went to a mini room that I ran, as an idiot, but had a great writing staff. I didn’t know what I was doing, didn’t know how to lead a writing staff. I had some great collaborators and ended up writing a great season. We just couldn’t cast it, couldn’t cast the show. Starz put it on a shelf. I was like, “That’s it for me. I’m moving home. That’s end. That’s the end of my meteoric rise.” I licked my wounds, wrote a feature, just to do it, and then went off and actually got that staffing experience on Rick and Morty.

I was a writer and producer on Season 4 of Rick and Morty, went back and got to feel like what it was like on the other side of the whiteboard, which was very helpful, to be a showrunner, to know what your writers are feeling like and their anxieties as they’re pitching and coming in every day. Then right toward the end of Season 4, that feature that I’d written made its way over to Marvel. It was a time travel action comedy that just happened to be the perfect sample for the Loki show they were developing. That’s how I got in the game on that project.

**John:** Great. Now, before we get into Loki here, I do want to talk about the mini room you did for Heels. How many writers did you have in that room? You said you did it wrong. Tell us some lessons you learned in doing it wrong.

**Michael:** There was six of us, I believe. I didn’t know how to synthesize all of my writers’ tremendous ideas while still making it be my vision. That was just a hard thing of how do I take what your room is wanting it to be and reconcile that with what I want it to be. Every day I walked away being like, “Am I making the show I even want to make?” Then I wasn’t really giving them great instructions for the first half of the room. It took a while for me to realize that at least my best approach to a writers’ room is if you’re the showrunner, if it’s your thing, then your writers’ room is an extension of your vision, the voices in your head.

The best thing I think you can do as a showrunner is just listen, is to throw something out there, an idea that you’re interested in pursuing, part of your vision, and then let your writers take it somewhere really, because that’s what you’ll be doing at home in your head anyways. Here you have the benefit of great professionals who can do it out loud. It just took me a while to realize that that was the way to do it as opposed to I was a guy who was used to just sitting at home on my couch writing and doing it all on my own. That’s what I had to learn is you don’t have to do it all on your own.

**John:** Now, when Heels finally did shoot, were they using the scripts that you had come out of from that room, or did you have to go back and take everything out of that?

**Michael:** It was a combination. The first half of the season was pretty much locked and loaded. We needed to do big revisions on the back half. They brought in Mike O’Malley, the great writer and actor who had created Survivor’s Remorse for Starz, brought in him as showrunner. It was crazy, because it really did feel like I was giving my baby to someone. When they wanted to revive it in 2019, I was off doing Loki, and so there was no way I could do it. I had to give Mike the keys to this car that was very personal to me. Really, I owe Heels everything. I owe it my life, those characters and that world. He was just so gracious and generous and made the show better every step of the way. That in itself was a great learning experience of the ultimate collaboration, giving something so personal to someone else.

**John:** Let’s jump ahead to Loki here. I want to talk through the process from, okay, Michael, you got the job to now the cameras are rolling and we’re starting to shoot this show. What time frame was that? What were the steps along the way? They’re meeting with you. You’re pitching how you would do it. You get the job. What is your first step? Are you making documents just by yourself? Are you immediately going into a room situation? What is the process like for this Marvel series?

**Michael:** It was really the dawn of the Marvel series. Loki was the third or fourth one to go. It was at first very solitary. It felt almost like I guess developing a feature. Then it was just meeting with our executive team and pitching on… The core idea they had was, here’s Loki, and it’s Loki and the TVA. The pitch that I developed was where does it go from there. It’s Loki hunting a variant of himself across time.

Once I got the job, first off there was a process of mourning leaving Rick and Morty, where I’d been for nine months and created a lot of great friendships and was very comfortable. There was a real comfort level there. I was going into a situation of total unknown. It was hiring a staff and launching a room. This time around, I knew what I was doing.

On the first day of the Heels writers’ room, the only person I actually knew what to tell to do was the writers’ PA. I was like, “Here’s how the lunch order should go,” because that was the job I had had. On the first day in the Loki writers’ room, I knew I have a vision for how I want this story to go, and I want us to all get there together.

**John:** Is everybody looking at the same document? Are you talking at them for an hour about the big, broad strokes vision? What are those initial conversations?

**Michael:** There was a core document that I… They read my pitch that I gave to Kevin Feige that got me the job. It was pretty thorough. Here are the six episodes. Honestly, they’re generally what the episodes ended up being. Episode 3 is Loki and Sylvie are crossing a moon together. Then you want to hear, okay, my brilliant writers, what do you think the best version of a Loki show can be? They know the general framework and where I and Marvel would like to take it.

In the case of that show, our first job was let’s figure out the emotional story of this thing. Let’s figure out what each of the six episodes is. We can say Episode 2 is the zodiac episode. Episode 3 is Before Sunrise. We know what each episode is. Then we had to take about two weeks and just do time travel, which was its own… That was a new experience of really doing a sci-fi camp together, of a lot of us drawing lines, squiggly lines on the whiteboard, and just trying to create a shared institutional language of what is time travel in this show, what is a time law, how can it be broken, because we had to all be on the same page. By the end, it felt like we’d been in the writers’ room for 60 weeks, not 3 or 4.

**John:** That first writers’ room was how many weeks long?

**Michael:** Twenty, and that was it.

**John:** Was it enough?

**Michael:** It was enough to get solid first drafts of everything. The one tricky part of it is I hadn’t written the pilot. That’s the one atypical part of the process there was I hadn’t written the pilot as the writers’ room launched. It was about 9 or 10 weeks in, it became really important for me to get a decent version of the pilot written so that we could establish the tone of the show. Otherwise, it becomes really hard to write a writer’s draft if you don’t really know what the tone of the show is going to be.

**John:** For sure. During this 20 weeks, you guys are breaking these 6 episodes. Were there story areas? Were there outlines? What are the actual written documents that are coming out of this process, before there are scripts?

**Michael:** Everything starts with me with a story circle, which comes from the Dan Harmon camp.

**John:** Very familiar, yes.

**Michael:** From the Dan Harmon camp. That was how we broke our stories, which probably drove everybody else crazy, because I think everybody else prefers to do note cards. Even I am like, note cards are probably more efficient. It was outlines. It was let’s get a beat sheet that we feel good about and then let’s send a writer off to write an outline. That outline goes up the flagpole. Once that’s approved, we’ll write a draft.

**John:** A beat sheet is one to two pages. An outline is longer. Are those the right lengths?

**Michael:** Yeah, I think our outlines were, I don’t know, never more than 10 pages. Again, that’s probably a function of my own personal style. I am a bad planner. I like to discover it on the page. I’m more apt to send someone off to outline or to script with a little less figured out and leave some room for discovery, which is exactly what happened in Loki Episode 102 a lot. So much of the great stuff with Loki and Mobius in that episode was Elissa Karasik, our writer. I just trusted her to go off and say, “Go figure some of this stuff out,” and she did. It was all great. I was glad that we didn’t waste time in the room trying to figure out all the details when you can just rely on your writers to do that.

**John:** Is the first time the studio is seeing the specifics of what happens, are they seeing [inaudible 00:33:17] or they’re seeing the outline?

**Michael:** In the Loki process, we actually had our executives, our producers in the room with us. It was atypical but really fantastic.

**John:** Were they listening or contributing?

**Michael:** Contributing. It was great. It was like having other writers, other producers, somebody there who, A, is incredibly steeped in the Marvel lore, what’s come before. They also know what’s coming next. The most important role that is Stephen Broussard and Kevin Wright, they’re producers, but they’re also filmmakers. They may as well have been writers on our team for all the great ideas they had. Some of the most valuable things they did was know the stuff that Kevin Feige and the higher-ups were not going to respond to. Instead of spending five days in the room chasing a storyline that’s just going to end up being an absolute non-starter, you’ve got somebody to say, “No, don’t go there. I don’t think anybody’s going to really respond to that.” As a showrunner, or as somebody running a room, that is invaluable to not have to burn that time.

**John:** Jac Schaeffer was on the show, and she was talking about how on the first day of her writers’ room, she had up on all the walls all this imagery about what she wanted the show to look like and feel like, because she was in a physical room. You were in a physical room your whole time too, because this is all pre-pandemic.

**Michael:** Yes, I was in a physical room. The first time I walked by Jac’s room and saw it, absolutely, I was like, “I got to quit.” I was like, “This is a nightmare. I’m bad at my job,” because we shared a wall. They were the room right next to us. You look in there, and I was like, “Oh my god, it’s so organized.” By the way, her writer’s assistant was a guy named Clay Lapari, who was the writer’s assistant on Community with me a hundred years ago. It all comes back around. I came in, I was like, “We got to print some pictures out.” We did. I felt better once we had that stuff up there.

**John:** Earlier you referenced on Heels this other guy, Mike O’Malley, was coming in to be a showrunner on that show, and yet you’re listed as head writer on Loki. What is the distinction? Is there a meaningful distinction? Job-wise, what he was doing versus what you’re doing, are they similar?

**Michael:** The Marvel shows don’t have a showrunner. I guess the best way I know to put it is it’s you and the director, whoever the producing director is, you’re passing a baton over to them and working in tandem together, whereas if you’re Mike O’Malley, the showrunner, he’s the final say over the head of directors on set, through the edit, through everything.

The Marvel process is I guess a much more collaborative one, where at least in TV I’m not necessarily the final say. I was like, “There’s definitely an opportunity to have my ego bruised by this.” You realize, “I’m not the showrunner of this.” Then quickly it’s like, “I just want the show to be great.” When we hired Kate, her and I were so instantly on the same page creatively, and her level of ambition with the show matched mine. It was like, “This is going to be good. This is going to work.”

**John:** This is Kate Herron, the director?

**Michael:** Yes.

**John:** At what point in the process did she come on board and did you start having these conversations? Was the room finished? Was the room still going?

**Michael:** Yeah, maybe, I don’t know, a month or two prior. She came in at a great time in the process where we had our first drafts. I was making my way through my revisions on everything. She represented just creative, fresh eyes. I’m like, “Hey, we’ve all gone insane this summer making this crazy time travel show. Does this make any sense to you as a normal person?” Also, a practical filmmaker’s perspective. We’ve got a trained heist sequence. I could sit with Kate so I’m not wasting a week writing an action sequence that is simply un-renderable on screen.

**John:** I want to get to some listener questions, but I don’t want to skip all over Doctor Strange and your involvement on Doctor Strange. I’ve done a zillion features. This was your first feature to do. How did you take your experiences on these TV shows and apply it here? Did they apply? What did it feel like to be a writer on a feature?

**Michael:** Weirdly, it felt like TV. Sometimes it felt like showrunning. That’s just a testament to how collaborative Sam Raimi is and that he empowered me so much. He and I had a really special kinship together, forged by the fact that we were coming up with a movie over the course of 2020 when the world was ending around us. I was not on set of Loki. I was getting ready to fly to Atlanta to be on set. I got a call that said, “We need you more right now on Doctor Strange.”

**John:** Doctor Strange was shooting in London?

**Michael:** Shooting in London. Then COVID hit, and it became the last two and a half years of my life. I was on set every day of Doctor Strange. I was there for six months last year locked down in London. When I think about Doctor Strange, really I think about it as much of a filmmaking experience as a writing one. I was writing, but it was also just so much working with our actors and working alongside and learning from Sam about directing and everything he does. When I think about Doctor Strange, I just think about being cold on set in London.

**John:** A lot of being on set is just being cold or hot or being in the sun when you don’t want to be in the sun.

**Michael:** Exactly.

**John:** Or cursing the sun for coming up when you’re supposed to be shooting nights and you run out of night.

**Michael:** Precisely. It was an absolute adventure that didn’t… Probably 2020 and 2021 for a lot of people doesn’t quite feel real, but yet again was an amazing experience, where I just got to learn so much.

**John:** Great. We have some listener questions. This first one I see is actually about film school. It feels like exactly what we should have you talk to us about. Megana, what’s the first question here?

**Megana Rao:** Live and Die By Approval from Columbus, Ohio wrote in, “I was recently accepted to USC School of Cinematic Arts. As a country bumpkin from the shire of Ohio in the twilight of his 20s, this is an honor and huge dream come true. Recently, we had a meeting about financial aid options. The thing I most anticipated hearing about were merit-based scholarships. Turns out they emailed everyone who had received a scholarship earlier that day, and I received no such email. It’s funny, despite having gotten into one of the most competitive film schools in the world, I already feel like I’m not enough. If this class is a group of people who they view as having a unique voice among thousands of other voices, I somehow feel like I’m already on the low end of this elite totem pole.

“I guess I’m asking for any words of advice you may have on handling rejection or I’m not enough self-judgments. It’s one thing to battle those voices in your personal life. In dating, for instance, sometimes people just don’t fit. It’s another thing entirely when there’s something as measurable as money at stake to validate your insecurities.”

**John:** To summarize, Live and Die has gotten into a great film school but feels bad because they didn’t get a merit-based scholarship. They feel like they’re coming in at the bottom of this class or not at the top of this class.

**Michael:** As somebody who got rejected from USC’s screenwriting program, I would say congratulations. Also, your ability to focus on defeat, even in the glow of victory, means you’ll probably be a very successful writer, because that is a quality we all share.

If I’m reading between the lines of that, I know what it’s like to feel like a country bumpkin wanting to go out to Hollywood and make it. I’d say first off, that is a voice that needs to be… Shit, I’ve made a career out of it. Hollywood needs country bumpkins too. It is an honor to get in, and Hollywood does need your voice, clearly, or you wouldn’t have gotten accepted. I think rejection that is tied to finances is a bummer. That’s just your first lesson in film school, because that is going to be your whole career is rejection tied to finances. Steel yourself now.

**John:** I would say, Live and Die, that you’re having a feeling, and feelings don’t come from logic. Sometimes we try to use logic to justify the feelings that we’re having. If we actually check the facts, you got into one of the best film schools in the country, if not the best film school. This obsession with a merit-based scholarship is like… What are they actually measuring? Do you even know how many people are getting them, why people get them? Do the people who get them succeed more often than the people who don’t?

I think just hearing Michael on this podcast today, he was talking about how you get value out of film school. It’s actually by showing up and just doing the work all the time and try to do your very best in it. So often, I think as writers, we were probably really good at being in school and were probably really good at getting grades and everyone commending for our writing. Suddenly, when you get into a place where you’re not necessarily the best, you panic that you’re the worst. That’s just not true. You could come in there with a head of steam and actually get amazing stuff done while you’re in film school. I understand your feelings, but you got to push them aside and be excited to be at USC. Megana, do we have another question?

**Megana:** Yes. Cherry asks, “After years of struggling to break in, I’ve signed my first contract to write a feature, and it will qualify me for the WGA. I’m thrilled to finally be in the game, but now the real work begins. My primary focus is nailing it with this project. My question is, what should I be doing to prepare myself for the next step?

“I have new spec scripts that will be ready to share soon. I’ve had a couple meetings with managers and an offer of representation. I have a light relationship with some producers, agents, and development execs who have read my work. How do I go about getting the next job or getting my new material in front of the right people? It seems like the next step would be to sign with a manager, but I’m not sure how to navigate that. What am I looking for in a manager? More importantly, what am I looking to avoid in a manager? If I didn’t work with a manager at this stage, what would an alternative game plan be?”

**John:** Michael, you’ve had a manager all this time. Talk to us about managers.

**Michael:** My relationship with my two managers has been one of the most important parts of my career, as has my relationship with my agents. I’ve had the same team my whole career, which is atypical. My answer to that is it’s all personality base. I am teamed with people that I click with on a personal level whose values align with mine. It’s not based on agency or management company clout. Wherever you’re going to seek representation, I wouldn’t even say tell yourself you need a manager vs an agent. You need somebody that you connect with and that can be an advocate for you. That’s the most important thing.

Then as far as what is that next thing, it’s doing a great job on the project you just landed, which is amazing. Congratulations. That is the most important thing. That’s what will get you the next jobs is kicking ass on the thing you just got hired on. Really, don’t think too much beyond that other than maybe know what is the one thing that I have behind this that I believe in the most that I would show someone when that next opportunity comes calling.

**John:** You’re going to probably end up signing with some manager, Cherry, who is going to take you on the water bottle tour of Los Angeles that Michael was describing earlier where they just sit you in a bunch of rooms and you talk with people. That’s good. That’s a natural function. Whether it’s this person who’s already introduced themselves to you and wants to represent you… Maybe it’s them.

A really good place to check on that is the other producers you have light relationships with. Ask them. Say, “Hey, this person offered to represent me. What do you think of this person? Is this a good match?” If not, they might suggest a better person or a different person you could meet with. All of my previous assistants have gone on to have writing careers, and most of them had managers. In every case, they would come to me like, “I think this person is great, but I get a weird feeling.” If you get a weird feeling, that’s not the right person. You should not sign with a manager or a representative or a lawyer who you dread taking their phone calls or dread getting their emails. It has to be somebody you’re excited to be on the phone with, because otherwise it’s just not going to work.

**Michael:** Hundred percent agree with that.

**John:** Megana, do you have another question for us?

**Megana:** Yes. Moomin asks, “In the conception phase before any word of the screenplay is put to paper, what tools or methods do you both use to keep everything organized? Where do you compile all your thoughts, ideas, and bits and pieces?”

**John:** What are you doing for that stuff, Michael?

**Michael:** Not being as efficient as I should. A lot of my writing is done walking my dog, going for walks in the woods, or driving around. Then as far as recording it, it’s usually going onto my iPad and doing story circles and stuff.

**John:** Are you doing story circles just with a pen and drawing?

**Michael:** Yeah, just to get it down. In the inception phase, that’s what I’m doing. I spend a lot of time just daydreaming. I don’t necessarily need to write it all down, because I feel like anything that I don’t remember probably wasn’t that good of an idea to begin with. It’s the stuff that I can’t let go of, finally I know it’s time to put this down. Then when I’m actually writing a script, my process becomes really inefficient, because the way I’ll write a scene is I’ll just retype it over and over and over again, making little, minute changes here and there, because I just need to… It’s how I play the scene out in my head is typing it out.

**John:** I loop scenes just in my head first. I have the blocking for everybody and the rough dialog. I will do a scribble version, which I’m just like, the quickest version on paper I can possibly get down so I don’t forget it. Then I’ll start tackling the scene. I’ll know that sometimes in this loose version, some stuff’s just not making sense. I’ll work on that when I get to the real final version. That scribbling process isn’t part of my overall note taking or overall recordkeeping.

I think more what Moomin’s asking for is those general ideas that come to you, you don’t want to lose. I’ll have index cards everywhere. I’ll just scribble it down on an index card. Then I just try to process those once a day. I just put them in. Now we’re using Notion, but we used to use other tools for that, just so they are someplace. I don’t look back to that that often, but sometimes I do need to find that thing, or if at least it’s in the same document, I can say, oh, all of these ideas go together, and they fit in a meaningful way. If I don’t write something down, I’m going to have to keep spending brain cycles to remember it, because it’ll go away. I want to use those brain cycles to do new stuff, rather than just remembering stuff.

**Michael:** That’s how I end up looking back in my Notes app. I’m like, “2016 Moby Dick in space?”

**John:** Fantastic.

**Michael:** What an idea.

**John:** It’s come time for our One Cool Things, where we recommend something to our listeners. Michael, do you have something to recommend to the folks listening to this podcast?

**Michael:** Yes. A cool thing that I’m going to recommend is giving blood, which is a cause that has become near and dear to my heart. One of my best friends, a writer and actor named Breck Denny, who was a member of the Groundlings, he passed away earlier this year. He was a beneficiary of a lot of blood donations. They were trying to save him. Cycled through an outrageous amount of blood in the hospital. What I learned on the other end of that process is just how bad of a blood shortage there is in the country right now and how far a single blood donation can go. We’re at a historic shortage of blood in the country.

My buddy, he was one of the first people to get COVID back in 2020. After that, he started giving blood religiously, so they could test blood, and was actually part of vaccine trials and everything. He was just a great guy. As a way to honor him, we created a blood drive called Blood for Breck. You can find it in my Instagram bio. I think it’s on my Twitter. You can go there and pledge to give blood.

Really, giving blood, it’s an awesome thing that you go, you do it for 30 minutes, you get to take a picture. It just makes such a difference. It really does save lives. I don’t know. I feel like in a day and age where we spend a lot of time being like, “How can I help?” and it’s like, if I just do an online challenge and donate money, where does that money go? What is this? A bag of your blood is going to go into somebody’s body that’s fighting for their life. It’s just not a thing I ever really thought about until this touched our world, and so now it’s something I’m passionate about.

**John:** That’s great. Back in college I donated blood and loved donating blood. As of right now, we’re recording this in Pride month of 2022, gay men still can’t donate blood in the US, which is crazy. There’s lots of work being done to try to fix that problem. If you can donate blood, donating blood is a great idea. We’ll put a link in the show notes to your blood donation charity and some other blood donation drives out there across the country.

**Michael:** Great.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is this essay I read this week by Elizabeth Williamson in Slate. It was an excerpt from her book about Sandy Hook. I’ll put a link in the show notes to this. I’ve always been fascinated by conspiracy theorists and people who believe in impossible things. The people who believe school shootings didn’t happen are just this weird, special breed. This is what the article’s really getting into. This one talks about this Tulsa grandmother who goes by the handle gr8mom and really dives into why is she going after parents of Sandy Hook families and continues to believe that all these school shootings are nonsense, and digs into it.

It describes a dark triad of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, which is basically you really fundamentally cannot convince them that this is not the way it is. There’s no reasoning with them. They literally just cannot be swayed from the path that they think they’re on. If you point out any inconsistency in their logic, they will “what about” to get to another thing.

It wasn’t a hopeful article to be reading, but I think it actually helped me understand more like, oh, they’re actually just psychopaths, really, some of the people who are believing the wildest of these things. As opposed to other people who get sucked into it and they can be talked out of it, there are some people who are just never going to be talked out of this, and maybe we shouldn’t try.

**Michael:** You found some depression I hadn’t even thought about in a while. That’s great.

**John:** Absolute pleasure to have you on the show this week. That’s our program. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Ryan Gerberding. 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. Michael, are you on Twitter? That’s where I reached out to you the first time.

**Michael:** Yes, @michaelwaldron and on Instagram @fakemichaelwaldron.

**John:** Love it. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. We have one Loki-inspired T-shirt, which you should check out. Our 10th anniversary T-shirt is Loki-inspired. Our designer Dustin Box did a great job making it feel both like Scriptnotes and like Loki.

You can find the show notes to this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. You can sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record about Atlanta. In the meantime, Michael Waldron, thank you so much for coming on Scriptnotes and sharing your history here.

**Michael:** Thanks for having me. It was an honor. I’ll see you after another 555 episodes.

**John:** It’s going to be great. We’ll be living in the future.

**Michael:** Yes, exactly.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** We’re back, and we’re here with Michael Waldron, who is not only a film writer and a TV writer, he is a person who came from Atlanta, who now works in Atlanta. We will all inevitably now work in Atlanta, it seems. Can you give us some tips for… Let’s say I’m a Los Angeles person who is moving to Atlanta for work, to work on a thing. Where should I live in Atlanta? What should I do in Atlanta? Give me an overview of life in Atlanta for a writer.

**Michael:** Right now I think the heat index is 106 degrees, so don’t come. That’s my biggest advice.

**John:** We won’t. Okay, done, won’t come.

**Michael:** It’s great here. It’s been amazing to watch the city become more progressive and grow up as the years have passed. As far as living, the places that you’re going to feel the most like LA, like what you’re used to probably, it’s Inman Park is what you always hear, down south side of the city. Inman Park, Grant Park, Old Fourth Ward.

**John:** What are the Los Angeles equivalents of any of these neighborhoods? What’s the Silver Lake?

**Michael:** Inman Park is like the Silver Lake. It’s like one big Silver Lake. There’s a bunch of different areas around there. That’s probably the place to look at if you’re moving that’ll feel like LA. It’s very walkable. Atlanta’s great. There’s a thing called the BeltLine. It’s a sidewalk. It’s a sidewalk that stretches throughout the entire city. You can walk or bike across the whole city. There’s great restaurants and breweries and all sorts of stuff all around it. Inman Park or anywhere right around there, that’s going to be your best bet.

**John:** If I’m moving to Inman Park, but I’m working on a Marvel property, a Marvel project, how long is my commute to get from where I’m living to-

**Michael:** Marvel, we shoot all our stuff down at… It’s called Trilith Studios now, which is the old Pinewood, which is in Fayetteville, which is… I don’t know, it’s about a half hour with traffic and stuff. If you’re from LA, you’re not going to be daunted by any of the travel times out here, unless there’s a wreck on 85. Then you’ll be like, “What on earth?”

**John:** Like, what choices have you made?

**Michael:** You can get screwed, but it’s nothing. The traffic here, it’s as congested as LA, but somehow you’re always still going 80. It’s like Nascar. Get ready. It’s an intense vehicular experience.

**John:** Now, when I’ve been shooting things in Vancouver or Toronto, one of the things we have to watch for is any line that a local player has to say that has a U sound in it, so no “abouts” and that sort of problem. There are certain lines we’re going to write around certain things. Is there any local casting things you should be aware of if you’re filming something in Atlanta that is not supposed to be in Atlanta?

**Michael:** I’m always delighted with the local casting around here. It’s some real talented folks. What wouldn’t you want? I don’t know, if you can write stuff with Southern accents, you’re going to have an easier time. That’s for sure.

**John:** Now, something like Loki, which obviously had a tremendous amount of set work, you had some real practical exteriors as well in that show, because the main… Or at least the places that weren’t sound stages, like that TVA building. Was that a real building?

**Michael:** The shot of the archives with the elevators coming down, yeah, that’s an old hotel in Atlanta. Everything else was, generally in the TVA, that was a practical set that we built down there at Trilith. That was Kasra Farahani, our brilliant production designer.

**John:** Are people who have to come into Atlanta and leave from Atlanta, are there now direct flights? Are there enough direct flights that you can always get back and forth reliably or are you flying two places now?

**Michael:** It’s so easy out of LA. There’s probably eight or nine flights out of the day. Atlanta, it’s the Delta hub. The airport is massive. You’ll never want to go back to LAX after you’ve been to the Atlanta Airport. Before COVID, they’d added direct Burbank to Atlanta flights, which were really nice, but they were always on planes that felt like they were from the ‘60s. You’d get excited, and you’d take them, and then it was a real like, “I don’t know about this.” You’re normally on a nice airbus if you’re flying Delta to and from LA. It’s pretty easy travel-wise.

**John:** Now today, a lot of productions have moved to Atlanta, obviously. How much post-production on these shows is happening in Atlanta versus other places in the world? Is any writing happening in Atlanta? I feel like maybe Walking Dead maybe did writing in Atlanta. Do you see either writing or more post happening there?

**Michael:** I don’t know. I’m certain there’s got to be post going on here. Maybe, sure, Adult Swim does some of their stuff. None of my shows have posted here. That’s all still LA. Writing-wise, still LA, but maybe in the future. I think that if you were doing something that was very specifically Southern, maybe it would be helpful to immerse yourself in the fast food and the fried catfish and stuff for a couple weeks.

**John:** You as a student who was going to high school and then college in Atlanta, there would’ve been opportunities for you now to be working on sets and doing PA kind of stuff…

**Michael:** Totally.

**John:** …that there wouldn’t have been before.

**Michael:** I was an extra. They were shooting a Revenge of the Nerds reboot that got killed. I got to be an extra in it. I was like, “The movies came to Atlanta. I can’t believe it.” Now it’s everywhere. I think, yeah, if you’re a kid now who loves show business, you can just get out there and do anything, put honey buns in a basket somewhere as a PA, and you’re going to meet people who can help you get that next job.

**John:** This is not a specific Atlanta question, but what’s your instinct on writers’ rooms going back to in person versus staying virtual? What’s the split going to be? Is it mostly going to be in person? Is it mostly going to be virtual?

**Michael:** I guess it’ll be dictated by showrunners. Generally, I think people prefer to work in person. You just get better work. I think about so many of our great ideas come from just the moment, the times after lunch when you’re screwing around. It’s like, “Wouldn’t it be funny if Loki went to Walmart?” and suddenly-

**John:** Then he’s at Walmart, yeah.

**Michael:** That’s not how that came about, by the way. That was just an example. I think it’ll go back to in person, but probably not the five days out of the week grind. Like in anything in show business, there can be a lot of wasted time in a writers’ room. Hopefully, if we go back to in person, we retain the efficiencies that we’ve picked up from doing it on Zoom.

Links:

* [Michael Waldron](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5642271/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/michaelwaldron?lang=en) and on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/fakemichaelwaldron/?hl=en)
* Donate blood with the Red Cross [#BloodforBreck](https://sleevesup.redcrossblood.org/campaign/blood-for-breck-the-breck-denny-memorial-blood-drive/)
* [“Prove to the World You’ve Lost Your Son”](https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/06/shooting-school-texas-uvalde-sandy-hook-conspiracy.html) by Elizabeth Williamson for Slate from [Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1524746576/?tag=slatmaga-20)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Ryan Gerberding ([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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