Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/the-journey-the-destination-and-movie-lego).

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

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

**John August:**
And this is Episode 529 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do screenwriters balance the needs of the scene versus the needs of the story? The two are of course interlinked but in practice are often at odds. We’ll wrestle with how and when to prioritize one over the other.

**John August:**
Then it’s another round of the Three-Page Challenge where we look at scenes submitted by our listeners and offer our honest feedback. And in our bonus segment, for premium members, what do you do when you get bored with what you’re writing? Is that a sign to bail or buckle down?

**Craig Mazin:**
We’re going to give excellent advice and terrific feedback. And overall, provide tremendous value to our listeners.

**John August:**
Right. Provide tremendous value to both our free listeners and our premium members who we love a little bit more.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. I just feel like you we’re a value proposition.

**John August:**
100 %.

**Craig Mazin:**
I’ve been watching Succession. So, I have all these nerdy business phrases in my head. I think sometimes they’re just making stuff up.

**John August:**
Sometimes, they probably are. But someone said all those things.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. Someone said it somewhere.

**John August:**
Someone said that I don’t love you but I love you.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, I didn’t know what that meant. I got to be honest with you. Sometimes, they are legitimately over my head.

**John August:**
I love succession. And so, we’re going to talk just a little bit on about Succession. I love Succession. But I do feel like that which the intimacy in the tabletop and the next slide dialog will be like, “What the hell did you just say to me? Why would you say that? That was the worst thing you could possibly do.” And yet somehow, they continue on with their lives.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, it is really interesting that they haven’t all just left. I think normally, especially if you can just be bought out of a company, why would you stay?

**John August:**
Why would you stay?

**Craig Mazin:**
If you’re any of them?

**John August:**
So, were of course having a conversation on Friday before Sunday, the finale. So, for all we know, everything’s changed.

**Craig Mazin:**
Do you all love each other now?

**John August:**
Yeah, so my theory going into it, which I can spoil now, is that I think that Tom was wearing a wire through a lot of this season. And that will hopefully be revealed on Sunday’s episode, but it might not. I may have ruined it for other people.

**Craig Mazin:**
If that is revealed, then I assume the government will have to figure out what I love you but I don’t love you.

**John August:**
That’s what it is.

**Craig Mazin:**
I said it backwards. I don’t love you but I love you. Which one was it?

**Megana Rao:**
I don’t love you but I do love you.

**John August:**
Okay. Well, now that just clarified.

**Craig Mazin:**
What?

**John August:**
Yeah. Regardless of interest.

**Craig Mazin:**
I know the difference between I’m not in love, I love you but I’m not in love with you. Is that what they mean?

**John August:**
That’s how I feel about you, Craig. I’m not in love with you. But I do love you as a friend.

**Craig Mazin:**
Sure. I don’t know. It’s a little weak. I don’t like the way you said it.

**John August:**
So, we can have this banter because we are three feet away from each other. For the first time, you’re no longer in Calgary for a brief period of time.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yep. Little hiatus over here.

**John August:**
Yeah. So, we’re here back in our Hancock Park abode. Let’s talk through some news. This is news. Craig, can you tell me what an open writing assignment is?

**Craig Mazin:**
Of course. An open writing assignment is a job that the studios have. They need a writer to write something. It’s often a rewrite. But sometimes, it’s a first draft of some property that they already own.

**John August:**
Or it could be something like how would this be a movie if there was an article they bought, that becomes-

**Craig Mazin:**
That becomes an article. And so, they go to the agencies and they say, this is… and each agency has an agent that covers that studio. And they say to that agent, “We have an open writing assignment. This is the job. This is the producer. And we’re looking roughly for this thing.” And then, the chum is in the water and everybody starts going for it.

**John August:**
Absolutely. And so, in some cases, they may be going out to certain writers, and I say like, oh, we’re out to this writer, this agency, and we’re waiting to hear back this writer. Or, it could be like, this is the thing we’re looking for. Who do you got for us? And the agents reach out to clients and say like, “Is this a thing you’d be interested in pursuing?”

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. When they have an open writing assignment, it usually means they aren’t pursuing anyone in particular. They’re looking for people to come in and impress them.

**John August:**
When an assignment is out there, there are emails exchanged back and forth, or phone calls. And this last week, the WGA introduced this thing called the Project Page, which is a one sheeter that essentially collects all that information about a future project in one handy document. It’s shaking it in front of him. So, we’ll put a link to this in the show notes. But it’s just a simple PDF you download.

**John August:**
The idea behind it is that the Product Page is for the producer, executive, to give those critical details about where the IP rights have been secured, who else has written on the project, if there’s talent attached, who are the producers, and hopefully, at some point, get to a place where you can say, “Can you send me the Project Page?” And that’s the summary of where the project is at this moment in time. Will they fill this out? We’ll see.

**Craig Mazin:**
Because you might as well have a big box on here that says, “Are you lying?” The question are the underlying rights secured. They just lie about that all the time.

**John August:**
They will. And so, I had a conversation with some agents about this, this past week. And all of them want this to happen and also feel like it may be hard to get the producers and studios to agree to do it. And yet, I think it’s very useful for writers and maybe we could talk through what’s on the sheet because I don’t think you should be considering taking a job unless you could answer these questions. So, in some ways, I want to have this by the computer to actually check all these boxes, like do I know this information? Because so many times I’ve actually had to call my agents, email my agents to get clarification on like, “Wait, tell me who the producers are because I have a feeling I know who one of the producers are and I will never work with that person again in my life.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, it is a good checklist for stuff that would be nice to know as long as you understand that you might not… let me revise that, that you will be lied to at least to some extent. So, for instance, when it says, how long has the project been in development, they’re going to lie. The names of the previous writers, they’re going to lie. This is a rewrite, number of previous writers, that’ll be a lie. Can you briefly describe the project’s development history? This is a fresh project. We’re looking for an exciting new voice, lie. So, they’re just going to do all that because it’s Hollywood. But the part that I think is helpful is at least putting them on notice that you’re asking the question. Once an agent starts to ask, then the problem for the studio is, if they lie to that agent, and then another agent comes along, and they hear a different thing, then they have an agency problem. So, it’s a good conversation to have. This is maybe the most useful version of this is one that you put in front of your agent and say, it sure would be good if you could tell me the answer to these questions.

**John August:**
That’s what I really think we should be our first and lowest goal is basically say like, before you come to me with this project, I want to be able to know these answers because I want to know the IP rights are not all secured. Great, but what’s happening here, like is it really based on thing? You and I have a common friend. I don’t think she’s ever shared this story publicly. But she wrote something that she thought was an original that ended up being based on something and wasn’t, so she got to arbitration that she found out like, “Oh, this was actually based on a book.”

**Craig Mazin:**
Which they will do.

**John August:**
They will do that. And so, this will not preclude that. But at least you have some conversation. At some point, they said it was not based on something else.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. Once you get hired, they do have to list all the assigned material to you. So, at that point, you should know, it should be in your contract. But certainly, if they don’t have the underlying IP locked up, then not only is there risk for you, but also they’re using you to get the IP.

**John August:**
Let’s also talk about why this is important for any writer considering one of these projects. Because if you are going to go after this thing, that could be not just hours, but days or weeks of your time putting together a pitch, figuring out like is this worth your time to pursue. In many cases, you won’t know if you didn’t have the answers to these questions.

**Craig Mazin:**
Correct. Also, any open writing assignment is usually fraught with a lot of risk. The reason it’s an open writing assignment is the same reason that there’s stuff in the sale bin. It means that it’s not particularly high on the studio’s priority list. It may be something that a producer is pushing really hard that the studio isn’t particularly interested in, but, sure, make 100 people jump through hoops to bide some time before we convince you. We’re not going to ever do this.

**Craig Mazin:**
There’s all problems with open writing assignments. They are somewhat dangerous. They’re like junk bonds. Junk bonds can make you a ton of money as many criminals have proven. But there’s a lot of risk.

**John August:**
Transformers was an open writing assignment at one point. And they came to me with it, like I don’t get transformers, not for me. But it was for somebody and became a huge property. But there have been so many things that across the transom. It’s like, I don’t know.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, the worst version of this, and this is fairly common is they’ll come to you. And they’ll say, “Yes, this is an opening writing assignment. It’s from, let’s pick a studio, Universal, and the producer is, “Let’s just call her Vanessa. And Vanessa has this property that she’s talking to the estate about. And we’re putting a pitch together. The studio is super into this and is a priority for them. And what she’s really doing is laundering things, right? The people who own the rights to the thing, which may be useless, or like, “We’re not going to give you the rights unless we see what the movie would be.”

**Craig Mazin:**
So, they’re going to you, and they’re saying, “Yeah, we can’t give you the job unless you show us what the movie is.” And then, they’re just looking across, share that stuff. And somehow they get money. But it’s all they’re just lying crosswise to everybody.

**John August:**
But I’m pretty sure his job though is just like dream about a movie that could possibly exist and convince folks that you’re building stuff out of smoke, and that’s their job, too.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. I don’t want to imply that that is completely morally treacherous. It has resulted in good things. But a lot of times, open writing assignments are a bit, they’re vaporware. And you just have to be aware of that that they can go away.

**John August:**
I think if I’d had this checklist earlier in my career, there are things that are just like, oh, hell, no, I’m not walking down that road, because I wouldn’t have pursued it. So, if it avoids somehow for some people, it’s a good thing to have them.

**Craig Mazin:**
When you’re young and you don’t have children, what else do you do? Seems like a pretty good use of your time. Practice your skills.

**John August:**
And I think you should practice your skills to the degree that you’re not actually stopping writing original stuff for yourself. And that’s, I think that’s the trap that people fall into this. They’re only pursuing open writing assignments and they’re not actually doing new stuff because they have nothing to show for a year of their writing time.

**Craig Mazin:**
There’s only one writer that’s ever going to get any internal credit from the studio. And that’s the writer that gets this thing, the green light. Everybody else is just somebody that they had to fire along the way. So, odds are that this won’t work out great. So, there’s glum. It’s almost Christmas time. I should probably pep up a little bit. We are out of spooky season, correct?

**John August:**
Yeah we’re in the holiday spirit. Megana who’s here with us, talk to us about how you’re feeling post-spooky season, like we’re still in cozy season. So, is it still a good time of year for you?

**Megana Rao:**
It’s still a good time of year. It’s a little too dark for my taste.

**John August:**
Yeah. My one cool thing is about this darkness. When I asked Siri what time the sunset was and she said 4:45, that’s not okay. A sunset-

**Craig Mazin:**
Do you guys have a little problem with the sunset down here in Los Angeles?

**John August:**
Oh, yeah, we do.

**Craig Mazin:**
Because I wake up in the darkness. And then, I go to lunch in the darkness. And then, I go to bed in the darkness In Calgary.

**John August:**
Yeah, you picked that place.

**Craig Mazin:**
It was selected for us for a number of reasons. I love Calgary. But my goodness, the first thing that happened when we got there in May was we realized that at 5:00 a.m., the laser blast of the sun was going to hit your eyeballs through anything. It penetrates through wood, concrete. And, man, now it’s dark. Oh, wow. Is it dark?

**John August:**
Yeah. People moved to Los Angeles. And I think they don’t… because it’s warmer. They seem like it won’t get dark in some way. But it feels like it gets extra dark here.

**Megana Rao:**
Yeah, because it’s extra bright during the day.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. No, it does not get extra bright no. It’s actually fairly moderate when it comes to that thing.

**John August:**
The main thing I want to talk through today is this idea of scenes versus the whole movie, scenes versus the story and the journey versus the destination. And I think one of the things that’s so fundamental that’s easy to overlook. And we’ve talked about this in various ways over the course of the 10 years of the show. But writers are both creating stories and scenes. And if the scenes are like the individual pieces of Lego, the story is what you build with all those Legos assembled.

**John August:**
But we experience books and movies linearly. So, they are assembled in front of us or watching them be assembled. And the pieces themselves are constructed. They’re little movies themselves are built of these smaller moments, bits of dialogue, visuals, conflict. And so, the tension is that we’re trying to create the most interesting little Lego blocks that are full and joyful to look at and are fantastic. But that will ultimately fit together to build that, the unit we’re trying to build. And sometimes, those are not compatible goals is that we are trying to… both have every moment be spectacular and brilliant and insightful and rewarding and have the whole experience fit together and be what we’re set out to make. And those are real tensions. And you experience it in the movies where you’re experiencing I’m sure the same writing a show right now.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. No, that’s always a challenge. And it’s why I do like to outline early on because it’s the one time where you can engage in very simple scene work like just describing what a scene will be, where is it, and what’s the point, and then look at all of it together. Because what happens when you do all this work is you begin to realize that scenes are always in the context of what came before and what’s coming after. And those things change what that scene feels like to you all the time. You’re guessing how that will work. But it doesn’t always work the way you think. And there are certain things that you… especially once you get into editing, you realize that seems so important. And now, it’s like, yeah, just get rid of it.

**John August:**
Yeah. I think it’s both a craft of making sure the individual later blocks those scenes, those moments as bits are the best possible versions. But also, do we even need that Lego block? Or, no, it’ll all fit together better. And these hold them stronger without that, that extraneous piece is actually breaking the flow of what you had originally intended.

**Craig Mazin:**
It’s so hard because you wonder, Am I giving something away that I should hold on to? Is this one of those stories, where if only I’d kept that thing there? And then, you also think, Oh, wait. Am I being precious about this? And does it not matter? You’re making these value judgments all the time. It’s very frustrating. But it does drive home the need for transitions. I do think that as you’re crafting your Lego piece, if you know how it fits with the one before it and the one after it, better chance that it sticks around.

**John August:**
So, let’s talk about planning versus pantsing. Whether you are carefully outlining and figuring out what the whole story is. So then, as you zoom in on this scene, this scene is to accomplish this thing. This is where I need to get into and this is what needs to achieve at the end. And I’ve done that on movies. There’s also been other movies where I have pants it as it’s grown organically out of like, this is what the scene feels like. This is where the energy of the scene is taking us to the next thing. And sometimes, that works, and you don’t know if it’s going to work. So, it’s probably a riskier way to start. It’s that organic, just like what wants to happen next. But some really good movies have come out of that process.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, certainly. I try and do a bit of a hybrid thing, which I think a lot of people do. I’d like to know, just I like to know what the scene is before I write it. I think some people just start typing and then see where it goes from there, which is a bit like auto writing like using Ouija board. For me, I like to know what I’m supposed to be writing. I like to know what the beginning, middle, and end is of the whole story, of the scene.

**Craig Mazin:**
But then, once I’m in it, a little bit of auto writing is good for you. You get surprised by things. It’s fun to be surprised. And certainly, I have had moments where something just happens. And it’s the best part of the scene because it even got me. If it can get me, right, then it’s definitely going to get other people I think.

**John August:**
That’s when writing is working well. We have good writing and somehow, magically, it feels like both these individual pieces and the whole thing, we’re always in unison. They were always going to support each other. But when we experience bad writing, sometimes it really is that tension where like the writing is bad because it was trying to fit this outline, like this outline probably looks really good and you can still smell the whiteboard markers. They were like locked into this thing. And characters are doing stuff that may not feel organic, that the story is moving in ways that don’t feel like the scenes themselves are rewarding. The scenes aren’t funny. They don’t have texture. They don’t have specificity. They’re not unique moments. They’re just functional. They’re just the basic Lego bricks that are going to hold the thing together But they’re not interesting. And we’ve also seen bad writing, which is like, yeah, moment by moment, these things are interesting but it doesn’t go anywhere. And we all have these frustrations of things that just feel like they’re constantly in a loop because these characters are saying brilliant things and yet we’re not actually achieving our goals.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, there is definitely value in occasional wastes of time, all of its precious real estate. But I’m thinking there’s a rambling bit in Shrek, where Shrek goes on about an onion, or the two of them are talking about the onion. It’s just a shaggy dog thing. Everybody remembers it. And it’s an utter waste of time, particularly in an animated film as CG animated film.

**John August:**
Is watching money burn, yeah.

**Craig Mazin:**
That conversation cost many millions of dollars. And maybe people would have been like you don’t… you can get away with saying one quick thing there. Or showing it. Show, don’t tell every dumb rule there is. But there is a value in occasionally wasting time because it is a human thing. A little bit like singers who have beautiful pitch. If they wobble a little bit on a note, keep it because that’s how everybody knows it was an auto tune.

**John August:**
That says a lot.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. So, I think that it’s good to do that. The trouble is when that’s all people have. And then, you just get one of four… I mean, Megana reads how many of these… They’re still doing for Tarantino up there, right? They’re still just blah blah blah blah blah blah. Yeah, those aren’t so much scenes as indulgences, which if you are a particular writer and filmmaker can be delicious. But for the rest of us, not particularly.

**John August:**
Well, there’s the struggle of the screenwriter who’s working on their script. And, okay, I’ve got the idea for the movie. This is how all the scenes are going to fit together. I’m writing a scene. I’m working on this. But then, there’s the whole second level of like, Okay, now, you’ve turned this in, and now you have developed, you have notes. And you have people who are trying to optimize this. And one of the ways they’ll try to optimize this is like, can’t we just do this shorter? Can we get out of the scene faster? And sometimes that instinct is correct. You and I both experienced, they’ve just squeezed all the life and joy and then that just becomes a plot machine. You’ve lost the things in those scenes to actually make those scenes worthwhile. You’ve tried to cut a scene so short, the scene barely starts, and you should just get rid of the scene. And that’s the frustration is recognizing you could have this master plan, you can have these beautiful scenes. And then, stuff will happen. And you have to find a way to make it work without those things. It’s like you’re building a bridge, and they said, “Oh, no, you have 30% less steel than you expected.” Work with it.

**Craig Mazin:**
Well, that’s pretty much always because I don’t think anyone’s ever gotten the budget they needed. So, even money-wise, this ends up happening, and that’ll impact you as well as the notes. There’s also this thing where you have to be accountable to your own notes because we just talked about sometimes surprises. So, you’ve planned something out, and then you surprise yourself. And then, you go, “Whoa, hold on a second. This now has ramifications for many things. I have to be accountable to those. I can’t just get stuck here.” And then, all of those subsequent scenes need to be considered in the Gestalt. That’s right, I said Gestalt.

**John August:**
And we’re that kind of podcast. [crosstalk]

**Craig Mazin:**
We say those things. Everything. I feel like we talk about almost one topic in so many different ways. And that is about balancing competing interests. And in storytelling, you just have to balance the whole with the parts, because the individual parts of the ones that people love, in the moment, but they will only remember the whole after.

**John August:**
Yeah, they will remember some certain little moments of that little highlights during that thing, but then they’ll have an experience like, did I like the entire thing? Or did I not like the entire thing? And then, that’s the frustration. And I think our shared frustrations also that in teaching screenwriting, there’s such an emphasis on structure, which is the whole, which is basically this roadmap of like how it’s all going to fit together, and not nearly enough emphasis on the actual writing moment to moment. How do we keep all these balls in the air? How do we keep this moment feeling alive and excited? How to make the most fascinating Lego pieces? It’s just about like, here’s how you click the Lego pieces together to build this dinosaur.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, it’s like we make a mosaic. So, we have to have an image that we’re shooting for with all of our little tiles. But each tile has to be really cool. That’s annoying. The Romans just had the blue in the way. And it was fun. And they made a whale. And it was great. But not us. So, to me, the great majority of the work we do is actually inside of the scenes. But the most inspired work we probably do is about the whole, is understanding what is the story that people would care about, why, what tone is it, and roughly, what is the shape of it?

**John August:**
And that shape is really the journey. So, the other metaphor be the destination versus the journey, like you started here, you got there. But really, the experience of the movie is how you got from point A to point B and what route you took. If it’s a road trip, it’s like the fastest way to drive from LA to New York is not going to be the most interesting way to drive from LA to New York, is not going to be the most rewarding way to drive. But you’re going to have to make decisions about what the choices and compromises you’re going to make, like you can’t see all of America. You’ll have short amount of time. You’ll have a certain amount of gas or electric charge. You’re going to have to make some optimizations. And that’s the choices you’re making as a screenwriter.

**Craig Mazin:**
And as you go, you have to look and see how it’s going. And sometimes your beautiful route has just too man rivers in a row. And then, you have to change it. You have to be very relaxed in a weird way when you’re doing it, although I find myself very tense. Well, to me, it’s like a tense relaxed. I guess there’s the balance. Again, you just need to be able to pivot all the time in response to what’s happening.

**John August:**
Yeah, I’m working on two projects now. One of which is the scene work. And one of which is the big macros, or what is the shape of this whole thing want to be? And it’s exciting to have those two opportunities. But even in trying to figure out the whole shape of it, I need to zoom in on certain moments. I feel like, is this even going to be rewarding in those individual moments? I’m imagining myself a few months down the road, am I going to enjoy writing those scenes or not? And that’s a thing you’re always asking yourself.

**Craig Mazin:**
And eventually become accountable to the world. So much thought and energy is required. And then, people can just go, “Sucks.”

**John August:**
So, on the show, we often do a Three-Page Challenge, which is where we look at the first three pages of scenes that people have sent in. We’ve given our honest feedback. And I think that some of that’s in response to the pressure of ordinary screenwriting books and such talking about the structure as a whole thing. So, we zoom in on this really tight… We’ll focus on just three pages, like what’s happening on those pages. But maybe we should look for a way to actually talk about the shape of stories overall. I don’t know if we want to read treatments or longer things. But I felt like-

**Craig Mazin:**
I can answer that question.

**John August:**
You don’t want to read them at all.

**Craig Mazin:**
No.

**John August:**
No.

**Craig Mazin:**
No.

**John August:**
Or we could look at, I guess, when we do our deep dives on existing movies, we have a sense of the shape of the whole thing.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. And ultimately, there is not much interest for me, at least in talking about story in the abstract. Whereas doing scene work is lovely. It’s very detailed. When you’re in production, it’s the work of the day. You’re doing scene work and you can talk about all little things. For overall stories, the truth of the matter is if somebody told me the overall story for karate kid, I probably would shrug and go, “That just feels like so rocky” but like little rocky with karate, I guess. And then, you see the movie and you experience all those scenes, and they’re wonderful. And they collect up too much more than what it sounds like. So, I think we are probably doing this right. I think, in fact, it is one of the problems with… Well, there are a number of problems with screenwriting schools, not the least of which is just listen to this podcast. Honestly.

**John August:**
I do get frustrated when people ask like, “Oh, can you give us some advice on scriptwriting?” I’m like, “Yes, I have a weekly podcast you can listen to. There’s 500 episodes.”

**Craig Mazin:**
Dude. When people are like, “I just want to take you out to lunch and pick your brain, you don’t have to.

**John August:**
No. I’ve done it.

**Craig Mazin:**
It’s picked.

**John August:**
It’s been scraped clean. There’s nothing left on the inside on the scale.

**Craig Mazin:**
We are literally. Why would anyone ask us for screenwriting advice at this point?

**John August:**
No, they shouldn’t.

**Craig Mazin:**
No.

**John August:**
No, but they do. They write down the questions. Sometimes, we answer them.

**Craig Mazin:**
They do.

**John August:**
So, let’s get started on our Three-Page Challenge. We’ll start with Firebird. Now, if you want to read along with us, these PDFs are linked in the show notes. You can stop now and look at the PDF and get your sense of it before we discuss what we’re reading on the page. But Megana will give us a summary of what it is we’re about to read.

**Megana Rao:**
Great. So, Firebird by Benjamin Blattberg. The voice of father narrates an animated Russian folktale about a woodcutter who strays from the safe path when he uses his axe to free a trapped crow. As soon as the woodcutter realizes he stepped off the path, the crow opens its mouth, unleashing explosions. We then cut to Stalingrad in November 1942 where 12-year-old Mila steers out of her apartment at burning buildings and bombings. Her Aunt Anya urges Mila to pack and collect her parents’ jewelry, money, and food to help her escape from Stalingrad. Mila refuses saying her Papa told her not to. Anya slaps her across the face and keeps packing. Mila brings a book a fairy tales with an inscription from her father.

**John August:**
All right. So, that’s where we’re at the end of these first three pages. There’s things I want to talk about in this but I was intrigued. I basically got the setup. I got the situation. I was intrigued to read the next thing. It did feel JoJo Rabbit to me just because that was the most recent movie that I saw that had a similar situation happening. But there’s a lot of stuff here that I thought can work. The animated opening can work, the tie in with a fairytale book. It felt tragic and whimsical at times. These are good combinations. What was your first instinct on this?

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, that was really well done. And in the sense of scene work, regardless of how it might unfold, I thought that there was so much here worth recommending to people who are wondering roughly how should these things feel and flow. It looks great on the page. Lovely, broken up. I was-

**John August:**
It’s Courier Prime, so it’s already off to a good start.

**Craig Mazin:**
He’s just a suck up is what he is. But where got me was, I’m following along. I love Russian folklore. So, I’m looking along here and I got a little confused when the woodcutter chops at roots and branches laughing as he frees the crow. The crow flies to his shoulder and they laugh together. I thought, well, that’s very odd.

**John August:**
I didn’t know whether I was confused or whether it hadn’t been clear on the page. What was your instinct?

**Craig Mazin:**
I think it was just tonally bizarre, but that’s okay. Because then, something is coming closer. The crow opens its mouth. But what comes out is the sound of next line, all caps, explosions. Next line, lowercase, far off, coming closer. That’s actually quite horrifying. And then, we are immediately into reality and we realize we’re with a child. She is in the middle of World War II. Her city is being bombed. Her aunt, there’s a slightly clumsy introduction to the fact that she’s the aunt, where she refers specifically to her brother, Mila’s father, she just, my brother was too soft on you. That was-

**John August:**
Well, also, Mila says, “I’m not leaving Aunt Anya.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, we generally don’t do stuff like that. But we’ll figure it out. Eventually, there’ll be a reason to… you don’t need to shove it in right there. I don’t think you can let that develop later. And the conversation between Anya and Mila is pretty good because it’s real. This feels normal.

**John August:**
It feels heightened and rushed in the way that there’s an urgency to it, which is great. And they’re cutting off lines, things trail off when they need to trail off. They dash dash, cut off, when people are cutting each other off. We can improve a little bit here on the bottom half of page two. We run into a situation where between every line of dialogue, there’s a line of scene description. It’s a little staccatoAnd so, you could get some better flow by figuring out when to break that up and when not to break it up, which of those things that go to parenthetical, but that’s a small criticism.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. For instance, where did your father hide money? Mila looks at her blankly, effing hell, where that could just be in parentheses, no response. So, we can absolutely do a little bit of squishing down here. But I could see the space. I could hear it. There was a point of view. I understood that I was with Mila. Certainly, the general concept that her father had left to this book and the book was important that the father had imparted her with a love of fairytales and the fairy tales in theory would help her survive some of this. All that felt there and good. And so, yeah, I think Benjamin Blattberg can do this.

**John August:**
Yeah, I agree. You talk about, so that we’re from Mila’s point of view. And I think that’s crucial. And one of the ways in which we’re seeing it right in Mila’s point of view is when we get to this apartment from the next room, we hear drawers being opened and slammed. Mila just fetches with the buttons and follows code so long and heard that it’s him sweeps the floor. That tells us because we’re starting from her point of view. We’re literally only with her and we’re sitting out here and off camera sounds. We know that she’s the one to follow. If we’d seen the aunt first, it would have been the aunt’s story.

**Craig Mazin:**
Completely, and great use of sound. We talked about transitions. This is full of them. And we’re using all the palette that we are provided, directing on the page, thank God. And also, just like the… things happen with that too much of a Mila being made of them like Anya slaps Mila, that’s a sentence. That’s a perfectly good sentence. Subject, verb, object, done. Great.

**John August:**
Cool. So, let’s go on to our next Three-Page Challenge. This is The Drawing by Todd William Knack.

**Megana Rao:**
Ten-year-old Luke draws a mysterious woman on a piece of paper in his bedroom. It’s Gabrielle Lawson, 38, with a power ponytail, calls to him yelling that it’s time to go. Gabrielle speaks with Officer Raymond Carter in the front doorway. The officer shows her the stakes he’s put in the yard and explains the boundaries of the perimeter. Gabrielle asks Luke where his backpack is, but he doesn’t answer. We learned that Luke doesn’t speak. Twenty-four-year-old Scarlet enters carrying Luke’s backpack. She drops it by her feet where we see her ankle monitor and realize that the new perimeter is for her house arrest.

**John August:**
Craig, start us off here. This is again, we have a story of a young kid. You have a parent authority figure. We have some mystery about what’s going on. How did this work for you?

**Craig Mazin:**
I spent most of these pages utterly confused.

**John August:**
Yeah. I was confused too.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, about what was going on. First of all, there’s the view of an oncoming train and then we reveal it’s actually just a toy train, but that’s a reality shift. And it’s so short. I’m not sure what we’re getting from it exactly other than it’s somewhat clever, but there’s not enough of it to make it feel like it’s a thing.

**Craig Mazin:**
Formatting notes, a ton of capitalized words here in this one paragraph where we see the things in the room. Weirdly, there’s Edward Gorey posters. Edward Gorey is not capitalized, but posters is. Most of the stuff, you don’t need to capitalize like art supplies.

**John August:**
It’s uppercasing and that doesn’t need to happen.

**Craig Mazin:**
Right. And then, we meet this kid and he’s scribbling a picture of a shadowy figure and then we hear a woman off-screen, “Luke time to go.” Who is that woman?

**John August:**
The woman is theoretically Gabrielle, but it’s weird that we don’t identify her here.

**Craig Mazin:**
But also, if she’s yelling to him, she’s also talking to a police officer at the same time. Interior front doorway, that’s not a location. You could be by the front door. You could be foyer. The police officer, here’s the description, crop dark hair in perfect unison with his short beard. Okay.

**John August:**
How are things in unison?

**Craig Mazin:**
Well tidy, I guess, weathered. Never told a joke. But if he did, it would be quality.

**John August:**
I don’t know how to play that.

**Craig Mazin:**
What is that?

**John August:**
I can’t do that. It’s not a playable thing.

**Craig Mazin:**
If you’ve never told a joke, how could it be quality?

**John August:**
So, Ashley Nicole Black, when she was on the show she was talking about, she’s also an actor, and she talks about when she’s going out for a role she reads the character description there and she gets frustrated when it’s just like, that’s not a thing I can actually do or play.

**Craig Mazin:**
No one can do that. But even if you could, you couldn’t because it’s contradictory. Never told a joke, but if he did, it would be quality. That’s like never drove, but if he did, he would nail it. But no, because you’ve never… what?

**John August:**
Yeah. So, never told a joke period. I get that. That’s a playable thing.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yes. So, the sticks in the yard, again, not really sure why they need to be there exactly. But that’s fine. And then, Luke shows up and she says in the pantry, honey, but wasn’t she just calling him telling him to go?

**John August:**
That’s what I’m confused about too.

**Craig Mazin:**
So, if she’s telling to go, but was it maybe, was it Scarlet that was saying time to go? I don’t think so. Because Gabrielle eventually says, “Ready? Where’s your backpack? So, Gabrielle yells, “Time to go.” We don’t identify her by name. And then, she does not seem to have any sense that it’s time to go. Still not a word, huh? Just more drawings. No. No.

**John August:**
You’re setting up too much that this is the fundamental thing. That’s strange about this character. We don’t know how long he’s been involved in their life, which seems strange to. So, let’s talk about the stakes because the literal stakes have been put in the ground by Officer Carter. They’re already in by the time it started. If you were putting the stakes in, that would be intriguing to me. What is he doing that? And then, I was like, “Oh, the fact that it’s about her house arrest and the perimeter, then we’re in the middle of something that’s great.” But they’re just standing having a conversation about a thing that’s already happened. I don’t know the context of it.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. And it’s putting a lot of pressure on this reveal. She’s under house arrest. But there’s probably a more interesting, casual way to drop that in there. I do struggle when characters have this openness with each other. Someone says, still not talking. Yeah, no, just drawing. Typically, a parent of a child who has any struggles will be far less forthcoming than that. Still not talking, huh? No.

**John August:**
Let’s also talk about point of view. So, in the last thing we were looking at, it was clear that we own the little girl’s point of view. I’m not sure who’s…. We’re not in the boy’s point of view.

**Craig Mazin:**
We’re no one’s point of view. So, I don’t know whose scenes belong to. If I were directing the scene between Officer Carter and Gabrielle, I’m not sure what they want. They don’t seem to want anything actually. This is a problem. So, in scenes, typically, people are trying to achieve something. Is he hitting on her? He’s not doing a particularly convincing job of it. Does she want something from him? Does she want him to leave? She doesn’t seem like she does, nor does she want him to stay. Everyone’s mild.

**John August:**
Yeah. And mild is usually not a good sign for a first scene.

**Craig Mazin:**
No.

**John August:**
So, let’s go back to our earlier conversation about the Lego pieces. And it’s like it’s entirely possible that Lego piecewise that this is actually building up, stacking up something interesting in the fact that they’re under house arrest, the stakes are going to be useful down the road, but the actual scene work that we’re seeing, the Lego pieces that we’re looking at, they’re confusing, and that’s not helping us.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, even if this exists just to set up that there’s somebody under house arrest and there’s a kid and he’s drawing a weird picture. And maybe there’s some, who knows what’s with the picture. The problem here is the conversation between the cop and this woman. The two of them don’t seem to have any reason to be talking to each other. It’s almost like we’re watching aimless small talk, which you tend to avoid like on planes and in lines.

**John August:**
So, we actually have a logline for this one. So, we now ask for a logline. So, here’s the logline for the whole thing, which I do believe this Lego thing. After mysterious and tragic incident, artist Scarlet finds herself on house arrest at our strange aunt and silent 10-year-old cousin’s big empty house. Soon she begins to experience supernatural events, all of which she suspects is linked to her cousin’s artwork.

**Craig Mazin:**
Sure. And you get a supernaturally vibe from the description of the artwork itself.

**John August:**
But I don’t feel like she’s the central character of the story. It’s showing on the three pages you’ve given us.

**Craig Mazin:**
No. No, this would be… There’s the answer. This should be from her point of view. She’s the hero. Everything that’s happening here is boring. So, if she’s watching all this and she’s watching a cop describe the perimeter and her looking at it-

**John August:**
That’s interesting.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, that would be interesting, yeah, perspective. I would feel like she would have feelings about that. She’s trapped. So, that’s a good thing. And she’s trapped and then she turns and there’s that little kid staring at her. That would be scary and weird. There’s a lot of ways to go. But the key is her. And we get nothing from her except this very bit at the end, which is like-

**John August:**
Her description is-

**Craig Mazin:**
Cold and distant but without angst.

**John August:**
I don’t know how to play that either. I could play cold and distant without angst.

**Craig Mazin:**
Well, angst is incompatible with cold and distant, right? So, I don’t know what the word but is doing. So, I just think cold and distant would be enough. And then, he adds detached, which I think was covered by cold and distant. And she’s-

**John August:**
But also, cold and distant is a hard thing to stick on your central character. That’s the hard first thing to give us a character who is the one we’re going to actually be following through the course of the story.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. I think it’s also something that is the thing you can get from the execution of the character in the scene with the kid. So, if the kid walks in there and he’s like, “Hey, can I… and she just says one word answer or doesn’t answer at all, but just looks away, that’s cold and distant. Better to do that probably.

**John August:**
Yeah. And use that character description line to give us some visual, some specificity about who this character is versus anybody else who could be in this movie.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. Last thing, Todd, I would say just on when you’re on mild patrol. On page three, Officer Carter chuckles and tips his hat and then at the end of the page, Scarlet chuckles. Chuckling is just for like grandpa. Yeah-

**John August:**
As Megana laughs.

**Craig Mazin:**
And then, you like to chuckle. That doesn’t count as chuckling. That was a proper laugh. I was thinking of chuckling as like [demonstrates chuckling].

**Megana Rao:**
I see. I see.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. Usually, your ruffle a little. Your grandson’s hair because he took him fishing and he said something funny and you go. Chuckling is mild.

**John August:**
Yeah, it’s very mild. All right, let’s get on to Perdition by Terry Rietta. We’ll get a summary from Megana.

**Megana Rao:**
We’re in Cullman, Alabama in the 1830s. Thirteen-year-old Duncan narrates the pastoral setting as he comes upon, strangled 16-year-old Eily’s body by the creek. His father, Loren tells him to go get Pastor Haig. As Duncan runs to the pastor’s house, he flashes back through memories with Eily. Loren and Pastor Haig discuss next steps as they look at the body.

**Megana Rao:**
The sheriff is too far away to reach that day, so they take the corpse to Eily’s home where her mother Eustace falls to pieces at the site of her daughter’s dead body.

**John August:**
Alright. So, yet again, we have young people and dark things happening around them. There were moments here that I like. I liked the idea of finding a body in an older time. We have a sense of what a modern day kid finding a body is. But I liked that it was awkward. And there wasn’t a natural thing to do. There wasn’t police to call. I liked all of that. And yet what I was actually seeing on the page didn’t feel like the best version of this scene in the sequence to me, and there are a lot of small things on there I want to talk about in terms of showing vernacular dialogue, showing accent, showing regionalisms in a way that is suggestive, but not annoying to read, and sometimes just got a little annoying to read in terms of the “gittins” and the “aint’s and the “gahs.”

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. And I don’t know, Megana, if these are all linked together by little fantasy moments perhaps because this is the third one in a row now, where there’s a slight fantasy aspect to it because he sees himself playing with the girl when they were younger, and she was choked to death, which I found confusing.

**John August:**
I am confused too. And I don’t know how…. So we’re talking about on page two as he’s running. He sees these things as like, I don’t know that as a viewer. I would get that he was seeing an earlier version of this. And also, it’s weird how the, a teenager, a young person that’s imagining a younger version of himself. That doesn’t happen.

**Craig Mazin:**
It doesn’t happen. And generally, people aren’t looking at themselves in memories. They can see other people in memories perhaps, but happy memories just seemed like we were hit with a pretty tonally shocking thing. And then, on top of that, we were hit with this gimmick. And then, writing over all that is voiceover.

**Craig Mazin:**
So, we have three competing interests. And I’m not sure where I’m supposed to look and feel, but I can tell you what I wanted. To me, what’s really cool is this, a peppercorn snail, and I don’t know what a peppercorn snail is [crosstalk]. But I loved it, a peppercorn snail.

**John August:**
Daddy, I want a peppercorn snail.

**Craig Mazin:**
I want it now. A peppercorn snail crawls up her porcelain shoulder, revealing deep purple bruises around the girl’s neck. I didn’t love it was her and then the girl’s because it sounded like two different people. But what I loved was that there was a snail on a person, and that’s how we find out they’re dead. And that’s really cool and weird. And I wanted basically the kid to shut up. Now, I don’t have anything against voiceover. Sometimes it’s brilliant. In this case, it’s turning everything rather corny.

**John August:**
It is. So, let’s read through the voiceover here. So, it’s labeled as Duncan’s voiceover. I’m confused whether this is Duncan, the 13-year-old kid or an adult. And as I read this aloud, I think you’ll be confused with me. “Cullen, Alabama, was a pretty place anytime of day. Old oaks leaning down, big moss feathered slabs of stone, soft grass will take the print of your foot and hold it. In the spring, the bubbles don’t seem to rise but rather hang like a string of beads. And Eily Jurdan looked the part of it just lying there like a girl in a tale.

**John August:**
Now, in a book, great. I love that. I actually think that’s good writing. And I really do enjoy it. I don’t believe a teenager can say that. So, it has to be an older version.

**Craig Mazin:**
It says a boy, 13, speaks with a soft southern accent.

**John August:**
Yeah. So, I guess that’s him talking but it doesn’t track for me.

**Craig Mazin:**
It doesn’t sound like what anyone would say to anyone. It does sound book-like. It is an omniscient narrator description of things. But if I were describing my town to you and I started talking like this, you would walk away. There’s something wrong with me. Soft grass, it’ll…

**John August:**
I’m going to start doing that.

**Craig Mazin:**
Take the print on your foot and hold, you’d be like, “What? What are you talk… what? Just where are you from?” Staten Island. I think that it’s a bit purple in terms of its prose, which again, in a novel can work. But coming out of someone’s mouth will sound corny. And on top of that, a 13-year-old boy who talks like this should be studied in a lab because it’s just too much.

**John August:**
A very specific on the page note here. So, in that block of dialogue I just read, this voiceover, and Eily in parenthesis, it says rhymes with highly. I like that we have that clarification here. But I was so tempted to read the parenthetical aloud. So, maybe put it in brackets, put it above this if you need to. I didn’t mind knowing how to pronounce it. We also run into problems with Eily on page three. We’re in this open cart and Duncan is in the back. Duncan sits with Eily holding her head in his lap and I had to think like, “Wait, is she dead?” So, I think Eily’s body is really what we needed to have here.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah.

**John August:**
On page three is also where we see, the first line is, outta get the sheriff. It should be an oughtta to get sheriff. That oughtta is spelled differently. Half days ride to Huntsville and it’s getting dark. Animals will get at err if we just leave her out. You don’t need the errs in that situation. I think at a certain point you have to stop dropping on all the “g”s. We get a sense of what the sound is supposed to be. But it gets to be frustrating to read that all the time.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yes, you don’t need it. And the actors will generally do that. If you give this to them, you run the risk of really getting a lot of-

**John August:**
But things like animals will get her if we just leave her out. The animals’ll, I like that.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. The animals will get at her. You can say that too. It’s just the err. It does seem a little much… I get immediately confused on page one. First of all, he’s describing things as if they were in the past. But he’s there looking at them in the present. So, I don’t understand quite how that functions.

**John August:**
I don’t know when we are in time.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. And then, Loren is this guy who is staring at her. Now we’re going to presume that unless Duncan sounds like a boy boy, that’s who it is because that’s who’s staring at this girl. And it’s the first person we see. Loren it says blends into the setting, granite face, stoic and sporting blood on his pants. Okay, a couple of things. That does not going to blend into the setting, too. You don’t really spurt blood on your pants, blood-stained pants. But when I see a dead body and then I see a guy next to it with blood-stained pants, my mind goes to weird places.

**John August:**
Pretty natural connection. They’re somehow connected that there’s blood on that. Yes.

**Craig Mazin:**
And yet after reading it over a few because I get very disturbed. And then, he said, “Oh, a few freshly caught rabbits dangle from his belt.” Okay.

**John August:**
Maybe start with rabbits.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, maybe start with the rabbits because right now, oh, bloody pants. Nobody wants that.

**John August:**
Page one. Afternoon sun kisses the foothills of the Appalachians, dangerously purple but okay, I’ll allow it. Next slide, hills, pastures, pines, and hardwoods. You said foothills in the previous sentence. I don’t think you need to say hills twice.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yes, I agree. And when we go into this next section, there’s the promise of Eustace. Before we get to Eustace, there’s a preacher. Duncan has been told to run to get the preacher. And Duncan says, is she dot dot dot? And obviously she is. She’s dead. Clearly. He’s 13. He’s not nine, right, or eight. He should know that she’s definitely dead. She’s not breathing. She’s pretty dead-looking. Regardless. And because it’s always this fake-ish. He finally gets to the preacher’s house. He pounds on the old oak door, a weathered… this is second weathered. The other script had a weathered.

**John August:**
Everyone’s weathered.

**Craig Mazin:**
Everyone’s weathers. Kindly man opens it. A cross around his neck and round spectacles on the end of his nose. A bit central casting there for the old person. This is preacher Haig. The preacher’s face falls at the sight of Duncan standing there, tear-stained and out of breath. What happened? Duncan throws himself in the preacher’s arms. Well, this is a whole different type of movie now. What? So, I think maybe he meant collapses into.

**John August:**
Yeah. Yeah. I’m not buying that either. I’m not buying that moment. I don’t mind buying that as an out. So, what happened is a good exit line in general.

**Craig Mazin:**
You don’t need what happened. How about just uh-oh, right? He reacts to this kid standing there. And then, the two of them are chit-chatting. And then, they get to Eustace who I assume is his mom.

**John August:**
Eustace is a man. Eustace looks past the preacher and sees his little girl. So, last thing I want to talk about is there’s a dedication page. So, after the title page before the real script, definition of the word perdition in Christian theology, a state of eternal punishment and damnation into which a sinful and unpenitent person passes after death. Great. I’ll take it like, yeah, I’m fine with that. And that’s a good use of that dedication page.

**Craig Mazin:**
I did not like that perdition was printed out in syllables.

**John August:**
I’m going to allow it because I could see people pronouncing it strangely or getting tripped up on it. If it weren’t for the Road to Perdition, the Sam Mendes movie I wouldn’t know.

**Craig Mazin:**
You wouldn’t know about perdition. So, I think Terry, less novelistic here probably less than general seems like you’ve got a great eye for visuals. You can really see this place and I can see it with you. You probably are over describing in spots. When I say probably, I mean definitely. And given that you have such a good eye for visuals, don’t clutter it quite so much with extra stuff.

**John August:**
I will be fascinated to see the version of this that basically has no dialogue which is all just visuals telling the story and then fill out the scenes you need to. Here’s a logline, 1830s Alabama, after discovering that a small town’s golden girl has been strangled by in a creek and her friend Isaac, a boy 18 with down syndrome has run off with a stolen horse.

**Craig Mazin:**
What?

**John August:**
It’s a confusing logline. A posse is organized by the girl’s wealthy father to bring back the boy to account for the crime they think he committed.

**Craig Mazin:**
I see.

**John August:**
So, it sounds like there’s a posse going after the presumed killer of this girl.

**Craig Mazin:**
Sure. And that’s fine, but that’s not what this is giving me.

**John August:**
No, it’s not.

**Craig Mazin:**
And it feels a little bit, Terry, like you’re forcing To Kill A Mockingbird on us here. It just feels To Kill A Mockingbird-ish. It’s that vibe. And that’s that vibe. And honestly, it’s an old fashioned vibe.

**John August:**
Yeah, to strangle a sparrow.

**Craig Mazin:**
It’s a great book but it’s an old book. We honor the things that come before but then the fact that they get popularized and then recycled and redone a bunch, you got to move past that and I think this feels a little too Pepperidge Farm remembers.

**Megana Rao:**
Can I ask you a question?

**Craig Mazin:**
Sure, of course.

**Megana Rao:**
On page two where Duncan’s sprinting and as he passes the field, he sees himself much younger with Eily playing in the high grass .Say Terry did want to keep that, would you recommend doing another logline or like a flashback? Would that help?

**John August:**
Yes, I would recommend keeping our kid out of it and just seeing the younger version of the girl. I have a hard time imagining how that’s going to help tell the story. I don’t think it works with the Lego piece but I don’t think it’s going to actually help him and the entire thing is trying to construct is to have flashback moments.

**Craig Mazin:**
That’s also the wrong time for this information. I just saw her dead. Give me a moment or two. Let me learn a little bit about… let me at least hear what supposedly the deals with her before you start showing me things that are maybe private things like her kissing some guy behind the barn. At a church, he sees Eily kissing a man behind a barn. Maybe there’s a barn near the church, usually aren’t.

**John August:**
No, shouldn’t be.

**Craig Mazin:**
No. Regardless. It’s too soon. Oh, I see. He’s running by the church. And then, he sees Eily kissing a man behind a barn. Now, how would you do that?

**John August:**
I don’t know how you do that.

**Craig Mazin:**
I don’t know how you do it.

**John August:**
So, we’re having a hard time visualizing what we’re actually going to see on screen. And that’s a real problem, especially on page 10.

**Craig Mazin:**
Plus, why is he thinking of this at all right now. He’s got a job to do, which is to get to the preacher.

**John August:**
Do your job. Get to the preacher.

**Craig Mazin:**
Throw himself in the preacher’s arms.

**Megana Rao:**
Okay, second question. So, in the last script and maybe in this one, it feels like a thing that you guys are bumping up against is the fake reveal, like false suspense. So, do you think in this script, like with that line is she dot dot dot, if they just said is she dead, that would have been better?

**Craig Mazin:**
Yes. Yes, that actually would have been better because then you would have had an opportunity for the other character to look at him like, what do you think, idiot? And then, that kid could hang his head because that was a stupid question. It gives you an opportunity for humans to interact.

**John August:**
Yeah. And the “is she…” doesn’t… it’s false. Doesn’t feel real. You could say almost anything else would make more sense in that moment. She’s dead, right? Or what do we do? I really don’t have anything. It’s probably better than like the is she because we’re just assuming she’s dead.

**Craig Mazin:**
Is she?

**John August:**
Yeah.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yes.

**John August:**
Is it time for the next sample? Let’s take a look at Helen Sedwick’s pages for Ten Million.

**Megana Rao:**
We open on the San Francisco Bay and close in on an upscale home at Dawn where Patti Wendecker rushes down in her bathrobe to greet a SWAT team of FBI agents pounding at her door. Patti reminisces about the old days in voiceover as we watch federal agents restrain her and storm her home. Patti’s teenage daughters Abby and Monica are escorted downstairs where they’re seated next to Patti. Patti insists the agents have made a mistake until they dragon her husband, Sam, 45, an attorney, whom the agents caught trying to escape in the backyard. Sam apologizes before he’s escorted away. The dFBI asked Patti if she has any firearms in the house.

**John August:**
Great. I like these pages. And I like the situation that was being created here. I’m going to have a lot of very specific notes about things I think could be improved. But meeting this character in this situation, I think feels interesting and right and appropriate. I was a little confused about the time period and start. For some reason, I assume it’s modern day, but it feels like could also be ’80s or ’90s. So, I was a little curious about that. But I was with it moment by moment, which I think is a good sign for these pages. Craig, what was your first instinct on this?

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. There is a good reveal here, which I liked. Because she sold me on the fact that they were in the wrong house. And then, turns out they’re not in the wrong house. And that’s interesting. However, there’s a little bit of a thing that happens here early, which lost me a touch and that is Patti in voiceover says, and this is what we hear first as she’s coming downstairs. “If you ask me, the FBI should let you finish your first cup of coffee and run a brush through your hair before they pound on your door with warrants, rifles, and bulletproof vests.” Pound pound pound.

**Craig Mazin:**
Then she opens the door, shakes her head in disgust. “I told them right off you’ve got the wrong house. By noon, FBI idiots would be trending on TikTok.” Now, a couple things, one, shaking your head in disgust. Nobody shakes their head in disgust at the FBI unless they’re like a mob wife and this is the 12th time. This is new. This is weird. Second, by noon, FBI idiots would be trending on TikTok. That makes it sound like that’s exactly what happened. But it isn’t what happened. And also, I don’t see them say you’ve got the… I don’t see her say you’ve got the wrong house. They slam her to the floor. She says sometimes, “I miss those days” in voiceover which I was okay. So, something is interesting.

**Craig Mazin:**
But I was already nervous that I was disconnecting from a normal human reaction to a situation. And I got particularly nervous when the daughters were taken. And towards the end, the agent says to Patti and her girls… and how old are the girls?

**John August:**
They are 16 and 14.

**Craig Mazin:**
Sixteen and 14. Monica is 14. And Daddy has already been dragged off by the FBI and apologizes. Something’s gone terribly wrong. The agents say to Patti and her girls, “Now, don’t move.” And Monica says, “What? And missed all the fun?” Excuse me?

**Craig Mazin:**
You’re 14-year-old mouthing off to the FBI that just apparently justifiably dragged your dad out. And you guys are all on the floor and tied up. No. So, tone was a problem for me. But the layout of things was really interesting. It was a cool scene to start with.

**John August:**
Yeah, I agree. So, I think let’s talk about the daughters because this is about what we hear. Girls scream, Patti’s daughters Abby, 16, and Monica, 14, stumble down the stairs, their hands bound behind them and a behemoth in a black helmet on their tails. Patti tries to stand but with their hands tied behind her, she topples over. The behemoth sits the girls beside Patti and tips her back up.

**John August:**
So, I love Patti trying to stand up. I love the daughters coming down. I don’t know if I believe that they had their hands behind them. Maybe they do. Maybe not.

**Craig Mazin:**
No.

**John August:**
I don’t see it. They’re juveniles. But then, being freaked out is great. But I’m only seeing them as this collective unit. I don’t know anything specific about who they are because they’re not going to be the same girl. And so, give us some visual that distinguishes this. So, who they are, what are they wearing? Are they still in their pajamas? Well, just what’s happening here? Because these are supposed to be important characters I’m taking and I am just getting names for them.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. And they screamed, and they are tied up. And yet they’re sassing the FBI. It just didn’t seem to make sense. This is more where the scene ends. But there is a fairly chunky description at the end of this about what’s on the walls.

**John August:**
Let’s about that because I think there’s actually some good stuff there. And maybe it is the right time to wait and hold back where we can sit for a second where we can actually see some of the stuff. The way that their home reflects affluence, but not true wealth, a wall of glass facing the San Francisco Bay, other walls are lined with shelves holding a chaotic assortment of art and mementos, handmade pottery, Mexican alebrijes, bolga baskets, most of which has been tossed to the floor.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, they were tossing stuff earlier. I think it probably would have been better to integrate that into the action. So, it didn’t feel like we stopped things just to get a little cataloging.

**John August:**
Let’s talk about the difference between how Patti is responding in her voiceover and what she’s doing in real life. Because that’s some of the tension that I think you hit on it at the start. She’s not actually saying, “I told them right off, you’ve got the wrong house. She’s not saying those things. And maybe it’s okay that her reporting of what actually happened is different than what we’re seeing, but maybe it needs to be more dramatically different that she actually didn’t really is freaked out and crying.

**Craig Mazin:**
Which she’s not because she’s having it both ways. It’s like, you guys don’t belong here. You have the wrong house. None of that should be happening, which normally, first of all, why is she… when she opens the door, she’s not surprised. So, I’m confused by what her context for them is.

**John August:**
If this felt like a home invasion almost from the start, which is probably what it would feel like, then her natural reaction to that is probably going to be interesting and compelling. And I can imagine there’s a version of this voiceover that is a good counterpoint to it. But I think to reveal the husband can be done better, because right now the husband’s coming in, for whatever reason. It’s morning, but he’s already dressed in a suit. I don’t understand where he was.

**Craig Mazin:**
And he was in the backyard. Right? That’s where they caught him, in the backyard.

**John August:**
Yeah. He’s trying to get out.

**Craig Mazin:**
Right. But how did he even know to get out like… Anyway, there’s a lot of logical issues here. Patti is incredibly not forthcoming with these agents. And I’m not sure why. Everything that she’s describing here sounds like she’s a mob wife, like she is…. So her husband is a criminal. And she knows it. But she’s getting sassy with the feds. This feels Carmela-like a little bit. But that’s not what she’s saying in the voiceover, really.

**John August:**
I’m going to cheat and look at the logline. Because we don’t look at the loglines before we do this. The logline is a woman’s safe suburban life has shattered when the FBI raids her home and arrest her husband, a high price attorney, for stock fraud. So, it’s not a mafia situation.

**Craig Mazin:**
Then this is not correct. Just tonally speaking. Helen, you’ve got a really interesting situation here. But what you’ve done is you’ve shoehorned in an attitude that doesn’t necessarily comport with even if Patti is just that person who’s got that cold ice water in her veins. Her freaking daughters couldn’t be like that. And plus, if your mom and your two daughters have been tied up and thrown downstairs by the FBI, you’re going to be emotional. She’s just very-

**John August:**
Yeah, so I’m going to take this moment to, again, talk about how amazing Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers is, but one of the things that Hustlers did so well is the characters comport themselves when they’re being interviewed in formal situations. And they present the story of what happened in a very different way than what we actually see in them happening. And so, I would be fascinated if the voiceover that we’re getting in that character that should present yourself at the end, we’re going to learn through how she became that thing. And it doesn’t match up with the character seen at the start. That can be really-

**Craig Mazin:**
That could be really interesting. Unreliable narrator being proven right in front of us.

**John August:**
Yeah. All right. So, as always, we want to thank our four writers who sent in their Three-Page Challenges. But also, everyone who sent us a Three-Page Challenge. Megana will read through how many for this session.

**Megana Rao:**
A bunch, yeah.

**John August:**
A bunch, a bunch. So, thank you, everyone who sent them in.

**Craig Mazin:**
Five.

**John August:**
If you have pages you would like us to look at on the show, you can go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. And you’ll see a forum, which you can fill out the information and click to attach your script. And it goes into a magic mailbox that maybe we can look at and pick things for our next Three-Page Challenge. But, again, thank you, everyone who sent that stuff in.

**John August:**
Now, it’s gotten dark as we record it and it is time for one cool things. My one cool thing is this cool little thing that I got this last week that I found very helpful. Craig, can you describe what this is?

**Craig Mazin:**
Oh, this is one of these things. So, this is a flexible strip that you can snap onto your arm. And it lights up. That’s cool.

**John August:**
Yeah, so it’s like a slap wrist.

**Craig Mazin:**
Slap wrist bracelet.

**John August:**
This bracelet thing, but it has an LED inside of it. So, it reflects but also it glows. And so, if you’re running at night or walking your dog, I find it actually really helpful because cars can see you. It can be set to just be a steady light or it can blink and so people can see you because I just find that this time of year, both as a driver and as pedestrian or a runner, it just becomes a little bit dicey because you don’t know that people can actually see you. So, I recommend this. This is cheap. I’ll put a link to it on Amazon. This is the Nite Ize SlapLit, SlapLit.

**Craig Mazin:**
Sorry. SlapLit.

**John August:**
SlapLit, LED Slap Wrap.

**Craig Mazin:**
SlapLit.

**John August:**
Yeah, there’s other ones that-

**Craig Mazin:**
Oh, SlapLit.

**John August:**
SlapLit.

**Craig Mazin:**
I thought it was Slap Let.

**John August:**
SlapLit.

**Craig Mazin:**
Like a Slap Let like a bracelet.

**John August:**
SlapLit.

**Craig Mazin:**
So, SlapLit.

**John August:**
So, I would just recommend this if you’re going to be outside walking in a place where a car can hit you.

**Craig Mazin:**
How much does that cost?

**John August:**
It’s really cheap.

**Craig Mazin:**
I’m looking up right now. The SlapLit is currently going on Amazon for $10.59.

**John August:**
So, to not be hit by a car, I think it’s money well spent.

**Craig Mazin:**
My one cool thing is slightly more expensive than this.

**John August:**
All right, tell us.

**Craig Mazin:**
If you’re in the market for a new computer. And we are writers, it is our instrument. I don’t necessarily recommend this for everyone, of course. It’s a bit of a budget buster. However, in the sense of the technological aspect, the new MacBook Pro 16 with the Apple, this one has the Apple M1 Max, is spectacular. It said return to a chunkier MacBook Pro, which I actually like. I never needed it to be the MacBook Air. I never needed it to be slender. It’s a little heavier. They got rid of the glowy bar that was a wonderful gimmick that literally nobody wanted or liked. The screen is brilliant. But my God, the speed on this thing is remarkable. And the fan doesn’t run. It also uses way less energy so the battery lasts way longer. It’s just everything you would hope for has been put in here. I was telling Megana that the thing that I use that’s the most processor-intensive is when we play Dungeons and Dragons.

**John August:**
And so, last night when you’re playing you were using on this machine and your ability to hang on an app, which is much, much faster.

**Craig Mazin:**
Oh my god. And so, did it read faster-

**John August:**
Oh, yes. Faster, yeah.

**Craig Mazin:**
Because normally it would be like wuuuuuuuuh, and now it’s like poink, which is awesome. And my side, because I’m the DM, my side is always going to be the hardest one to run because it’s seeing everything. So, it’s rendering everything all at once all the time. And it’s also showing me all of your lines of sight. So, it’s basically doing five or six times the work that your computer’s doing. Plus we’re running Zoom. It’s great. So, just a huge thumbs up on these suckers. My favorite computer.

**John August:**
On my home office here, I have an iMac which is my main one. But of course, the MacBooks are much faster than my iMac is at this point, which is frustrating. Megana and I both have the M1 MacBook Air, which have been great. They’ve been super-fast and reliable. Again, you don’t appreciate how nice it is to not have your fan run for anything but the battery lasts forever. It’s smart and good. It’s good.

**John August:**
That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by added 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 the longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. We have t-shirts and they’re great as well as hoodies, too. You can find my Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes @johnaugest.com. That’s also where you find the Three-Page Challenges that we talked about today. You can find transcripts and can sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptsnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments. And starting this week, you can also listen to us on Spotify.

**John August:**
So, if you’re a premium member and want to listen to it through the Spotify app, there are instructions for that. We emailed it to you but you could probably figure it out. It’s not that hard. But if you’re confused, we’ve sent you an email. So, search your email history because we sent you screenshots on how to sign up in Spotify, if you want to listen to the premium feed in your Spotify. Craig, Megana, thank you so much.

**Megana Rao:**
Thank you.

**Craig Mazin:**
Thank you.

**John August:**
All right. For this bonus segment, this is a question we got from Kyle in New York City.

**Megana Rao:**
I’m an amateur screenwriter who started writing during the pandemic.

**John August:**
We don’t believe the word amateur screenwriter.

**Megana Rao:**
I’m represented but hope to eventually get to the point of being paid for my work. I’ve encountered an issue where I can write really well when I’m excited about a project. But I tend to get bored easily. And once something bores me, it’s nearly impossible for me to find the energy to keep hacking at it. I could be wrong since I’m new to the craft. But I imagine one of the traits that separates amateurs from professionals is the ability to keep going even if you’re not feeling what you’re writing. We can’t all be on 100% of the time.

**Megana Rao:**
Do you have any mental tools or tricks you’d recommend for getting back to a place of energy around a project to make sure you give it its due diligence? What do you do when you need to finish a project but are sick of it?

**John August:**
Kyle, I have to embrace you. You’re the only person who’s ever felt this way. Literally from the moment I start a project to the moment I finished project, I fall more in love with it. I start out really liking it. And I realized, no, I’m deeply, deeply in love with it. This is the best thing I’ve ever written. And I cannot wait to get to it every morning.

**Craig Mazin:**
Do you have more sex with your spouse now than you did when you first met?

**John August:**
100%.

**Craig Mazin:**
Through the roof.

**John August:**
It’s crazy.

**Craig Mazin:**
There’s not enough time in the day and it gets worse year after year.

**John August:**
So, it’s the right equivalent, where I just can’t get my hands off the keyboard. I’m so eager to get back to this project and just keep writing it. I have hypergraphia is really what it is, is that compulsion to write is really this one idea that is just so good. And really everything I’ve ever touched, it’s been that experience.

**Craig Mazin:**
Well, Kyle. So, look, good and bad news. The good news is, yep, you’re like us. You’re like human beings. I don’t know if there’s necessarily anything you can do to get back to that original feeling of excitement. Nor should you need to or want to. Because the original feeling of excitement is a fresh romantic vibe. It means your brain is buzzing because something new has collided into it. The work that we do is to execute carefully and steadily. And that is sometimes rather boring. It’s certainly rigorous. But you’re not going to get that excitement. It’s gone, it’s over. And it will never come back. And like I said last week from beloved Polish poet, even success feels like failure. So, really, this is a goal-oriented process. It is a process process and that you need to learn how to sustain yourself through the process, which is not particularly exciting. But you must be driving toward the goal of finishing.

**Craig Mazin:**
The difference between professionals and amateurs is not that we have the “ability to keep going even if we’re not feeling what we’re writing.” The difference is we’re paid. That’s literally the difference between professionals and amateurs. And it turns out that when you are paid and there are lawyers and contracts, you don’t have the option. You have to do it. And this is actually quite valuable.

**John August:**
There have been times on projects where I’ve just been so frustrated that actually I calculated. This is early in my career when I wasn’t making much money, but I was like, I’m going to calculate how much I am being paid per page. And that’ll get me through this day’s work.

**Craig Mazin:**
But there’s also times where I thought, what would happen if I just gave the money back, every writers had that moment. And lately, sometimes I’ll just think to myself, if I’m in an elevator in a tall building, I’ll just turn to… if I’m with Jacq or Bo and I’ll just say, “Well, if the elevator just plummets, I won’t have to write these episodes,” just get out of some writing, which should be nice. This is the deal.

**Craig Mazin:**
But then, you have moments where you do well. And you will not have those moments until they have happened. They do not happen before they happen. So, you have to do the work to make them happen without having them happen.

**John August:**
So, Kyle’s experiencing intrinsic validation, where he was loving the product, he’s loving doing this because of the excitement about the idea and it was all internally generated. And eventually, it just faded away. And he’s waiting for that moment where there’ll be external forces that will tell him like, “No, no, it’s good. It’s exciting. You’ve done a good job. “And that hasn’t kicked in yet. That’s the reality of being a new person at this.

**John August:**
The other thing I will say is that as you have more experience and no one’s an amateur screenwriter. You’re a newer screenwriter. You don’t have the experience to be able to tell like, “Oh, is this a crush, or is this a possible relationship”, when it comes to a project idea. And so, sometimes you have a crush, like, “Oh my god, I’m so excited about this.”

**John August:**
But Craig and I, you and I both have enough experience to know this is a crush that will pass and I can see what the problem is going to be. And I will fall out of love with this versus there’s some ideas because you’re like, “Oh, that’s a genuinely good idea that I can build a relationship with this project.” This is a thing that can actually sustain and build.

**John August:**
And so, the choice of whether to buckle down or bail, we can make a different calculation because we know how this all goes and we know where this is. But we can only do that because we’ve been in other writing relationships with other projects that know how we react, how projects react. We just know how it all works.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. And I think Kyle probably like most people, his relationship with movies and television is he sees finished products. He doesn’t have a finished product. And even worse, he has to dive into every little grain of this thing over and over and over and over again. It becomes mind-numbing. I can be maddening. And wait until you get into the editing bay. And then, you’re really going over and over and over and over.

**Craig Mazin:**
It’s just the nature of the gig. It’s very foreign to everyone. I think nobody experiences this for the first time it goes, “Is this process been my whole life?” It’s grueling.

**John August:**
Let’s go back to a word he says. I get bored easily. So, let’s talk about boredom. And so, boredom is it happens when it’s no longer new. It’s no longer exciting. It’s no longer fresh. But also, it’s because you don’t know what to do. It’s not intriguing, or the problems in front of you are not interesting, solvable problems, are actually just difficult problems you have to grind on and get through them.

**John August:**
And so, I would say try to look for ways to make that day’s work less boring. Make some challenges for yourself. How can you approach this scene, this Lego piece, and make this the most interesting Lego piece it can possibly be? And once you tackle that, then you get on the next one, the next one eventually. You might fall back in love with it because you see something in this that you didn’t even see when you were first crushing on it.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. Megana, do you have any tricks for yourself when you’re feeling bored or unmotivated?

**Megana Rao:**
I usually have a playlist associated with a project and sometimes listening to that helps, or getting external feedback can help me, I don’t know, relive excitement about certain parts of it. Okay, I have a question for you guys. So, in talking about having a crush on a project versus a long-term relationship. So, I was recently working on a project where I felt like I was banging my head against the wall for so long. And it just felt like endless and I should just walk away from it. Because I’m never going to figure out these problems.

**Megana Rao:**
All of a sudden, it felt like the wall broke open and there was sunlight, and I could see my way out. I’m just confused how I make that differentiation. Do I trust that that’s going to happen always because it happened this time?

**John August:**
I don’t think you can necessarily trust. There’s been projects like that for years. Where I just got to a certain point I just couldn’t quite crack what that was, or that there’s something that I knew was not working quite right. And it just was wrong. And so, even though we have experience with these writing relationships, we can’t know how it’s all going to go or work and how it’s going to really be on the page.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah, again, balance. You just wait and hope. But there is a difference, I think between a project where you are stuck but you wish you had the answer, and a project where you stuck because you don’t care what the answer is. And if you’re in that space-

**John August:**
You can stop writing.

**Craig Mazin:**
… it’s over.

**John August:**
Yeah. So, I think the only case you made for finishing that project is if you’re pretty close and you just think you need to have the experience of having finished the things, that makes sense.

**Craig Mazin:**
Which is-

**John August:**
Something.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. There is a resilience that’s required, obviously, to do all of this. But I think if it gets hard, don’t confuse hard with bored. Don’t confuse I think I’m maybe not good enough to do this with bored. Boredom is an all-purpose term for dissatisfaction. But you have to interrogate a little bit why you’re dissatisfied with this. And here’s the tricky part for people who are starting out, a lot of their ideas are bad.

**Craig Mazin:**
And a lot of times, even if the idea is good, their method of executing is bad. So, they should stop because it’s bad. But then, if you don’t finish, you don’t get better. So, balance.

**John August:**
Yeah. You got to work through it. There’s a case we made for finishing those things. The other thing I’ll remind people is that a lot of times, newer screenwriters were always really good at school, for example. They’re always really good writers. And everyone’s like, “Oh, you’re a good writer.” And so, they approach this thing. And they have the sense of like, “I know what good writing is. People tell me I’m a good writer.”

**John August:**
And then, something that’s been comparatively easy for them versus other people, they’re in the middle of it like, “Crap, it’s really hard to write. This is actually exhausting. I don’t know what I’m doing. Maybe I’m just bad. Or maybe it’s this project.” And you’re just not used to struggling.

**John August:**
And sometimes, what you’re saying is bored, it’s actually you’re just struggling and it’s new and it’s uncomfortable and you’re not used to be uncomfortable writing. But that’s what writing is.

**Craig Mazin:**
And our culture encourages everybody to be a jerk. So, everybody grows up. If you’re interested in film, if you’re interested in TV, perversely, you are encouraged by culture and like-minded people to crap all over everything all the time. So, you become rather convinced that it is easy, because look at all the garbage. This is what Ted Elliott has always called crap-plus-one, your job, you think is to just write one better than all the crap out there.

**Craig Mazin:**
But the truth is, with the rarest of exceptions, if you are a new writer, you are actually not good enough to write the crap. That’s how bad you are. And that’s how hard it is. It’s so much harder than they think. So, when they get into it, there is a cognitive dissonance between this thing that’s supposed to be so simple and how hard it is.

**Craig Mazin:**
And I think maybe the brain convinces you that you’re just bored. Because the only other explanation is, you’re not good enough. But you’re not until you are. And unfortunately, you’re never good enough, because you’re just as good as you could be on that day. You try and get better. And then, it’s over.

**John August:**
I’m thinking about Megana and Megana’s metaphor for you and your writing group has a chance of accountability. And so, where you have to do stuff and that might be actually a humble thing for Kyle to find at some group of people who he can be accountable for. So, he’s actually getting some work done. And he also recognized like everyone is struggling at the same time in the same ways. And he can get a sense of how it all fits. And if you could find the right group that might get him on board.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yeah. And you can always pick somebody that if you vibe with that person and say, “Look, we’re going to spend two hours. For one hour, I’m going to talk to you about my problems about this script. And then, for the other hour, you’re going to talk about your problems with the script.” And the only ground rule is that nobody can say, yeah, I thought of that but. Or, yeah, I tried that but. Because that’s just annoying to everybody. Just pretend you didn’t talk it through. Talk everything through.

**Craig Mazin:**
Sometimes just talking makes it clear. If you write alone, you can go deep into your own weird mind and get totally lost and you can confuse feelings with facts.

**Megana Rao:**
One more pitch for writers’ group. There have been times where I’ve gotten so bogged down in the weeds and really unexcited about a project but the people in my writers’ group who have seen it since the inception have reminded me what excited me about it and that can be really helpful.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yes, something was there. You had something that made you do all of this. Certainly, Kyle, if you are writing by the seat of your pants and you feel you have a tendency to get bored, I would strongly recommend plotting the whole thing out first. It’s hard to get bored when you know exactly what you’re supposed to write that day,

**John August:**
Yeah, if you had a good outline and then you could really approach how to make this piece the most awesome scene it could possibly be and not going to waste the work, that might help him.

**Craig Mazin:**
Precisely.

Links:

* [WGA Introduces Project Page](https://www.wga.org/members/employment-resources/wgaw-project-page) check out the [pdf here.](https://www.wga.org/uploadedfiles/members/employment_resources/project_page.pdf)
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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/the-one-with-jack-thorne).

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

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

**John August:**
This is episode 530 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’ll look at making TV in the U.S. versus the UK, and what writers on either continent need to know. Then we’ll discuss disability on screen and behind screen. As we get ready to move into 2022, we’ll focus on some goals you can control. Now, Craig, since you and I are not well versed on several of these topics, could you suggest someone who could talk to us more eloquently about these issues?

**Craig Mazin:**
When you’re looking for somebody who is eloquent and you can’t find that person, you immediately to turn to Jack Thorne. One of my past One Cool Things, one of my favorite writers and one of my favorite people in the world, Jack is, among other things, very tall. He is wonderfully British and a spectacularly good and almost as importantly, spectacularly prolific writer. Among his as many brilliant credits are the The Aeronauts, National Treasure, not the looking for treasure in the U.S., but National Treasure, the sexual abuse scandal film that was done in the UK, Wonder, Enola Holmes, The Secret Garden. Television credits include His Dark Materials, Skins, Shameless, and the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, along with the miniseries This is Britain. Basically Jack is kind of the cornerstone, as far as I’m concerned, of modern English screenwriting for feature and television, and again, one of my favorite people in the world. If he weren’t already wonderful enough, he’s gone and kind of out-sainted you, John, which is really hard to do, by giving voice to an issue that has gotten a bit of a short shrift as our industry, global industry, has attempted to rectify sins of the past and do better for everyone working within. That is advocacy for disabilities and the representation of disabilities and disabled folks on screen. Welcome Jack Thorne.

**Jack Thorne:**
Thank you for having me. You’re very nice.

**Craig Mazin:**
I agree.

**John August:**
Jack Thorne manages to be incredibly humble. Even in emails, you could hear his voice. This is the first time I’m really meeting him, but you could hear his humility in an email like, “Oh, I shouldn’t even be on the show.” It’s like, of course you should be on the show. Thank you very much for agreeing to join us here.

**Jack Thorne:**
You’re very kind. I feel like I sort of thrust myself upon you, but yes, all good.

**John August:**
Now we’re going to talk about these things, but I also want to, for a bonus topic, get into the differences between American English and British English and sort of how you reveal which side of the pond you’re on in your screenwriting and whether you should basically put the U’s in the words when you’re writing a British thing. We’ll get the official answer from you about writing American versus writing British.

**Craig Mazin:**
Just spoiler alert. Don’t use the phrase fanny pack when you’re writing in England.

**John August:**
Now, as I was watching your MacTaggart lecture, which we’re going to put a link in the show notes to, it was one of Craig’s previous One Cool Things, we have questions about it from our listeners, but as I started listening to it, I recognized that this is a famous lecture given every year at the Edinburgh Film Festival, Edinburgh TV Festival I guess, about television. Can you just give us a sense of what the MacTaggart lecture is? Your being chosen for it was an honor, of course, but also probably a huge responsibility. Then we can maybe transition into really talking about British television, because I kind of only barely understand it.

**Jack Thorne:**
The MacTaggart is a big thing. It’s had all sorts of different stages in its existence. More recently it’s had quite a lot of makers talk. Michaela Coel famously gave a speech which laid the groundwork for what became I May Destroy You. Before that there was a period when it just basically took the most powerful people in television and gave them a microphone, which included at one point an excruciating lecture from James Murdoch. It’s had lots of different iterations. Everyone from Dennis Potter to Troy Kennedy has done it at different points, and it was a ridiculous honor to be given it, and as you say, a huge responsibility, because coming out of COVID in particular, it was clear what I needed to talk about, but whether I had the necessary means to talk about those things, whether I had the moral power to talk about those things, were questions I really wrestled with.

**Craig Mazin:**
Let’s talk about your moral qualifications. By the way, I should apologize. The shows you work on were called This Is England, not This Is Britain, but I’m a donkey, so this’ll happen every now and again. Why were you wondering if you were morally qualified to deliver this talk? In what ways do you have any kind of personal insight into this, or why this? Why connect it to this topic for you?

**Jack Thorne:**
I walk a really weird line where disability is concerned in that I was a disabled person. I had a physical breakdown when I was 21. I got this condition called cholinergic urticaria, which left me unable to move. I became allergic to heats in all its forms. I became allergic to sunlight. I became allergic to radiators. I became allergic to my body movement. Every time I moved, I provoked an allergic reaction. I spent six months flat on my back, and then slowly but surely I worked out how to get better. I got on the right medication and I got the right doc support. It was about 12 to 15 years of my life, I was very limited in terms of what I could do, but I got better.

**Jack Thorne:**
Now during that time, there’s this theater company in the UK called Graeae. Graeae are this wonderful company, disabled-led, that’s trying tell stories about the disabled experience with disabled performers and disabled writers and disabled makers. They have this open day. I went along to this open day, unsure whether I belonged or not. I talked to a woman there called Alex Baumer, and she said, “Of course you belong here. You are a disabled person.” It felt like something just kind of … My back straightened. It was like, “Oh right, this is where my pain makes sense,” because the thing is, if you are battling pain every day as I was, you don’t really know who to talk to about it. There comes a point where people get a bit bored of hearing you talk about it, and so you sort of stop talking about it. That thing of being part of a community of people for whom pain was an everyday occurrence and who navigated these things, and it didn’t mean that I had someone to moan to, it just meant that I felt like I belong somewhere.

**Jack Thorne:**
The way I talk about myself now is I was a disabled person, I am now a member of the disabled community. Whether that’s legitimate or not, I don’t know, but it’s what I cling to because I think that that experience and what happened to me is a history that’s still very current in my body, and it’s a history that’s still very current in my head. I’m trying to, as much as I can, do disabled work and have disabled performers and disabled makers within my shows. I am in no way an angel where that is concerned. I have got it wrong a huge number of times. As I talk in the lecture, I have been a coward a huge number of times. That question as to can I talk about this, is it legitimate for me to talk about this, and how will people feel about me holding the microphone when I talk about these issues, when I’m not someone who has the stigma and the attacks, who isn’t coping currently with a disability, how will people feel about me being the one that’s holding that microphone?

**Craig Mazin:**
They seem to feel pretty good about it, from what I can tell. The response was dramatic and it was extremely well received, and for good reason. You have chosen an excellent cri de coeur, and you have delivered it beautifully. One of the things you talk about are the notion of invisible disabilities. Disability is something that affects everyone sooner or later. This is a universal condition at some point for everyone. Chronic pain is something that an enormous amount of people live with silently. I myself have lived with chronic pain now for about four years. I don’t talk about it much, or ever. Here I am. I’m okay. We carry on. I’m very British this way I suppose. I should start saying English. I’m very English this way. It is something that everybody deals with to some level or another.

**Craig Mazin:**
One of the things that I really admire about you is that while you have talked a little bit about how and why you came to be inside of this movement, you also don’t make it about yourself. You recognize that there are tiers of disability and that there are people who have been more egregiously treated and more egregiously left out. That is something that is happening on both sides of the camera, behind and in front, in terms of how people, when we create characters who are disabled, how we treat and portray them, who we hire to cast them, who is writing those characters. All these questions are now coming to the forefront in a way that I think had not happened until people like you, not only you, but people like you really started banging the gong over the last few years.

**Jack Thorne:**
The way I see it is that I’m temporarily in a spotlight for a moment. I was given that spotlight by the MacTaggart, and my job is to get out of that spotlight as fast as possible, which would be nice, personally would be nice, in order to let more legitimate people come to the front. I’m trying to do that in my working practice too, in terms of co-writing and producing and trying to change the dial so that the spotlight is filled with those people that it should be.

**John August:**
Great. Before we get to some of the recommendations about improving portrayals of disability on screen and the work behind screen, can we talk a little bit about the environment in which you’re giving this lecture? Because I don’t think we have anything equivalent to this in the United States. We have upfronts, which is the annual meeting of big advertisers where they pitch their big new shows. In the film industry we have the big exhibitor screenings where we’re talking about things. We don’t have a situation where there is one point of focus saying this is the state of the industry, this is an important thing we must focus on, whether it be you talking about this, Michaela Coel or Rupert Murdoch. We don’t have anybody talking about this and what needs to change, why it needs to change. I think you also bring up in the lecture is that television actually does have a moral responsibility because it is in everyone’s home. Can you talk to us about how television functions in the UK and if you feel like that might be different than how it functions in the U.S? I feel as an outsider, I think there is a central authority to television in the UK that does not exist in the U.S.

**Jack Thorne:**
That’s really interesting. It’s not something I’ve especially thought about in terms of comparing the two, but we do, I suppose, wrestle a bit more in this country, maybe with the general state of the industry rather than specific programs. The MacTaggart is supposed to be that conversation, what should TV be, because yeah, I think that TV is hugely important. I think it’s the stimulation of a conversation. If you look at the trajectory of where we are, I think TV, sometimes it’s reflecting society and sometimes it’s pushing society on. The movement between the West Wing to Succession is quite a stark point. What it means that we want society reflected that way, or is the reflection provoking the society that is, is I think a really, really fascinating question and something I think about an awful lot.

**Craig Mazin:**
You’ve got a situation in the UK where there seems to be a lot more state involvement in practically everything, and television is no exception. BBC, I don’t know if it is technically the most viewed channel on television, but it’s certainly-

**Jack Thorne:**
I would suspect so. I would suspect so.

**Craig Mazin:**
In the United States, PBS gets about 12 people a week watching it. I apologize, PBS. I know it’s more than that, but it’s very small. As John says, all of our gatherings, whether it’s the Television Critics Association or the upfronts as you mentioned, it’s all commerce. It’s all about selling. That’s partly because it is entirely a question of corporations and not at all a question of the state, and therefore there is no governmental interest or point of view in the United States. Television is an industry and it is not necessarily ever promoted as some kind of potential lever for good. I think that is a cultural difference between the United States and the UK that is stark. It makes a lot of sense that in the UK television and culture in general would be spoken about both in terms of commerce, but also in terms of how to promote the public good. I’m interested in how you feel things have gone practically. I know that at least in the public space of discussion, your lecture, as I mentioned before, was incredibly well received. It was reprinted and revideoed everywhere. I think it’s the kind of thing that makes people feel really good to talk about. My question is are they just talking about it or are things changing? Because ultimately I feel like the only prayer we have over here is in this instance seeing some leadership from your side of the pond.

**Jack Thorne:**
As part of what has happened in the last year, I’ve been part of this pressure group. We call ourselves a pressure group called Underlying Health Condition. We call ourselves Underlying Health Condition because we are angry at the appropriation of that phrase to describe essentially disabled people and disabled deaths. Certainly in the first half of the pandemic, the idea of dividing deaths in two seemed to go everywhere, where it was like, okay, there’s one set of deaths that we worry about and then there’s one set of deaths that we really don’t. We had our first Omicron death in this country recently. you saw the question being asked everywhere, which is, did he have an underlying health condition, in that should we be concerned or is it just happening to disabled people? We formed this pressure group, and we formed this pressure group to look at TV. My lecture came out of that pressure group, and now we’ve launched a report on the back of our findings. A number of different things have happened in the last six months, that straight after the lecture that the BBC and Netflix and Channel Four made commitments to disabled programming. There were certainly mooted commitments from Sky and Channel Five too.

**Jack Thorne:**
What we are focused on, I mean Underlying Health Condition, which isn’t just me, it’s me, Katie Player and Holly Lubran, who are two people that work behind the scenes, and Genevieve Barr, who is an actress and a co-writer of mine, we’ve done three things together, and a writer in her own right too, and what our focus has been on is accessibility, because TV is incredibly inaccessible. I’ve been sitting on panels with disabled actors and makers for the last 15 years, and at the start of every discussion, the first question that basically comes up is how do we make TV accessible to us, because we can’t use the toilet.

**Jack Thorne:**
Underlying Health Condition did a survey of facilities companies and of studio spaces. Facilities companies, one of the starkest findings was there is one accessible honey wagon. The honey wagon is our name for toilets. I don’t know whether you call the toilets-

**Craig Mazin:**
We call it that too.

**John August:**
Honey wagon, right.

**Jack Thorne:**
There’s one accessible honey wagon in the whole of the UK. For 20% of the population, there’s one toilet that they can use. I hear stories all the time from friends who are wheelchair users about trying to restrict how much they use the toilet, because using the toilet costs the production time, and they do not want to be responsible for costing the production time, because this is the reality for disabled people all the time, which is we do not want to cause trouble. If we cause trouble, we might not get hired again. On panels, every single time that would come up. From friends, every single time that would come up. We set out, trying to work out how our industry could break down the barriers, how we could reform the way that the industry functions so that if you are a disabled person, you are not excluded by the space you work in. The response to that has also been very good. We are at the start of that process. It’s going to require a big injection of time and money. Who knows what practical things will come out? Certainly at the moment I’m talking to very senior people in the BCC and Channel Four and ITV and in Sky and Amazon and Netflix, and going to find ways to address our recommendations. There is stuff happening. It’s just it’s going to take a while. It’s going to be hard.

**Jack Thorne:**
In terms of what you say about the U.S, that’s really interesting. We work closely with the One In Four Coalition, which was set up by a wonderful talent manager called Eryn Brown. What she’s done is amazing. One of our key recommendations is for an accessibility officer on every set.

**John August:**
That’s interesting.

**Jack Thorne:**
That comes from One In Four. They have been at the forefront of that. They say the same as you, which is maybe, if Britain, which is a smaller community with more government, maybe if Britain sets about answering some of these questions, then the ripples can be felt in the U.S.

**Craig Mazin:**
That’s really interesting.

**John August:**
We’re going to put links in the show notes to both the Underlying Health report and the One In Four Coalition to see the recommendations. There’s overlap between the two of them, but I want to focus on the four key recommendations that you have in your report, which they seem very practical, which really speaks to the fact that you are a person who makes television and understands that you need to actually be able to do things and achieve things and make things happen. The first recommendation is a line in every budget for needed adjustments. Talk to us about adjustments that might need to come up in a budget to make a show accessible to a disabled person.

**Jack Thorne:**
That was about making the production responsible for those adjustments. By the way, you say in terms of practicality, I am useless. I am one of the least practical people alive. Katie Player, who’s one of my co-writers on this, is a production manager. She understood behind the scenes a lot better than us. When it was coming up with these recommendations, she has been an invaluable part of that. The idea is that there is small fund, and by small we’re talking 5,000 pounds adjustable down if you’re a smaller production, which is available for interpreters, is available for ramps, is available for a stool, is available for anything that the accessibility officer or coordinator suggests that just might make the experience better. It’s not a radical sort of like, “Yeah, we’re going to have to build something specifically for a purpose.” It’s about adjusting what we’ve got.

**Jack Thorne:**
Katie worked on a show of mine a few years ago and managed to get a hold of a ramp that she now takes with her wherever she goes. She was working on another production where the ramp didn’t quite go down to the floor because the trailers were a bit higher, so someone built her a little wooden extension to the ramp. Those sorts of things, it’s not a huge amount of money, but it can make a huge difference that the production is prepared and ready and considering the adjustments that might be required for a disabled person.

**Craig Mazin:**
It doesn’t seem like that an enormous amount of resources are required. What’s required is a minimum of care. When we all started in the business and somebody was walking around, let’s say on some sort of elevated space in a scene, they would walk around and the stunt people would say, “Don’t get too close to the edge,” and you wouldn’t get too close to the edge. Now we tether people and we paint it out digitally because we have safety standards that are stricter. Yet as we have advanced the cause of safety where we can, we don’t have disabled accessible toilets or a trailer that has something other than steps on it. I watch even people who aren’t disabled but merely old struggle on sets. I struggle on sets at times just to get around and over things. It is not the most hospitable place. Changing things would not require a lot of money. It seems to me that it just needs attention, a small amount of attention, which is why I’m desperately hopeful that this kind of attention that you’re bringing to this is going to work.

**Craig Mazin:**
Normally what you hear is, “Yes, no, of course, and we’re absolutely looking into these things, but it’s a large budget item,” and rah rah blah blah blah, of course. They’re discussing this while they’re having dinner and charging it back to the production. Something for instance, you mentioned the idea of a disability coordinator I think. Is that what you called it, a disability coordinator?

**Jack Thorne:**
Accessibility.

**Craig Mazin:**
Accessibility coordinator. Even better. We have intimacy coordinators now. We never did before. In the old days there would be sex scenes, there would be scenes with nudity, and some of those sex scenes were violent and criminal in nature, and people would just do it. A lot of weird stuff happened. A lot of bad stuff happened. There was certainly an enormous amount of pressure on people and confusion about boundaries. Now we have an entire professional class of people who appear to help mitigate those problems. We’ve had somebody like that on our set, not for a sex scene, but just because there was something that involved some nudity. It was amazing having her there. She made everything really clear and simple. It was a relief. I would think that productions would want this, because it’s a relief to have somebody help you navigate through it, especially if you are running the production and you aren’t disabled and you don’t have a lot of personal experience with people with disabilities. Then let’s just hire the people who do and let’s make everybody comfortable and welcome, physically comfortable and physically welcome.

**Jack Thorne:**
Absolutely. Disability is a spectrum. It could be that there are people who identify as disabled and for whom the accessibility coordinator will make a huge, huge difference immediately. There are others on the set who won’t necessarily know how to talk about what’s going on with them. To have someone that they can talk to privately about what needs they might have that the production isn’t automatically addressing will make a huge difference to the comfort of their lives and their ability to do the job. It’s such a small thing, but it could just create an unbelievable change in how people feel going to work. It stops things happening like, a friend of mine’s a producer, the production was on the fourth floor, the lift stopped working, so they put her in the canteen. She wasn’t part of the production from then on. She was just excluded on the outside of it. That happens all the time. If you have someone that’s just there to go, “This doesn’t work. We need to address it in a different way. We need to radically think about things or just moderately think about things,” the difference could be profound.

**Craig Mazin:**
We’ll get to lift versus elevator later.

**John August:**
Our premium members can hear about the lift versus elevator debate. Now you were talking about the needs on a set or the physical needs of a place, but one of your recommendations seems more targeting who gets to actually be able to write on programs. This is freelancer funds coming out of the high-end TV pool, which is where I recognize that I don’t know how British TV works, because what is a-

**Craig Mazin:**
What is that?

**John August:**
… high-end TV pool? Your MacTaggart lecture also mentions different tiers of budgets. Can you talk us through what those are? Because it’s really confusing to me.

**Jack Thorne:**
I don’t know it all. High-end TV is everything I believe above 750,000 pounds an hour. That’s about a million dollars would it be?

**Craig Mazin:**
Yep.

**John August:**
About a million.

**Jack Thorne:**
The high-end TV pool was formed a little while ago. It was a commitment by broadcasters that if your show was above that tariff, if your show budgeted above that tariff, then you would pay not .5% of your budget into a pool, which was for training purposes for people coming into the industry. It’s run by an amazing group called Screen Skills. Screen Skills have been talking to us about whether they could be part of this freelancers fund. It would be amazing if they can. The idea is that it’s not .1% on top of that, which would just allow for disabled people who have needs to have those needs cared for.

**Jack Thorne:**
I was working on a show. Someone’s call was at 6:00 a.m. Now if their call is at 6:00 a.m. that requires a carer to be with them at 3:00 a.m. They don’t have the money in their budget, their personal budget, to have a carer with them at 3:00 a.m. If they had access to this freelancers fund, that would allow for it. Similarly, deaf people and having an interpreter around both on set and off set so that they are not excluded from the processes that are happening off set as well as on set. All these things require someone to make life work more easily for those who have impairments. A freelancers fund would allow for that.

**Jack Thorne:**
Now we have something in the UK called Access to Work, which is for disabled people to access, which is supposedly for that, for the adjustments that they need that go beyond what an industry would pay for them, so that the industry wasn’t paying for them so that the government pays that bit so that the industry still pays their wage and so people aren’t excluded from work. It’s a very, very brilliant scheme. Unfortunately, it doesn’t operate very well in the TV sector because our jobs are very transitory, can happen very quickly, and also Access To Work has had quite a few cuts to it in the last 15 years under the Tory government, which has meant that it operates a little less well than it used to, well a lot less well than it used to.

**Jack Thorne:**
We think that this fund, which the rich in the TV industry will pay for, you know that everyone that makes high-end TV is rich in comparison to the rest of the country, our industry is doing very well compared to the rest of the country, would allow for a world in which disabled creatives would have power over their own agency.

**John August:**
The point to bring up here is that it’s one thing, with it probably equivalent thing American with Disabilities Act, which requires that place of employment, place you need to go into are accessible. It’s one thing if you have an office worker who’s making sure that getting into the office building and the use of the office building is accessible, but a freelancer going from show to show to show, in television or in film, they cannot count on the fact that things are going to be accessible for them. Some sort of funds that let them bring their accessibility with them feels crucial. I think that gives me some hope that some of these changes can be implemented. As we saw with the advent of COVID that studios really wanted to be back in production as they found ways to, “Okay, we’re going to set up COVID funds. We’re going to figure out how to do this thing.” It was really difficult, but you know what? We made a lot of good film and television during the pandemic once we figured out how to do this stuff. They can spend money when it’s in their interest to spend money.

**Craig Mazin:**
Oh yes. Think about this, John. Every day our production is providing health support and services to every single member of our crew in the form of COVID testing and making sure that everybody has PPE and all of that stuff. We do it. There’s an entire job now, and an entire team of people working for the guy who’s in charge of COVID compliance. We have cleaners that we didn’t used to have before. We were able to mobilize an entire new department, new division of people that cost new amounts of money so that otherwise healthy people wouldn’t get sick. We seem to struggle with anything that would help people who live with a disability. That’s just shocking. It’s the sort of thing, and Jack, don’t beat yourself up, you’re doing amazing work, I know you’ve mentioned your cowardice, I don’t note any of it. I think the sin out here in the world of not being Jack Thorne is a general obliviousness. It’s very easy to be oblivious about this sort of thing, until it gets you, and then harder, a lot harder to be oblivious.

**John August:**
Let’s talk about differences between the U.S. system and the UK system. The UK system has this sense of moral authority in television and in industry grappling with a thing. We don’t have that, but we do have unions. We do have, in ways that the UK doesn’t have, we have bodies that set standards for things. It does feel like in terms of performers being able to do their job on sets, that feels like a thing that SAG wrestles with, to a degree to which writers have the ability to participate in a writers room, to have interpreters be available for them if they need them. That feels like a WGA thing, the same with DGA. We have groups that can mobilize tremendous pressure to get some of these things done, and I would not be surprised if as we push forward here, we’ll see these unions step up to demand some of these changes happen. It won’t happen the same way. It may not happen as quickly. I think some of these things can and should happen.

**John August:**
I’m also reminded that when we added the parental leave benefit to the WGA, which is a new thing we won, one of the artist rule to make is that, listen, everybody who works for Netflix right now gets paternity leave, gets parental leave when they have a kid. It just seems right that the writer who’s creating that show should have the same benefits as the executive who’s running that thing. I can imagine a situation where people who are working for the studios right now have expectations that their workplaces can be wheelchair accessible for people who need to use wheelchairs. The same should apply to our sets. I think that logic sometimes can help and help people think about why they need to be thinking about this and why they need to be ready to spend some money to make that happen.

**Jack Thorne:**
I love that. I’d not considered that the unions could be a huge, huge role. You’re right, the power of your unions is so much bigger than the power of the unions in this country. The idea that they could provoke this change, it’s really warming, it’s really huge, really exciting to hear actually.

**Craig Mazin:**
All they have to do is work together, which they’ve never done before [inaudible 00:30:51].

**John August:**
Even working under their own self-interest though, some things can change. It tends to build upon each other, so things do happen. We have two listener questions that came in which were very specifically designed for you to come on the show, not even knowing that you’d come on the show. Megana, can you help us out with some of these questions that we’ve gotten?

**Megana Rao:**
Great. Scared of Umbrage but Desperate for Insight asks, “Craig-”

**Craig Mazin:**
Here we go.

**Megana Rao:**
“Your cool thing has broken me. Jack Thorne’s MacTaggart lecture was extremely impactful. I feel broken because I’m concerned I’m taking the wrong lessons or that I’m being selfish. Originally I was writing a story with a main character who had been disfigured in military service. Later I decided to pare it down to a mental health issue like PTSD, because I just didn’t think that I should write it, as I have no experience with physically disabled people, but I can’t help reference the embarrassingly large number of stories put to screen that have clearly been written by people who don’t have the slightest clue how their character should sound or how those events should play out.

**Megana Rao:**
“Mr. Thorne’s speech has made me think about a lot of things that I don’t have answers for. I want to write for female characters, because in my life the women around me have been so valuable and interesting that I’m inspired to write with them in mind. I listen to the voices of marginalized people speak on how they feel. They just want a place at the table, starting with their faces in popular culture. I fall immediately into self-doubt and concern for what my place is in producing that culture. I am a near radioactive level of white bread American. Should I even participate?

**Megana Rao:**
“Jack Thorne spoke passionately and with great vulnerability about a group of people that just wants dignity and a fair shake. How do I participate in the business of storytelling that doesn’t perpetuate the endless narrative of the singular white male voice telling the world what culture is?”

**Craig Mazin:**
Jack, that’s a simple question and I’m sure you can answer that in, I’ll give you seven words.

**Jack Thorne:**
I think authorship is something we’re all wrestling with right now. I write a lot of female characters. I write a lot of female character-led dramas. I always have. It’s something that I’m asking about myself why I do that and whether I have right to do that.

**Jack Thorne:**
When it comes to disability, one of the groups that spoke at our event, we had this launch event, and we didn’t want it just to be about Underlying Health Condition, we wanted it to be about all the major disability groups in British television. We had lots of different people speak. One of the people that spoke was this man called Laurence Clark who outlined how a writers room should be run for disabled people and what consideration should be given when having disabled people in the room. It’s really complicated because you’re talking about a group that have been historically excluded. It’s a very, very small group. It’s a group where being given authorship is not something that historically has happened. I don’t quite know whether no one should be writing disabled people except for disabled writers. I certainly think disabled writers need to be part of a discussion when it comes to writing disabled characters, and they need to be a senior part of that discussion, and they need to be armed so that future authorship is exclusively disabled, because as the caller says, there has been historically a huge amount of ignorance, and quite dangerous ignorance put on the screen by people who didn’t know better but should’ve known better and have perpetuated myths about the disabled experience, which has been incredibly damaging to disabled people everywhere.

**Craig Mazin:**
Well said. I think Scared of Umbrage but Desperate for Insight, don’t fear my umbrage, I have no umbrage for you. I feel for you. I would suggest that somewhere along the line in our bourgeoning and justifiable desire to include people who have been traditionally excluded and to have better, fuller, clearer, and truer representations of all sorts of people on screen, we have lost sight of what the word fiction means. Particularly when we’re talking about fiction in drama, everybody is writing something they’re not. There is only one story you can write that is perfectly true to yourself, and that is your autobiography, and even that will probably be garbage. We are professional liars, who like actors, occupy the minds of people we are not. That is literally the job. What’s happening I think is that some people are having an existential crisis about what it means to actually be a fiction writer.

**Craig Mazin:**
What I do think is critical, and we’ve said this on the show many times, is that you have to approach material with respect. You have to approach the lives of other human beings with respect. Here’s the deal. Doesn’t matter how good your intentions are. If you are a bad writer, your writing will be bad. If you are a good writer but a callous writer, your writing will be probably put off in that pile of what they call lazy or tropey or oblivious. You have to be both good and you have to have your ears open, you have to have your eyes open, and you have to have some humility. You have to talk to people. When you are writing a character, and if that character’s disabled in a way that you don’t have personal experience with, find people who do, who are already willing to discuss these things, not people that you know who that you can then burden your questions upon, but rather there are groups, advocacy groups. The Writers Guild is very good about putting you together with people who want to talk about these things, who are interested in helping. If you do get into a position, a privileged position where you can hire people, hire them. That’s important.

**Craig Mazin:**
When you are writing characters who are a different race than you are or a different gender and then you cast those people, talk to the actors and ask them, “How did we do? What did we get wrong? What did we get right? Let’s have that discussion.” What we should not do is box ourselves off into a place where we can only write who we are. If anything, that would mean fewer representations of disabled people on screen. What I like about what Jack is doing is that he’s advancing in a rising tide manner everybody’s opportunity. If you write something great that provides opportunity for better representation and employment of different people than you, then that’s a victory for everybody.

**John August:**
One moment of the current discourse I’m following closely is West Side Story. West Side Story is an iconic musical that is problematic when you look back at the original incarnation of it. You look at this new incarnation and Tony Kushner’s work on it, and you can see that like a Jack Thorne, he was very concerned about his role in telling the story and making sure to find the information about the communities he’s writing about and what the communities were like at that time and how this could all fit together. It’s a difference between letting that concern guide you to do more and harder work and letting that concern stop you from ever trying to do that work. That’s I think what Scared is wrestling with. I think you may be looking at it as a blockade, a wall preventing you from actually doing the work, when in fact it is a challenging path for you to go down, but really it’s an invitation to really explore what’s out there.

**Craig Mazin:**
Megana, what’s your take on this question?

**Megana Rao:**
I agree with all of the things that you guys have said. One other thing that came to mind is I watched an interview with Ariana DeBose, who plays Anita in West Side Story. She is a Black Latin woman. She talked about going to the interview with Steven Spielberg and saying, “I’m not going to take this role unless you honor what it means for Anita to be played by a Black Latin woman.” They were really receptive to that and made the changes in the script and worked with her on doing those things. I think that speaks to what you were saying, being open to the experiences that your actors or actresses who are representing these characters bring to that material as well, even in the later stage of the process.

**John August:**
Megana, you have one more question that feels very much on topic here.

**Megana Rao:**
Great. Mike from London asks, “I got COVID in May of 2020 and subsequently developed long COVID. Most of my symptoms have improved since then, but I’m still suffering extreme fatigue and post-exertional malaise. In short, getting COVID seems to have triggered chronic fatigue syndrome. Before this I was a healthy 27-year-old with dreams of writing for Hollywood. I improved as a writer each year and was starting to see a small amount of success. I was a semifinalist in the Nicholl last year and was getting some reads from managers and production companies, but unfortunately, getting long COVID has made everything much more difficult. I now have to be careful not to use too much energy in a single day. Even a small amount of activities, like going on a short walk and writing two or three pages, can be enough to completely exhaust me for a few days. Just writing this email feels like a huge mental drain, and because of this, I know I won’t have energy to write this evening. All of this on top of having to somehow keep my job has left me worried that I’ll never reach my goal of being a working writer. I’m wondering if you know or are aware of any working writers with similar chronic diseases. How has their disability informed the content of their writing and their process?”

**Craig Mazin:**
Rough situation there, Mike. First of all, we are still learning a lot about long-term COVID, long COVID, long-haul COVID as it’s sometimes called. We don’t know if it’s permanent. It is very tempting when you are in the middle of something difficult as, Jack, you are in the middle of your disability. I’m sure it seemed to you at the time like it would be permanent, which is terrifying, I assume. I’ve certainly felt that way about my situation.

**Jack Thorne:**
I was told by a doctor, “You won’t get better.”

**Craig Mazin:**
Even if you’re not told by a doctor, you’re told by your own fear center in your brain that you’re not going to get better. That is really terrifying. First things first, it seems to me, Mike, you just have to honor the reality that you’re in. The reality that you’re in is you can only do what you can do. You can’t do more than you can do. If I told you that the only way to be a working writer would be to climb 100,000 steps a day, no matter what your situation would be, you wouldn’t be able to do it. That’s not a failure. That’s just reality. Accept the reality that you have.

**Craig Mazin:**
Perhaps as a relatively young person, in fact rather young, half my age, sir, or ma’am, give yourself a little bit of time here. Maybe what you could do is concentrate on what you might be able to do to get a little bit better, if there is that ability, and if there’s not, then take the time to readjust your life. If you write, I think it says writing two or three pages in a day is enough to completely exhaust you for a few days. Then that’s what you can do. You can write two or three pages for every few days. By the way, I know a lot of great writers that have zero problems who do exactly that. If they’re two or three great pages a day or two or three great pages a week, that’s two or three more great pages than almost everyone else can write in the world.

**Craig Mazin:**
Count the blessings, but also accept the reality. Make your peace with it. Mourn what you’ve lost. Do anything you can that’s available to you. In terms of resources, yes, I think Google is your friend. There’s got to be some groups of writers living with disability and working with disability and chronic disease. John, does the Writers Guild have a resource or a group for something like this?

**John August:**
I don’t know that they do. I know that there are committees that have writers with disabilities, but I don’t know. This is actually I think a great question for Jack to answer, because this feels like this is not an accessibility kind of issue, this is not even a representation issue, this is like it’s hard for me to do the thing that I want to be doing situation. Do you have experience with this?

**Jack Thorne:**
Yeah. I would say try and find a community, because that’s what gave me the most solace. In terms of the UK there’s two groups I would say to go to straight away as you’re a Londoner. The first is a group called DANC, which is D-A-N-C, or also called Triple C, which is confusing, but I think it’s www.triplec.org.uk. Then there’s another group called DTPTV, deaf and disabled people in television, who are also amazing. They are on Facebook and Twitter. Both those organizations have a community of people that you can talk to about this stuff. Reach out to them. Make yourself part of it. Become a member of the community. I think you’ll find that there’s lots of other people going through similar things. My experience of that was feeling like I had a home. Once you feel like you have a home, I think everything gets a bit easier. I’m so sorry you’re struggling. I really hope it doesn’t stay with you, but if it does, there are lots of people who are going through chronic fatigue and who do produce beautiful work, behind and in front of the screen, very good friends of mine who do find ways to manage their condition, and as a result of finding ways to manage their condition, find a way to have a fruitful career in our industry.

**Craig Mazin:**
Great.

**John August:**
Great. Our last little bit is hopefully inspiring. Actually I think does fit in well with this last question, which is basically do the things you can do and control the things you can control. This comes off of a TikTok by Franchesca Ramsey, but it’s Ashley Nicole Black, friend of the show, who had retweeted it, put it on my timeline here. Let’s take a listen to what Franchesca says.

Franchesca Ramsey:
If you’re a writer, winning an Oscar or selling a $100,000 movie, those are huge goals, those are awesome, but you can’t control those right now. So many things have to happen in order for those doors to open and those opportunities to come to you. Instead, shifting your goal to something you can control, like write 10 pages a day or take a writing class, start a writing group, finish my feature, try a pilot new genre, those are things that you can control, and then you can actually cross them off your list and feel like you are accomplishing things that are helping you get to the place that you want to get in your life.

**John August:**
That’s Franchesca Ramsey. Ashley Nicole Black also had said if your goal was to be cast on Saturday Night Live, you’re giving all of your power to Lorne Michaels to cast you on Saturday Night Life, but if your goal is to learn how to write great sketches, that’s a thing you can learn how to do. Jack, as a incredibly prolific writer here, what can you tell us about the work you control versus the work that makes it out in the world ratio in your life?

**Jack Thorne:**
It’s so interesting, isn’t it, that I’m still wrestling with now, to be honest, in terms of, “Oh, but if I do this, then I can get this. Then if I get this, then maybe people will like me.” I don’t think that goes, that feeling.

**Craig Mazin:**
I already like you.

**Jack Thorne:**
You’re weird.

**Craig Mazin:**
So true.

**Jack Thorne:**
It’s strange in terms of thinking about my career. I remember ringing my parents so excited because I had a lunchtime reading at the Young Vic, and my parents being completely nonplussed by a lunchtime reading at the Young Vic and me realizing that it was a huge achievement for me, but no one else quite being able to see it. I think that thing of just constantly seeing rungs of a ladder and then going, “Oh right, if I do this and if I do that.” I suppose what she’s saying is try to avoid the ladder entirely and just celebrate what you do every day. To be honest, I’m nowhere near able to do that yet. It’s a good goal for me for 2022.

**Craig Mazin:**
It’s funny, the word goal maybe is part of the problem, because I think sometimes people, what they outline as a goal is really a symptom. Winning an award is a symptom of something. So is being cast on Saturday Night Live. You have a goal, and the goal should be something that only can be things you can control. It’s not just focus on goals you can control. If you can’t control it, it’s not a goal, as far as I’m concerned, because the only purpose of the word is some target that you can hit. You try and be the funniest you can be, and then you show up for an audition and let’s see what the symptom is. You try and write the best you can write, and then you hand it out in the world, let’s see what the symptom is. Let’s see what the reaction is. Everything goal-oriented is probably a bit of a trap. The only way to get there is to immerse yourself in the process. If goal has an antonym, I suppose it’s process. Process is everything.

**Craig Mazin:**
The work is unromantic. We talk about this on the show all the time, how unromantic writing is and how angry I get when I see portrayals of writing on screen. You want to talk about bad portrayals on screen, writers getting some sort of mystical burst of energy and typing a novel all night and then it’s celebrated and the next thing they’re at a book signing. I hate this crap. I just want to fire it into the sun.

**Craig Mazin:**
Maybe, maybe if you want to get to the next third eye in the forehead level of achievement here, don’t have any goals at all. Just try and write. How about that? Just create stuff. Try and access what feels honest and good to you and enjoy it for what it is. I will tell you the thing that I’ve done that was received the best was not a goal-oriented thing. There was absolutely no expectation that it would even get made. The goal concept sometimes is a liar that whispers stuff in our ear and turns our head from the path.

**John August:**
I think it’s so important to distinguish goals that can actually be achieved under your own efforts versus goals that you just rely on the universe working out a certain way, which I think Saturday Night Life is a universe working out a certain way. The goals that are under your own control to some degree, like wanting to run a marathon, “I want to finish a marathon,” okay, if that’s your goal, great, but what are the actual things you need to do in order to get yourself up to being able to run a marathon. Completing a marathon is a lagging indicator. If you got to that point, it’s only because all the leading indicators, which were how many short runs were you able to do, how far could you go. All the work that it would take to get up there, that’s what you could actually focus and do, which is basically putting on your shoes and starting to run. You’re not going to put on your shoes and start to run a marathon. You’re going to put on your shoes and start to run a mile and then two miles and eventually you’ll get up there. Frustratingly, writing is just that hard work of page after page, mile after mile. To be more inspiring going into this, maybe go into 2022 thinking about forget your goal, let’s focus on what you’re actually trying to do each day and make that work rewarding.

**Craig Mazin:**
What if we take the goal away, meaning let’s take the reward away. Doctors make a the bin Laden mistake. Megana and I are both unlicensed medical doctors, so I think we both understand this. Doctors put an enormous emphasis on the scale, on your weight. This is automatically a very goal-oriented thing. “You’re 240 pounds. You need to be 160 pounds.” That’s a goal. No one’s pretty much going to get there. What’s sad is for a lot of people, that goal isn’t even revenant to their well-being.

**Craig Mazin:**
If they simply just made certain changes in their life for the sake of bettering their health, with the promise of no reward, if I say to you, “Look, I’ve looked into your future. If you do the following things, you will not lose any weight at all, but you will live another 10 years,” and so we’ve taken away all the reward. You’re not going to wear the skinny pants. You’re not going to look like the person on the cover of the magazine. All that’s garbage. What you are is going to be happier and healthier. Would you take that deal or not?

**Craig Mazin:**
It’s hard for people, because what you’re saying is it’s just process. Goals that are distant and far off like that and intangible are really hard, whereas when someone says, “Okay, I’ve got a goal. I’m going to be 150 pounds. I’m going to do the thing. I’m going to be on the cover of Men’s Health,” that’s when they fail, inevitably. You’ve set yourself up for failure by turning the goal into the goal.

**Megana Rao:**
Something Ashley said in her tweet was that she added what she wants the work to feel like as part of her goals. She says, “I wanted to work in a calm, fun environment, which makes decisions easier to make.” I also think shifting from thinking about goals, how you want the experience of the process to be, I don’t know, that’s not a concept that I’d heard before, but definitely something I want to use in 2022.

**Craig Mazin:**
I like that too. Look, in the U.S. the goal always has a dollar sign in front of it. We’re trained this way from birth. The whole thing is basically fame and fortune, fame and fortune, fame and fortune. When you look among the class of the famous unfortunate, you find a lot of misery and bad behavior, because humans are human, as it turns out.

**John August:**
We should also call out Ashley Nicole Black for her new deal at Warner Brothers. She’s joining Craig over there in HBO Max land.

**Craig Mazin:**
See, that was a goal that just happened. I doubt that was her goal. It’s a symptom of her good work.

**John August:**
Indeed.

**Craig Mazin:**
It’s a process symptom. Well done.

**John August:**
Any last thoughts on goals, Mr. Jack Thorne?

**Jack Thorne:**
I’m interested in the notion that, because the show that you’re referring to, which I know you probably get bored of talking about, but the show that you’re referring to happened despite setting a goal with Chernobyl, and yet that was you taking a fork in the road, wasn’t it? That was you going, “I don’t want to write the sort of shows I’ve done before, so I’m going to take a fork in the road.” That is you setting yourself a goal of working in a new genre, working in a new way, and challenging yourself in a way that you hadn’t challenged yourself before to do a certain type of work. By doing that, and I think that you’re probably the starkest example of someone that’s done that, of writers that I can think of, you changed the whole trajectory of your working life. Is that not a goal? Is that not a, “I am going to put my head down on a stone and rub it until I get to a different place for myself.”

**John August:**
What a metaphor that was.

**Craig Mazin:**
I don’t know if it was a rubbing stone. I think I wanted to do it because I felt like it was worth doing. When I did it, there was no promise of anything. Really the only promise was that it would likely just be ignored. Nor did I know if I could do it. I just wanted to. It to me very much was there was no real money involved, there was no guarantee of anything, nor was I doing it with any expectation that you would need to be watched. I honestly thought that it would mostly end up being a thing that substitute teachers would show the social studies class on a rainy day in high school. It really was not goal-oriented. A lot of what I do, I’m very haphazard about a lot of things, I have to admit. When I find that I start thinking about how to create outcomes, that’s actually where I get into trouble, because artificial things start to seep their way in. Maybe I’m a bad person to ask this question to, because my career has been weird and meandering and confusing. There’s not a lot of shape to it. I have a lot of notes on the narrative of my own life and career. It’s not a well told story. Weird fits and starts. You have a much better narrative, Jack Thorne. That’s a story. I like that story. That’s a good one.

**Jack Thorne:**
The distinction between going, “If I do this, I’m going to win an Emmy,” and, “If I do this, then I might find a tad more professional well-being in my soul,” I found your example very motivating and very interesting in terms of the choices we make for ourselves. That is a goal, is it not? I suppose it’s just that that interests me.

**Craig Mazin:**
I think that sometimes people underestimate the joy I had in prior work to all that, because I really did enjoy them.

**Jack Thorne:**
I’m not saying you didn’t. If your character was singing the I want song, you used the word I want, there would be a moment where you were making a film that you were enjoying and you said, “I want to write about the Soviet Union, and I feel like I’ve got a way of singing about the Soviet Union,” and then the audience would be on their feet.

**Craig Mazin:**
See, that’s the thing about writing. I love that this is something that was specifically targeted by Franchesca Ramsey to creatives, is that there’s nothing in between you and the doing of a creative thing, unless it requires a lot of money, but writing doesn’t. You don’t even need to get to goal step. If you want, and I did want to write something, write it. That’s the best part. It’s not even a goal. It’s there. You can do it. You can paint whatever you want. You can write whatever you want. You can sing whatever you want. All that’s there. Now are people going to watch it? Is it going to get made? Will it be popular? Are you going to get money? Will you get a big deal? All that stuff happens after.

**John August:**
It’s completely out of your control, which is of course-

**Craig Mazin:**
It’s completely out of your control, exactly. In a weird way, if your goal is to write something amazing, you can take that write out of the goal column and put it right into the I’m doing it today. You don’t have to wait. A goal to me isn’t the future. Maybe I just am confused about the concept. There’s nothing stopping you right now today from writing anything you want. It’s free, which is wonderful.

**John August:**
Now in our discussions of goals, Megana has in our little workflow here a year in review. Our goal with Scriptnotes was not to have 500 episodes in 10 years in Scriptnotes, but-

**Craig Mazin:**
Jesus.

**John August:**
We hit that-

**Craig Mazin:**
Thank god that wasn’t a goal-

**John August:**
… this last year.

**Craig Mazin:**
… because I wouldn’t have done it.

**John August:**
Lord no. We were listened to in 198 different countries.

**Craig Mazin:**
Oh god.

**John August:**
We had 2.15 million downloads so far this year in 2021.

**Craig Mazin:**
Oh my god. Now wait, with that 2.15 million downloads, I presume that’s just three people that just keep redownloading it over and over.

**John August:**
It’s all bots. It’s bots all the way down.

**Craig Mazin:**
It’s bots. Just bots.

**John August:**
A bit of housekeeping, we’re hoping to do another random advice episode. That’s this episode where we just answer random listener questions that don’t have anything to do with writing at all. It could be about relationships. It could be about real estate. It could be about the proper fork to use for a certain meal. If you have random advice questions, send those into Megana, ask@johnaugust.com, and we’ll get a special list of those together and we’ll answer random things that are not about writing.

**Craig Mazin:**
That’ll be fun. We should have Jack on for that as well. I think Jack should be the new … Let’s just have him all the time.

**John August:**
Absolutely. It’s time for our one cool things. Craig, do you have a one cool thing?

**Craig Mazin:**
No, I don’t.

**John August:**
Jack Thorne, you got the memo. Did you find a one cool thing to bring in?

**Jack Thorne:**
I’ve got two.

**Craig Mazin:**
Thank god.

**Jack Thorne:**
One of which is slightly embarrassing.

**Craig Mazin:**
Good. I’ll take that one. That one’s mine.

**Jack Thorne:**
Craig chose me for One Cool Thing six, seven years ago. I don’t know how long ago it was.

**Craig Mazin:**
I would call that early Thorne period. America still didn’t know.

**Jack Thorne:**
It was a highlight of my life and a really beautiful thing and it made me spill my water. Sounds like I wet myself. I almost said made me spill my tea, and then I was like, I don’t drink tea. I don’t drink any caffeine. One of my one cool things is Craig Mazin, who appears like he is a misanthrope and seems to present like a misanthrope, and yet is incredibly kind. I once went to lunch with him wearing Ray Bans and he laughed at me for about an hour, but it was still … His ability to give time to things that he shouldn’t give time to is a very, very kind thing, and so he is one of my one cool things.

**Craig Mazin:**
Thank you, Jack Thorne.

**Jack Thorne:**
If that’s all right.

**Craig Mazin:**
Jack, I think you had another less Craig-oriented one cool thing.

**Jack Thorne:**
Which is authentic and celebratory portrayals of Father Christmas, because I find it very annoying that Father Christmas, I have a five-year-old, is frequently portrayed in our modern world as a dark, despairing figure or someone with a take on it. We’ve watched Santa Claus the movie, the Dudley Moore film from 1985 twice this week, and we’re probably going to watch it a third time, purely because Elliott, my son, finds the Father Christmas in it so authentic to his impression of what Father Christmas should be. I don’t know whether Father Christmas should be white or any of those things, but a jolly person who is having a good time is a good thing, and we need more of him I think.

**Craig Mazin:**
Can I ask, this might seem like an odd question, but who’s Father Christmas? We don’t have him here. Who’s that?

**John August:**
That’s Santa Claus.

**Jack Thorne:**
Santa Claus.

**Craig Mazin:**
Oh, Santa Claus. Oh, Santa Claus.

**Jack Thorne:**
You don’t call him Father Christmas?

**John August:**
No, we call him Santa Claus. There is more of this in the bonus segments. Trust me.

**Craig Mazin:**
Megana, have you ever heard of Father Christmas?

**Megana Rao:**
I have.

**John August:**
I’ve heard of it.

**Megana Rao:**
I have.

**Craig Mazin:**
Wait, hold on. Now I know. It’s from the Kinks song, (singing).

**John August:**
It’s not from the Kinks song. It’s a thing that exists and the Kinks mentioned it.

**Craig Mazin:**
I thought the Kinks invented it. All right. So much for that.

**John August:**
My one cool thing is also Christmas-related. This last week I fell down a rabbit hole of the Wikipedia list of common misconceptions, which if you have not read it, you should just spend an hour of your life looking through the Wikipedia list of common misconceptions. Mine is that the Bible does not explicitly say that three magi came to visit baby Jesus, does not mention a Father Christmas or Santa Claus either, nor does it mention that there were kings or rode on camels, that their names were Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar. The three magi are inferred because there were three gifts. Basically the three kings who come to visit baby Jesus in the Christmas story, that was just made up sometime in the third century. We don’t really know where came from, but not part of the original Christmas story. My one cool thing. That is our show for this week. Jack Thorne, thank you so much for joining us.

**Craig Mazin:**
Thank you, Jack.

**Jack Thorne:**
Thank you for having me. I’m very sorry for talking quite a lot.

**Craig Mazin:**
No, that’s why you’re here.

**John August:**
Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Nico Mansy, if you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is sometimes there at @clmazin. I’m always @johnaugust. Jack Thorne, are you on Twitter?

**Jack Thorne:**
Not really, no. No. It sent my brain mad.

**John August:**
That’s fine.

**Craig Mazin:**
Me too.

**John August:**
You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and sweatshirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. The sweatshirts just came and they are actually genuinely the softest things I have experienced in a sweatshirt. Craig, your sweatshirt should be there, if you ordered that first batch. Mine came yesterday. Check your mail. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments. We’ll learn from Jack Thorne what a British person would call a bonus segment and other words that don’t make sense on either side of the pond. Thank you all very much.

New Speaker:
BONUS SEGMENT

**John August:**
We’re back. Jack Thorne, as you were talking, I was writing out some of the things you said that were-

**Craig Mazin:**
Ridiculous.

**John August:**
… distinctly British. You said Graeae are this wonderful company. You used are because the company is plural, but we would say Graeae is this wonderful company. Pluralism is a thing that is different between American English and British English is you would say are and we would say is.

**Jack Thorne:**
I wouldn’t assume that I speak good English. I’m not a very educated person, so I wouldn’t assume that [crosstalk 01:04:06].

**Craig Mazin:**
This is outrageous.

**John August:**
This humility.

**Craig Mazin:**
This is outrageous.

**John August:**
You said, “I remember ringing my parents.” We never ring our parents at all here.

**Craig Mazin:**
We call them.

**John August:**
We call them. We don’t ring them.

**Craig Mazin:**
Then oddly, when people are describing names in England, they will typically say, “Oh, I met a guy, he’s called Jack,” and here we would say, “He’s named Jack.”

**John August:**
British English still does that thing like [inaudible 01:04:29] you’re calling somebody. You call somebody the same way you phone them, which is strange. Are you ringing your parents if you’re ringing them on their mobile phones?

**Jack Thorne:**
Yes, yes, still ringing my parents. I would still say that, yes.

**John August:**
Now you’ve written for both the UK and for American audiences. Do you change anything in your actual writing if you know it’s going to Warner Brothers rather than to the BBC?

**Jack Thorne:**
Yes, and will use U.S. spellings. Now I say I do that. I have an assistant called Mariella who is rather brilliant and does that and makes sure that I make sense in another country.

**Craig Mazin:**
I had the opposite experience. Jane Featherstone, who is a very small person, and yet a giant person in-

**Jack Thorne:**
She is.

**Craig Mazin:**
… British person, she was rather insistent, and I think reasonably so, that as we were a European production on Chernobyl that I ought to use English things like torch instead of flashlight. You wouldn’t go into the hospital. You would be in hospital. I was trying to think. Color and even spelling, which doesn’t show up on screen, but color and favor with a U.

**Jack Thorne:**
Honor.

**Craig Mazin:**
Honor, which is actually fun to do. Then there were certain things too like firemen. We have firemen, and you guys have fire brigade.

**John August:**
[crosstalk 01:05:55].

**Jack Thorne:**
We have firemen, but if they’re a collective then they’re a fire brigade.

**Craig Mazin:**
You call the fire brigade. There’s a line in Chernobyl where he’s like, “There’s a fire,” and he goes, “Call the fire brigade,” but originally he said, “Call the fire department,” because that’s what we call it, the fire department. She’s like, “No one calls that here.” That was it. When Jane tells you to do something, you do it.

**Jack Thorne:**
Jane is always right.

**Craig Mazin:**
Yep.

**John August:**
Growing up, sometime in about fourth grade or something I recognized that British people put the U’s in the words, and I was just obsessed with putting the U’s in the words. I’d put U’s in words that they couldn’t possibly exist. I would try to do it. All my school essays I would do it. Sometimes I’d get flagged for it, sometimes I wouldn’t. I’m wondering if it was just an early case of cultural appropriation. I just desperately wanted to not be this Colorado kid. I wanted to be this international student. Craig, did you ever do the U’s in your words?

**Craig Mazin:**
No, but I think that the cultural appropriation was taking the language and bringing it here. That’s cultural reappropriation. I never did that. That would probably get you beaten up on Staten Island, John. I got to be honest with you. That, by the way, the other thing that sometimes, we mentioned fanny pack earlier, so in America fanny is your butt, and a fanny pack is that silly pouch that travelers wear with the belt that goes around their butt and they put their money in it. In England fanny is cruel slang for vulva, I think would be fair to say. There are certain differences like that.

**John August:**
There’s a word for cigarette that we don’t use here.

**Jack Thorne:**
Do you know what we call a fanny pack?

**Craig Mazin:**
You call it a bum bag.

**Jack Thorne:**
A bum bag, yeah.

**Craig Mazin:**
Now if you say bum bag in the U.S., people will assume that that’s something that involves a hobo. It is entirely different. Also I’ve noticed in England the C word, which is quite a verboten term here, is tossed around like it’s nothing over there.

**John August:**
It becomes really challenging, because you’re not sure whether that person, a British person’s using it in a sexually offensive way, in a way that it’s going to cause a lawsuit, or if they’re just speaking their language.

**Craig Mazin:**
I think they’re speaking their language.

**Jack Thorne:**
Try being in a rehearsal full of 50 people and just using it as part of your sentences, because that’s who you are, and then just looking at their faces as they stare back at you in literal sheer horror.

**Craig Mazin:**
I actually had the reverse experience where spending so much time in Europe with Brits and then coming back to the U.S. and people like, “I’m sorry, what?” I’m like, “Oh, right, sorry. I’m not [crosstalk 01:08:33]-”

**John August:**
“You can’t say that.”

**Craig Mazin:**
“… anymore. It doesn’t work that way anymore.” We do speak a common language, but there are these fascinating. Really it’s the structural differences that get me, the things like called and named and in hospital. He’s in hospital.

**John August:**
I would say as a screenwriter, when I’m working on a production that’s going to be shooting in the UK, I’m not sticking U’s in my words where they don’t need to be there, but I am mindful if there’s a thing that’s going to translate wrong or feel different in the other place or if I can just get away from that problem. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is an example of we wanted the movie to feel like it didn’t exist either in the U.S. or the UK. The cars drive down the middle of the road. The bill he picks up out of the street is not a British pound or American dollar. We’re deliberately in no place. That’s great, but then everyone speaks with a British accent, so I guess we are still in the UK.

**Craig Mazin:**
That’s how that works.

**Jack Thorne:**
I love that film, and it felt very British to me. Even if it wasn’t intended to be, it felt like that to me.

**Craig Mazin:**
One of the other challenges that screenwriters face, and I think we maybe talked about this on the show before, is in the U.S. we use eight and a half by 11 paper. In the UK we use A4. They’re so close to being the same, but they’re not the same.

**Craig Mazin:**
It’s outrageous.

**John August:**
A4 paper always looks wrong to me. Mathematically it makes so much more sense.

**Craig Mazin:**
Of course.

**John August:**
It’s such a smarter design for paper.

**Craig Mazin:**
As is the metric system.

**John August:**
100%.

**Craig Mazin:**
That’s the nice thing about England is you guys straddle the metric system and the imperial system, which I like. You haven’t quite let it go, which is good.

**Jack Thorne:**
I think we firmly believe in the imperial system.

**Craig Mazin:**
You believe in the imperial system unless it comes down to things like liters of petrol, litres of petrol.

**Jack Thorne:**
Yes, we do, but you can also see gallons. There’s a separate measure for gallons.

**Craig Mazin:**
Very good. Wow. This plus the blue passports, England is back.

**John August:**
Now on a practical matter, if you were working on something like you’re working on His Dark Materials, which was a complicated production. There were American companies involved. There were probably British companies involved as well. Were your scripts done on A4? Were they done on eight and a half by eleven? Did you just make a choice early on and just live with it?

**Jack Thorne:**
I didn’t even think about it. I just opened final draft and just used whatever format. I guess other people might’ve changed it, but I don’t think so. Those sorts of questions, I think our industry’s a lot more haphazard than yours. We don’t really ever deal with them. No one complains. I guess I just kept doing it the same way that I was doing it.

**John August:**
I ran into it on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. We were using A4 paper, and the Warner Brothers script department, which is a whole notorious thing, we could talk about a whole rant about the Warner Brothers script department, would send it back to us in not A4 paper, and so the scripts would be longer and we’d get all these concerns about budget. It’s because you put it on different paper. It’s the exact same script.

**Craig Mazin:**
Oh wow.

**John August:**
Drives me crazy.

**Craig Mazin:**
A4.

**John August:**
A4.

**Craig Mazin:**
A4.

**John August:**
[crosstalk 01:11:24].

**Jack Thorne:**
I’m so sorry.

**John August:**
Jack Thorne-

**Craig Mazin:**
That’s Britain.

**John August:**
Again, don’t apologize for everything. Far too much.

**Jack Thorne:**
I’m afraid my country, the imperial system and everything else that comes out of my country, gets away with the fact that we are probably responsible for more evil than any other country in the world.

**Craig Mazin:**
Certainly A4 is just maybe the worst thing that Britain ever did, A4, top of the heap, followed by the slavery and colonization.

**John August:**
Jack Thorne, thanks so much.

**Jack Thorne:**
Thank you so much.

**Craig Mazin:**
Thank you, Jack.

Links:

* [Jack Thorne’s MacTaggart Lecture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxUZPMBRIPU)
* [Jack Thorne Launches Underlying Health Conditions Pressure Group, Publishes Major Report Into Disabled Representation in TV Industry](https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/jack-thorne-underlying-health-conditions-1235125435/)
* [1 in 4 Coalition](https://www.1in4coalition.org/)
* [Ashley Nicole Black and Francesca Ramsey Twitter Thread](https://twitter.com/ashleyn1cole/status/1460703224285908993?s=20)
* [Santa Claus: The Movie](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089961/) a celebratory portrayal of Father Christmas
* [Wikipedia List of Misconceptions](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions?wprov=wppw1)
* [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/)
* [Jack Thorne](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2113666/) on IMDb
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Nico Mansy ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/530standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/m-is-for-minimum).

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

**Craig:**
My name Craig Mazin.

**John:**
And this is episode 528 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show with animation writers fighting to get paid what live action writers get, we’ll look at what minimums and backend really mean, but it’s also a craft episode. We’ll talk about the kind of movie, where the hero is actively trying to find themselves and is the waste paper basket the writer’s most important tool? Plus, in our bonus segment for premium members, is movie dialogue actually harder to understand these days? Craig has opinions.

**Craig:**
Amazing. Absolutely [inaudible 00:00:36].

**John:**
A taste of what’s to come for our premium members. Craig, it’s nice to be back recording with you. It’s been a minute here.

**Craig:**
Yeah. A little bit up and down over here, as we make our way through this insanely large production, still here in Canada, although we’re catching a little bit of a break now, as we head into the holidays. I get to come home for a little bit, looking outside at beautiful Calgary, it is a lovely dusting of snow. Apparently La Nina and El Nino have joined hands to make Il Nino and something enormous is coming apparently. Apparently it’s going to be snowpocalypse up here, which is okay for us. We’ve got an episode, where we need a little bit of snow.

**John:**
Oh, it’ll be great.

**Craig:**
Yeah.

**John:**
Yeah, little bit of snow’s also good for skiing. I would love some more snow for that.

**Craig:**
Yeah. I’m not going to do that.

**John:**
Yeah. I’m going to do that, but while you were gone, we replayed the Die Hard episode. This was a special episode we’d done for premium members. We put it in the main feed and I added in a bonus segment for our premium members, where we talked with Steven E. de Souza about the writing of Die Hard, which is so exciting. We did some follow up on that. Megana, can you help us out with a follow up?

**Megana:**
Great. Jeb writes, “You did a great job in the Die Hard episode, highlighting the various Reagan era elements of the film, bumbling experts, idiotic feds, awful Europeans, et cetera, but one of the key elements in the story, is the fact that Holly works for a Japanese firm. As you of course remember, the 80s featured a fascination with Japanese culture, highlighted perhaps best in Karate Kid, but also fear related to the perceived decline of the US, in relation to Japan. Japanese companies excelling in the auto industry, electronics, and even US real estate. Movies like Gung Ho, highlighted those tensions for comedic gain, but that anxiety was real. Anti-Asian hate crimes were rampant in the era and the fact that Holly is working for a Japanese company, building its own towering foothold on American soil, is just one more thorn in all American John McClane’s side. The fact that he prevails and saves the American employees, is a not too subtle message.”

**John:**
That’s a good point. Let’s talk about that [crosstalk 00:02:45].

**Craig:**
[crosstalk 00:02:45] Jeb.

**John:**
Okay. I would say that a person looking at the movie now, who didn’t grow up in the 80s might not realize the degree to which there was this sense that, “Oh, Japan’s going to take over the world,” because they didn’t. Spoiler and it is interesting, because I do sense that at the start of the movie, the fact that this Japanese company is made a little bit more of a thing, but I like that the movie doesn’t feel racist towards the Japanese owners and the Japanese owners are good people and solid.

**Craig:**
Yeah. That’s where I’ll push back a little bit on Jeb. I do agree that of course his pretext is correct. There was a very famous memo written by the head of Sony, that was circulated around American businesses in the 80s, as a warning that they were going to beat us, but also why aren’t we like this? It wasn’t simply a Japan-a-phobia, it was also Japan-a-phelia. There was an admiration and a desire to raise our standards to theirs. They were doing it better than we were. The Nakatomi building is in a not-80s-way, It’s not played for racism jokes. Nobody makes fun of the Japanese culture. The boss is portrayed as an honorable, decent man, whereas the American employee is the cokehead snake. The fact that John McClane saves the day, that’s not I don’t think, a particularly trenchant point about America versus Japan as just, he’s the movie star, he’s the action hero that came to save the day. If anything to me, the fact that it was a Japanese company, which by the way, disappears in terms of importance almost immediately. It’s just not really a thing, I would say reflects nothing more than what was in vogue at the time, which was, yeah and we should make it a Japanese company, because that feels like an 80s thing right now.

**John:**
I would say that the Japanese company helps set up McClane’s initial fear of losing his wife, because not only has his wife moved to the other side of the country, but she’s really working for a Japanese company and will probably end up moving to Japan at some point. I think I remember that. It said that she may actually need to move to Tokyo at some point and the sense of losing all of the stuff that he’s had, to this company is real and yet that’s not the meat of the film at all. It’s misdirected.

**Craig:**
No. There is a really interesting episode, that I think we could do and we’d want to bring in some friends to discuss I would imagine, about the movie Gung Ho, which Jeb cites here, which is a fascinating 80s attempt, I would call it, an 80s attempt by white people, to make an anti-racism movie and spoiler alert, it doesn’t go great, but it also weirdly wears its goofy heart on its sleeve.

**John:**
I’m trying to remember the premise. Is this Michael Keaton or is this Tom Hanks?

**Craig:**
It’s Michael Keaton, although it could have been Tom Hanks and more importantly, it’s Ron Howard. It’s this kind of very… Ron Howard to me, always represents the sweetest, most innocent American point of view, which doesn’t always mean it’s enlightened, it just means it’s not coming at something out of anger or disgust or contempt, but yeah, Ron Howard directed this movie. Starred Michael Keaton and it was about a Japanese company purchasing an American company and it was a car company, changing the way the auto factory worked and how it suddenly became a culture clash and it was Gedde Watanabe and George Wendt and Michael Keaton and very much white savior stuff, but also weirdly at times, beautifully human. You could see, it was actually a little bit ahead of its time. The problem was the time was really behind where we are now. It was ahead of its time and yet behind where we are now, it’s a fascinating thing to look at and I think maybe one day we can dive in. It won’t necessarily be the most comfortable, deep dive we do, but worth examining.

**John:**
Yeah. Now if we were to make Die Hard today, that Die Hard never existed, but it was just being made today. It would not be a Japanese company. It’d be a Korean company, who inevitably was building that building, which brings us to squid game, not squid games, but we have some follow up on that. Megana can talk to us about what Eliza sent.

**Megana:**
Eliza says, “As an avid Korean-American listener, I want to clarify why the show’s English title is Squid Game singular and not Squid Games, as in the Olympic Games or Hunger Games. The last game in the series of childhood games, is The Squid Game. If the last game had been hopscotch, then perhaps the title would’ve been Hopscotch. If one is unfamiliar with the Squid Game as are most English speakers, there’s a desire to encapsulate the entire experience with an umbrella term. However, you can see it wouldn’t make sense to title it Hopscotches, had the last game been different. Squid Game sounds awkward to a Korean speaker and only sounds right to an English speaker. Furthermore, Korean doesn’t have a plural indicator like the S in English. A single rock is Dol, just as a fist of rocks is Dol. The rest of the sentence communicates the nature of the rock, as it relates to its surroundings and condition.”

**Craig:**
Well, Eliza, thank you for that. We love language here, obviously. I think the thing that I was perhaps primarily ignorant of, wasn’t the fact that plurals work differently in Korean, as much as that, apparently there are more than one game that occurs in Squid Game and Squid Game was the last of those games. I just thought the whole thing was just all Squid Game, because I still haven’t seen it. That said, this interested me. What really grabbed me on this single rock is Dol, a fist full of rocks is Dol and I checked with our intrepid Bo Shim over here, because what I was curious about was the Olympic Games, because Eliza mentions the Olympic Games and Korea has hosted the Olympic Games and I asked her in Korean, what do people call the Olympic Games? And she said, that in Korean people simply call them Olympic like, “We’re hosting the Olympic,” and of course this confirms what Eliza’s saying, but now what I want to do, is not say Squid Games or a Squid Game. I just want to call the show, Squid.

**John:**
Reduce everything down to it’s single elemental route, that the fundamental thing that everything ventures out from. Yes.

**Craig:**
I have not yet seen Squid.

**John:**
Not a bit of it. More follow up on our Thanksgiving movies. Lars from Cologne writes, “I finally got around listening to episode 522 and would like to suggest that another reason Thanksgiving movies are not as common as Christmas movies, could be, that Thanksgiving is an American tradition, which would make it tough overseas. That’s also why they’re often sold as road movies, as John pointed out. The event is really just an excuse to get some people who don’t see each other often, but have a lot of history and unresolved issues, to sit down at a table and fight them out. Yes, I think the universality of Thanksgiving is not in it’s favor for a movie.”

**Craig:**
A little bit of editorializing there from Lars, from Cologne. Sometimes Lars, I know this is hard to believe, people just sit down and have a good time. Typically that’s what we do on Thanksgiving, but yes, it’s true, Thanksgiving is solely American, although Christmas is not particularly universal. I think more people than not, in fact, I know that more people do not celebrate Christmas than do, but also a Thanksgiving movie could be very cheap proposition to make. Yeah. I think honestly we figured it out last time, but thank you Lars for the help. Just there’s no narrative built into it. It’s a meal, that’s it. It’s a meal.

**John:**
Yeah. Now back to Christmas though, two years ago, I celebrated Christmas in Korea. This is going to be the Korean episode. It’s really what I’m getting back to you. It’s all going to be about Korea, this whole entire episode and it was delightful to celebrate Christmas in Korea and they really did a number there. They really celebrated it big.

**Craig:**
Yes. Christianity is very big in Korea. Although, I would imagine it is not at this point, quite as big as Squid.

**John:**
Nothing is as big as Squid.

**Craig:**
I do love there’s a… It’s not Squid, it’s Cuttlefish, but there’s this dried Cuttlefish, Korean snack called Ojingeochae. It’s like-

**John:**
It’s [crosstalk 00:11:04] get that for you and then you actually mark in the bag, how much of the Cuttlefish each of you has eaten?

**Craig:**
No, that would be insane.

**John:**
Yeah. No, nothing like the ketchup doritos?

**Craig:**
No, no, no, no. Here’s the deal. The ketchup Doritos and I’m going to say it again. Something happened and I don’t even want to get into it, but something went wrong there and it’s-

**John:**
And now you don’t like them?

**Craig:**
No, I love them, but it’s driven a wedge between me and Bo. No, I started eating that all the way back in 1992, because I was living with my friend, who’s a Korean American named Chin and he introduced it to me. It’s almost squid jerky, is what it is, but it’s actually, you would think, “Oh squid jerky, this right off the bat didn’t sound great.” It’s delicious. Delicious.

**John:**
Yeah. All right. Another piece. This could be umberage inducing, but let’s see how this goes here. Our podcast that you’re listening to right now, is called Scriptnotes. There’s a feature in final draft called Scriptnotes, which is how you leave little notes for things and several people pointed out this week that they’ve started putting a TM after Scriptnotes. A trademark symbol. I did what a person does and I looked at the trademark registry. They used to have a trademark on it, but they let the trademark lapse in 2018.

**Craig:**
Well, why don’t we trademark it?

**John:**
We could try to trademark it.

**Craig:**
I think we should. Let’s trademark it and then let’s sue them.

**John:**
Here’s what I know about trademarks, because I actually had to get a trademark on this other game that we were doing at one point and trademarks exist in certain spaces. It’s entirely possible they could get their trademark for this feature in a software program, called Scriptnotes and we could get our trademark in the podcast called Scriptnotes, but honestly let’s just stop fighting over a trademark and just not-

**Craig:**
Well, the good news is we haven’t started fighting over the trademark. I think we can just stay right here where we are. Obviously they could have said something about it, prior to the abandonment in 2018, but they didn’t, probably because the thing that you’re worried about when you get a trademark, I have a trademark for instance, for my production company Word Games, is that what I don’t want, is another company that does what I do, calling themselves Word Games and then the question is, “Oh, well who made this?” And without question Final Draft the company, could have said there is a marketplace confusion, if we have Scriptnotes as part of our script running software and these other guys are doing a podcast about screenwriting, people might be confused and think that they represent us, but I have a suspicion that they were happy about that.

**John:**
Yeah. One of the challenges when you have a trademark, is you have to protect and defend your trademarks. You have to look for people who are infringing on it and you have to send them letters saying, “Hey, don’t infringe on our trademark.” I sent actually, a very nice email to Final Draft, reminding them that they don’t actually have the trademark on Scriptnotes. We’ll see if they take the little TMs off their videos and such.

**Craig:**
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Look Final Draft, we keep it on a simmer with you guys. Don’t wake the dragon.

**John:**
All right. Back to Korea news. When the agency campaigned, the WGA agency brujaja was settled, one of the points in that, was that the companies who own production entities had to sell down to a 20% stake, basically were limited to a 20% stake. This past week it was announced that Endeavor is selling its content side to CJ Entertainment, which is a Korean firm. I think I may have even predicted that on the show, that that’d be who would buy out this entity, because it makes a lot of sense, because this is a Korean company who wants to do more American production, who has a lot of experience, has a lot of money. It seems like the right outcome for both sides.

**Craig:**
Yeah and yeah, the company’s worth quite a bit of money there. You never know with these things. It’s a little bit like when they make sports deals and then you find out later, “Oh, well it’s not really that much money and the other team paid for half of the money, that they said that they got,” in any case who knows, but it’s impressive regardless either way and yeah, CJ Entertainment’s a real deal.

**John:**
They did Parasite, they did Big Fish in Korea. They’ve done lots of… There’s just two examples of high quality things they’ve done. They are the equivalent of Sony Entertainment for Korea. They are a big production house.

**Craig:**
This is an interesting development. I’m watching it and yeah listen, every time a new company comes into Hollywood, I think there is a reasonable, people get a little bit excited, because they think new buyer-ish person or somebody that will perhaps get and sometimes that’s true. More often than not, the new companies are worse than the old companies and I don’t know exactly what the relationship is with CJ Entertainment and say unions and you always have to wonder, how this is going to go, but as far as I’m concerned, it can’t be worse than Silicon Valley and their attitude towards unions. Let’s see how it goes.

**John:**
All right. Megana, do you want to talk to us more about some bullshitting?

**Craig:**
Ooh.

**Megana:**
Great. Brandon wrote in and said, “The discussion on bullshitting for writers was quite illuminating for me. I feel like there’s this proverbial wisdom out there, that you should fake it till you make it, but the saying has always felt a little toxic to me. Is it really okay to say I’m a writer, if I’m not making a living as a writer or should I be honest and tell people my day job, when they ask me what I do? When meeting someone new in the industry, the question of what do you do, is almost inevitable. Any guidance on how to navigate or bullshit a response to this question, would be greatly appreciated.

**John:**
Craig. I think it is fine to identify yourself as a writer, who is not making a living as a writer. What do you do? “I’m a writer, in the meantime I’m working a day job at someplace,” is absolutely fine and valid to say. I think, especially when you’re newly moved here, speaking aspirationally is good and normal and appropriate, but how are you feeling about that?

**Craig:**
How will I put it? I understand Brandon’s squirminess about this. I would say Brandon, that the saying fake it till you make it, isn’t really, at least for me, it’s never about just straight up lying about stuff that you wish were true, because that’s delusional and that’s dishonest and misleading. I think fake it till you make it is more about, “Hey, I believe I have the capability of doing something intellectually. Right now, I’m terrified. Let me just behave like I’m not terrified and then I won’t be scared, once I get into it.” In terms of describing yourself, if you’re not making a living as a writer, it’s a little weird to stick the word aspiring on, because that sounds weird. What I would say, is I’m working on a screenplay. I think this is perfectly fine. Say, I’m working on a screenplay. I have a day job, but I’m working on a screenplay. It’s going really well. I’ve got some interest from X, Y, or Z. If you have no interest from X, Y, or Z and it’s just, you’re writing a screenplay at night while you’re working during the day, then no, I wouldn’t say I’m a writer, because that’s not really true. I am a writer, does implies certain things and the reason I’m saying don’t say that, is not because I’m feeling like there should be forced humility, it’s more that I’m just concerned about the follow up questions you’re going to get. What are you working on? Who do you work with? And then you’re stuck. I’ll tell you the question I always get. If somebody doesn’t know who I am and they say, what do you do? And I say, I’m a writer. I work in television and movies and the next immediate question, is: what have I seen? Every single god damned time. Have I seen anything of yours? Since all those questions are going to be forthcoming, you might want to just make it more about the process itself. I’m working on a blank.

**John:**
Yeah. I think the “ing” forms are really helpful here. To say that you’re writing is great. When you say that you are a writer, then you’re going to get the follow up question, “Oh, what have you gotten made?” Or if you say, I’m a novelist, it’s like, “Okay, well, where’s your book?” But if you say, I’m writing a book for this or I’m working on stuff. That is true and honest and also basically where you’re at in the process.

**Craig:**
Correct. Totally.

**John:**
Yeah. A bit of news and follow up here. Last year, as we came through the contract negotiations, we added paid parental leave to the deal for writers. For the first time, writers who have new kids have, I think it’s eight weeks of paid parental leave. Effective January 1st, 2022, the health fund will offer coverage for infertility treatment, for those who have a medical diagnosis of infertility, available to all participants with active coverage for them and their spousal dependence, with a lifetime cap of $30,000 with no deductibles or copays.

**Craig:**
No deductibles or copays. Lifetime cap of $30,000. Oftentimes it does cost more than $30,000 and of course, if you want to have more than one child, then you’re going to need that infertility treatment coverage later, you then will have to probably dip into your pocket, but let’s not underplay the fact that, that’s a big amount of money that you used to have to pay for entirely by yourself and while my wife and I, very luckily did not have any infertility issues. I think we’re the exception of so many.

**John:**
My husband and I had infertility issues.

**Craig:**
Well yes. Right there is a big one. John, you guys aren’t having another kid, I would imagine?

**John:**
You know what, with this $30,000 bonus, maybe so. I’m just saying-

**Craig:**
Maybe you and I should have a kid, because if you think about it, who’s going to inherit this podcast one day?

**John:**
Yeah. We’re experienced parents at this point. We really know what we’re doing. Yeah. I have a kid who’s going to be heading off to college in 16 months. The thought of having a brand new child, while I love babies, I think we’ve established on this podcast, I absolutely love babies.

**Craig:**
Love them.

**John:**
Love them.

**Craig:**
Love babies.

**John:**
But I don’t want to have another four year old, for example, or another 10 year old.

**Craig:**
No, no, no. At all. This is great news and I think I always, in these moments, want to tip my hat obviously, to the Writers Guild for, we represent half of the trustees on the health fund and they’re the ones who make these decisions. We don’t actually negotiate these in contracts. This is something that has to be worked out between our trustees and their trustees, but I also tip my hat to the companies, because they have half the trustees too and this doesn’t happen unless the companies agree and there are certain areas where I think everybody starts to find their collective humanity and their shared experiences and there are people on both sides, management and labor, who know the pain of wanting to have a child and struggling and this is a fantastic thing and I tip my hat both to the Writer’s Guild and the companies.

**John:**
Yeah and it’s also important to note the distinction between, there was no more money added to the pot for this. Basically, it’s reprioritizing how you’re spending the money that’s in the pot and that you’re going to start covering fertility treatment, as opposed to paid parental leave, which was part of the contract, because it’s additional money being put in there, to actually pay for that fund. That’s the difference there. That’s why that was a contract thing and this was just a decision made by the folks who run the fund.

**Craig:**
What they cover and what they don’t cover medically, is always going to be part of their decision and they do run the numbers and they generally do have to balance the budget. I hope that they did that by removing nonsense alternative treatments, that don’t do a goddamned thing.

**John:**
Yeah, I imagine so. That’d be great. All right. I was going to lead us into this Netflix topic by talking about Netflix numbers, but I feel like I’ve talked about Netflix numbers so, so much, that I’m just tired of talking about Netflix numbers.

**Craig:**
John, your discussion of Netflix numbers is the most listened to discussion, ever in Scriptnotes history.

**John:**
I would like to congratulate my friends, Rawson Thurber and Ryan Reynolds for the number one movie of all time on Netflix. It’s fantastic. It’s great. Wonderful. I’m so happy that it’s happened. I hope that you guys get the equivalent of backend off that. I hope for every time they send out a press release about how much money or how many viewers it’s had, you get a ca-ching. That would be fantastic. They won’t, but let’s get into how money works and how backends work, because this past week, a bunch of things showed up on my feed and a lot of questions showed up in my feed, about writers getting paid and backends and residuals. I think it’s because animation writers right now are going through negotiations about increasing their pay, because animation writers are generally not covered by the WGA, covered by the Animation Guild and people had natural questions about backends and profits and scales and minimums. I wanted to have a little segment here to talk about the difference between minimums, which is something that’s being handled by the Guild contract and what writers actually bring in, which is handled by their own contracts. We have a lot of terms to define here, but hopefully we can make sense of where money comes from and how it gets to writers.

**Craig:**
Yeah, totally normal thing to happen when you’re looking at one group of writers, like animation writers, who aren’t doing as well as Writers Guild writers and what will happen is, people will point towards Writers Guild writers and say, “Here’s what their experience is. Here’s how they’re treated. Here’s what they get,” and some of the things that they’re pointing to, are things that the Writers Guild has not gotten them at all and more interestingly then by implication, they don’t need the Animation Guild to get them either because we are, the term is an overscale employment base, at least certainly in features and in television, where the overscale occurs most notably, is in the double job description, writer/producer. A lot of things happen under the heading of producer and the Writer’s Guild doesn’t touch or affect any of those.

**John:**
Yeah and it’s especially complicated in TV, because the number of weeks that count against gets wild, but let’s start with some really basic things we can talk through. I want to discuss the difference between the contract, which is the big contract that’s being negotiated every three years, versus individual writer contracts. I want to talk about when writers get scale and when they don’t, profit participation and residuals and the idea of CPI and increases. Basically, how much things ramp up over the years, because that also gets confusing. Craig, can you talk to me about the difference between the contract and what’s in the contract, versus what’s in an individual writer’s contract?

**Craig:**
Sure. For the Writer’s Guild and this holds true as well for Animation Guild, the collective bargaining agreement is also known as a Minimum Basic Agreement. Minimum Basic Agreement, simply means nobody that is in our union can do worse than this. That’s what it is. They could also call it the worst case scenario document.

**John:**
It’s the floor.

**Craig:**
It’s the floor. Now our individual contracts by design, already incorporate everything that’s in that contract. There’s a clause in our individual contracts that say, under no circumstances can anything in this contract be construed as doing something worse than, the terms of the Minimum Basic Agreement. However, obviously in our individual contracts then, there are lots of things that our lawyers, managers, or agents, well, not managers legally, but our lawyers or agents can get us, that are better. A lot of those things are almost boiler plate at this point, because everybody gets them. Some of them have to do with you and your individual status and work history and perceived value to the company, but most contracts I would argue, have at least some aspects that are better than the Minimum Basic Agreement that the Writer’s Guild or the Animation Guild provides.

**John:**
Back in episode 407, we talked through understanding your writing contract and it was you and me at the Guild, along with some Guild lawyers and we literally walked through what an individual writer’s contract looks like and some of the things that are in there, are essential about this is how much you’re getting paid for your first draft, for your rewrite. These are the optional steps, the guaranteed steps, but also carried in there is, this is your net profit definition and this is what your backend looks like and you laugh now, but we laugh every time, because movies are designed to never actually achieve net profits. Only a handful of movies each year, each decade, could be considered net profits. Something like a Blair Witch Project is so successful, that there’s just no way to hide the money that’s coming in there, but they achieve this process for never actually becoming profitable, by continually siphening out for the money that’s coming in and charging fees against things. You could never actually hit those profits. Those things are still in your contract, but they’re not actually meaningful. The confusion I saw from people on Twitter is, “Oh, that means they writers don’t get anything for the movies, they make,” and it’s, “No, we get residuals and residuals don’t have anything to do with profitability,” and I think that’s an important thing to distinguish. Craig, can you talk to us about residuals and how residuals get calculated in a broad sense?

**Craig:**
Residuals are calculated on a gross basis and a number of people in this discussion on Twitter, were saying that residuals needed to happen for the Animation Guild, so that they could participate in the profit of things and then some people said, “Well, the problem with the Writer’s Guild, is the residuals are only there for profits and nothing ever shows profits and they should really be based on the gross,” and the answer is, they are. That’s exactly what they are. Residuals have nothing to do with the profitability of a movie. They have everything to do with how much the movie grosses and by grosses, we mean the amount of money that comes into the studio, regardless of expenses. Now, the residuals are defined in such a way, that the only part of the money coming in that matters, is for movies, not the ticket sales and not exhibition on airplanes, but all the other stuff afterwards. The now dead videotape and DVD market, but online rentals, online sales, the sale of the movie to streamers and cable outlets and networks overseas, all that gross comes in and then there is a formula that is applied to it. Is it a great formula? No, but it’s formula and it generates money.

**John:**
And it’s important to stress that, that formula and the recalculation of that formula, happens every three years in the contract, the MBA and that, that is where the residuals are calculated. Your individual contract might have something like hand waving towards residuals, but that’s not where your residuals are coming from. Your residuals are coming from this Minimum Basic Agreement, that applies to all film and all television that’s done underneath a WGA contract, which is good, which is how you want it and it also means that there can be consistent accounting for it and the WGA can actually collect that money on your behalf.

**Craig:**
Which is why your agents, managers, or lawyers, should never commission that money and if they are, ask them to please stop, because they didn’t negotiate that term, the Writer’s Guild did and while it is true that, I guess I would characterize it as every three years, we have the opportunity to adjust those formulae, when in reality they’re adjusted almost never. Once they’re there, they’re there for a long time.

**John:**
They largely get baked in and the things that, when you get news about what changed in the contract, it could be the thresholds for certain things may have changed a bit, but the actual percentages rarely change or what counts rarely changes. Only when there’s a brand new thing that you have to figure out, how are we going to treat this new thing that’s existing, do you sign a brand new residual and as we said many times on the show, figuring out how we’re going to handle residuals for movies that are made for a streamer and only show on a streamer, a movie like Red Notice is complicated, because if that movie was made by a studio and then sold to a Netflix, the residual will be based on what that sale price was to Netflix, but because there’s no sale price, it’s tougher to figure out what the residual is and it’s going to be a big focus in negotiations.

**Craig:**
It will always be lower. Until something changes, the way that Netflix does things in general, works very much in their favor, surprise, because there isn’t much of an independent and this does tie back to Netflix. You have an article here that you linked to, we’ll throw it into the show notes, from Variety about Netflix’s data expansion being a flex, which is a very nice way of saying the thing that you and I have been saying for a long time.

**Craig:**
Which is, that Netflix just continually manipulates data to make it sound like everyone is watching Netflix every minute of the day and every new thing that comes out, is the biggest thing that Netflix has ever done, because just the data is a big, huge hailing storm of hot air and what’s bizarre is, a lot of people do watch Netflix. It’s incredibly popular. I don’t know why they need to do that, other than to say that they have a total black box control over who watches what and when they report it, meaning how many people have seen this and similarly therefore, how they deal with residuals, which usually is some large buyout, works in their favor, almost always.

**John:**
Yeah. Now, here we’re talking about the back end of what’s happened and everything. The movies come out, but let’s talk about initial compensation, which is also crucial here and one of the things I’ve noticed with the animation writers talking about, is their initial compensation is just dramatically lower than equivalent conversation would be for a live action writer, a WGA writer. They’re trying to raise that initial compensation. This is something that we’re really talking about scale. We’re talking about, this is the minimum that you could be paid to do this job, to write this script, to be working on this show and that’s where we’re trying to increase here. Now again, we’ve got to stress, that is the minimum they can pay you, but certainly for future writers, you want to be working above scale and your goal is to get above scale as quickly and as thoroughly as you can, so you’re not being stuck at the absolute minimum they can pay you for things.

**Craig:**
There are two limits that impact how people are paid in general. One is the floor, which is obviously as you mentioned, something the union sets and the other is whatever the perceived ceiling is. That may be the biggest difference, because there is a difference between the floor, but it is not a massive difference. The massive Delta is in the ceiling, where the most highly paid writers in live action are paid vastly more than the most highly paid writers in animation and I’m talking about with the exception of maybe some Pixar features and things like that, but when we talk about television, when we talk about animation writers for television animation, not WGA television animation, the ceiling is just nowhere near what the ceiling is on the live action side. That is where you can start pulling people up a bit.

**John:**
Also, we should make sure the ceiling is not defined. You’re not going to find some contract that says, this is the most we’ll ever pay. They just have this internal thing. The company will say, “We never pay more than this,” and I’ve been through this in my own experiences. You probably have been too. It’s, this is the most we’ve ever paid for this. This is the most we’re willing to pay. We don’t go above this line.” [crosstalk 00:34:24]

**Craig:**
It’s the market price and that line, they will go over that line. It’s just not today, but that line is a market line and every now and then something seismic occurs and that line changes, because somebody gets paid a whole crazy amount, because somebody really, really wanted that person. That part can change. The issue with more than anything in animation writing, non WGA animation writing, is that they haven’t yet zeroed in on those people, that are worth an enormous amount. That starts to change, because at that point, instead of a factory floor, you have a factory ladder. For animation writers, they have a double problem. The Animation Guild does have low minimums. They don’t have residuals, they don’t have credit protections and in the marketplace, that group of animation writers doesn’t have a cadre of extremely high paid people, that are setting a progression for everybody else.

**John:**
Now, there have been notable animation showrunners who have made fantastic deals at places and that’s awesome for them and they can hopefully use some of that power to get writers paid more, but that’s the exception rather than rule. There are very few big animation showrunners, who could pull that off and it’s not like live action TV showrunners, who do get those 10 figure deals.

**Craig:**
Yeah. Pretty much everyone that’s running a show on television, is getting paid pretty darn well, when I talk about live action. Some people are being paid numbers that require extra digits. You have deals that are approaching a billion dollars at this point. It’s insane, but certainly a number of people being paid in the hundreds of millions of dollars and I don’t think that is happening at all in non WGA televised animation and in the cases sometimes where it is, I think you are dealing largely with the production entity. It’s just a different culture and what it comes down to is and this is where I feel for the people who run the Animation Guild, because they are trying. I have talked to a couple of them over the years and I know, they know and they’re not delusional. They’re not sitting there going, “No, our numbers are great.” They know and what they’re dealing with is a cultural problem that the industry does not value the animation writers, the way that the industry values the Writers Guild writers and that is a cultural problem that also needs to be attacked and in that circumstance, the partners they need unfortunately at the Animation Guild, are the agencies because agencies do this too. They look and see, “Well okay, those people are being paid that, so let’s not really concentrate on that, because 10% of that isn’t that much,” but they can drive that up too. They’re the ones who push the market around.

**John:**
Now, you hit on this early in the discussion, but it’s important to note that in television, someone who’s staffed on a TV show, they’re going to get paid a certain amount for their writing services, but also as a producer. As a staff writer, as a story editor, as a consulting producer, they’re getting a separate paycheck, that’s covering their producing services for a show and their writing services will tend to be listed at scale, but everything else about their producing services, is a part of their individual contract negotiation. It’s important to notice that if you’re a newly staffed writer, you might see in your contract that, “Oh, it looks like I’m being paid scale,” but you also are being paid separately as a producer and that’s just the weird way that we decided to do television, which is frustrating for folks who come from the feature world.

**Craig:**
Yeah. In one aspect, when you do come from the feature world as I did, you look at it and go, “Well, man, I’ve been paying a lot in dues, that these producers and television haven’t been paying at all.” In features, I paid a 1.5% of every dollar I ever made and television, I pay 1.5% of basically minimum, because the companies have used the producer valve, as a way to essentially pay out more, that doesn’t get applied against, for instance, healthcare and pension and the writers who take this money including myself, recognize that there’s less in dues to pay as well and you get more perceived power, because you’re a producer. For the animation writers, I’m not sure that this relief valve is there. I think basically they’re saying, this is scale. That’s what you get and there is nothing else, but there is and part of it is just figuring out how to push that marketplace forward. For me, if I were running the Animation Guild, I’ve got to be honest, I wouldn’t start right today since it’s… Look, they’ve lost over and over and over, okay? It’s quite a losing streak. How do you turn around a losing streak? Maybe you start with something that doesn’t cost money at all, but is about dignity and that would be credits and if you begin to open that door with credits and dignity, then you start to push ahead on how to make something out of those credits, because right now everything seems to be decided by the companies with a reactive position from the Animation Guild, because they don’t have the strength or backing really to get something done. It’s possible that now with the new leadership in IA, which did threaten a strike for the… We almost had an IA strike for the first time in Hollywood history. Maybe they could throw a little muscle behind the Animation Guild, which is part of IATSE. It’s complicated.

**John:**
One of the other challenges with the Animation Guild, is that Writers Guild represents just writers, Animation Guild represents not just animation writers, but also everyone else who works in animation and their interests are similar, because they’re all trying to make great animated projects, but it’s not quite analogous to the WGA, where everyone’s doing the same job.

**Craig:**
Correct and there is a conflict that can occur, because you have story artists who, if you’ve worked in animation you know, they are writing with pictures and they often throw a lot of dialogue in as they’re pitching and there is a blending of how writing functions in animation, that our terms in the Writers Guild don’t really artfully cover and those people have to be taken care of too. I think sometimes part of the problem is, that people who’d have a title and function that is very similar to what we do in the Writers Guild will say, “Wait, they got that and I’m getting this and it’s not fair and also I should be covered by the Writers Guild.” Can we just, once again John, point out that that cannot happen.

**John:**
It cannot happen. Here’s the challenge, is the folks who are represented currently by the Animation Guild, they are represented by a union and the WGA cannot come in and say, “No, no. We are taking these writers out of your unit and putting them into the WGA.” That just cannot happen. That’s just not federal law. That’s just not going to happen. What can happen is on new projects that are not covered by the Animation Guild, they can be covered by the Writers Guild and there’s a push to get more new projects covered by the Writers Guild and I have a show that’s going to be an animated Writer’s Guild project. It is doable. It’s hard to do, but that is the way you are going to get animation writers covered by WGA contract, is by setting up new projects and new places, that do not have already coverage by the Animation Guild. That’s just how it’s going to have to happen.

**Craig:**
New employers is a huge part of it. The problem, is that new employers generally aren’t stupid. They can look and see which one’s going to cost them more and it’s the Writers Guild. That’s definitely going to cost them more.

**John:**
And that’s why there’s a push to get a bunch of animation showrunners to say, “Hey, we will only do new projects at places that can offer WGA contracts,” because there are some folks who are worth it, they’re willing to do a WGA deal at certain places. That’s how I was able to get the one I just did.

**Craig:**
Yeah, years and years and years ago I was hired by Bob Weinstein, to write an animated movie and I said, “I won’t do it if it’s not WGA,” and what they did was, they just made a company.

**John:**
Yeah. They [crosstalk 00:42:39].

**Craig:**
They made a new company and that new company became signatory to the Writers Guild and that new company existed solely to employ me to write this movie and that’s fine, it’s a bunch of paperwork and as you say, it can be done, but if it’s done on an ad hoc basis, because they really want you to write something and they really want me to write something, that is not going to ever really move the needle, because the vast bulk of stuff that’s done, is done at places that are fully married into doing things through the Animation Guild.

**John:**
Yeah, but you get the point of the wedge in there and you can start to make some changes and that’s-

**Craig:**
Tip of the spear.

**John:**
Tip of the Spear. We’ll do it. Around the office this week, we started talking about the kinds of movies where you have the hero, who is undergoing transformation, which is true to all movies hopefully, but where the point of the story, is that the hero is changing and transforming. They’re not going on a quest for something else, but they’re actually struggling to find themselves from the start of the movie and the two things that were making me think about this, this past week, the Kendall Roy character on Succession, especially this season, you see that he’s desperately trying to figure out who he is and he’s trying to organize this publicity and to promote this image of himself. But really, he’s trying to figure out who he actually is. He wants the world to tell him who he is. He wants the press to reflect back what he wants to see and the answer is, you’re an asshole and that’s not a great answer for him to get, but I was also thinking about this article, it’s a letter sent to Blair Braverman, who writes the column for Outside Magazine and it’s about a writer who moved to a cabin off the grid and she figured like, “Oh, here I’ll be able to write every day and it’s going to be great. I have this fantasy version of what my life is like and it was just miserable,” and I wanted to talk about this as a movie construct and also maybe a TV construct as well, but this idea of characters who enter into the story, looking to transform rather than going on a quest, where the transformation happens along the way.

**Craig:**
Yeah. It’s really… Partly what this wonderful essay is talking about, is the over romanticization of writing, which will have another little thing we want to mention about that, but what’s fascinating to me about these movies, is that they aren’t necessarily doing something that any other movie isn’t. In fact, they are necessarily doing something every other movie also necessarily does. Somebody changes, but what I like about movies like this or stories like this on television, is that the character is aware of it. Whereas when they’re not aware, which is probably the majority of the time, we might be aware, but we understand at the end, she is different than she was when she started and in these kinds of stories, the character says, I don’t know who I am or I don’t like who I am. I want to figure out who I’m supposed to be and then they are somebody different at the end and that is simply about a self-awareness. There’s a meta aspect to this character who understands that they need to figure out the nature of themselves, as a protagonist in their own story.

**John:**
Yeah and as we looked at examples of things, The Graduate comes up, where we have a kid at the end of college, who starts trying to figure out who he is and what he wants in life. In Good Company feels like the same kind of movie. There’s a heavily gendered component to this, where you have a lot of women who are going through this transformation. Under the Tuscan Sun, How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Eat Pray love, but even recent examples, like Tick Tick Boom, is that you have a guy who’s trying to stage his show, but really he’s trying to figure out his existential angst, is over turning 30 and this sense of doom. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what I want.

**Craig:**
Am I successful? Am I not successful?

**John:**
Yeah. Exactly. Should I take this advertising job? And it’s really about figuring out who he is and being a musical, he can sing through his frustrations there and I think its so important to stress, that every movie’s going to have some hero transformation ideally, but it does feel so different when the character starts wanting to transform.

**Craig:**
Yeah and there’s something that is amusing about the whole thing. When they do this and this is the part of these stories I generally don’t like, what they’re doing is looking at you in the audience and saying, “You know this feeling right? You’re scared too. You don’t know who you are or you’re unhappy with who you are or you think you’re not yet where you’re supposed to be. You’re freaking out, let me show you a fairy tale where I figure it out. It’s going to make you feel good. It’s figure-outable and the fact is, that it’s generally a simplification of how that process goes, because the real process of figuring out who you are in life, is a process that ever ends and then you die. And of course in these stories, there’s a conclusion and I think I find that the conclusion is always amusing, because the last scene is, I did it. I’m happy. I’m self-actualized, I’m pleased and then we never see the next scene, where they have to wake up and then they have diarrhea or something and the next day begins again and they’re like, “Wait, actually, I’m still just… Ah, man. I’m still me.”

**John:**
Yeah. Taking off our movie lenses, because obviously we’re looking for closure in a movie, I think two series that do a very good job of characters trying to find what they actually want, Search Party, which I love, which is ostensibly about trying to figure out what happened to this missing girl, but it’s really the central character trying to figure out who she is and what she wants and her arc in transformation, but of course, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend starts with this woman on an existential quest, I don’t know what I actually want in my life and transforming everything and transforming everyone around her as she does it and because it’s a series and doesn’t have to resolve in movie time logic, it can go through all the ups and downs and the moments of realization and moments of self doubt, that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to fit into a classic two hour movie structure.

**Craig:**
Yeah and those journeys are fascinating, because they are actually dictated or at least they used to be more like this, not necessarily by what the character’s experience was and how they were following a path and arriving in a destination, but rather more how well is the show doing, because when it’s doing really well, they can’t figure their shit out yet. They’re going to have to wait until the show is ready to conclude, at which point they will figure their shit out and that’s why one of my favorite endings for a who am I, what am I supposed to be journey, is the Sopranos, because it begins with a man going to therapy as a villain, but he’s going to therapy to try and figure out who he is and what his problems are and he never gets it. He never figures it out and then he’s murdered and that’s pretty much the way life works, except minus the villain and the murder part, occasionally there’s murder.

**John:**
Occasionally there’s murder. You put a great article in the show notes here about a writer’s advice to other writers and let’s tie this in because I think it harkens back to the article I listed, which was the woman moving to the cabin. Talk to us about what you put into-

**Craig:**
Yeah, it is a wonderful little story here. Somebody has written a… I’ll just talk about the woman that it centers on, is a Polish author name and I apologize, I’m murdering this name, Wislawa Szymborska. If you are Polish please right in and help me. I’m sorry. I’ll just call her Ms. Szymborska. She was a poet. She died in 2012, at which point it was discovered she had destroyed about 90% of her writing, which is amazing. Despite that or perhaps because of it, she won the Nobel prize in 1996 for poetry. Now here’s what I love about this and this ties into this romantic search for self and particularly as writers figuring out, am I a writer, as one of our questioners asked or how do I describe myself as a writer? Or should I go to a cabin and try and write there?

**Craig:**
She wrote an anonymous column for a Polish literary journal, called Zycie Literackie. Again, I screwed that up. I’m sorry. It means literary life. She did this from the 1960s to the 1980s and the column in literary life was called Literary Mailbox and I’m quoting now from this article, “The idea was that aspiring writers would send in their work and receive helpful advice. Mainly, the article says Szymborska advised them to stop writing at once and destroy all their work.” This is like the dark iron curtain version of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:**
“The aspiring writers,” I continue to quote, “imagine that being an author will bring them happiness, fame, and fortunes. Szymborska tells them to get a grip. Writing is a ridiculous profession, she argues persuasively. Failure is inevitable. Success is highly conditional and mostly feels like failure as well,” which I’ve got to tell you is absolutely true. What is her positive advice for poor wretches out there attempting to be writers. I quote from the article, “Her advice is monumentally sensible. Don’t be a narcissist. Work much harder. The best writing utensil is a waste paper basket. Life is short, yet each detail takes time. Don’t be a utopian, but keep away from the void for as long as you can.”

**Craig:**
I’ve got to tell you, I feel like even though Ms. Szymborska and I lived at the same time, somehow I think the two of us may have been scrambled together in the simulation, because man, she’s just putting beautiful Nobel worthy, poetic words to how I feel all the time.

**John:**
Yeah. What she’s saying, also reminds me of the Kendall Roy thing I mentioned at the start of the last segment, which was basically people write into her or they want to be writers, because they have this perception of, “Oh, if I have these things, then I will be happy,” and she’s there to tell you, no, you will not be happy, just as Kendall Roy could get the company and he will not be happy.

**John:**
He just wants someone to tell him what he wants and no one can do that except for himself and in many ways, her saying, “No, you don’t want this. You’re not good at this. Stop doing this. It’ll only going to lead to misery,” is a gift in some ways. We’ve talked on the show, different times, there have been some people who’ve come up to us at live shows over the years like, “Thank you so much for your show. You convinced me that I did not want to be a screenwriter,” and I think that it’s a huge success, because if we’ve driven some people away from it who recognize like, “Oh my time is better spent doing something else.” That’s great.

**Craig:**
Completely and I think I really just want to underscore again, success is highly conditional and mostly feels like failure as well and it must be hard to believe, but-

**John:**
You and I are pretty successful and yet we often feel like failures.

**Craig:**
Well and the success in specific, because when it happens you think, “Okay, the thing is, it’s still just me and my meat suit, moving around and thinking and worrying and all the rest of it and it’s hard to describe.” Success never feels like success. The word itself is promising a mirage that you never get. You have to be just okay with all the stuff in between, because there is no cake.

**John:**
Listen, you’re not going to enjoy every moment of sitting down and actually writing, but if you actually hate writing, if you actually hate the process of doing this, but you’re just doing it because you think it’s going to feel great when you’re successful, you should stop right now, because that’s not likely to happen. You’re not going to feel good being a famous published author, if you don’t feel reasonably good, being an unpublished author.

**Craig:**
No and the cabin won’t help you and being alone won’t help you and the herbal tea won’t help you and for God’s sake, if you ever see a movie where an author suddenly gets a burst of inspiration and then there’s a typing montage and then a novel erupts, just understand that’s the writing equivalent of watching porn. It’s not how it works. It’s fake. Never, ever, never think that, that’s what happens. It has never happened. It will never happen.

**John:**
The worst part of Misery for James Caan, was he had to write a book.

**Craig:**
Exactly.

**John:**
Ah, all right. It’s time for one cool thing. My one cool thing is, one that I know Craig is very excited about, because I tipped him off about it. This is The Game Master’s Book of Non-Player Characters and the resource for really D and D, but there’s this whole weird thing where you can’t say D and D, but you can say fifth edition and it’s designed for Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons. It’s not made by the official Dungeons and Dragons people. It’s written by Jeff Ashworth and what I love so much about this, is that the writing is just so good and it’s all these characters you can use for different adventures or different encounters in underground locations or big cities or small towns. Their characters are so specific and let me see if I can get just an example of one character’s description here, because I just love the little box descriptions on people. This is Boo Boo Crawford, a foppish man of middle age, with an overwhelmingly large explorers pack, strapped to his back a few pots and pans hanging from the straps of his chest, holding a guidebook like a mask. That’s your first initial taste of Boo Boo Crawford and they talk through what he’s actually trying to do, what his goals are, what his wants and needs are. It’s so useful and I kept imagining Craig finding voices for all these characters. Craig, does very good voices when we play D and D.

**Craig:**
I try my best. I’m excited to look through this, because I really do believe that fun and interesting NPCs are half of what makes the experience fun. If you don’t have them at least here and there, the conversations become incredibly utilitarian. They’re not really conversations. There’s also not conflict. Part of it’s figuring out how this other person works. In this other game I DM, there’s a council of three people that make decisions for the town and the way that the module presents it, it’s talk to the three people, see if you can convince them and I’m like, “Okay, but who are they?”

**John:**
Yeah, I would say the official adventure books, don’t do a great job describing those characters and this is what I was [crosstalk 00:56:34].

**Craig:**
Yeah, this exactly. One of the things I did, was I decided that there would always be a vote and there’s three of them. The vote would always work one way or the other, except that one of them is just incredibly indecisive. It’s really just about, we’re no longer trying to convince this woman to why your point of view is the best. You really need to help her. You need to give her therapy, so that she can figure out why she can’t make a decision about things and the characters can engage in that way and it’s more fun and what I like about this resource is, sometimes when I’ve got 30 minutes before we’re playing, I’ve got to figure out who these three people are, being able to turn to a book and finding some great ideas would be lovely. This sounds like an amazing resource. I purchased it within seconds of you texting me about it. I’m very excited.

**John:**
I want to give one more character description here, because this is actually useful for all of us as writers. This is about Fresticia and Pillow, a barefoot girl around eight or nine years old with dark skin, a missing front tooth in her innocent smile and her hair tied up in fluffy pigtails atop her head, dressed in a black dress with a scrappy red scarf tied around her neck. She is trailed by a skeletal cat. Two sentences. I got a whole picture there.

**Craig:**
Yeah. Yeah, exactly and what’s the story with the cat and all that is great. Sometimes it’s all you need, is just a little bit of a starter and then off you go. Great recommendation, if you do play Dungeons and Dragons. I know they say game master. It is obviously the dungeon master, but of course there’s Pathfinder and all these other lovely games. John, my one cool thing and this is a 10 year odyssey of trying to find the best email client for Mac. I dumped the mail app a long time ago. Fooled around a few things, landed on Air Mail and I’ve been using Air Mail for many, many years. I think I might have convinced you at some point to use Air Mail, but there’s a new one now that I’m using, that I find much, much superior to that and it is called Canary. Canary works beautifully, far fewer errors or weird buggy techies. It’s also fast, fast, fast, fast, fast and it is for Mac OS and iOS and the two sync between each other flawlessly. I find it to be an excellent email client. I recommend it highly.

**John:**
That’s great. I think I’ve told you this before, but I switched over to Superhuman at Rachel Bloom’s recommendation and.

**Craig:**
Superhuman?

**John:**
Superhuman. I think Craig, you may want to check it out. Superhuman only works with Gmail, sits on top of a Gmail.

**Craig:**
Oh, I got a problem with that.

**John:**
All right. I’m entirely in the Gmail ecosystem, but it is ridiculously fast and it does such a great job of sorting stuff out, so I can get to inbox zero super quickly. I’ve been loving Superhuman, but it’s not to everyone’s taste. Interesting with superhuman. The onboarding process, you basically apply for it and then they make an appointment and then you have a half hour Zoom with the superhuman tech who walks you through everything.

**Craig:**
I’m never going to do that. Ever, ever. I don’t want to talk to somebody.

**John:**
It’s better. It’s better.

**Craig:**
I obviously have some Gmail addresses as everybody does, but I don’t have only Gmail.

**John:**
Yeah and you and I never actually email each other. We’re only texting.

**Craig:**
Yeah. Emails… Megana just email’s for old people, right?

**Megana:**
What? I email a lot.

**Craig:**
Well, you’re old.

**John:**
It’s a sensitive subject there, Craig.

**Craig:**
Yeah. Oh, you thought I was asking you from the young person’s point of view?

**Megana:**
Oh God.

**John:**
You can reach Megana Rao. She’s our producer of Scriptnotes. you can find her at ask@johnaugust.com. Our show is edited by Matthew Chilelli after this week is by Timothy Fajda. If you need 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 sometimes @Clmazin. I’m always @JohnAugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

**John:**
We have t-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. It’s dicey, whether you can get one of those t-shirts or hoodies by Christmas, but try. They’re really nice. They’re really soft. You can sign up to become a premium member @scriptnotes.net. You get all the back episodes and bonus segments. Like the one we’re about to record on why movie dialogue is so hard to understand. Craig and Megana, thank you so much for a fun show.

**Craig:**
Thanks guys.

**Megana:**
Thank you.

**John:**
Craig, we are talking about this article that Ben Pearson wrote for Slashfilm. I saw it passed around all over Twitter this past week, looking at whether and why movie dialogue has become harder to understand over the years. We’ll start with the first question. Is the thesis correct? Has movie dialogue become harder to understand over your lifetime?

**Craig:**
I think so. I think so. I am a sound obsessed producer and I struggle all the time, all the time, when I’m watching things. Sometimes I play things back. I struggle with the way they mix things and I wasn’t even aware of how grumpy I was about a lot of it, until I read this article and thought, ah, okay, I’m not nuts. I’m not nuts.

**John:**
Yeah. I approach it from a couple different ways. They talk about Christopher Nolan in here who seems singularly uninterested sometimes in actually, us being able to understand what his characters are saying, but also having worked on enough sets and worked with enough sound people, I know that we have tremendous technology to record sound and mix it properly and I don’t think the problem is technological on any level or that our sound professionals are not extraordinarily good. I think they all are and I want to make sure we are not throwing any of them under the bus, because it’s not their fault.

**Craig:**
No, not at all. In fact, we have more technology now than we ever have, to present excellent sound to people and I don’t mean excellent sound like everything is crisp and clear and quality, but even just beautiful. This is a problem that everybody who works on a mixing sounds stage, is well aware of. They’re fighting against this all the time. Similarly, on stage the sound recording team, which is the sound mixer there and the sound assistant, who’s wiring everybody up and the boom operator, they’re always worried about sound and they always want to make sure that we’re not picking up stuff, we shouldn’t be picking up and that the lines aren’t being muffled or squished by the movement of clothing or anything and I support that tremendously. It’s one of the first things I say early on, on a production is how important sound is to me and I let the first AD know that to me sound, it’s more important the sound is good during a take, than if I don’t know, a light gets a little wonky, but that’s me.

**John:**
Yeah and I think you’re probably also willing to say, for this shot, I don’t really care about sound. I’m not anticipating using the sound for this. You can tell people when it’s the priority. We have to understand everything here clearly or that should be the default, but if there’s some wide shot, where you’re just not going to care about the sound, you know you’re not going to use the sound, you can also tell them that, so that the sound person’s not trying to kill themselves to get sound, that you’re not going to be able to use.

**Craig:**
Which they know.

**John:**
They know.

**Craig:**
They know and the reason why we say in wide shots, the sound and dialogue isn’t particularly as important, is because we’re far enough away, that we can probably put another take in their mouth if we need to.

**John:**
Let’s talk about that, Craig, because I think most listeners probably don’t have a sense, the dialogue they see characters speaking, it may not be the actual take that they are… Editors do magic all the time.

**Craig:**
All the time. Keep in mind that obviously when we’re watching people talk, there are a few shots where we see them both at the same time, like wide shots and then once we get into coverage, meaning, okay, but now I’m over a shoulder to you and I’m over a shoulder to you or I’m clean on you and I’m close up on you, some of the dialogue is off screen. It’s off camera and we can put any take in there. We can also take a word that you might pronounce a little funny and find another take where you said the word correctly and just drop it in there with an audio edit and you’ll never know. Dialogue editors can do incredible things, but only if the dialogue has been recorded cleanly and there wasn’t the sound of a truck going under it and if the producer in the room in television, me the show runner or in features, typically the director, cares to make it sound good.

**John:**
It’s the producer or director saying, “No, no. This has to be good and we are going to either do another take, so we can get this right. We’re going to not do that noisy thing, so we can get one clean thing. We are going to get coverage. We’re going to get wild lines. We were going to spend the time to do this,” because time is probably the biggest reason why some dialogue is not recorded as cleanly as it could be.

**Craig:**
And for me, I just have an ear on it. If I’m watching a take and it’s really good, but there’s one word where, because somebody shifted in their jacket, the lab is all screwed up, then I ask the sound people, do we pick it up on the boom and also, is there another take where I could just stick that line in or is it the kind of thing where I could edit around, but the biggest impact I think the director or show runner can have on dialogue and the clarity of dialogue, is talking to the actors, because there is and this article sites something that I absolutely believe is true, a contagious mumble-core-ism, that has infected everyone and it’s bad.

**John:**
Let’s get into this, because you’re also an actor. You are on sets, where you’re having to make choices about how you were going to-

**Craig:**
I’m a great actor.

**John:**
You’re… I’m sorry, Craig, you’re a great actor., Who’s honest at making choices about how you’re going to play a line.

**Craig:**
Yes.

**John:**
And one of the choices you could make, is to bury the line or mumble the line or just not bring a lot of attention to the line, basically set it internally and you’re choosing not to do this. Talk to us about the decision about realism in delivery of things, versus the heightened thing that you might do, so people can actually understand what you’re saying.

**Craig:**
Well then once again, comedy gets it. Clarity and understanding is essential to appreciation of something, generally speaking. In drama, what can happen sometimes with actors, is in their reasonable desire to avoid indicating, emoting, overdoing, pushing, they get small, they can get really quiet. Sometimes in rehearsals, things that are just a normal conversation, like the one you and I are having, get slow and whispery. Part of it is a little bit of a fear, part of is a little bit of an insecurity. The one thing that I really don’t like doing is table reads, because I find that really good actors recognize that this is unnatural. They don’t want to be judged for their performance in that room, sitting around a table and they get mumbly. They just don’t want to be on the hook for it. Sometimes it’s about comfort. It’s about getting the actors comfortable through a few takes, so that you can start to get volume and clarity and things aren’t too whispery or mumbly.

**Craig:**
Some of the whispery/mumbly stuff is just pretense and some of it is a lack of caring. I’ve got to tell you, the thing that they cite here is Bane and I love doing my Bane impression, but I missed a bunch of Bane stuff, because I just didn’t understand why I would miss it, because it seemed like they were actually taking the audio from him, from the mask and not just re-recording it and then filtering it through the… Because, if you’re going to wear a mask, other people have to at least understand you. By the way, if in Bane, he had been, [inaudible 01:08:47] and then Batman was like, yeah and [inaudible 01:08:51] and then he’s like, “No, seriously, I do not… Say that again slowly.” [inaudible 01:08:56] and it would’ve been awesome, but they didn’t do that. Everybody understood them except for us where we were like, “What?” I do think that it’s important for the show runners and directors, to carefully and respectfully get the actors to place where you know people are going to be able to appreciate the words they’re saying.

**John:**
Yeah. I also wonder whether sometimes actors don’t have appreciation of how much editors and directors and posts and everyone else, can help them get to that quiet place. I think they may think that they have to be super, super quiet to hear, because they would be whispering in real life and don’t understand that, no, no, no, we can actually see the effect you’re trying to achieve. Let us achieve the effect, rather than you thinking you have to do it all yourself. They don’t want to feel stagey and theatrical in that way, but no, we can get you to that volume place appropriately, just give us a little bit more here, so we can record it.

**Craig:**
Yeah and a lot of times what I will do, is make a note that a word or two has been garbled a little bit. The other thing is that enunciation is a big deal for people, who’ve been trained in theater on stage. Enunciation is not necessarily something that has been strictly drilled into people, whose primary experience has been in television or film and some people struggle with enunciation and for me, rather than becoming a speech therapist, I just make notes and I think to myself, “Okay, if I really need that one clear, I’m going to go in there and say, this word got a little bit garbled,” but not, in my mind I think I’ll loop it.

**Craig:**
I can get that later and I can blend it in and it’ll be really good and looping, which is our all encompassing term for recording the line again later in a sound studio and then dropping it into the film, has become better and better and better to the point now where I’m way more comfortable believing that it will blend and that we will not notice a discontinuity in sound between naturally recorded voice and looped voice later.

**John:**
Working on a serious television show now, you’ll also get a sense of, these are actors who I know are just fantastic at ADR and looping and they are people who can say, okay, no, this is going to be fine, we’ll get that in the room, versus there might be other people like, you know what, it’s actually not their greatest skillset, is being able to hear what they did and match it and you might want to get that wild line or get another take, there on the set.

**Craig:**
Yes and one of the nice things about doing episodic television, is while we’re shooting, we’re also editing. I can go and sit down with Bella Ramsey and say, “Oh, we’ve got 20 minutes. Let’s bring our sound team over here. I just need you to say this line, because it’s off camera and it was a little funky on the mic, so let’s get it nice and clean now and then we can drop it in,” because we know it’s easy to do. We can start actually looping before we ever get even to proper post, which is advantageous.

**John:**
But, underlying all of this is you have to care and the fact that you do care, is why you’re going to get some good sound. Basically, the answer to this question about movie dialogue and how to get it better, is just it’s caring and it’s making sure that the caring comes from the very start.

**Craig:**
It’s caring and as much as I love when people have complimented a show I’ve made, about how it looks, when I get a compliment about how it sounds, that’s the thing that just warms my heart the most and I think I’ve seen this interesting look on the face of people in post, when I talk about this and it’s sad, because the look is, finally. Do you know what I mean? They’ve been neglected and it’s not right and look, maybe it’s just me, but sound to me is like smell. It’s a weird one, except that’s where all the memories come from. It’s just a faster root to my weird under brain and that’s what I find sound can do.

**John:**
Love it. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:**
Thank you John.

Links:

* [Endeavor sells its content side CJ Entertainment](https://labusinessjournal.com/news/2021/nov/29/endeavor-sells-content-studio-south-korean-media-c/)
* [WGA Health Fund](https://www.wgaplans.org/health/healthfaqs.html) now eligible for infertility treatments.
* [For tips on understanding your contract, check out episode 407](https://johnaugust.com/2019/scriptnotes-ep-407-understanding-your-feature-contract-transcript)
* [A writer who moved off the grid and hates it](https://www.outsideonline.com/culture/love-humor/remote-cabin-write/) advice by Blair Braverman
* [Have You Considered Accountancy? How to Start Writing (and When to Stop): Advice for Writers By Wisława Szymborska (Edited and translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh)](https://literaryreview.co.uk/have-you-considered-accountancy) review by Joanna Kavenna
* [The Game Master’s Book of Non-Player Characters](https://www.amazon.com/Game-Masters-Book-Non-Player-Characters/dp/1948174804) by Jeff Ashworth
* [Canary Mail](https://canarymail.io/) email service for MacOS and iOS
* [Why Movie Dialogue is so Hard to Understand](https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-has-gotten-more-difficult-to-understand-and-three-ways-to-fix-it/?fbclid=IwAR3ClhGA3-F33lfL1MXxML90-rrSH8Tt2vARyijsSFKEsZL-3D5vrJO6i-g#) by Ben Pearson for Slashfilm
* [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 Timothy Vajda ([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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