Scriptnotes Transcript

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

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name’s Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 543 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

While it may sound like a normal John and Craig episode, it’s actually not. Craig and I couldn’t find a time to record together this week, so instead we’re recording two separate episodes in which we attempt to answer 40 listener questions.

I am going to tackle the first 20. Of course, all this wouldn’t be possible without our intrepid producer, Megana Rao. Megana, welcome to the show.

**Megana Rao:** Hello.

**John:** I say welcome to the show, but you’re actually always on the show. We can hear your laughter sometimes in the background, even when you’re not asking questions. Today you’ll be asking so many questions.

**Megana:** I’m ready. I’ve done all my vocal exercises.

**John:** Sounds good. Now next week you’ll be doing the same exercise with Craig, who will answer 20 more questions. I’m curious who’s going to have the better answers. I will be listening to this without having any exposure to it. It’ll all be a surprise to me when the next week’s episode comes out.

**Megana:** Yes, but it’s not a competition, because they’re different questions. I couldn’t bear to pit you guys against each other.

**John:** Also, we’ll have a Bonus Segment, as always. This week, Megana and I will discuss murder architecture, specifically how it relates to the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Fresh. Basically, who are these architects and contractors who are hired to build these houses in which all you can really do is kill somebody? I really want to get into the backstory behind how these houses exist, because they’re really cool and cinematic, but they’re also not practical for things other than murder. It’ll be fun.

You and Craig, I suspect you’re going to discuss millennial stuff, because Craig is obsessed with you as a millennial.

**Megana:** I hope to represent us well.

**John:** Represent us, but not me, because I’m Generation X. You’re representing your people.

**Megana:** Correct.

**John:** Your millennial identity. Last week’s episode, we were talking about keyboards. Craig mentioned that he was incredibly fast typist, he was over 100 words per minute. I was joking that you were a slow typist. We actually took a typing test and found out that you are a faster typist than I am. What number did you get?

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

**John:** I had 62 words per minute and 100% accuracy. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the test that we used, so if you want to compare yourself to the Scriptnotes folks to see how well you did. The 100% accuracy, I did make some mistakes and then back up and fix some things.

**Megana:** It counts against your total time, so I think that’s fair.

**John:** I think it’s fair too. That’s with my current weird keyboard. I do feel like the typing test, obviously you’re looking at stuff and you’re trying to type what they’re having you type, but that’s not necessarily reflective of how I really type in real life, which is basically dumping my brain out onto a page, which I think could be a little bit faster than that.

**Megana:** Because this typing test was you had to accurately notate what words they were giving you, it wasn’t–

**John:** Yeah. If I wanted to write their words, I wouldn’t be a screenwriter. In our discussion of ergonomic keyboards, several listeners also pointed me towards the ZSA Moonlander, which is a very cool looking keyboard. I always wanted to try it out, because it does look neat. It’s one of these very split keyboards where your left half and right half are completely separate units that you can position however you want to position them. They look neat. I’m eager to try something. An advantage to it may be that it’s much more portable, because one of the challenges I have with my weird vertical keyboard is it’s a bitch to pack. It’d be great to have something I could travel with if I need to travel. I’m going to be traveling this next week, so we’ll see.

**Megana:** Do you normally travel with that keyboard?

**John:** I don’t. Normally if I’m just traveling, I’m just using my MacBook, which is fine for short times, but it’s harder for longer periods of time. The year I was living in Paris, I did have to travel with my big keyboard, and so I had to find a whole setup there for how I was going to make this work with the keyboard. It’s a fragile thing to be packing and traveling with this stuff.

**Megana:** It’s massive.

**John:** It’s massive. It’s big.

**Megana:** This thing’s gorgeous though. I hope you get it.

**John:** You’ll see it. It’s coming in about two weeks. By the time I’m back from my trip, it’ll be here and we’ll try it out.

**Megana:** Cool.

**John:** Cool. It’s time for all these questions. Usually on the show, the questions get pushed to the end of the episode. Now we’re going to start with the questions and go through it. You and I were both looking at the 72 Questions with Phoebe Waller-Bridge from–

**Megana:** Vogue.

**John:** Vogue, yeah. This will not be nearly as scripted, but hopefully we’ll have some good answers to questions that our listeners actually really truly have.

**Megana:** Cool. Are you ready?

**John:** I’m ready. I’m ready. I’m stretched. I’m limber. Let’s go for it.

**Megana:** We’re going to start with a short one. Steve asked, “Are Stuart Specials a bad thing?”

**John:** Stuart Specials are what we call when we get a Three Page Challenge that starts in a way where a situation, a scene has happened, and then at the end of the three pages, then we flash back to the real time. Essentially, it’s opened in a flash forward. I don’t think Stuart Specials are always a bad thing. They become a cliché in the Three Page Challenge.

Here’s an argument for the Stuart Special is that you’re giving the reader and viewer a taste of where your movie is headed to and what it’s going to evolve into, which may not be indicative of what the normal start of the movie would be. It’s attention-grabbing in that way. Go opens with a Stuart Special. That’s fine. It is a little bit of a cliché. Megana, as you’re reading through Three Page Challenges, do you find yourself avoiding any of them because they are cliché within our little domain?

**Megana:** I think that’s exactly it. I like Stuart Specials when I see them on screen, but when I’m reading through so many Three Page Challenges, I think I get frustrated because I feel tricked by the end. I’m like, “Where is this going?” because I only have the three pages.

**John:** When I see them in real movies, they can be really effective and it gives you a sense like, oh, this is where it’s headed. You’re also waiting for that scene to happen. Sometimes you can become impatient for that moment to happen, because you know it’s supposed to be there.

**Megana:** I also realized this as I was reading this question. I forget about the beginnings of movies a lot.

**John:** That’s fair too. A movie that’s doing well, a movie that’s setting us up well and going well scene by scene by scene, you forget what you saw before, and you’re really just in it in the moment, so therefore you’ll forget about the Stuart Special. Hopefully, it caught your attention, but it’s not making you think back to it. If you’re thinking back to the opening halfway through the movie, something’s not working halfway in the movie. Cool.

**Megana:** Sam asks, “I’ve encountered a lot of advice over the years about dealing with scripts that are too long, but I rarely see people talk about what to do when a script comes up short in length, like when a feature draft is 75 pages. I realize I might just write 75-page features, but I have a hunch that I rush through things. I’m a video/podcast editor as my day job, and I think my instincts to cut things down take over during outlining and writing. I have a hard time not going as quickly as I can from wherever I’m starting a script to the ending I have in mind. Do you have any advice for how to allow scripts to breathe or for how to take a short script and look for what might be missing from it?”

**John:** Sam, I think the real problem here is you probably don’t have a second act. I’m guessing that what you’re really writing is a first act and a third act, and you’re not really allowing a second act to breathe and develop and grow and change. By that, I mean you’re creating a situation and then you’re resolving that situation, without building and conflicts and other developments in between. I suspect it’s not that your scenes are too short, that you’re running too efficiently. It’s just that you’re not actually creating enough obstacles along the way for your story to finish. There’s nothing inherently wrong about a short script. I think we all love things that can clock in at under two hours. You are probably just not actually creating enough moments of conflict and development and suspense. You’re just not doing enough there. It really is probably an outlining phase problem.

Before you start your next project, really look at where are you starting, where do you think you want to end up, but where are the surprising things along the way that can happen? What are the detours that will be rewarding? Remember, you as the writer know where it’s all headed, but the audience shouldn’t know where it’s all headed. Really, what does the character want in the moment? How can you send that character down a road that makes sense for the character, that point, but is going to lead to new obstacles and new complications? I think you’re just probably missing beats. You’re just not letting yourself explore and enjoy the story the way that you want to in a feature film.

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

**John:** A couple things. I’ve talked on this show a lot about how I have a stack of index cards scattered throughout the house. If I need to write something down, like a note, an idea, a thought, I’ll just grab an index card and write it down and put it some place where I can find it again. If it’s in the middle of the night, I will take that and stick it by the bedroom door so that it’s there and I can take it downstairs in the morning and process it and put it in my notes of things to do.

I will also use the Notes app on my phone for things like casting lists or like, that’s a good idea for this person in this role. The Notes app is really helpful for that. We certainly share notes between me and my husband for things like the grocery list and stuff like that, stuff we want to be able to easily access and add to and share at any moment.

For things that I want to hold on to and I don’t have a thing to do with them right now, but I need to not forget them, I started using Roam, R-O-A-M. It’s called Roam Research, which is like a personal Wiki where you can just dump information. I’ll have broad categories of places where I’ll put stuff. It wants to enter everything into a daily view, so you can track what day you entered some stuff. Then it’ll have little category labels for things. If this is related to a project, I’ll just use that project category and dump in my notes for that. That’s how I’ve processed those individual index cards full of information, make sure I don’t forget those things. I don’t do a great job of going back through that, honestly, and remembering it, but I know it’s always there. It keeps it from being a loop in my brain.

I think one of the best things about taking notes is it just frees your brain from having to remember stuff yourself. The only way you can remember things is by looping it and keeping an active memory. Put it in that long-term memory, and then you don’t have to stress out about it.

**Megana:** Super helpful.

**John:** Megana, what do you use for your notes? I see you doing different things. What are you using right now for your notes?

**Megana:** I mostly use the Notes app on my phone, but it’s an absolute mess. I found a note on there the other day that just said “animals” and I have no idea what that means or why I wrote that. I will write things in the middle of the night or whatever, I have an idea, I’ll create a new note for it, but it’s not organized and it’s not functional in any way.

**John:** We don’t have phones in our bedroom, and so I don’t ever turn on my phone in my room. Having just physical paper is good, because it lets me get it out of my head, but it doesn’t invite me to do anything more with it. I can’t look something up in the middle of the night, which is really helpful for me.

**Megana:** That’s very cool. I’m going to try the index card thing.

**John:** If you’re reading a book and you need to take a note about something in a book, how do you do that?

**Megana:** I guess I take a picture of it on my phone.

**John:** Then do you do something with that picture or it just sits in your photo roll?

**Megana:** It just sits in my photo album.

**John:** I think using the camera as a memory tool, it’s so helpful and it’s just so handy, but it’s hard to doing anything with that after the fact. Now with the iPhone, you can select the text in a photo and copy it out. It’s a thing to do, but you have to actually remember to do that.

**Megana:** You can search by text now, which is cool, because I’m always quoting things that I read, but have no sense of where they came from, so that’s helpful.

**John:** It’s nice. If I’m reading a book and there’s something I do need to remember, I will grab an index card and just write it down, because the actual process of having to actually write it makes me think about it more and makes me think of the context of it. I will, again, try to just use paper when I can.

**Megana:** Do you ever annotate your books?

**John:** I’m not a person who marks them up a lot. I don’t underline or mark stuff up. You’ll see some books around the house where I’ve done that, but it’s really the exception. Are you a marker-up of books?

**Megana:** If it’s something I’m using towards my writing, then yes, but otherwise, not really.

**John:** Makes sense.

**Megana:** It’s a lot of effort.

**John:** I feel like I’m never going to see that again. I have that shame about not marking up books, because what I was taught in grade school and libraries is you just don’t mark up books. I always feel bad for the next person who’s going to get that book.

**Megana:** Exactly, or embarrassed that they’re going to think the things that I marked up were lame.

**John:** It’s always fun when I read a book on Kindle. You can see that a bunch of people have marked, have highlighted a passage. It’s like, oh yeah, I can see why everyone has highlighted that one passage.

**Megana:** I know, but I judge them for that. I’m like, oh really?

**John:** So basic.

**Megana:** Clint asks, “Since shorts move so quickly, I’d like your opinion on ways to do character development. It feels like there isn’t much time to develop a character. Should we strive for longer shorts of characters more the focus rather than plot?”

**John:** Clint, I wonder if you’re not thinking about shorts in the right way, because I think we talk so much on this podcast about character development and characters having wants and needs and going through a journey, and there’s this whole sense of leaving home and emerging transformed, and it’s all about a onetime journey that transforms a character. Shorts aren’t necessarily that. Shorts are often just a situation. Shorts are like short stories. They’re really describing what a character is experiencing. They’re like a snapshot in many ways, more than a full journey at times.

I think maybe you can ease off on your pressure to have this massive character development, because there’s not really a time or space for that. It’s not really what a short film is designed to do. A short film is more like a joke. It has a setup, development, and then a punchline, a delivery. That’s great. You don’t have to think about, oh, I need to make a longer short in order to have better character development. No. I think as long as you’re really exploring the question that the short film is asking and delivering a good answer, that’s really the goal.

What you may also be thinking about is how many characters you’re trying to introduce into your short film. I think some of the best short films are really constrained in the number of characters they’re giving us, so it can really follow one person’s short journey in it. You may not have time or space to have meaningful characters set up who are having real conflict with each other. Really, it’s about one character encountering a situation and getting through a situation.

**Megana:** I agree with you. I think maybe the expectation for a short is different. Even as an audience member, I’m not expecting to see character development. I just want to see something, a little slice-of-life sort of thing.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s a postcard rather than a full book.

**Megana:** Adrian asks, “In what part of writing the script do you think about music? Not like the movie Yesterday where the plot revolves around the music. I’m particularly curious about music rights that you don’t own.”

**John:** I tend to think about music pretty early on in the process, because I’m really trying to figure out what does this movie feel like, what does this show feel like, what does it sound like. I will try to build playlists for myself in Apple Music pretty early on, just like, this is what reminds me of this movie that I’m writing. Those songs won’t necessarily make it into the soundtrack. They may not be part of the script, but they’re just giving me a sense of what this all feels like.

There’s a new project that I may be doing. I’ve already started pulling some songs that make me feel like, oh, I would love to see this in context of the show, or it just reminds me of what I want this to feel like. This is a composer that I think would be fantastic for it. This is a vibe that I think is fantastic for it. Pretty early on, I do think about the music.

Yes, there are practical concerns about what songs you’re going to actually be able to get or not get. That’s going to come down the road. I don’t try to stress out about that too much at the start. For my movie The Nines, I wanted some musical kind of numbers. There would be two songs that would be sung in the course of the movie. Quite early on, I knew those would be important story scenes and that we needed to actually license the rights and prerecord them and do all that stuff. That was great and that was exciting. That’s not the norm for most scripts you’re going to be writing for someone else to read.

I would say just use thinking about music as a way to help you build the world in your head, but also don’t let it become a time suck where you’re curating the perfect playlist for this movie that you’re never actually writing. All these kind of things can be distractions from the actual real hard work of sitting down and putting words after each other to actually build your movie.

**Megana:** I get to listen to that music sometimes when you and I are driving around or something, but are you sharing that with anyone else?

**John:** Generally not. There’s one project which I had a collaborator on, so he and I have a shared playlist for that. No, I’m not usually sending in a bunch of tracks along with the script to the studio. If it is generally musical, then of course we’re all listening to the same things or making sure we’re talking about the same songs. At this stage, I wouldn’t be sharing this with anybody else. For one project I’m working on, there’s a very specific vibe of music that I’m trying to do. I think it may make sense for me to put in links in the script to some examples of what this is going to sound like, because otherwise people may not really have a sense of what it is I’m describing. You’ve actually talked about one of your projects, you just put links in the pdfs to the songs, and that was helpful. I’ve done that with another project, on your suggestion.

**Megana:** Cool. I’ve never seen you reference a particular song if it wasn’t a musical in your script before, but I definitely feel that the vibe that you’ve created in your playlist translates.

**John:** In my script for Dark Shadows, Let the Sunshine In was an incredibly important song for one sequence. That’s a thing where I did script into the movie, like, this is going to happen here, but that’s really an exception for me.

**Megana:** Cool. Nick asks, “What are some of the ways seeing your work produced has influenced your writing style, particularly seeing actors perform your characters and their dialog, and possibly the questions they ask you about it?”

**John:** It is a big difference when you first see something actually happening in front of you. The first thing I had produced was Go. I remember sitting on set. We were shooting this scene which is no longer in the movie. We’re in this apartment building. I’m sitting on the floor outside of camera view and watching this first scene get shot. I was just so excited. I’m seeing these things happening. These words I wrote are actually now… Actors are saying them and it’s all happening in front of me.

Then you realize it all becomes small technical questions on the day. You approach the scene with this perfect idealized version of how it’s all going to be. Then when you actually get there, you realize there are a thousand compromises and some wonderful discoveries you make along the way, like, “Oh, I didn’t see that as a possibility. This is really great. I love that line reading they’re giving. I love how the director’s staging this thing.”

More importantly and more present are the compromises that are being made based on the reality of the locations you have, the time you have, who you have, the number of setups you can get into. I think a thing you learn over time is what’s easy and what’s difficult in production. The things that are going to be obstacles along the way could be the number of night scenes you have, the number of kids you have, the number of really complicated setups, the number of characters you have in a scene.

A thing I don’t think I realized was when I was just pushing words around on paper is that if you have a character who is not doing anything in a scene, it’s really tough for that actor to be present in a scene but not actually have lines or have a specific thing they’re trying to do. They just become dead weight there. When we’re reading a script, we don’t really notice it in there, but then you actually shoot a scene, you realize, oh wow, that character’s standing there and has nothing to do. That becomes a problem. That’s a conversation you end up having with directors and actors and finding business for them on the set.

A thing you also recognize once you’ve actually had things produced is recognizing that scenes that aren’t absolutely necessary will probably get cut, because there’s just this ruthless pressure to have everything build to the next thing and build to the next scene. If you have a scene that you really need to keep in there for tone reasons, for comedy reasons, make sure there’s a plot reason why it also needs to be in there, because otherwise, it’s in real jeopardy.

When you talk with actors about what they’re doing in the scene or what their motivation is, it’s important, as a writer, to remember that they are there to be the character, they are not there to be the movie. Always frame your answers in terms of what it is they’re trying to do right now and what is right in front of them and not what the scene is supposed to do or what’s happening in the movie, because they don’t know, they don’t care, that’s not their responsibility. Their responsibility is to their performance in this moment. That can be a thing that’s hard to remember, because you are the person who has this God’s-eye view on the whole thing. You remember why that character’s saying that line, because it’s setting up something down the road that doesn’t matter. What matters is why they are saying in that moment.

One of the things I think is really useful about being the screenwriter though who does have a God’s-eye view is sometimes there can be an instinct in a scene to make a little change. It doesn’t matter. It flows a little bit more naturally, but you know it sets up something very important later on. It echoes something later on. You may need to stop and say, “I get why you’re trying to do that. This becomes important later on for these reasons,” and you can have that conversation. That’s another good reason to have a writer on set, because you can sometimes point to things that they wouldn’t otherwise see.

The last thing I would say is that you’ll see in director Q and A’s about a movie that came out, it’s like, “Oh, I had this long scene, and then we decided that actor can just do it in a look. They don’t need all this dialog. They don’t need all this stuff.” Sure, that happens some. Often, you do need the dialog, or at least without that dialog you wouldn’t have gotten to that look. It’s recognizing that you are giving them things to say and stage directions to help create that mood. Sometimes they can cut things out, because we got it with a look. That doesn’t mean it was a failure on your part as a writer. It means it was a success that you were able to create a situation in which they could give a performance that didn’t need to have all the words you originally could’ve put there.

**Megana:** That’s super helpful. You and I both watched a movie recently where you could say all of the actors are in their own different movie. That’s a really helpful thing to keep in mind. Your point about having actors who are necessary to the scene reminded me of that Patton Oswalt clip in, I think it’s the King of Queens, where he’s in the scene but doesn’t have any dialog, and he just stands perfectly still in the background. Have you seen it?

**John:** I haven’t. That sounds great.

**Megana:** It’s amazing. I’ll include it in the show notes and Slack it to you. It’s so good.

**John:** That surprises me with something like King of Queens, because I feel like an ongoing show would have a really good sense of like, okay, we have to service all these characters and all these actors. They probably wouldn’t put somebody in the scene who didn’t absolutely need to be there. Sometimes they needed him for one line, which was coming at the very end. There are these wide shots that you can just see him there in the acts. It’s tough.

A thing you don’t appreciate when you’re writing scenes is how they’re going to be shot and how coverage is going to work, which is basically when the camera is focused on one actor versus another actor and when you’re in wider shots, when you’re in medium shots, and how differently it’ll play than the master shot that you’re probably thinking about as you’re writing the scene. Generally, we’re writing scenes to reflect reality, like what is actually really happening in this space. We’re not hopefully thinking too much shot by shot by shot by shot, but ultimately it is going to be shot by shot by shot by shot, and understanding that some things are going to change and feel different because of that. The rhythms and the tempos will change. That’s just the compromise we’re making for the media that we’re chosen to write in.

**Megana:** I’d love to hear you guys talk more about just the mechanics of characters entering and leaving scenes.

**John:** Absolutely. Let’s put that on the board for a future episode, because entrances and exits are so crucial. We try to cut them as much as possible, because they can be shoe leather, but they can also be really essential when they need to happen. On stage, they have to happen, because bodies have to move on and move off. There’s a whole art to that. There’s a very different art to how we do it on film and television.

**Megana:** Great. Next question, Katie in LA asks, “I’ve been wanting your perspective on the intersection of parenting and art, specifically in regards to Euphoria. Do you watch it? Do your children? As a parent of a five-year-old, it gives me panic attacks, but as you are further along in your parenting journey, I’d love to know if it’s a thing for you and/or how you’re talking to your kids about it.”

**John:** As a parent of a teen, Euphoria also gives me panic attacks. Listen, it’s a show about high schoolers, which means that junior high schoolers really want to watch it. They want to watch it most. Yet it’s a show that’s really made for adults.

I want to both support the show in terms of it has its vision of showing high school life through a very different lens, and I want to support that vision, and yet as a parent I really wish the show didn’t exist. I can say that. I wish the show didn’t exist as a parent, not as a writer, because I think it is so dangerously attractive to exactly the teens who shouldn’t be watching it. It’s not trying to glamorize that life, and yet it is glamorizing that life, because these are ridiculously attractive people doing really dangerous things in this perpetual Southern California fog somehow. For all the reasons it is so attractive to teenagers, I think it’s also not a great thing for certain teenagers to watch. I think it can be really triggering for some kids who should not be seeing it.

Katie’s talking about she has a five-year-old. You can control access to media for a five-year-old. It’s much harder to control access to media for a 13-year-old, a 14-year-old who has the internet and who can find stuff, even if you were to put a password on your HBO Max account. That’s a real question. I think the issues of responsibility kick in there too. Yet I don’t want to take away their specific vision of somebody who wants to make this show about this experience. It’s just tough.

I have to hold both things, that I want the show to be able to exist, because it’s a show with an artistic vision and really great performances and all the things that are noble about it, and as a parent I don’t want it to be out there for teens who shouldn’t see it. It’s really hard to keep your teens from seeing it. I do feel like sometimes people who create things like this aren’t aware of how challenging it is to keep things from teens who want to see it. Megana, what’s your take on Euphoria? You’ve watched it.

**Megana:** I’ve watched it. I watched the first season. I haven’t seen the second season yet. I also don’t know if I’m ready for it. They are impossibly cool and hot. I could totally see how if I was in junior high school it would set up this expectation. I think kids are able to parse things out and know that that’s not reality, but it is a little bit harder to discern when you’re that age and you’re that close to it. I totally hear what you’re saying. That makes a lot of sense.

Jerry asks, “I’m intercutting between two scenes that happen at the same place, but at different times. This will be sustained for three and a half pages. Is it best to use slug lines in transitions or offer an action line detailing the nature of the transitions early on in the scene?”

**John:** The word Jerry wants is intercutting or intercut. What he can do, and this is common, you’ll see it in a lot of scripts, is let’s say there’s two basic scenes happening. There is a bank robbery happening and there is a scene in a diner happening. They’re happening at the same time. You’re intercutting between the two of them. They have some sort of play between the two of them, but they’re not the same scene. They’re two different spaces. Generally, you’ll set up one moment. The bank heist is happening, and we’re seeing what’s happening in the vault. That’ll be its own scene header. New scene header for INT diner day, and these two characters are having this meal.

Then at a certain point you say intercut. Intercut means both scenes are going to be happening. From that point forward, you can just use the scene description to talk about what’s happening in those moments. You don’t have to keep going back to scene header, scene header, scene header. For most situations, this will get you through it and it’ll feel nice and natural, because you’re not stopping the flow constantly the way you would be if you were throwing in scene headers all the time. It makes it really feel more like the sequence would be in the movie then just a bunch of scene headers on a page. Intercut or intercutting is your friend there.

At a certain point when you’re done with that, you say, END INTERCUTTING. That’s all uppercase, generally with a period, basically like, hey, we’re done with that sequence and now it’s time to move on. Then either you stay in one of your moments, in one of your situations, or you go to a whole new scene header for a new place that you’re going to end up.

**Megana:** I see. Would you also delineate when you are going to see a certain scene by using voiceover from the other scene? Does that make sense?

**John:** If it’s important that we’re not seeing the character on screen doing it, but that it’s a voiceover, sure, you put the VO after them. I think you would probably want to indicate, from Max side, Molly VO, they’re coming right towards you, or something like that. That’s a situation where you might want to try to make that more clear. In most cases it will just make sense. You can find ways just with scene description to have it make sense. We know who the characters are. We know where they are. You don’t need to hold our hand through it all.

**Megana:** That’s super helpful.

**John:** That was a good palette cleanser there. We can go back to something a little bit more challenging.

**Megana:** Enthusiastic But Not Ignorant asks, “I’m a mid-career mid-list novelist. I’ve written several books which have been published by commercial houses and well-reviewed in major outlets, but I’m not a bestseller. Now an established production company with a solid track record has made an option offer on my latest book, with the aim of making a limited series. My question is this. If I wanted to use this opportunity to get some TV writing experience, what is the best way to go about it? Should I ask to take a crack at the pilot on spec? Should I wait to see if something goes into production and try to get in the writers’ room? I want to be involved, but I also want to give this the best chance of success, which probably means allowing people who have actually done this before to take the reins.”

**John:** I love Enthusiastic, because Enthusiastic sees what they want, but also recognizes why going after what they want too aggressively may hurt the thing down the road. You’re coming at this from the right perspective. Congratulations on writing the books, and this book in particular which may go to limited series. Take that victory for what it is.

I think your goal now should be, how do I help this series be as awesome as it could possibly be? That is by being supportive and enthusiastic about the project, supportive and enthusiastic about who are they bringing to be the showrunner on this project, who hopefully you will meet with. Try to be that resource for them, so that they always feel like you’re on their side, you are that person who can help them achieve greatness with this.

I would not try to write this pilot yourself, because you don’t know how to do it. All the natural problems that are going to come up with writing this pilot are going to be amplified, because they’re going to be worried about you as a new screenwriter trying to adapt this thing. You could turn the same script that somebody else could turn in, but they’re going to judge it weirdly because you don’t have experience actually making the show. I think you should not try to write it.

I think you should offer to read absolutely anything, give enthusiastic, positive notes, really try to help the process, but not intervene very much in it, because I do worry that you’re going to probably derail it more than you’re going to help it. In success, then you have the opportunity to be more involved on the next project, and you’ll also read a bunch of these things, you’ll have seen how this all happened and how the sausage was made.

**Megana:** Would you recommend that Enthusiastic try to get into the writers’ room down the line? I hear what you’re saying about the pilot, but should they, I don’t know, try to position themself for any sort of writing credit on this project?

**John:** I don’t think that’s a great idea, because I think if you were going to be in the writers’ room on a project, there’s going to be this weird power dynamic between you and the showrunner, because you are the person who created the original material, and this is the showrunner, and if they’re changing things, people look, like, “Oh, is it okay that they’re changing this thing? I don’t think that’s a great idea.”

If people can write with other experiences where it’s worked out great, fantastic. I know on The Leftovers, Damon Lindelof and the guy who wrote the book The Leftovers, they did collaborate on stuff, and that sounded great. If the person who wants to adapt your book wants to adapt it with you, that’s great. That’s a fantastic dream scenario, but that’s not likely. It’s going to probably be a very special situation if that’s the case. I think Tom Perrotta is the man I was trying to think about for The Leftovers. Maybe that’ll happen, but I don’t think it’s going to probably happen in this case.

**Megana:** Got it. Francesco asks, “I’ve been watching the Dirty Harry series on HBO Max recently, as well as Bullet, and found myself wondering why we don’t get a lot of movies set in San Francisco anymore. In the ’60s and ’70s it seemed like a reasonable place to set movies, but in the last couple of decades, everything seems to be set in either New York or LA. The exceptions are biopics about people from SF, like Milk. Even a movie that was written and set in San Francisco like 500 Days of Summer ended up being switched to LA. Is there some financial or logistical reason for this, like San Francisco not offering good tax credits, or are cities other than Los Angeles and New York not considered relatable or interesting anymore? I ask about the lack of San Francisco-based movies because it’s my nearest big city, but I suspect if they were making Rocky now, it wouldn’t be set in Philadelphia. Thoughts?”

**John:** I think Rocky would still be set in Philadelphia. I think San Francisco is a weird special case that’s worth looking at. San Francisco, from what I understand from producers who try to shoot there, it’s just ridiculously hard to shoot there. It makes you recognize how much LA and New York City bend over backwards to make it comparably easy to shoot there. When it comes to permits, policing, neighbors, parking, basically the infrastructure within a town to make it simple to shoot a film there are just much robust in cities that shoot a lot. There’s a virtuous cycle where because things shoot here, it’s easy to shoot things here. Because things aren’t shooting in San Francisco, it’s harder to shoot things there. You don’t have the crew and equipment infrastructure, because there aren’t crews ready to go in San Francisco of a size for a big studio feature, because there aren’t people living up there who have been doing that all the time.

There are some logistical problems in San Francisco apparently also just because of it’s so hilly. Where you park the trucks is a real challenge. If you don’t have good cooperation from police and traffic and everybody else to move cars off the road, so you can actually park places where you need to put those big trucks, that can be a challenge.

That said, there are movies that are shot there. I’m thinking back to Diary of a Teenage Girl. Marielle Heller came on to talk about that. That was shot in San Francisco. Again, it’s a smaller movie. It has a smaller footprint, which makes a lot more sense for that. The HBO show Looking that I loved was also set in San Francisco, shot in San Francisco. They made it work, but I bet it was more challenging in San Francisco than it would’ve been here in Los Angeles. They made the choice to really do it in San Francisco, which is great for that.

I do think Rocky would shoot in Philadelphia. That was iconic for that movie, that place. You’re also close enough to New York City that you can pull in a crew from New York if you need to. It’s not that challenging.

When we made Big Fish, we were in Montgomery, Alabama and Wetumpka, Alabama. There was no crew, and so we had to pull people in from every place else. The city was really accommodating for us because we were the first big feature to come in there, but they didn’t have the kind of infrastructure that other places would have. We had to wing it. We had to spend money that we wouldn’t have otherwise had to spend, just because of the challenges of shooting in a place that was not used to filming.

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

**John:** I think Zoom pitches are here to stay. Right now in Los Angeles as we’re recording this, it’s safe enough that people could go back in the room to do things in person. I actually think they’re going to go back to doing stuff in person. All the meetings and the pitches I’ve had recently have been on Zoom, and producers and other folks who aren’t even in Los Angeles. It would be really impossible or very unlikely to get them to fly to Los Angeles to do this one pitch. I think Zoom pitching is here to stay. I think 70, 80% of pitches coming up will be Zoom pitches, at least for the next few years. It’s not just the pandemic. It really is an easier, better way to do some of this work.

Megana, you’ve been helping me out so much on pitching recently. I have these slide decks I need to use. We discovered it’s much easier for you to join the Zoom call as well and be the person driving the slides while I’m just talking. I’m not responsible for clicking forward and switching stuff from one input to another input. I think it does just make sense for pitching really. When you’re on Zoom, everyone can look at the same set of slides or everyone’s looking forward. You’re not having to pay attention to one person in the room or other people in the room. I just think it’s better, and I think Zoom pitching is here to stay.

**Megana:** All the things about, I don’t know, your bodily awareness you don’t have to worry about in a Zoom pitch, like, oh, this outfit I’m wearing is scratchy or I’m too hot in this room. You can control it, because it’s your house.

**John:** Megana, you’ve been pitching a ton, but you’ve only done Zoom pitches. You don’t really have the experience of pitching a project in a room, correct?

**Megana:** Correct, but I love Zoom pitches. They’re fun. I guess I’ve adapted to the Zoom of it all. I’m sure I would love in-person pitches too, because I like meeting people and chatting. I think the Zoom, and now that we’ve all gotten a little bit better at the logistics of sharing kino and the tech behind it, it’s become really seamless and everyone knows what to expect.

**John:** What I do miss about in-person pitching and in-person meetings, general meetings too, is I think you get a sense of whether you vibe with somebody better in person than you do on Zoom. That’s just a reality check. I remember very early meetings with Andrea Giannetti, who’s at Sony now, but back when she was at TriStar, she calls me into her office and she’s like [unclear 00:37:46] going through stuff and just get a sense of, oh, I get who you are. I don’t think I would have that same experience with her now on Zoom, just because a Zoom meeting is just much more functional. It’s not hang out and vibe and chitchat a bit. It’s different on that level. I will miss a little of that, but on the whole, we’ve had the chance to pitch to, as you saw, 12 places that would’ve been impossible to pitch if we were trying to do this in person.

**Megana:** Oh my gosh. That’s a great point. I’ve had a couple of generals that have been in person. From the logistics of meeting someone and figuring out who they are at the coffee shop or where to go in the office, all of that in-between stuff, I do think you get a good sense of your dynamic and who the other person is that you don’t via Zoom.

**John:** There’s going to be some function of in-person stuff for certain kinds of things, but if we’re actually going out to pitch a project and trying to pitch to 10 places in a week, Zoom is just so much better. I remember when we were trying to set up Prince of Persia, and Jordan Mechner and I were literally driving studio to studio to studio, and it was all like, could we get from this place to that place, or suddenly we’d have to go from Sony to Warner Bros.

**Megana:** Oh my gosh.

**John:** It’s tough. The folks who don’t live in Los Angeles are like, what’s the difference between Sony and Warner Bros? It’s an hour in bad traffic.

**Megana:** What else is nice is I feel like it frees up your day, because there are certain times of day in Los Angeles where no one should be driving. Now you can pitch at 4 o’clock and it’s no big deal.

**John:** There was a company who wanted to do Arlo Finch, and so I remember going out to have a meeting with them in Santa Monica. I liked them, but the fact that they were in Santa Monica made me really a little bit down on them as a place. Now, much less of a deal, because I recognize I would never be driving out to Santa Monica.

**Megana:** Moving on to Ben, Ben asked, “I finally got a job at a major film studio. I’m a receptionist/office coordinator. On my break, my boss’s boss’s boss saw me working on my script. We talked about story for a while, and as she was leaving, she invited me to send her a, quote, solid script, and that she would forward it to the head of the studio. I told her that I had just started on this script and I wanted to take my time. She said, ‘No worries. This is an open invitation. Take a year if you need. We aren’t going anywhere.’ My question is, can I really take a year? I’m worried that she’ll forget about her offer or she might move on to another studio or something like that.”

**John:** Ben, you can take a year. Don’t burn this offer too quickly on something that’s not great. Whatever you do decide to give to her, have some other people read it first and tell you, oh, this is good, because don’t give her something that’s not good, because it’s not going to help anybody. She says she’ll forward it to the head of the studio. We’ll see. She’ll forward it to the head of the studio if she really, really, really likes it. More importantly, she’s a person who could be a fan on your side, so that’s great.

It seems like Ben is back in person where he’s working, because someone’s walking by and seeing him do something. That’s exciting for Ben. That is one of the real advantages to being in person is that casual notice somebody’s doing something and have it work there. It reminds me of when I was an intern at Universal. I was responsible for really menial filing of paperwork and stuff. Doing my lunch breaks, I would type up my script. I had handwritten pages, and over the lunch break I would type them up on my little laptop in the commissary.

**Megana:** Aw.

**John:** Some people would ask to see stuff, and I just knew that I wasn’t ready to show this to anybody. It was nice that they asked. They could see that my goal wasn’t to be a clerk filist, my goal was to be a screenwriter, and they were rooting for me in some way, which was nice. You had more experience though with this probably recently with folks in your writing group and when they show it to superiors or folks they’re working with. What is the consensus you’re hearing out there on the street?

**Megana:** I agree with you. I think a year is totally fine. I think in LA there’s just a weird sense of time because we don’t have seasons. To me I wouldn’t even notice if someone sent something to me a year later. The other point that I was going to make is I think definitely have your friends or your writing group or writers you respect read it. A piece of advice that my friend Joey Siara from my writers group gives is, at a certain point though, if your friends have been reading multiple drafts, they’re no longer objective readers, and they’re your friends, so they can’t always give you harsh feedback. I think at a point like that, using something like the blacklist or having a third-party reader who’s not been invested in your project since the genesis of the idea is really helpful to get some more measured and neutral feedback before you send it to a professional like your boss’s boss.

**John:** For sure. [Unclear 00:42:37] next.

**Megana:** Mark from Tennessee asks, “Can you give examples of scenes that you wrote that you realized would be difficult to shoot and how you rewrote them to be more shootable and/or production-friendly without compromising the quality or purpose of the scene?”

**John:** Great, I can think of a lot of examples of those kind of rewrites. In the original script for Big Fish, there is a sequence about how Edward Bloom was born. It came from the book. It was this big mythological birth moment that happened. We got to Alabama, and Tim Burton said, “I just don’t have a place to shoot this. It just doesn’t actually work here. Can we do something simpler like he’s really slippery?” I’m like, great, he can be a slippery baby. It became a much shorter, simpler scene. Also, it got a laugh and it was the right kind of change. It was really a production change. It was a money, budget, couldn’t actually shoot it change, but it was a better change for the movie, so I was happy to make that alteration.

In Go, the original script, there is an additional character who appears in the third section. I always called her the Linda Hunt character. She’s a supervisor to Burke. She got written out because she had nothing else to do. It was logistical in the sense of we just couldn’t really afford the scenes, but also it just didn’t need to be there. It was a good cut. Then when we went back and did the reshoots for Go, originally the three sections of that movie branched off from different scenes. It was at the supermarket, but they were different scenes. That’s what kicked them off. It was recognized, oh no, we should go back to the exact same scene each time that jumps us off to the new place. It was this simplification there that really helped.

For The Nines, I think one of the things that was really helpful is we found a way to shoot LA for New York City. When we did the actual real New York City stuff, our footprint was super, super small. It was just me, a camera operator, and a local sound person. We didn’t have any trucks. We didn’t have anything. We could just shoot the New York exteriors we needed and sell that. We didn’t need to bring anybody else there to New York. A lot of the stuff that takes place in the New York section of the movie is all LA, including the New York jewelry district, just because our downtown LA can look like New York if you frame it right.

The other thing which was so crucial for The Nines was recognizing that usually when you’re trying to schedule a movie, you’re trying to schedule around locations. You’re trying to shoot out a location and move on to the next location so you don’t have to go back to a location. In this case, we had to optimize for what part of the movie we were in, and really it came down to the state of Ryan Reynolds’s hair and beard, because we were cutting his hair, we were coloring his hair, he had a beard, he had no beard, and so we had to optimize for that. Because we were shooting the main set as my house, we could shoot at my house, go do something else, come back to my house, go do something else, and so we could dress the house and do the house, just be really flexible in that location. That made all the difference, because the movie would cost so much more if we had to do wigs and other things to make all the rest of the things work so we could shoot out a location. That was a big factor.

The general things you’re looking for when you’re trying to figure out for production concerns are, does it have to be night. If it can day, it’s going to be just simpler. Can we not have children? Can we not have animals? Those are things that add complexity. If you can avoid those, you’re going to save some time and some frustration.

**Megana:** Can I ask you a question about this simplifying out the Linda Hunt character? I know that you worked on movies that are shooting as you are rewriting things. What is your methodology for that? I feel like my brain would explode.

**John:** That got dropped out before we had really even budgeted. We knew that that was going to go away. If you’re in production and you’re recognizing, okay, all these things are shifting… The Charlie’s Angels movies are examples of everything was shifting every day, and you had to figure out what we shot, what’s coming up next, what was public. You really just try and optimize for what is the movie we’re trying to make right now and not be too beholden on what the original plan was behind things. If there’s a simplification to be had, do it. If it’s not going to materially affect the story you’re trying to tell or the production value you’re trying to achieve, you do it. Things like if you have to move the crew from one place to another place, that’s a huge drag, unless it’s not.

An example in Big Fish is we were shooting in Montgomery, Alabama, and we would shoot exteriors at the river, but then if the weather turned or the light was not good, they could just pull up the trucks at lunch and move back to our stages, which was just this warehouse, and shoot stuff in the afternoon at the stages. Being flexible and recognizing what is the priority. In the case of Big Fish, sometimes the priority was let’s get really good light for these exteriors, and you could optimize for that.

**Megana:** Very cool. Moving on, Ryan asks, “Screenplay examples for instruction comes in waves. Tootsie, Star Wars, Casablanca. Which scripts from the last 20 years do you think should get, quote, taught in film programs?”

**John:** My first instinct was to say Aliens, but then I realized Aliens is more than 20 years old, which makes me feel so, so, so old. Listen, I think there’s so many great scripts to be picking there. A lot of indie films should also be higher up there. I think Booksmart is a great movie and does a really good job of its storytelling and character wants being explored and expressed, and it has a sense of fun and a sense of style, which is great. All Lord and Miller’s work is creative and fun and does really interesting things with audience expectation, so I’d move those up higher there. Wow, other great, recent movie examples…

I think the reason I was reaching back to Aliens is that was such a seminal script for how we’re writing action on the page, and I feel like it’s been duplicated so thoroughly and modeled so much in movies after that point that you could probably read any action film over the last 10 years and it’s still going to have some of that quality to it. Megana, I’ll throw this back to you. You’re newer to the screenplay format. Of the stuff that you’ve read that’s more recent, what do you think is going to be very teachable?

**Megana:** I guess a couple of other examples that I think seem fresher to me are The Wolf of Wall Street or Adam McKay movies where there’s just so much breaking the fourth wall and exposition done in a different way that feels new. Is that true?

**John:** I think that is also true. I think it’s playful with the format. You look at The Big Short and it’s how it’s getting that information out there. We’ve talked about The Social Network as being a really good movie to watch in terms of how it is telling a story, how it is using real life just as a springboard to make a very specific point about this environment. I think those movies will be on the short list.

It’s also worth noting that so many of the classic movies we’re pointing to, say like Tootsie, Star Wars, Casablanca, white guys wrote them, and so I think making sure that the canon that we’re teaching from isn’t just like, these are the white male screenwriters of that era. There’s really amazing films being made by filmmakers of all different backgrounds, and making sure that we’re not just teaching one kind of thing.

**Megana:** Totally. Eliza asks, “I’m an aspiring writer, and I’ve recently learned about the TV fellowship programs and decided to apply. Fast-forward to a month later and I’m bleeding out of my eyeballs and pulling out my hair.”

**John:** Oh no, Eliza.

**Megana:** That was so graphic. “The truth is I find TV spec scriptwriting to be incredibly hard. The number one tip that I’ve encountered is, spec what you love, but I love highly serialized shows. When I sit down and try to find some tiny crevice where I can maybe explore something further, say on a season of Killing Eve or The Morning Show, I run out of steam by the end of Act One. I just can’t for the life of me come up with a spec story that has legs long enough to travel for 60 pages, which lines up perfectly with what occurred in the preceding episode and what will occur in the succeeding episode.

“Writing a TV spec has been so shatteringly difficult that it’s making me question if I have potential as a writer at all. It’s supposed to be a straightforward exercise that amateur writers can use as a steppingstone to become professionals. In other words, it’s child’s play, right? Is this an indication that I should just pack up my stuff and head to the exit?”

**John:** Yes, Eliza, you should give up now. You should completely give up. No, Eliza, you have, I think, some wrong expectations. Let’s disabuse you of your wrong expectations. First let’s talk about what spec writing is for TV. When someone says a spec script when it comes to TV, they’re probably referring to this is an existing show, I’m going to write an episode of this existing show, not because they’re paying me to do it, but to show that I know how to write and that I could write a show like this. You write one of these things not because you’re trying to get hired for that specific show, but as a sample for you to get staffed on a show that could be kind of like it. If you’re writing The Morning Show and you’re hoping to get staffed on Bridgerton or something, you have the ability to do an existing thing.

These kind of spec scripts have fallen a bit out of favor. They were much more common when I was starting. Some showrunners really like them. I remember Mindy Kaling tweeting about how much she loves reading specs, because you get a sense of can this person write this voice, can this person really understand how this TV show works.

Useful exercise, but just understand that it has its limitations. One of the limitations that you’re encountering is that you really can’t try to fit your episode into the existing narrative and existing plot lines of a serialized drama that same way. You can’t make this be an alternate Episode 3 of Season 4. It’s just not going to work. Take that pressure off yourself. Instead ask, what is something you would love to see the show do at a certain point. Don’t try to be so serialized.

Find a way to take these characters and have them do something interesting that feels like it could be an episode of the show, it just wasn’t an episode of the show. The characters feel consistent with the universe of that original TV show, and yet they’re not trying to directly slot into something else that has happened in there. I’m going to reach back to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You don’t have to make it fit into one season mythology or one big bad mythology. Just have it be something that feels like a classic, good episode of that show. Maybe if you’re going to do something interesting, take those characters somewhat out of their normal environment, put two characters together who don’t generally have opportunities to interact.

Do something that is both the voice of the show, but also stands out and is unique, so that a writer who may want to hire you, a showrunner who may want to hire you, says, “This person not only understands the show, but understands how to do something interesting with those characters and the elements that they’re given.

**Megana:** Totally. I think some of the expectations that Eliza has are a little too high. I don’t think anyone who is reading these fellowship applications is going to be tracking at one point in the season or the plot line this goes. They probably don’t even watch that show. They just have a sense of who the characters are or maybe they’ve seen an episode. I think that you’re absolutely right, and taking some of that pressure off will really help.

**John:** Don’t bleed out your eyeballs and don’t give up on this, because you’re trying to do something that’s really difficult, and it’s not a normal job at all. It’s not a normal thing to have to write an episode of a show you’re not getting paid to write, that you don’t have the writers’ room as a resource. You’re trying to do a weird thing, so just try the best job at it you can. I think honestly these kind of spec pilots make more sense for comedy. They show your comedy chops and your ability to write characters’ voices in a way that make more sense, which may be why I think so much of staffing has moved to reading original stuff rather than specs of existing shows.

**Megana:** I think specking what you love makes a lot of sense because you know the world of the show, but I’ve never specked something that’s a highly serialized drama. I wonder if that’s also making it harder for her. I wonder if there’s a procedural she likes enough that she could write a spec for.

**John:** That’s such a great point. It reminds me of that Ira Glass quote about, at a certain point you recognize you have taste, but you don’t have talent. She probably has really good taste when it comes to The Morning Show, so she knows exactly how it’ll all work and she knows what a great episode this is, and she’s comparing what she’s writing to the very best episode of The Morning Show ever, and not being able to see the process to get there. I do think picking something that she loves so much may be part of the problem.

**Megana:** Totally. Moody asks, “What’s the deal with streamers and residuals? For example, do the writers of a Netflix Original or another subscription-based streamer make close to what a writer for a studio is going to make with purchase and rental fees? Are residuals even relevant the way they used to be?”

**John:** Oh yes. The question of streamers and residuals is an ongoing one. It’s going to be inevitably a focus of negotiation for the next MBA negotiations. Let’s talk through the current state of, if you write something for a streamer, how residuals work.
The important thing to understand is right now it is a fixed residual. Let’s say you got story and teleplay on a credit for a one-hour that you write for Netflix. This is an example here. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the WGA document that talks you through how you actually calculate what these things are, based on the current deal. For this one hour written for Netflix, the residual base would be $29,657. That’s not money you’re getting right now, but that’s what’s called the base of it. That’s how much the residual pot is worth for that.

Then it depends on how big the streamer is. There’s this thing called subscriber tiers, which is by how many people, I think only in North America, are subscribers to that service. In the case of Netflix, it’s the highest tier because they have the most at more than 45 million subscribers. It’s called a subscriber factor. You multiply that original 29,000 by 150%, so it increases that. Working off that, there’s what’s called an exhibition gear percentage. Basically, each year, a percentage of that total money, you’re getting paid out as a residual. It starts at 45% in the first year. It drops to 1.5% in years 13 and beyond.
For this hypothetical show that you’ve written that you got written by credit on, you would be getting a first-year residual of $20,000, and then it would drop dramatically year after year after year until 13 years where you get 1.5% of that, or one 40th of that really is the best way to think about that.

It’s really hard to compare this residual to what you would be getting in cable or in broadcast, because cable and broadcast, they are generally not fixed residuals. There’s a fixed residual for the first rerun in broadcast, but really your residual in normal TV is based on a percentage of the licensing deal. When Friends sells, for licensing, there’s a certain amount per episode, and you as a writer get a percentage of that. An incredibly successful show like Friends, that licensing fee is huge and your residuals can be huge. A show that is not a big hit could be a lot less.

Right now the deal with the streamers is, probably for some shows you’re getting a little bit more residuals on it, because it doesn’t matter whether it’s a success or not, but for the big hits you’re getting really screwed. You’re not getting any piece of that pie on a giant hit. If you write Stranger Things, you’re still getting the same crappy fixed residual. It’s not great right now. It could be a lot better. It’s a reason why I think there’s going to be so much focus on trying to improve how we’re doing this and to really make the success of a given show be reflected in the residuals that a writer gets for having written that show. Did that make sense? I’m trying to talk through a lot of numbers.

**Megana:** It does. We’ll link to this WGA article, because it’s really helpful, these graphs, and then the calculations and the examples that they walk through make it easier to follow. It is surprisingly complicated. I didn’t realize how much these percentages dropped off year over year.

**John:** Yeah, I think it falls off a cliff. Some caveats here, we’re talking about high-budget subscription video on demand, which is what you call the expensive stuff made for something like a Netflix. There’s a lower-budget thing, which obviously the results aren’t going to be as good, and the calculations work differently. If you’re making a movie that is originally intended for a theatrical market, but then it’s released on Netflix instead of being released theatrically, in that case they have to calculate what’s called an [unclear 00:59:01] license fee, which is basically how much they think the movie would be licensed for if it were out on the open market. That becomes harder and harder to do as there are fewer movies out there who then are showing up on streaming later on. There’s ways to calculate it when it’s not clear that it was made for this market, but it’s complicated.

When you’re in one of those situations, you get the Guild involved to check on it, and the Guild is constantly arguing about how certain things should be counted, so it’s tough. Let’s say you have an existing show that is then licensed through a streamer. That goes through a more normal residual process, which is basically there’s a license fee, Netflix is paying a certain amount per episode, you as a writer get a percentage of that amount in your residuals.

**Megana:** I have a lot of follow-up questions. Is that why day-and-date release stuff that came out during the pandemic was more complicated? Did that affect drastically how writers were being paid for movies that were simultaneously being theatrically released and put on streamers?

**John:** The fact of the residuals to some degree had a bigger impact though on box office bonuses, which is one of the ways we get around the problem of not having backend participation or having a meaningful backend gross is that we say in our contracts, okay, when this film reaches $50 million in the US box office, I get a bonus check of this. When it hits $100 million, I get a bonus check of this. It’s a way of giving us a backend. If something’s released day-and-date, your box office is going to be greatly lowered because of that. The Scarlett Johansson lawsuit over Black Widow was really about that, which is basically she had bonuses in her contract that she was not going to be able to hit because they released the movie day-and-date theatrically and in theaters.

**Megana:** Got it. Cool. We have four more questions left.

**John:** Let’s do it.

**Megana:** They’re pretty quick. Mattias asks, “Other than writing, what’s something aspiring writers who live in LA should be doing?”

**John:** A quick checklist of things you should do other than write while you’re in Los Angeles. You should see movies. You see a bunch of movies. See the new releases, but also go to things like the Academy screening series. Go to any sort of retrospective stuff. Those are great to see. Anything where there’s a Q and A afterwards, especially with the filmmakers, with the writers, those are terrific. Whenever the ArcLight reopens, they do those. Directors series at Film Independent is really good. I host some of those events. Go to festivals. Go to festivals like Outfest or the indie festivals. Volunteer to crew at one of these things. You’ll meet some people. You’ll see a bunch of movies.

Go to plays. Go to comedy shows like Groundlings. You’ll see stars before they become stars and see how all that works. Take a class if you feel like taking a class. Again, you’ll meet other people who are trying to do what you’re trying to do, and writers, which is always good. If you’re in LA, you should hike, because you can, because there’s just a ton of hiking around Los Angeles.

Make sure you’re exploring different parts of the city. It’s really easy to get stuck in your one little bubble in Los Angeles, but LA’s giant and there’s so much to do. If you’re in Silver Lake, make sure you make it out to the ocean every once in a while. Vice versa, if you’re on the West Side, make sure you’re hitting downtown and other parts of the city.

Crew on your friends’ films. Find films that need PAs and be a PA. Just get some experience on a set while you’re here, because there’s always so much shooting. Learn how to shoot something. Get a camera. It doesn’t have to be an amazing camera. You can do it on your phone as well. Write a short thing and learn how to shoot it, because that’s a skill you’re going to need to learn to have. Understanding how shot by shot by shot you put something together is crucial. LA is where film was born, so do that while you’re here.

Finally, there’s a bunch of events that are always happening in Los Angeles. It’s one of the biggest cities in the world. Go to concerts, go to museums, make an art date with yourself to get out of your apartment and see things and do things, because there’s no reason to stay trapped indoors in Los Angeles. Go out and do stuff. What other advice would you have for Mattias here?

**Megana:** I think all that’s great. It’s made me more excited to live in LA. I think also specifically do things that are not related to the industry or not going to help you in any way. I think working in the industry and living in an industry town is really overwhelming and sometimes just suffocating, and so having things that are completely separate from that is helpful, like hobbies like swimming or pottery or things where there’s no way for you to network or be thinking about anything professional.

**John:** Agreed.

**Megana:** Great. We have a question from Flustered. Flustered asks, “Later this year we’re shooting my first US studio feature. I’m not a total newbie. I have experience in my home country, but this film is definitely my biggest moment to date. I pride myself on being a pretty chill person. I’m used to working with actors. I’m someone who’s never really been into celebrity culture. People are people. That is, until they attached our lead.”

**John:** Oh, no.

**Megana:** “They booked someone who would have made my 16-year-old self fall out of my chair. What I want to know is how do we as screenwriters be chill? I’ve had a couple of meetings with him to discuss the character pass I’m about to do, and he’s been bloody lovely, of course, so I’m off to an okay start, but come production, I’d love to get a photo with him. Ugh, just typing that feels so cringe. I just need tips on professionalism, and if asking for things like a photo is crossing some invisible line. This is a total nonissue in the scheme of things, but I literally didn’t know who else to ask.”

**John:** Don’t ask for the photo, Flustered. Celebrate the fact that you are interacting with this actor in a way that they see you as a professional and that they are excited to have you on board as the writer of the project. Don’t be a fan. Don’t ask for the photo.
It can be hard to be chill around people who are really famous and who are rich and successful and just gorgeous and all these things that overwhelm you. I find it helpful to be specific and really focus on what is your job, what do they need, how do you help them get the best performance, what are they interested and into.

My first meeting with Drew Barrymore was about Charlie’s Angels, and we really could talk, really vibe on what is the movie that we are trying to make, what does it feel like. We could arrive at a shared vision for how the movie should feel. That was a really good experience. Yeah, she was very famous at that moment, but she was also focused on the work. It sounds like this actor is focused on the work too. Don’t make it a fan situation by asking for a photo.

Here’s when you’ll get your photo. You’ll get your photo at the premier, which will be fantastic, because you’ll be on the Red Carpet and get a photo together, or on set, or the stills photographer on set. There can be some fun way for you to get that shot that you really want, but really focus on the movie rather than the photo.

**Megana:** This is the perfect time for fake it ’til you make it.

**John:** 100%.

**Megana:** Rena asks, “Do you have any tricks for not falling into patterns and dialog? For example, I find myself using the word honestly a lot, and honestly, it’s getting old.”

**John:** Oh Rena, I hit the same situation, and I find myself doing things like that where I’m just like, “Oh my god, I used the word actually three times on a page.” The only thing you can do is just be aware of it, and when you see it, stop it. Having someone else read through it, having, honestly, Megana read through stuff and say, “You used this word twice,” is how you’re going to notice it. Then when you do notice it, you will find a way to stop yourself from using it so often.
Now, in terms of dialog, yes, you’re trying to make characters sound like themselves. I think what you may be noticing is that if one character says “honestly,” another character shouldn’t say “honestly” that much. If one character says “honestly” a lot, that can feel authentic, because individual characters should fall into loops where they do say things the same way and have the same structure to things. That’s why Jim Halpert sounds different than Michael Scott. People have the natural things they go to, the patterns that they go to. I think Rena’s going to be okay.

**Megana:** Yeah. Also, with a tool like Highland, you can Find and Replace and just search for those things once you notice them.

**John:** Absolutely. If you notice “honestly,” just do a find for “honestly” and see all the times you’re using it and see when you don’t need that word. “Honestly” is one of those things where it generally can just be cut, and it’s a stronger sentence without “honestly” in front of it. If you need a softener, just find another softener to get you into it.

**Megana:** I have a problem with my action lines where I’ll say “starts to” instead of just whatever the action is. I do a pass where I edit all those sentences.

**John:** Good plan.

**Megana:** Last question, Shewani [ph] asks, “How do you handle balancing writing your own passion projects versus pitching on assignments?”

**John:** That’s a good question. I don’t always balance it great, but I think I’m always aware of these are things that I want to write. I have a short list of projects that I do want to hit at some point, or either start writing or come back to. These are things that are just things that I own and control that I want to be my own stuff. Whenever I turn in an assignment for someone else, I will try to prioritize going to one of those passion projects for at least the time I have, while I’m waiting on notes back or whatever, just so I do get some time to spend with those projects.

In terms of pitching versus writing your own stuff, if I am pitching something out there, I still have a lot of free writing time. I’ll try to use that free writing time on my passion projects. Am I trying to pitch these passion projects? Sometimes. Sometimes it feels like this is the time to get that thing out the door and get people reading it, but more often, the stuff I’m pitching on is stuff that exists that I’m trying to get to the next point or I’m trying to either get the job or get this project, this book or other property, set up some place. I still have the time to go and write the new stuff that is for myself.

Basically, I would say recognize that your writing time is crucial and important, and if you’re not doing work for somebody else writing, make sure you’re doing that work for yourself writing. Megana, we got through 20 questions. Was it only 20 questions? It felt like 9,000.

**Megana:** I’m sorry. I hope that wasn’t me asking the questions, but yes, that was 20.

**John:** 20 questions. 20 questions done. Let’s see Craig Mazin beat that. Should we go on to our One Cool Things?

**Megana:** Yeah.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is this video by Paul Stamets, who is a mycologist. He studies fungi and mushrooms. He as a scientist developed this fungi that attracts ants and termites, and they eat this thing and they bring it back to their nest where it kills them. It’s a pesticide, but it’s a very specific, clever pesticide where they bring it back into their nest and it kills them, but also makes everyone else stay away from it. It’s very site-specific, which I think is a really good idea. His patent is expired. He got his patent 17 years ago. Patents expire.

What I liked about this video is he was describing how excited he was that this is now open for anyone else to use, that this is now in the commons and people can build products off of it. Also, he was never able to actually bring it to market. He could never actually find a way to do it. I liked his honesty about like, “I really thought this would be a great thing and revolutionary, and I couldn’t do it. Maybe somebody else can. Also, here are the challenges you’re going to have, because it doesn’t have this patent protection anymore.” I just really liked his approach to this thing he developed which was really cool, which was not successful commercially, but is still good for the world. It’s just a good mix of the open sourcing and public goods and the real challenges of capitalism all wrapped up into one little video.

**Megana:** That really fits with the ethos behind your work.

**John:** Fountain is an example. It’s a public good. It’s screenwriting syntax, which is good for a lot of people. It’s had some success, but it hasn’t revolutionized the world in ways I would’ve liked. It hasn’t been the ever-attracting mushroom that has destroyed other entities, but it’s had its own little, small successes.

**Megana:** Very cool. I guess thematically related, my One Cool Thing is Under White Sky: The Nature of the Future. It’s this book by Elizabeth Kolbert. She won the Pulitzer Prize for this book The Sixth Extinction. I haven’t finished it yet, but I think there’s nine different examples of ways in which humans have tried to fix certain problems that have happened in ecosystems or the environment, and now she looks at things 30, 50 years down the line, and how we are now trying to remedy the ways that we have interfered and caused greater problems in the environment. She looks at the Mississippi River and carp. I was just telling you this example about these pupfish that are in Devils Hole in the Mojave Desert. While that land has been protected, 100 miles away in Nevada they were doing nuclear testing, and how that has influenced this very specific species’ survival rates is so fascinating.

**John:** On the inspiring-depressing scale, where would you put this?

**Megana:** I was thinking about that before I recommended it, because I was like, it does depress me, but you know I love some dry nonfiction to get me to bed.

**John:** Oh yeah, me too.

**Megana:** It’s pretty bleak, because so far it doesn’t feel like we as humans can do anything right. If we do something that seems to temporarily help the environment or help the world in some way, this takes the long view look at it, and it’s like, nope, you actually messed things up far more than you realized. It is pretty bleak. It’s depressing.

**John:** I’ll add it to the list, but I think I have a few more cheery things to get through before I get to a mass bleak book.

**Megana:** Fair enough.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Thank you again, Megana Rao, our producer, for all those questions, and for everybody who sent in their questions. That’s so, so helpful. Our show’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Out outro is by Ben Gerrior. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I am @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can also sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on murder houses. Megana Rao, thank you again.

**Megana:** Thanks, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Megana, let’s talk murder and architecture, because you had encouraged me to watch this movie Fresh. It’s only a very mild spoiler to say there is a killer in this movie who has a really stylish house, a house like, oh, I would love to have this house. It’s a little bit remote. It’s not a creepy cabin. It has good, natural wood finishes and details. It feels nice. It also has a basement that is set up for murder, but not a grungy, grimy murder. It’s much more sophisticated. It feels like a spa. It’s like a spa where you get dismembered.

**Megana:** Like one of those places where you can get plastic surgery but you’re still at this retreat.

**John:** Oh yeah, completely. Like where she goes in Hacks.

**Megana:** Yes, exactly.

**John:** Like that. It’s all tasteful, all well-done. You might be chained to the floor, but it’s got good aesthetics to it. You got your stainless steel toilet. You got a little drinking fountain. You’ve got some things you need. Even the bars closing off your cell, they’re wood. It looks like teak.

**Megana:** It’s like Scandinavian.

**John:** It’s very Scandinavian, which is also a good tie-in to Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, a Scandinavian thriller in which ultimately we discover this murderer who has this house. It’s like, okay, part of your house is just designed as an abattoir. It’s clearly set up to just slaughter people.

**Megana:** I re-watched that scene from Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. He also has this whole setup in the basement where instead of a sprinkler system, it fills the room with gas and he has his own personal gas mask that he just attaches, I guess, when he climbs down the stairs. It’s just all part of the process. I feel like he must have rigged that, because how do you get a contractor to do something like that?

**John:** Are they just really good do-it-yourself-ers who just have really good skills for this, because I was thinking the main character in Fresh is an accomplished surgeon himself. I don’t understand how he’s doing all the work he’s doing as a surgeon and as a dismemberer of bodies and as really an entrepreneur. Also, he has clearly some facility with how to build concrete structures and these things. Assuming he does have a contractor and an architect, what is the cover story for why these rooms are being built this way?

**Megana:** It’s like, yeah, I need you to build these guest bedrooms with metal chains that are bolted into the ground.

**John:** Maybe the chains are something he could do himself, or he could have just one lackey in on it with him. The bigger construction things, you got to have a crew there. There’s stuff that has to happen. Even with the pretense of, oh, maybe he has this private surgery center, yeah, I guess, but I find it suspicious, or maybe I find it as an opportunity for a movie or a docuseries about the people who build murder houses, like a home-flipping thing, but it’s really about murder houses.

**Megana:** You’re someone who owns a house and has remodeled your house. My understanding is that any time you want to make a change, you do have to get a permit from the city. Is that true? Is that true for everywhere or just LA?

**John:** I think that’s why murderers are moving out of Los Angeles, because it’s the bureaucracy really. It’s all the permitting that’s really getting in the way of innovation and murder houses. You have other things listed here in terms of the aesthetic. Parasite, of course, a great example. There’s the whole basement in Parasite. Essentially it’s a bomb shelter, I get that, but also it feels like a murder hole.

**Megana:** Totally.

**John:** Invisible Man. Look at this house that he built, that also seems set up for devious deeds. In that case, I can’t remember any specific room in there that feels like, okay, this is just a room that could only be used for evil, but maybe.

**Megana:** He has that room where he keeps the suits. I don’t know what about these really ultra contemporary homes is so frightening. I think maybe it’s all of the glass and then the concrete.

**John:** That sense of it’s all transparent so you can see everything, and yet…

**Megana:** It’s so disorienting.

**John:** Yeah, disorienting. Everything’s being hidden. It’s hiding in plain sight in some way. Concrete does feel fairly industrial and brutalist and confining and soundproof. They’re always a little bit remote so no one can hear you screaming as they’re cutting you apart. I see here in the Workflowy you have other examples of things that are tied into murder architecture or really questionable, like why would you build this this way.

**Megana:** Correct. One TikTok sensation that our whole office was obsessed with was Samantha Hartsoe, this woman in New York who discovered a secret… I guess she was getting a breeze through her bathroom and so she discovered that through her bathroom mirror, her apartment connected to an entirely different apartment.

**John:** Basically she could take out her medicine cabinet and climb into this accessory hallway that went into a completely different apartment which was empty. Why would you build that accessory hallway? It was all just unsettling.

**Megana:** So unsettling. Then I have this other story in here. I remember when I was in college, I was reading this story, the headline was Ohio State Students Discover Stranger Living in Basement. In the article, it actually really warmed by heart, because I was like, this is so Ohio. These boys were living in this house on campus. There were 10 of them. Strange things were happening in the house, but because there were 10 of them, they just always attributed it to a different roommate. Halfway through the school year they discovered that there was a squatter living in their basement. In the most Midwestern turn of events, all of the quotes are, “He seems like a really great guy. We wish we could help him out. Would’ve loved to be his friend or get to know him, but it’s actually not okay for him to live here.” It’s so apologetic and accommodating. It was so sweet.

I texted one of my friends from high school, my friend Sean, and I was like, “This is so funny and this is so Ohio.” He was like, “Yeah, man, that’s my house. Yeah, I was living there. He’s a great guy. He’s a philosophy major just trying to get by.” I was like, “This is so funny and heartbreaking.”

**John:** It reminds me of the people who are squatters in the Hamptons. Off-season in the Hamptons, they’ll just pretend that they should be living in these houses, and live in places where they don’t actually have any right to be there.

**Megana:** If Craig was here, he would talk about the nature of higher education and how cost-prohibitive it is, but yes, it is very similar to that.

**John:** College is the problem. Which would probably end up on Room, because you think about it, Room, it’s not within the house, but this guy has a structure in his backyard that it’s just designed to hold these people in. It’s apparently soundproof. I’m trying to remember. It’s underground? Basically, you can’t easily get out of it. A similar thing happened in one of the seasons of Search Party, where there was a secret underground bunker room that was all soft and padded and where she couldn’t hurt herself. Again, I ask, who are the contractors who are building these things, and what do they think is actually happening? I just think there’s a, I think if not actually a docuseries, then at least a good Onion article about the contractors brought in to do this project and what they believed that they were doing.

**Megana:** I think that there’s maybe too much overlap, and we need to be more suspicious of doomsday preppers and murderers. I don’t want to miscast doomsday preppers, because it’s like, do your thing, but I think maybe we should just be a little bit more skeptical or ask a few more questions around some of those precautions.

**John:** 10 Cloverfield Lane is a great example. It’s both a survivalist prepper bunker situation, but also a creepy murder shaft. The two things do seem like they fit together. If you have gratings in your floor and the ability to spray down blood into the floor, I don’t think that’s normal doomsday prep. It’s just me. I think those should be some things that if it’s on the spec sheet for the construction project, I think you’d intervene there.

**Megana:** Not only are these people committing crimes or murder, but they’re also probably violating some zoning laws.

**John:** 100%. Got to be strict here. Thanks, Megana.

**Megana:** Thanks, John.

Links:

* [Patton Oswalt in King of Queens Scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2QE3JpWfTo)
* [ZSA Moonlander](https://www.zsa.io/moonlander/)
* [Compare Your Typing Speed Against ours here!](https://www.typingtest.com/test.html?minutes=2&textfile=benchmark.txt)
* [Phoebe Waller Bridge – 73 Questions with Vogue](https://www.vogue.com/video/watch/phoebe-waller-bridge-on-fleabag-british-humor-and-her-creative-process)
* [Residuals for High-Budget Subscription Video on Demand (HBSVOD) Programs](https://www.wga.org/members/finances/residuals/hbsvod-programs) from the WGA
* [Paul Stamets on Seven Mycoattractant and Mycopesticide Patents released to Commons!](https://paulstamets.com/news/paul-stamets-on-seven-mycoattractant-and-mycopesticide-patents-released-to-commons?mc_cid=5d4ff8f8e6&mc_eid=8952ca1075)
* [Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert](https://bookshop.org/books/under-a-white-sky-the-nature-of-the-future-9780593136270/9780593136270)
* [Murder House Architecture](https://twitter.com/johnaugust/status/1506362648887136256)
* [Samantha Hartsoe’s TikTok NYC Apartment](https://www.tiktok.com/@samanthartsoe?lang=en)
* [Ohio State Students Discover Students Living in Basement](https://www.thelantern.com/2013/09/ohio-state-students-discover-stranger-living-basement/)
* [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 Ben Gerrior ([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/543standard.mp3).

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

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 539 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we ask the eternal question, how would this be a movie? This time focusing on stories and topics related to science. To help us out, we have two special guests joining us. First, Erin Macdonald is an astrophysicist PhD and a tattooed one-woman career panel for the field. She lives in Los Angeles, working as a writer and producer, and is currently the science consultant for the entire Star Trek franchise. Welcome, Erin.

**Erin Macdonald:** Hi. Thanks so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

**John:** I have so many questions about the science in the franchise, and specifically space science as it relates to Star Trek, which feels like it’s a long history there. Warp drives, we’ll get into all that stuff with you today hopefully.

**Erin:** Excellent.

**John:** Next up we have Leigh Whannell. He is an Australian screenwriter, actor, producer, and director, known for co-creating the Saw and Insidious franchises with James Wan. He made his directorial debut with Insidious: Chapter 3, and has since directed 2 more films, the widely acclaimed Upgrade, and The Invisible Man, which was the last movie I saw in theaters pre-pandemic. Leigh, welcome back to the show.

**Leigh Whannell:** Thanks for having me again.

**John:** You were on Episode 354, which was an episode that Craig recorded without me. Now we’re recording this episode without Craig. Essentially, we always have to keep one of us off the podcast when you’re there, because you’re just too dangerous.

**Leigh:** It would be too dangerous, like combining the wrong type of chemicals.

**John:** It’s all risky. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, speaking of risk, we are going to talk about Leigh’s proposal for a period shopping mall theme park experience. I’m strongly in favor of this happening, for the record, and so I want to really work through all of the possibilities for Leigh’s proposal to create a theme park experience period mall.

**Leigh:** Excellent.

**John:** We’ll do it. Before we get into sciencey stuff, we have a business question. Actually, it’s here from Megana. Megana, can you ask your question that I see here in the outline?

**Megana Rao:** I saw this tweet from Ed Solomon about the accounting for Men in Black. I spent an embarrassingly long time looking through these documents, and I feel so confused about what I’m looking at. I was hoping you guys could explain some of the movie accounting to me. He says, “Sadly, Men in Black lost over $5 million this period alone. Someone needs to call Sony and tell them to stop building sets. Seriously, does nobody know how to run a business?”

**John:** Ed Solomon is putting up links here to the profit definition, the profit statements from Men in Black, obviously a huge, huge hit, one that spawned many sequels. He’s one of the credited writers on it. He has a net profit participation in the movie. The movie is not into net profits, even having generated gazillion dollars. Leigh Whannell, you are a person who’s written movies that have generated hundreds of millions of dollars. Is this at all familiar to you?

**Leigh:** I did enter the film world through a different door. It wasn’t the front door. Obviously, Men in Black was a film that was made very much within the studio system. Big studio, big money, big movie stars. The first few films especially that I was involved in were definitely independent films. The first Saw film was actually financed by the producers. Two of the producers did what they say you should never do in Hollywood, which is spend your own money. They mortgaged their houses to pay for that movie. It’s a very different financial map. I guess it’s the old saying of betting on yourself. I think with those movies, by betting on ourselves, maybe we saw more backend and more profits.

What I hear about these big studio films, and maybe you can enlighten me, John, is that they always find some creative accounting to show why, “Oh, no no no, you see, the standees that we made in Malaysia mean that you don’t get your profit participation checks.” That’s what I hear from people who have worked more in the big budget studio system.

**John:** I’ve made many movies for Sony and for other places. I made Aladdin. I will guarantee you the movies will never turn a technical profit. The reason behind it is that setting out to make this movie, the studio takes a loan out to make the movie. They’re borrowing $150 million or whatever to make this film. Your film Invisible Man is probably similar sort of [unclear 00:04:20] because it was not that expensive, but it was still expensive enough that it will never turn a technical definition of profits.

These studios are taking out this big lump of money to make this film. They’re spending the money to make the film. They’re charging interest on that loan for the whole time. Even though they are both the bank and the person borrowing the money, they are essentially continuing to generate interest on that original loan, and that original loan will never pay down. They’re also throwing every conceivable expense against the film, including a distribution fee, which is money they’re paying themselves to distribute the film, basically all the other overhead and accounting they’re throwing at it. These films will never achieve technical profit, based on the definitions. Those definitions are laid out in the contracts that you and I have signed as writers when we are doing this. Even the attorneys who we’re paying good money for tell us never to expect to see real money in the backend on these things.

**Leigh:** You say the studios take out a loan, are you saying… This might prove my naivete on these matters. Are they taking out a loan from themselves? Don’t these studios have vaults full of cash that essentially when they finance movies, the money, it doesn’t come from a bank, it comes from those vaults? It comes from the studio coffers, right?

**John:** Yep. You would think that you could not loan yourself money in that way, but that is technically what they are doing. Each of these films, just like your Saw film or Insidious film, it is its own company that is formed and set up to do the thing. They’re loaning money to that production to do this. There’s many ways they could be structured. It could also be structured as an international situation. They are designing things in ways to maximize the amount of money that the studio gets back in without the film itself getting paid money.

**Leigh:** It is interesting to hear about things. I had a friend of mine who was directing a film for Universal, and he wanted to shoot some scenes on the studio back lot, in one of the studios. One of the producers was saying, “It’s too expensive.” My friend said, “This is a Universal film and we’re shooting on the Universal lot.” The producer said, “Yeah, you don’t get a discount for that. They will charge us.” I just found that an insane version of double dipping.

**John:** There might be circumstances where a studio will require a production to use its things, for certain good reasons, but they will still charge that full freight for using their own facilities. That’s just how it goes. This can be frustrating, but it’s also, I think, because it is unlikely that a writer will ever be paid these kind of net profits on things, that’s why you find other ways as a writer to get some backend participation. Obviously, residuals have nothing to do with the profitability of the film, and so we get paid residuals no matter how much it shows on this statement, which is great.

We might also ask for box office bonuses. If we know that our film is going to be theatrically released, which is never a given in 2022, we can say, “When the US theatrical box office on this film hits $50 million or $100 million, you have to write me a check for X.” That’s one way to get around these impossible net profit definitions. Megana, did we answer your question to any degree?

**Megana:** You did. Basically, it’s not supposed to make sense to me, but yeah.

**John:** When you’re back in the office, I can show you Aladdin statements or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory statements that show that they are similarly money-losing propositions on paper, even though they’ve made the studios good money.

**Megana:** Thank you very much.

**John:** We just played the role of business consultant here, explaining to Megana how this weird thing in accounting work. I’m only vaguely qualified to do that. I’m not qualified to talk about space or astrophysics. Luckily, Eric Macdonald is qualified to talk about this. Can you give us, Erin, a sense of your history studying astrophysics and how that segued into your working on the Star Trek franchise?

**Erin:** I’ve always been interested in film and television and the entertainment industry. I made that fork crossroads decision when I went to college, or university, to decide to study physics. As I went through there, I realized I didn’t quite like it as a career. I did research for many years, specifically in gravitational waves. I went through, did my PhD in Scotland, had a great experience, but when it came to the postdoc life of research, that wasn’t really for me.

When I left academia, I was looking for things that would scratch some of the things that I enjoyed doing in academia, one of which was teaching. I started going to sci-fi conventions to teach about the science behind things like Star Trek. I would go and give these science talks, and they were hugely popular. People just really lined out the door to see these talks. I started going to multiple conventions all around the country. I started to meet a lot of writers, creators. Then when I moved out to Los Angeles, a lot of them started to give me a call and start folding me in. I found my way in a very indirect route to now be a part of the entertainment industry, which I’m thrilled about.

**John:** Can you talk about those early calls you’re getting, asking for your advice, your input on a project? What are the kinds of things that, at a writing stage, they want to know from an actual scientist?

**Erin:** Typically, it’ll just depend on when they find out that I exist, whatever the stage the project is in. Typically, it’ll be in that story development period, where they’re coming up with a high concept, especially for some hard sci-fi. They’re going to ask me questions about like, this is the method of faster-than-light travel we use, or this is the energy source that this population’s using, or here’s the inciting incident that is somehow science-based. Can you just give me a pass on it to see how it feels? I always say, all right, if I can read it and it doesn’t make me throw up in my mouth, that’s a good pass.

**Leigh:** Erin, I have to say, this is really strange kismet that you’re on this episode, because I recently in the last six months started writing a sci-fi, horrory type thingy and needed to talk to an astrophysicist because our film was about that. Everything you’re talking about is exactly what I’m basically sitting someone down and saying, okay, how ridiculous is this?

**Erin:** I love that, by the way. I try to take the approach with writers that I’m going to “yes and” your project. I’ve heard a lot of stories of people with very negative experiences with science consultants, where they have a friend or a friend of a friend who has a background in that story, and then they send them the idea, and the response is like, “Nope, that doesn’t work. Science doesn’t work like that.” I really try to take a more positive approach, like, “Okay, if that’s what you want to do, let’s see how we can make this work and let’s see to what extent we need to explain it.” That’s sometimes a lot of what I do too is just say, “Yeah, you can do it. Just don’t try to explain it.”

**John:** Let’s think about the kinds of questions a writer might ask. A lot of times these are bigger conceptual questions. If it’s gravitational wave, faster-than-light travel, this is the means of faster-than-light travel I’m planning to use in my script, so great, and talking them through the options there. In some cases are you also talking about what the lingo is, what an actual astrophysicist would say in these moments? We had Zoanne Clack on the show, who was originally hired as a writer’s consultant on Grey’s Anatomy. She was there as a medical consultant, not just for like, this is the medical procedure, this is the disease, but also like, this is what a doctor would actually do or say in those moments. Do you get involved in this is what an astrophysicist would be like?

**Erin:** Absolutely, yeah. I think that’s where the direction of my career has gone. I still have those early concept conversations like you were talking about, Leigh, but now when I’m folded into a writer’s room or into a specific show, it can be all the way from story development and most of my days reading scripts. I will give little tweaks to the dialog here and there. Then like you talked about, maybe not necessarily getting the technological language right, but more the conceptual drive of what a scientist does. That’s something I’ve done for a number of episodes, where they have a scientific problem, and I’ll help the writer’s think through it as you would a scientist to build that story and to drive that forward.

**John:** We had a conversation two weeks ago with Mike Schur from The Good Place. He was talking about as it came time to do the moral philosophy on his show, he had done a lot of reading on moral philosophy, but he needed an expert who could really talk about this the way that a philosopher would talk about it. He enlisted Todd May and another philosopher on to do that. It sounds like you’re involved in a similar place where the writers may have a good sense of what they’re trying to do in general, and they’re coming to you for specific help and making this actual fit with everything else that’s around it. Is that right?

**Erin:** Yeah. What’s really interesting about my role now is I’m available to the whole Star Trek franchise. That’s five shows right now that are currently in development. They all use me very differently. Some of it is based on the fact that I’ve been with them for multiple seasons, and so that trust and that relationship has grown. I’ll be in from breaking season arcs all the way through to sitting in the writers room to reading scripts, but even be involved with the post-production aspects and help with graphics. Other shows, I’ll just get the script and I’ll just edit little dialog and just do a little wordsmithing here or there.

Any time I’m approached about a science-fiction project, I always like to ask, okay, science fiction is a huge spectrum of science to fiction, and tell me where you want to live, and we’ll tweak the science to fit that appropriately, because there’s a lot of different types of sci-fi out there.

**John:** Speaking of different types of sci-fi, Leigh, your film The Invisible Man involves a scientist who’s developed a means of invisibility, which is very different than in the original film. He’s really using optics to become invisible, and a suit that lets him do this. At what point in the development of the script were you really figuring out, oh, this is what is believable to me for how this invisibility technology works?

**Leigh:** It’s a good question, because Invisible Man and Upgrade were both films incorporating a lot of sci-fi elements. I am definitely not a science major. If you started quizzing me about the Periodic Table, I would draw a blank, but yet I have my imagination. It’s been strange to watch certain things that I’ve invented in my mind somehow create some link to the real world. In the case of The Invisible Man, I thought, what if you had a suit covered with cameras, and each camera was taking thousands of pictures and then simultaneously projecting a hologram, so it’s almost like this hologram suit.

We were well into pre-production in Sydney, Australia, when we went and talked to some scientists at the Sydney Institute of Technology. We were explaining to them that it would work. They were thinking, and they were like, “Yeah, that could work.” They said the technology’s not there yet, but if you had a camera that could render fast enough and take these images and project. It was almost like I was retroactively given the green light on what I was thinking, but by that point the ship had sailed. It is interesting, this meeting ground between your imagination and real science.

**John:** For our topic today on How Would This Be A Movie, it’s interesting, some of them actually are things that started out as science fiction and then crossed more into scientific discussion. There are ideas that were first broken in the pages of sci-fi, yet the underlying concepts were interesting enough that given enough time, real science could catch up to these ideas.

Let’s segue right into some How Would This Be A Movies. For this installment, I asked our listeners on Twitter for suggestions on articles, topics to explore, and as always, they delivered. We picked a mix of some astrophysics, social science, some biology. I want to dig into some of the reality of each topic, but then also, what are the fictional possibilities based on the topic. This first one is an example of something that we first see in science fiction and then explored more. This is the Dyson sphere. Erin, maybe you could help us explain what a Dyson sphere is and why we might be looking for those out in space.

**Erin:** Yeah, totally. I love Dyson spheres. I’m very excited about this. Dyson spheres are a theoretical construct, kind of a thought experiment that people have put together about trying to find advanced life out in other solar systems. Really quickly, we live in our solar system, which is a bunch of planets that orbit a star, and then there’s millions and millions of stars in our own galaxy, and then there’s a bunch of galaxies out there. Typically on this scale we’re just talking about within our galaxy, but outside of our solar system. The idea of a Dyson sphere is that you essentially build a giant sphere, sometimes starts as a ring, then that ring starts to grow, that goes all the way around the star, and it’s essentially solar panels, that you’re able to harvest all of the solar energy off of this star. It’s an insane amount. If your civilization is advanced enough to do that, then the idea is they’ll probably need that much energy anyway.

**John:** A Dyson sphere is a way of harnessing all the power of a star. The reason why we might notice those out there is if you’re actually collecting all this energy, astronomers here on Earth, using our space telescopes, might notice that something is weird about that star, and they might be able to see the effects of this Dyson sphere and that it’s collecting all this energy.

**Erin:** Yep, absolutely correct. When it comes to trying to find a Dyson sphere, the big thing is trying to find ways that astronomers can differentiate between an artificial object like a Dyson sphere versus any sort of naturally occurring objects. This actually happened. There was something called Tabby’s Star, where they discovered it had a weird signal to it, that it could be artificial, but upon further investigation, they think that it’s just a bunch of debris that’s around this star that was making its signal look weird. That’s the tricky part about astrophysics.

What I think makes it a great vessel for storytelling is we just have to take what the universe gives us. We really don’t know anything. We can’t create our universe in a lab. We get these puzzle pieces that we have to put together. Dyson spheres are a really exciting one to explore.

**John:** Let’s think about this in terms of a movie, because building a Dyson sphere would presumably take thousands of years, and so it’s not a thing that’s going to be happening in the course of one of our movies, most likely. It could be a character who is encountering a Dyson sphere that exists in the world, finding proof of an alien civilization, because they have one. Leigh, what’s jumping out to you in terms of a way that a Dyson sphere could appear in a film that you want to make?

**Leigh:** The first thought I had was of those two options. Are we building a Dyson sphere to save our universe or do we come across a Dyson sphere? I feel like you solved the first problem. It would take too long to really make a film about building one. Maybe this is a film about finding a Dyson sphere. It’s so funny, because the film I’m writing right now, I could really incorporate some of these elements. I would say coming across or seeing a Dyson sphere at a distance, and then where do we go from there?

**John:** It feels like it’s a setting, it’s an initial incident, but it’s not the actual thing itself. Erin, you can tell us… Obviously, there’s probably NDAs for future stuff, but have Dyson spheres already appeared in the Star Trek universe?

**Erin:** They have, actually, totally NDA-free. This was in The Next Generation. There was an episode where they discovered a Dyson sphere around a star system. It was a Next Generation episode, but they were able to bring back Scotty from the original series, that his ship has crashed into this Dyson sphere. That’s exactly what it was. It had a huge gravitational pull. That’s why his ship crashed, because it was just so massive. In this case it was a fully closed sphere, which it doesn’t need to be. The gravitational attraction of this is what caused the ship to crash. It’s been seen before.

**John:** We can’t talk about search for extraterrestrial life without maybe bringing up the Fermi Paradox, that sense of, there should be so many civilizations out there, given the time span of the universe, and there should be more things out there. It’s the question of why does it seem like we’re the only people, or at least we don’t see any other civilizations out there.

That paradox could be answered in a couple different ways. One of the possibilities is that no civilization actually gets up to the point where they would build a Dyson sphere that we could see them, they all collapse first, or there may be other reasons that we can’t understand why we’re the only ones who are visible. Maybe people are out there and they’re hiding because it’s a good idea to hide. There’s all sorts of interesting, provocative questions that are raised by the lack of evidence out there.

**Erin:** I love the Fermi Paradox. You touched on a couple good ones. Like you said, it’s this idea that it takes so long to create this advanced capability, whether that is a Dyson sphere or something like warp drive to be able to visit other star systems. A big one for me is not the philosophical aspect, but just the probability that your civilization is going to have an extinction event from space, like a gamma ray burst wiping you out, is much higher than you having enough time to build that. The analogy I use, it’ll take you 200 years to build a house, but you live in a 100-year floodplain. It’s going to wipe you out before you do it.

**John:** It’s all very dispiriting.

**Erin:** It is.

**John:** Leigh, let’s think about characters in this situation, because it feels like if we’re out in space doing things, we have such tropes about what space [unclear 00:21:38] are like, but is there any other way to get into the characters who would be in this story?

**Leigh:** I think if we’re talking about the human characters here, it sounds like a film about humans meeting obviously a much more advanced civilization. What’s interesting to me about a lot of these films is that a lot of sci-fi films that involve creatures from space or other civilizations still couch it in very human terms. A spaceship is a very graspable concept for human beings. It’s a flying car and the aliens look just like us except their skin is green or something. I find the mysteries of space so much more enticing, like the last 15 minutes of 2001, where what’s happening is so far beyond your comprehension. I do think Arrival was a recent film that, it made the aliens very mysterious. I thought their language was very provocative. For me, I see a movie about us primitive humans, the ants on the side of the freeway, meeting this super advanced civilization and learning about them, I guess.

**Erin:** I can throw out one fun science thing that you can maybe play with for the story, which is the fact that it takes light time to reach us from other stars. We might detect a Dyson sphere that’s, let’s say 100 light years away, but we saw them as they were 100 years ago. You can always factor that in in space exploration stories, especially about humanity, that can sometimes talk about the passage of time or the futility of existence, because hoping that they’re still there by the time you’re able to talk to them.

**John:** Or that they might be on their way to us. Can you give us a quick primer on warp drives, both the warp drives that exist in the Star Trek universe and what the other versions of warp drives we see in the Star Wars universe? What are the basic edges of faster-than-light travel in these different environments?

**Erin:** There’s typically about three flavors of faster-than-light travel. Warp drive is the one most people think of. That’s this idea that when you’re on the surface of space time, this bowling ball on the trampoline visual some people are familiar with, you cannot go faster than the speed of light. Once you have no mass, then you just coast in a straight line. Warp drive is saying, what if space time goes faster than the speed of light and you wrap that fabric of the trampoline around your ship and then that moves you faster than the speed of light. That’s essentially how warp drive works.

Other fun examples include things like wormholes, whether they’re artificial or naturally occurring, which is, again, thinking about that fabric, that trampoline, you take two points and you have a tunnel between them that’s actually shorter than the whole distance from traveling along the surface. We’ve seen a lot of those.

**John:** I think it’s Carl Sagan I first saw on Cosmos, who had the piece of paper bench and a pencil sticking through. That’s a very classic image of the hole through the plane.

**Erin:** Bingo. Exactly. That’s it. Again, wormholes are something similar to warp drive that mathematically our understanding of space time, they could exist. It’s just we’ve never seen one or we don’t have enough energy to create that. Then the final way to travel faster than the speed of light are things like we saw in Battlestar Galactica or Dark Matter, which were jump drives or blink drives, which is where you spool up. It’s as if you’re pulling that fabric toward you, using a ton of energy, and then you make a small jump, and then you let go and you get catapulted to where you were wanting to go. Also takes a ton of energy to do that.

You mentioned Star Wars, so I’ll just explain briefly. Star Wars is hybrid between a wormhole and a jump drive. It’s as if you’re building the wormhole as you’re traveling through that. Yes, I’ve tried to science Star Wars.

**John:** Let’s go from these big cosmological problems to really small, inside your DNA problems. We have a tradition of movies that explore science that goes too far. We have these human-animal hybrids, Island of Dr. Moreau. It turns out that hybridism is actually much more common than we would’ve guessed. Specifically chimerism, which is where a human has two different sets of DNA in themselves. We’ll put a link to a couple different articles about this. Oftentimes it’s from in the womb. You’ve absorbed your identical twin, and so both of your sets of DNA are in there. In real life, there are examples of a woman who was suspected of murder for her young children, and it turned out that she actually had a chimerism disease, disorder, that was causing these kids to be dying, or their DNA samples didn’t match who they should be, or they were not the father of their own children, weird situations that come up like this. Let’s think through some movie options, story options for chimerism. Leigh, is anything jumping to mind?

**Leigh:** I feel like my brain, it must be stuck in bad ’90s thriller mode or something, because the first thing that comes to my mind when you’re talking about this hybrid is it’s one bad twin, one good twin. They’re one human being, but it’s almost a Jekyll and Hyde situation with two personalities fighting each other and maybe one personality not remembering what the other person’s doing.

**John:** That’s literally the plot of Stephen King’s The Dark Half, which is that it’s an unborn twin.

**Leigh:** One of my favorite Stephen King books when I was a teenager. Underappreciated. That’s right, in that book he ingested his twin and it became his pen name. That’s where my brain first goes, but maybe that’s just the first piece [unclear 00:27:07] that you get out all the bad ideas before you get to the good one.

**John:** Erin, it seems like part of the issue, why we’re just discovering chimerism right now, is that there’s really no reason to check a person’s DNA unless there is a problem. It’s only in these weird fringe cases like a crime or a paternity thing that we would even notice that someone had two sets of DNA in them.

**Erin:** That seems to be the case. I think when you look up examples of chimerism, a lot that you see are aesthetic duality. You can play a lot with visuals there, where you have one half of the flower is one color, one half is another one, or a cat that’s half one type of cat and half the other type of cat, because it seems like… Again, I’m not a biologist, but it does seem like this DNA almost, it’s like they merge but they exist side by side as opposed to existing throughout the whole body. It’s really interesting.

**John:** It is. Let’s think about the kind of characters we would find in this story. Thrillers are natural, but maybe there’s options for comedies or other kinds of stories. It could be the main character is a chimera, actually has this double set of DNA. It could be like The Dark Half or it could be some other reason why they’re manifesting as two selves. It could be also the investigator who’s trying to find out how it’s possible this crime was committed by somebody who doesn’t match up to this thing or the DNA’s not matching. It could be a scientist exploring this. Leigh, any thoughts about who you’d want to see in this story?

**Leigh:** I like it from the point of view of the person living it, rather than the investigator, which turns it into a twist, like aha.

**John:** It feels like a Law and Order episode.

**Leigh:** Exactly, whereas I think a movie from the perspective of somebody who’s actually sharing their consciousness and their body with some other set of DNA, I think this could be really interesting, like a first-person. Maybe the two sides could be communicating with each other. You have these long blackouts where the other guy’s in charge. Then the two sides of the personality are communicating about what the other one’s doing. I think that’s a more interesting thing.

**John:** Erin, I’m thinking back to Star Trek: The Next Generation, or sorry, it was a later show. There’s the Dax character who has… It was a person who, they have another consciousness inside them. It feels like a trope that Star Trek has played with a bit.

**Erin:** Oh yeah, for sure. I think whether it’s a dual personality or whether it’s something that exists somewhat separately. Like you said, the Trill were these alien species that had a symbiont that would pass from a host to another. Instead of it being a chimerism thing, then you’re thinking it’s almost like two sentient entities. You’re talking a little bit more about a parasite symbiotic relationship, which is really fun. Then when I see chimerism, the first thing I think of is the original series episode, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, where you have the people who are white on one half and Black on the other. Black on the other half and white on the other half. It’s a not so deep metaphor.

**John:** I can’t imagine an analogy for anything.

**Erin:** They hate each other. Again, that’s more visual, whereas what you’re talking about is much more psychological, which I think would be a fun area of this to explore.

**John:** It’s also easier to envision a world in which chimerism was so common that people visually did look interesting. You could tell that they had multiple people in them at all times. We’ll put examples too. These people whose skin tones don’t match from side to side, but you can have more extreme examples than that. That doesn’t go quite to the black and white Star Trek, but it could be an interesting look for a character. If Craig were here, he’s always talking about hair, makeup, and wardrobe and how characters look. It could be an interesting detail for how a character looks. I like that.

When Craig was on the show, a couple weeks ago, we were talking in the Bonus Segment about population and how growing up I was always taught to fear population growth, that basically we’d run out of resources, that the world’s population was going to get too big, and now suddenly we’re facing, like, oh, populations are declining in a way that could be very detrimental, and population loss is a thing.

I want to talk about the scientific concepts behind sudden population loss. Asked on Twitter was, how much of the population do you have to lose where you go from a Leftovers situation, where they lost 3% of the population, it was sad, but life goes on, to Station 11, where they lose almost all of the population and you’re suddenly back in agrarian times. I’d love to talk through the math and science behind how much of the population you can lose before everything changes and everything falls apart.

**Erin:** When you think about population, there’s an interesting aspect, which is the exponential growth. I think I remember those messages sent from the past about how population growth is out of control. There is true to some extent, but when you really think about it, let’s imagine the blip, where half of life gets wiped out.

**John:** In the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

**Erin:** Yes, correct.

**John:** The Thanos snap.

**Erin:** I remember seeing something where people were like, if you just got rid of half the people now, our global population would be down to what it was in 1970.

**John:** Which doesn’t seem so bad at all.

**Erin:** Right, but half seems like a lot. That’s just our understanding of exponential growth, which I think we’ve also seen a lot this past year with how exponentially things can spread from one person to another. It’s hard for us to wrap our heads around sometimes. I’d probably err on going on the more extreme example of that.

**John:** It’s also this question of how quickly you lose all the people. If you lose 50% of your population in the snap of fingers, you’re also going to have a lot of collateral lost, based on the planes that were in the air and the people who are stranded and things falling apart. I think my question, which it’s hard to answer scientifically, but I think is good to grapple with as writers, is what other institutions of our civilization would just completely collapse if we didn’t have enough people to do them, that the human infrastructure behind things would be really challenging? Leigh, as you’re thinking through this space, we always talk about post-apocalyptic and we always think about, oh, there are zombies now or there’s some other problem, but honestly just having not enough people can be its own struggle.

**Leigh:** I was going to say, maybe the most interesting thing for me would be somewhere between the Leftovers and Station 11, whereas Leftovers was a chunk of the population and they were just dealing with the weirdness of it, and then Station 11 is everybody. What if it was like all of a sudden, there’s still a lot of people, but it’s half what was there before, and suddenly it’s like, wait, nobody knows how to make this anymore. We lost most of our scientists. It’d be interesting to suddenly see people having to grapple with minds that have been lost. A lot of people who were maybe working on things that were going to improve the planet are suddenly gone.

**Erin:** That’s so funny you say that, because I really feel… When I worked in engineering, and in academia, we had a lot of people that were like that, that had been in the industry for 30, 40 years, and make the morbid joke, like, man, he better not get hit by a bus. We’re in so much trouble.

**John:** Think back to the Y2K bug and all the problems that could’ve happened if we’d not been able to pull people out of retirement to fix the computer systems that were written in. Was it Coble?

**Erin:** Yeah.

**John:** They were the folks who actually knew how those things were built. If you lose certain people who know certain things, that’s going to be a huge impact, the folks who actually know how to run the nuclear power plants or know how to run our water systems. You look at the zombie shows, you look at The Walking Dead, and the zombies are terrifying, but not being able to use a sink is also terrifying.

**Leigh:** You think about time travel, I remember talking to a friend once and saying, “Yeah, I’d love to go back in time, 200 years. I would just rule the population by holding up my iPhone.” My friend was like, “Yeah, but could you explain to them how it works?” I was like, “No.” He was like, “What happens when it runs out of batteries? What would you do? Could you explain to them how a toaster works?” I was like, “No, but I could tell them what it was.” He was like, “You would very quickly be flayed and hung on the castle and you wouldn’t amount to anything because you can’t actually make anything or explain it.” He was very right about that.

**John:** That’s where I think it’s so interesting about sudden population loss, because it’s like time travel, where you’re having to revert back to an earlier time, even though you’re moving forward in time. It’s like certain things just can’t be done anymore because you don’t have those capabilities. As you think about this as a movie, let’s think about what characters we may want to see in this story, which also I guess depends on what time frame we want to tell our story in. Station 11, it’s both present day and jumping forward 20 years to what happens after that.

**Leigh:** What if it was a scientist character who was building something that maybe was going to some sort of climate technology that was maybe going to improve the world, and then suddenly he was part of the population that disappeared, and his teenage children or adult children are suddenly left with this thing that they don’t understand how it works, that their father was the mastermind of. He’s creating a tension there of we have all this stuff, but we don’t know how it works anymore.

**Erin:** Yeah, or even their colleagues or their people that they were mentoring or that are now having to piece together what they were working on.

**Leigh:** Exactly. There we go. Let’s [unclear 00:36:22].

**John:** In the second South Park movie about COVID, that actually is a plot point, where this one guy has built this thing that no one else can figure out how to do. It’s definitely an idea that’s out there, that sense of the person who’s created the situation is the only person who can solve it, and we can’t find the person who created the situation, which feels great. That person is probably not the central character. That’s the obstacle, the McGuffin we’re looking after. It’s either children of that person or someone else who is searching.

**Leigh:** Perhaps the thing that caused the massive population loss could be what the scientist character was working on. Suddenly he’s one of the people that’s gone, and his children or his colleagues, as Erin said, have to figure out how it works before everybody’s gone. There’s this ticking clock of how do we figure out how this thing works before we all disappear and there’s not 50% of the people here, there’s 0%.

**John:** At least pointing out that we have to have continuous stakes. If it’s a onetime event where we lose half the population, that’s horrible and there’s repercussions, but what are the ongoing stakes? What’s the ongoing narrative tension that’s being built up through the situation? Something like it’s going to keep happening.

**Leigh:** Maybe if there’s a rip in the dimensional fabric. Now we’re getting into Marvel territory. If there’s some sort of cataclysmic event, cosmic event causing the population loss, and this machine or device that the scientist character, she or he has been working on and is suddenly gone, I think as that tear in the cosmic fabric gets bigger and bigger, you’re like, there’s something to work towards.

**Erin:** I really like the idea of it being a continuous event and that ticking bomb of like, all right, we have to make this as accessible and as understandable to anyone, because we don’t know who’s going to go next.

**John:** Let’s talk about accessibility and understandability, because our characters in the movie are trying to understand it, but also we as an audience have to understand it. I think back to, Leigh, your explanation of how the suit works in Invisible Man. It was really clear. You were showing it to us. We were seeing it happen. It’s like, oh, I get what it was, and there wasn’t anything more to it. Anything that’s involving a scientist concept, we have to think about what is the simplest, most logical way to explain what’s happening here without over-explaining it.

**Leigh:** I always love people explaining something to a child. It’s always helpful, because then again, I think it’s a way to dramatize exposition. I feel like one of the gold standards for this is the scene in Jurassic Park when they sit down and they get the kids animation that’s like, hey kids.

**Erin:** 1,000%.

**Leigh:** Here’s how dinosaur DNA works. I remember the 13-year-old watching that movie in theaters. Within 30 seconds, the writers and the filmmakers had completely explained this hugely complicated concept of extracting dinosaur DNA from mummified mosquitoes. All of a sudden I was like, “Great, got it,” and they can just move on with the monsters and the crashing and the bashing. It was beautiful. I feel like if you involve a child, and the child’s like, “I don’t understand,” and you just have a character saying, “Look, this McGuffin over here is going to fix all our problems,” I feel like that’s a good way to explain it to the audience.

**Erin:** It’s a classic trope we use in Star Trek all the time. It started with Spock over-explaining something and then Kirk giving a blank stare and getting a much more simple–

**Leigh:** [unclear 00:39:50].

**John:** Then you have McCoy saying, “No one could possibly understand this.”

**Leigh:** I’ve noticed a tic in screenwriting. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, John. I’ve noticed a tic with screenwriting, like in Marvel movies and stuff, not to keep calling them out, but they’ll have one of their characters… I’m just making this up on the spot. They’ll have one of their characters say something like… It has to sound creative scientific and very complicated. One of the characters will say, “No, listen, what we need to do is take the interlocker and connect it to the vectranon and then when we plug it twofolds back into what we would consider dimensional da da da, then we’ll be okay.” Then one of the other characters will say, “Time travel. You’re talking about time travel.” It’s like, oh my god, they do it every time. I look around the theater, and I’m like, is it only our screenwriters noticing this tic?

**John:** I do want to give a shout-out to Episode 419 of Scriptnotes with David Koepp, where we actually talk about the film strip inside of Jurassic Park that explains all.

**Leigh:** Can I ask you, John, is there an actual industry screenwriters nickname for that thing of saying, “Time travel.”

**John:** In some ways it’s like hanging a lantern on the exposition. Basically someone’s explaining jargony stuff, and they do have some character comment on the fact that you’re explaining jargony stuff. It’s a little bit hanging a lantern, but if a listener has a suggestion for, oh, that’s what we called this, we’re happy to popularize a term for that phenomenon that I’ve definitely noticed.

**Erin:** I have no problem with it, because it’s been my entry into the industry is to write them, is to write those scenes.

**Leigh:** You do the jargony part for the screenwriter, and then the screenwriter comes in and goes, “Flying. You’re talking about humans flying.”

**John:** I love it. This whole thing has been a thought experiment on different story topics. Our next one actually is a thought experiment. It originated on a rationalist message board. It’s called Roko’s Basilisk. Basically the greatly simplified version is that a future artificial intelligence might punish or otherwise take action against anyone who stood in its way, including those in the past. It gets a little hand wavey, but essentially, because for all we know, we’re living in a simulation, AI could torture us, or torture indistinguishable copies of us, and so therefore, we shouldn’t try to stand in the AI’s way.

**Leigh:** John, just in reading the article, I did have one point of confusion, which was just how does this hypothetical AI torture people in the past? Does it have time travel capabilities?

**John:** Basically, because it could create a simulation with us in it, that would be indistinguishable from us, it’s torturing a version of you, even if you, Leigh Whannell–

**Leigh:** Right, but I would not be affected by my simulation being tortured. My simulation wouldn’t be having a good time, but I myself would not be–

**John:** If you stick it in the framework under which all these other discussions are being had, if a version of you is being tortured, it is you being tortured, if that thing is indistinguishable. That’s my best understanding. Help me out, Erin.

**Erin:** As far as I understand it, and this is one of those things that does result in crying in the shower in the middle of the night, but the way I have thought about it is it’s… This is why they talk about it as a doing thought experiment.

**Leigh:** I love when the article says, “Be warned. Just reading this article may send you insane.”

**Erin:** What they’re trying to get across is, once you’ve learned this sentient, all-knowing artificial intelligence could exist in the future, you now have a decision if you’re going to be one to help that or to not help it. Your decisions as you make along the way could influence that one way or the other and it could eventually punish you. Again, as John mentioned, there are versions of this where it’s in a simulation or we’re living already in that simulation. Extrapolating the probabilities of your own behavior, like when we code NPCs in video games, non-player characters in video games, we’re assuming they’re going to make decisions based on what you do. It’s the same idea that this artificial intelligence will make a decision based on what we’re deciding to do. It’s very philosophical.

**Leigh:** Maybe the movie there, so as not to skirt too closely to the Matrix, although maybe it already is, maybe the movie there is that there is an anti-AI scientist, somebody who is a distinguished scientist who believes that AI is the wrong direction to go in, if we give it too much power, suddenly starts to find their life falling apart. Things are happening. Maybe people they know aren’t recognizing them anymore. Starts to work out that the AI that this scientist colleague invents in the future is now inflicting pain on a simulation, but somehow that simulated version of this main character is affecting her own life. Somehow the simulation is bleeding into her own life, and it becomes this almost Jacob’s Ladder version of what’s real, what’s not, how can a supercomputer in the future be tearing apart my current reality.

**Erin:** It brings up good things you can play with with free will. Am I going to choose this? I’ve been predetermined to choose this. Everything I’ve been exposed to in the past says I’m going to choose this, but now I know that it knows I’m going to choose that.

**Leigh:** Maybe the main character’s life starts falling apart so much that the AI in the future sends her a message somehow, be it through somebody else or whatever, but saying, “This can all stop if you get on board and help your colleague to make me what I am today.” She has this moral crossroads of do I stop this tearing apart of my life and help my colleague create this thing that is tearing apart my life, or do I keep on my current track of trying to stop something that I think is bad for humanity.

**Erin:** I got to say, this reminds me of a film, Superintelligence, with Melissa McCarthy. It was really similar to this.

**Leigh:** Oh wow.

**Erin:** Really weirdly similar to this.

**John:** Let’s pull back a little bit and look at the article in context, because the headline is, are there basically ideas that are too dangerous to think. That reminds me of The Ring. Once you’ve seen the videotape in The Ring, you are cursed and you are going to die in seven days. I think there’s some aspect of once you’ve been exposed to a thing, you can’t ever get away from it, feels like an evergreen topic. Everything we’ve been describing feels like a horror film [unclear 00:46:23] in some ways. That knowledge could be a curse that you carry with you.

This also reminds me of, there’s a book that Megan McDonald and I both like a lot, called There is No Antimemetics Division, which has a sense of ideas that you can’t actually see or think, because they are anti-memes. They’re memes that are so powerful that they worm their way into your head. There’s something that feels scary about this, but also not necessarily super cinematic. I’m having a hard time picturing a thing that a camera would be pointed at.

**Erin:** I could picture it being a very heady hard sci-fi, psychological sci-fi horror about how do you forget you learned something, truly forget it.

**Leigh:** Also, if you have an AI in the future that’s torturing you, I almost see it as a science fiction Jacob’s Ladder where the character’s life is falling apart in really eerie and scary ways because this entity in the future is messing with her reality somehow. I can see things to point the camera at.

**John:** You’re quire a director. I’m also thinking early Darren Aronofsky. I’m thinking Aronofsky around Pi and that sense of people who get so obsessed with ideas that it takes over their life. [unclear 00:47:40].

**Leigh:** I want to pitch what I’m working on right now, because every time you guys are talking about seeing things in space that don’t make sense or a character becoming so obsessed with an idea, I’m like, I just want to pitch it, but [unclear 00:47:53] so I can’t.

**John:** Let’s go back out to very, very wide and things we can’t point a camera at, which would be solar storms. I’d love to talk about the reality and dramatic potential of solar storms, which are basically… The surface of our sun sometimes puts off these giant plumes of fire and radiation that can mess up life on Earth. We have records of these things that happened. There have been telegraph lines becoming charged and paper catching fire. That was before we had all the modern technology. If we were to be hit by one of these right now, it would be really, really bad. Erin, can you give us a sense of what a solar flare or solar storm could be like? You’d mentioned gamma ray bursts earlier on. There are things out there that are just really bad if they hit the Earth.

**Erin:** Yeah, space will kill us. I love that you brought this up. The big bad solar storms are called coronal mass ejections or CMEs. Actually, we wrote this into an episode of Season Three of Star Trek: Discovery, where the engineer referred to it as a star burp. We will simplify it to that. Like you said, it unleashes a huge amount of radiation, a huge amount of heat. Now you’ll survive the Earth getting hit by a CME. A gamma ray burst is such high radiation, you’re just going to fry. A solar storm isn’t going to necessarily hurt you, but what it does do, as you said, is it takes down technology. It’s a huge electromagnetic pulse.

You mentioned the telegraphs and the papers catching on fire. That was from an event in 1859 called the Carrington Event. That was when Earth got hit by a CME right at the early stages of this industrial era. It was so powerful, it took down transformers. It blew out all the telegraph lines. People who were using telegraphs, it set their paper on fire. They got shocked by it. It’s crazy. It’s come close to happening these days. I think in 2012 we discovered a couple years later we only missed one by a couple weeks. It can happen, and the implications are numerous and delightful and catastrophic.

**John:** It’s not hard to envision the big catastrophe movie of this, which would be everything gets taken down. Let’s set a moment to think about the period film of this. If we actually were to make a movie about the Carrington Event and what that would be like, in some ways it could be charming. It would be a disruption and things could happen, but it’d be a good parable for losing this technology we counted on and having to do things the old way or something like you can’t send a message out and so you’re isolated. There’s something charming about that image.

**Leigh:** Yeah, that’s actually a great idea. I actually think just that concept, it almost is by the by now when you talk about the solar storms. It’s like a movie based on what would happen to us all if none of our devices worked anymore, if suddenly everyone teenager’s TikTok in the world was not available to them. I think I can see an interesting dramedy about that.

**John:** As we went through this pandemic, it was bad. Everyone agrees, it sucked, but we still had our technology. Without our technology, it would’ve been much, much, much worse. Our ability to get things and communicate with people, if we didn’t have Zoom and FaceTime and phone calls, it’s hard to even imagine how much worse this would’ve been. Scaling back up to the modern day catastrophe movie, it would be horrible. It would be one of those pre-apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic kind of scenarios. We could get our way back, but it would be really, really hard.

**Erin:** I think it’s fun to explore. I’ve tried playing around with different stories with this too. We could be sitting here having this conversation, a CME could hit us, and it’d just all be gone. All the cell towers are gone. None of the electricity works. All the power lines are down. What do you do in that situation?

**John:** A question for you. I’m envisioning the Earth turning in space. Does it only hit half of us or does it hit the whole planet? Do we know what would happen?

**Erin:** Good question. That’s why we’ve dodged them in the past is because it’s just lined up with Earth’s orbit or not. Yes, if a CME hits us, it will affect the whole Earth, because of Earth’s magnetic field. These are all charged particles. If you think about iron filaments in a magnet, they’re all going to align with that. Certainly the side that’s hit direct will be affected by it, but the magnetic field of Earth will carry that throughout. There are some nuances to it, but it would definitely be a global event.

**John:** We talked through these different scenarios and different story ideas. Obviously, we’re overlapping so much with what Leigh’s already writing that he’s really angry at us now.

**Leigh:** No, I’m not angry at all. I’m desperate to almost chat it over with you so you guys can shoot holes in it and talk about it with me, but maybe to do that publicly wouldn’t be wise.

**John:** Maybe we’ll do that offline.

**Erin:** We’ll take it offline.

**John:** Yeah, we’ll do that. Thank you for talking us through the science behind all these things. If a studio were developing one of these ideas, how would they enlist your help in doing this? How early do you come in in a process? Do you come in when there’s a script done and the director’s figuring out some stuff? What is the best way to involve a scientific professional like you on this?

**Erin:** I’m naturally moving into the writer space. Other science consultants have done the same. Naren Shankar and Andre Bormanis both got their starts as science consultants on Star Trek. It’s very easy now for me to see how that transitions into a writing career, but what I’ve found with other writers is the earlier the better, because we can brainstorm fun ideas. We can break story. We can add layers that you might not have thought of, that have this backbone of science. Then we also don’t have to undo anything, just because it doesn’t quite fit. It’s not that I would never not let you do something, but it just means that we can make it stronger by getting ahead of stuff.

**John:** Erin, if somebody were working on a thing like the chimeras in a story, obviously they can do a lot of research themselves, but what would be your recommendation for finding experts or finding people in the field who they could actually bounce ideas off of? Do you have any guidance on that?

**Erin:** Yeah, there’s a few resources. The Science and Entertainment Exchange is one in LA that is available to writers. I know the WGA has some connections as well, that you’re able to reach out to them. I’m hired as a science consultant, and sometimes I do get asked biology questions. My role for that predominantly is to reach out to experts I know and whom I trust, but also that I have that research background to filter through a lot of the BS, to not waste anyone’s time, and that I can translate that in a way that helps your story. There’s lots of resources. Twitter’s also a great way to reach out to science communicators and people who are good at translating stuff for you.

**John:** Fantastic. We have one question here Megana’s put on Workflowy. Do you want to ask that for us?

**Megana:** Greta asks, “I’m writing a sci-fi horror project about an experimental medical procedure. I’ve gotten really caught up researching the science and mechanics of drug trials, etc, but when I watch other movies in the genre, they don’t seem to spend much time explaining or justifying the premise. My question is, how do I get out of the way of my own backstory?”

**John:** That’s a good question. We talked a little bit about that in the great explainer in Jurassic Park, which is such an efficient talking it through, like this is how this is all going to work. As I think through, so many of my favorite movies that are in a scientific space don’t spend a lot of time on the science. It’s just part of the premise itself. Leigh, with both Invisible Man and Upgrade, you have scientists in those movies, but they’re not sciencing that much.

**Leigh:** I feel like I remember reading an interview with a guitarist once who was playing really experimental, seemingly crazy music. He’s like, “Yeah, but you have to know the rules to do this. You got to learn the rules and then forget them.” I feel like one thing for me is just to know what the science is. In the case of The Invisible Man, I had my theory and had written out how I thought the suit worked, but I didn’t feel the need necessarily to have a scene where somebody explains that in detail.

I feel like sometimes you knowing how the science in your film works can filter through your screenplay in more of a drip feed fashion than this exposition dump. I do feel like audiences pick up on a lot. John, you said before, “I saw the suit and I felt like I knew how it worked,” but I didn’t really have anybody explaining it in the movie. I did have a couple of people say, “You didn’t even explain how the suit worked.” I guess you’ll never please everybody. My policy is just to know it yourself, but not necessarily force that knowledge on the audience in a heavy-handed way.

**Megana:** Do you find yourself ever going through in a pass and taking out some of the science if you’ve overwritten it?

**Leigh:** Sometimes, yeah, because I guess when you get into editing you realize that the essential bone marrow of the film is just the story, and anything that’s not pushing it forward is window dressing. What I actually love is one thing that you’ve talked about, Erin, that you do, is giving people technical terminology. There’s this thing that I love where it’s like when you’re watching a film and you feel like you’re in the hand of authority. If I’m watching a scene with neurosurgeons and somebody’s like, “Hand me the excavator,” is like, “Three milliliters of da da da da,” I don’t need to know what that stuff is. What I do need to know is that the people on screen know what it is.

It works very well in spy movies when somebody sits down and is using terminology that I don’t understand. If somebody sits down, some CIA guy, and is like, “This whole thing’s a blackout. I’m going to need a two-day wash-up on this,” I don’t know to know what those nicknames are. I’m like, “Oh, wash-up, that sounds important.” The scene would be bad if the character sat down and said, “Oh, this whole thing’s a blackout,” and the character they were talking to said, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I’m pretty new here at the CIA. What’s a blackout again?” and the guy was like, “A blackout is when an operation goes totally south and we have to pretend it didn’t exist.” If I was watching that movie, I’d be like, “Oh my god, you had me at blackout. What are you doing?”

The script I’m working on right now, just to give you guys… I’ve been talking to someone about telescopes, super duper powerful telescopes. This guy from Cal Tech was giving me all these terms that they use that I’ve been dropping in the script, like, “Check the baffles.” I wouldn’t explain to anybody what baffles are or anything. By the way, if I’m remembering correctly, it’s the black sheeting that keeps light away from the telescope.

**Erin:** Very nice.

**Leigh:** What I would do in the script is have someone on screen say, “Check the baffles,” and then somebody else would be like, “Baffles are all good.” I really don’t think the audience would be sitting there going, “Wait a minute, what about baffles? I’m lost.” All they need to know is that these guys are scientists who know their shit. That’s the most important thing.

**Erin:** The counterpoint too is that it gives a lot of good credibility when you do have that one astronomer or that one neurosurgeon who’s watching it, and they’re like, “Yeah, they used the right word.” [Unclear 00:59:15].

**Leigh:** On Upgrade I got a lot of comments, or I saw a lot of comments on Twitter from hacker types who would say, “He used the right terminology for that hack.”

**Erin:** Makes a big difference. It makes a huge difference. I’d still caution people to throw the techno babble in, as I like to call it, but making sure that it is right. You don’t have to explain it, but make sure what you’ve got is at least as close to possible.

**Leigh:** It’s not important for the audience to know how the science works. It’s just important that they believe the people on the screen know how the science works.

**John:** Exactly the point. You have to believe that the characters know what they’re doing and are doing things properly. The case with Star Trek, Erin, I will say that there’s techno jargon, but it’s also very Star Trek-specific techno jargon, because you want to make sure that you’re referring to the same things in the same way, episode to episode, series by series, that it’s consistent.

**Erin:** That’s a lot of the reason they brought me on to be available to the whole franchise was to maintain that consistency, because that’s five shows. Once shows are off and running, they’re operating pretty independently. Having someone double checking how one show’s talking about transporters or talking about warp drives or imposing any numbers or star dates, all that stuff is in my purview to make sure that that all stays consistent, and consistent with the last 55 years of Star Trek. No pressure.

**John:** I bet we have some listeners who are so envious of your job. It does sound remarkable.

**Erin:** Thank you.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article by Annie Rauwerda for Input. She’s talking about the love story behind… In Wikipedia, if you look up High Five, there are these four photos of this man and this woman doing high five, down low, too slow, showing what those actual things are. They’re the public main photos for those things. It’s tracking down who were those people in those photos and what is their deal, because they look to be like they’re in college. It’s not clear, are they a couple? What’s going on? The spoiler for it is they are actually a couple. They are actually married. They have two kids now. It was lovely to see a thing that’s been on the internet forever and tracking through who those people are now. It’s a lovely story that has nothing to do with science whatsoever, but made me happy as I was reading it.

**Leigh:** Very good.

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

**Leigh:** My thing would be, I’ve been reading these short story collections by an author named Brian Evenson lately. I’m really loving his short stories. He writes these, I wouldn’t call them horror stories necessarily, but they are somehow infused with existential dread. Literary horror I guess would maybe be the term. He’s written a few collections of short stories. I just read one called A Collapse of Horses. He has another one that I’m just about to start reading called The Glassy Burning Floor of Hell. Actually, each story is related to somehow, going by the back blurb, each story is related to what we are doing to our environment and our planet. I guess he’s building these stories of eerie dread out of the way our planet’s going. His stories, some of them are very short. They’re just amazing little bite-size chunks to read before bed or whenever, just because we don’t have enough existential dread in society right now. Things are going just fine, and you want to feel more uneasy.

**John:** We love it. Erin, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?

**Erin:** Yeah. I’m taking the opposite approach to Leigh in terms of existential dread and confronting it or running away from it. I have gotten really back into comic books and comic book stories and that lighthearted, fun, skirting around sci-fi fantasy world. I’m reading a book right now called We Could Be Heroes by Mike Chen. It is a delightfully fun book about two characters. One has woken up with no memory, but he’s able to erase other people’s memories, so now he becomes a super villain. He holds up banks in order to buy coffee and books. Then another character is also looking for her past. She can’t remember, but she can go really fast, and so she deliveries fast food. They meet in a memory loss support group and then they team up. I haven’t finished it, but it is an absolute delight to read. It’s We Could Be Heroes by Mike Chen.

**John:** That sounds absolutely great. That was our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Contra Entropy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. Leigh, where are you on Twitter?

**Leigh:** @lwhannell.

**John:** Great. Erin, where can people find you on Twitter?

**Erin:** @drerinmac. That’s D-R E-R-I-N M-A-C.

**John:** Fantastic. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where we’ll have links to articles and topics that we discuss today on the show. You’ll also find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on Leigh’s fantasy mall. For now, Erin and Leigh, it was an absolute pleasure. Leigh, thank you for coming back on the show. Erin, you’re welcome back on the show any time. This was a delight having you here.

**Erin:** Thank you. I had a great time.

**Leigh:** Thanks, guys.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Leigh, on Twitter one night I saw you pitch this idea of like, would anyone go to a period shopping mall where basically you were in the ‘80s or the ‘90s and everything inside this shopping mall, presumably a dead mall that you’d resurrected for the thing, would be of that time period. Am I explaining your concept properly?

**Leigh:** Yeah, pretty much. It was interesting. This idea of mine lives in the gray area somewhere between an actual business plan and a stoned 2 a.m. thought. It’s somewhere in the middle there. I just sent up this tweet. It got a lot of attention, maybe more so than my usual tweets. Once you get the attention of the internet, that can be a bad thing. The 17 Scandinavian Saw fans that usually respond to my every tweet are nothing but positive. All of a sudden the darkest tentacles of the internet were like… If we had to think of the internet as a creature unto itself and not millions of individual people, I’m always astounded at the anger of it.

In that tweet that you’re referring to, I said, “Would anyone want to come and visit this period ‘80s themed mall with movie theaters, but if you had to give up your phone to keep up the illusion of it being the ‘80s, would you do it?” It was astounding, the number of people who were like, “You can take my phone when you pry it out of my cold, dead fingers.” I was like, whoa, calm down, random guy, not really posing this. I was also astounded by the number of people who would quote tweet it and write, “So…a mall,” or like, “Hey, what if I took a mall and turned it into a mall?”

No, random people. I will use this podcast as an opportunity to say, basically what it would be is a little nostalgia theme park, that you take a dead mall and you make it all very period, so the cinema just shows ‘80s films. The arcade there just has vintage games that were around in this era of the mid ‘80s, the food, everything about it. Basically it’s essentially a Stranger Things theme park. You’re walking around. I just know that if someone did do this, I would want to be there every day. I would want to drink it in. It is something I’ve thought about a lot over the past year.

**John:** Now Erin, would you visit Leigh’s mall?

**Erin:** I would. Depends how long, but again, I spend a lot of time in malls. I don’t know if I have a ton of nostalgia for it.

**Leigh:** What I think the idea is, it’s not so much a mall, like hey, you’re here in a mall to go shopping. It takes the shape of a mall, but it’s really an adult theme park. I went to this place in Portland, Oregon a few years ago with my friends. It was called the Kennedy School.

**John:** The Kennedy School’s great. Describe it, because it really is a very unique place.

**Leigh:** Incredible, especially for someone who lives in LA, which is a city that I don’t think has great entrepreneurial bar and entertainment options that are happening, new ones. Basically, the Kennedy School, this company has bought this old elementary school, which I think was called something something Kennedy School. They bought it and they’ve converted it into this entertainment complex for adults. It has movie theaters in there, a bowling alley, several different bars. It’s a one-stop shop that you can go to. Instead of doing a bar crawl down a street, you go to the Kennedy School, and you walk in and there’s one little bar here, and then there’s a movie theater, and you can plan a night around it. I just remember being blown away. I don’t know how you felt, John.

**John:** I went there for a lunch. It was cool that it was clearly a public school and everything looked like a public school, but it had just been turned into a bar and restaurant, movie theater. I think there was even a hotel.

**Erin:** That sounds awesome.

**Leigh:** I loved it. Dammit, see, Erin’s loving this Kennedy School idea way more than my mall idea. The great thing about it is you’re walking down the corridor, and it was like an elementary school corridor with the little hooks for the coats and everything. I guess my mall would be like that. It’s not a mall in the sense that you can shop there. It’s restaurants and bars and entertainment options would be the only… There would be a movie theater, a bowling alley, an arcade, three or four different food courts, and different bars. It would all be housed in the shape of a mall. Maybe there would be some performance art. Maybe somebody is doing 80s style robot dancing or something. You could really build this little insular world.

I like this world building thing that’s happening with theme parks. I went to the Stars Wars World at Disneyland recently. I loved the all-encompassing nature of it, that when you walked in, it’s like you’d left this planet and you were now interacting with Storm Troopers.

**Erin:** I love that.

**Leigh:** I guess this would be the ‘80s nostalgia version of that Star Wars theme park. Maybe there’s a video store there or something.

**John:** We need to ask Megana Rao, who’s too young to have ‘80s nostalgia, would you visit Leigh’s ‘80s nostalgia mall.

**Megana:** Yeah. I like arcade games and bowling and things. I miss mall food courts. Would you have that there?

**Leigh:** Absolutely. Absolutely.

**Megana:** Yeah, I’m in.

**Leigh:** It would be good food. You would gussy it up a bit. It would have the look of an ‘80s style mall food court, but the food would be a little bit better.

**John:** Let’s talk about how we manifest this vision of yours, because I would like to visit this mall too. Who builds this? How much control do you want over this? Do you just want it to exist and be able to visit it or do you want to have some role in making it exist?

**Leigh:** It’s one of those things where a lot of people say if nobody’s doing it, you should do it. I’ve read a lot of interviews with people that have opened restaurants or whatever, and they’ve said, “I decided to open this restaurant because it didn’t exist.” If I’m to take that approach, I have no hospitality experience, so I guess I would have to get in touch with someone who is some sort of venture capitalist or had some experience in experiential… I do know there was a guy at Blumhouse who I’ve worked with a few times who was in charge of their maze experiences or anything that was real.

**John:** Escape rooms, that kind of stuff.

**Leigh:** Exactly. Maybe someone in that field who could… Maybe you could tie it in with… For all I know, you could go into Netflix and say, hey, this could be Stranger–

**John:** Stranger Things. If you are a Scriptnotes listener who is probably wealthy, but also has experience in hospitality, that could be great. I think about my friend Ryan Reynolds has a gin company. Ryan Reynolds doesn’t know anything about gin. He didn’t go into this knowing anything about gin. He wasn’t a gin expert. He had an appreciation for it, and he built this company and sold it for a gazillion dollars. I just want this to be your gin, Leigh. I want this to be your Aviation Gin.

**Leigh:** I feel like with your encouragement this might exist one day.

**John:** We’ll hope so. We’ll have you back on the show for that.

**Leigh:** Excellent.

**John:** We’ll do live Scriptnotes from your mall. I promise you that when the mall opens, Craig and I, we’ll commit Craig to doing a live Scriptnotes at your mall.

**Leigh:** Thank you. Excellent. I’ve got two guaranteed customers.

**John:** Leigh, Erin, thank you so much.

**Leigh:** Thanks, guys.

Links:

* [Ed Solomon’s Tweet on MIB Movie Accounting](https://twitter.com/ed_solomon/status/1495249600428523522)
* [What is a Dyson sphere?](https://earthsky.org/space/what-is-a-dyson-sphere/) and [Dyson spheres on Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere)
* [What is a Human Chimera?](https://www.insider.com/what-is-a-human-chimera-and-how-does-it-happen-2017-11) and [Becoming Two People At Once](https://interestingengineering.com/becoming-two-people-at-once-human-chimerism)
* Stephen King’s [The Dark Half](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Half)
* [The Science Behind the Endgame Snap](https://www.fandom.com/articles/avengers-endgame-science-snap) and [Minimum Viable Population](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population)
* [Rokos Basilisk: The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time](https://slate.com/technology/2014/07/rokos-basilisk-the-most-terrifying-thought-experiment-of-all-time.html)
* [There is No Antimemetics Division](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08FHHQRM2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) by qntm
* [Are Solar Storms Dangerous to Us?](https://earthsky.org/space/are-solar-storms-dangerous-to-us/) and [How We’ll Safeguard Earth From a Solar Storm Catastrophe](https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/space/how-we-ll-safeguard-earth-solar-storm-catastrophe-n760021)
* [The adorable love story behind Wikipedia’s ‘high five’ photos](https://www.inputmag.com/culture/wikipedia-high-five-too-slow-photos-mystery-couple-solved) by Annie Rauwerda for Input
* [A Collapse of Horses](https://theamericanreader.com/a-collapse-of-horses/) a short story collection by Bryan Evanston
* [We Could be Heroes](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087JJ5G5K/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) by Mike Chen
* [Leigh Whannell](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1191481/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/lwhannell?lang=en) and Leigh’s [80’s mall tweet](https://twitter.com/LWhannell/status/1490133853607919616)
* [Erin Macdonald](https://www.erinpmacdonald.com/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/drerinmac?lang=en)
* [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 Contra Entropy ([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/539standard.mp3).

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

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 534 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we’re looking at midpoints, that murky middle of the movie, where writers and audience both ask where are we, where are we going, and how soon will we get there.

First we have a ton of follow-up from listeners about previous topics, and new questions that will no doubt prompt more follow-up. Craig, we will never escape. Caught in a loop of provoking and responding.

**Craig:** Good. I think that that’s a good sign. You’re right, the more we talk, the more follow-up and, I wouldn’t call it push-back, but people have interesting things to say. People respond and react because they are … I don’t know if I’m going to go so far as to say they’re all in a parasocial relationship with us, John, but they are in a parasocial conversation with us.

**John:** That’s absolutely true. I like that you’re working that parasocial, keeping it up. I don’t know, at graduation, did anyone launch a beach ball at your high school graduation, and the beach ball bounced over the top of it?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I feel like that’s what you’re doing with the word parasocial. You’re just keeping it up in the air a little bit longer.

**Craig:** Keeping it in the air and trying to just stay connected to the Millennials, even though the Millennials are now, I must say, old. That’s how old we are in Generation X. We think the young people are who Generation Z thinks of as the old people. Hey Megana, did you know that, that you’re old now?

**Megana Rao:** I identify with Gen Z.

**Craig:** You can do that if you want. You can identify however you want, but factually …

**Megana:** I’m old, I get it.

**Craig:** Do you? Because I don’t think you do yet. You’re going to get it. It’s actually super freeing, Megana. You should really embrace this. It’s amazing.

**Megana:** I spend most of my day complaining about neck pain, so I get it. I’m there.

**Craig:** Yeah, but when you get a little bit older, that will be totally justified. You won’t feel weak about it. You’ll be like, “Yeah, like all of us, my neck hurts.”

**John:** My gift for Megana this … As we’ve established on the show, I’m not a good gift-giver, but I did give Megana a blanket thing to keep her warm. It feels like a gift you give not to a young person, but to an older person.

**Craig:** Young people don’t want wraps to stay warm. That’s absolutely true.

**Megana:** Yeah. My cold bones.

**Craig:** You’re going to be the best old lady. Fun.

**Megana:** I already am.

**John:** In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I want to talk about NFTs, because I always want to talk about NFTs.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** In particular, these three really great articles that really shine spotlight on what is so dumb about NFTs.

**Craig:** So dumb.

**John:** We’ll get into a little bit of that. We’re going to put it in the Bonus Segment so when people come after me, they’re going to have to actually pay for the Bonus Segment to hear about it first. Actually, we’ll profit from-

**Craig:** You should sell it as an NFT. That whole segment should be an NFT. Just for fun.

**John:** Going to be great.

**Craig:** Just to get meta.

**John:** First, Craig, we have to establish the Chekhov’s gun on this podcast, because about 100 episodes ago we started talking about COVID. It was actually in a Bonus Segment talking about COVID. Chekhov’s gun finally went off this last week for us on the show.

**Craig:** Boom, right in my face. Yes. I had COVID, or really COVID had me. I test constantly, because I am in a production. I tested positive for COVID, and my symptoms were nothing. I have to just take a moment to salute the scientists and researchers and everyone, honestly everyone who worked to create the Moderna vaccine, which is the only one I’ve taken, but I’m sure that everybody at Pfizer deserves the same, and all the other places that have worked so hard to do this, because I’m not going to bother with the anti-vax people. Basically eff off. For the rest of us who are normal and smart and understand facts, this is miraculous. It’s just an incredible thing. This was a disease that was indiscriminately killing people. Now it mostly discriminately kills people. If you are vaccinated, and particularly boosted, especially with Omicron, which I suspect is what I had, as it is incredibly-

**John:** 99% of all COVID in North America is that.

**Craig:** It really was a nothing. It was a big nothing. I’ve had mosquito bites that were more vexatious than this bout of COVID, if I can call it a bout. I just followed the rules, isolated, which was for me not a big deal, because I like staying inside. I really do. That was fine.

**John:** Craig, let’s talk about how you run a show that’s in production while you’re doing that. Let’s be a little practical here, because you actually had tools at your disposal which a couple years ago you wouldn’t have had.

**Craig:** The primary tool that we use now for remote viewing is called QTAKE. QTAKE is tied into the video playback system. On a set, all the cameras are sending a signal to the video playback system, the video playback operator. Ours is named Amanda. She is wonderful. Manages the signal from all the cameras, and also has the functionality to broadcast that signal via WiFi or network to stream it to whatever the QTAKE, that is the brand that does this, the QTAKE server, which then sends it right back out to anyone who has the username and password and has been invited, and I can watch. I can watch on my monitor at home or on a laptop or even on a phone if I wanted to, although I don’t, all three cameras. I can select one camera to zero in on if I’m really interested in A camera or B camera. I can of course hear everything. In this way, I was able to do pretty much the job I would’ve done there.

The part that makes it harder is, when you’re present you can be there for the parts that don’t include the camera, blocking rehearsals and things like that. It’s more efficient. Right now Liza Johnson is directing this episode. She’s fantastic. Liza and I were able to just text each other. Jack Lesko is there as well, so maybe we’ll text with Jack and then I can call them on a phone if I want to go over a specific thing. We absolutely managed it, no real problem. It was nice. It was nice to be able to do that and not have to put pants on.

**John:** Perfect. I’m glad it worked out. That system you’re describing reminds me of conversations I had with Dana Fox about her season of her show, which is shooting up in Canada, which she could not be there, because it’s the lockdown. Phil and Matt also came on to talk to us about the systems they were using when they had to shoot the first season of their show without being present on their set. It’s not ideal, but it’s possible now, which I think is fantastic. You were able to be safe and keep your crew safe by staying home.

**Craig:** It’s a strange thing to be like the eye in the sky. Obviously you want to be there. No major issues. It was a terrific week, honestly, of shooting. It was some really cool stuff. I’m excited for folks who have not experienced the story The Last of Us to see what we shot this week. I know that the people who have seen it will appreciate it a lot, and people who haven’t seen I think will also really, really enjoy it. It was a good one.

**John:** This past week, Craig, I got to do something that I know you enjoy almost as much as playing D&D, which is to tell writers to fire their representatives, to fire their agents.

**Craig:** Of course, that’s the rule.

**John:** That’s the rule. I was talking with an upper mid-level writer, so a guy who’d staffed on TV shows, had a good career going, but had about a year break where he just could not get staffed on a show and was having a hard time getting stuff set up. As I was having this phone call with him, he was doing all the right things. He was writing new stuff. He was finding new ways to generate his own material. He was getting stuff in development, but just couldn’t get a thing to land.

I asked him, “I think it’s probably your agents. I think there’s a real problem here.” He was already going to probably fire his agents. When you do, and you’re going to go to the next place, talk to the people you’ve been dealing with and ask them what they think of your reps. He did, and everyone hated his reps. That was actually part of the problem. Now he is staffed on a new show that he loves. He’s a co-AP. I was just very excited for that advice to pay off and for him to have done the work to actually say, “My reps were not helping me. They were actually hurting me,” which I don’t think we talk about enough on the show.

**Craig:** I think we have said in the past that a bad agent is worse than no agent. They can do harm. When you have a bad agent, but you don’t know they’re bad, you are trusting that someone is taking care of something, and they’re not. There is a natural thing that can happen I think for some writers with their agents, where over time you can be taken for granted. You’re the person that they have, so they don’t have to worry about you. They’re worrying about signing the new person, or they’re worrying about getting the next thing for the person that makes more money than you do. When you have a new agent, it’s new, and romance is in the air, and everyone’s trying hard. The new agent has never gotten you a job before. They really want to get you a job. That’s embarrassing if they don’t.

I don’t think you should ever feel like it’s a massive, major career thing to fire your agent. It’s really not. It’s not. Getting a great agent is a massive career thing for you. Getting the right agent, that’s the big career change. Firing a mediocre or bad one is meh. As long as you have a new port to steer into, you should be fine.

**John:** Agreed. Also this last week, there was a tweet by Bo-Yeon Kim. She’s reading Bong Joon-Ho’s Mother script and marveling how different Korean formatting is from the US. We’ve talked a lot about script formatting on the show and had a special episode about it. It’s fascinating looking at this. Craig, as you open up this tweet, you’re seeing two pages, probably essentially the first two pages of the script. What do you see when you look at these pages?

**Craig:** It’s in Korean, so even if we spoke Korean, but didn’t read Korean text, we would still not know what’s going on. It looks really similar. It’s not wildly different. When they number their scenes, they put the number there, and it’s a very short scene header. Incredibly short. Then there’s a bunch of action, which doesn’t look too far off from ours. The character and dialog blocks are combined. Instead of a character, and then underneath, dialog, they do, in the dialog, what we would call the dialog block, character colon, I’m assuming, dialog, including a parenthetical. Occasionally there are two exclamation points, which may have a meaning in Korean that is different than one. I do not know.

**John:** We shared this with Bo Shim, who works with you, who verified, yes, this is just a thing you would see in a Korean script. I think it looks beautiful. It looks like our Western format, just in Korean. A lot of white space. A lot of white space on the right-hand edge. They look beautiful. It’s fun to see stuff that you can’t read, so you’re just appreciating it as the form of it. I was surprised it was actually as recognizable as a script.

**Craig:** I’m not super surprised, because the modern film business was invented here in the United States. The modern screenplay format was invented here in the United States. It does stand to reason that other nations, as they begin their own industries, will probably look to the very successful original one as at least inspiration, if nothing else. This script format, for all of our gripes, has functioned extraordinarily well for over a century, so makes sense.

**John:** Makes sense. That’s a perfect segue into an email we got from Richard. Megana, do you want to share this Richard email about Casablanca and early screenplays?

**Megana:** Richard wrote in, “Like you two, I enjoy giving back and sharing as I try to be the teacher I never had. Honest, Craig, all film schools aren’t the same, as I’ve actually taught in the John August Room in the Writing Department at USC. Plus, I would never advise my students not to use we see in their action lines.

I’m writing in regards to Episode 531 that dropped January 4th. In it you discuss the history of screenwriting and screenplay format and mention that Casablanca was one of the first scripts to use a format that’s close to what scripts look like today. Actually, that format had been in use in Hollywood for much longer, at least a decade. As a movie lover and film nerd, I’ve read quite a bit about writers of the Golden Age, and have read their screenplays. Those screenwriters, such as Samson Raphaelson and Oscar winners Robert Riskin, Ben Hecht, and Frances Marion, all wrote in a style we’d recognize today. I recommend checking out classic screenplays at the WGA Library. There’s also a terrific book, Six Screenplays by Robert Riskin, for an example of how the Capra Touch started on the page.”

**John:** I love when someone writes in to say, “Actually,” but then actually provides the details. Yes, there were scripts like this before Casablanca. I just didn’t know about them.

**Craig:** I didn’t even know what Casablanca looked like. I didn’t even know what that script looked like. Thank you, Richard. Yes, all film schools aren’t the same. Certainly NYU and USC are the ones that people aspire to the most. In theory, if there’s going to be good film school experiences, it will likely happen at one of those two places, or certainly at least in the John August Room. I can’t imagine anything untoward happens in the John August Room, the worst room at the strip club.

**John:** Don’t get champagne in the John August Room.

**Craig:** No one ever goes into the John August Room in the strip club. That’s always a good idea to check out classic screenplays if you’re interested in how things have evolved over time. Robert Riskin’s certainly one of our greats. I note that Richard put Capra Touch in quotes, no doubt because he is implying, as I will state overtly, that directors have been credited with things that screenwriters have been doing for decades. The Capra Touch is the thing where Frank Capra shot the script that Robert Riskin wrote. That’s the Capra Touch.

**John:** What we talk about with a modern screenplay is that sense of there are scene headers and you move into scene description that’s actually very full, very full compared to what you find in a play, that the dialog is important, but it’s not the only thing you’re seeing in this. When people read plays and they read screenplays, they’re like, “Oh, there actually is a big difference here.” That difference is how full the scene description is, how important it is that we are moving from location to location, just because film is a different medium than a play. You’re not just in one space and you’re not going to have these 20-minute scenes in general in film. You’re going to be moving from place to place. You have to have a vocabulary for what that looks like on the page.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** All right, let’s get back to more follow-up here. Matt wrote in about QR codes. He says, “While listening to John and Craig’s discussion of updating the screenplay format, I was reminded of this tweet I saw earlier in the week about a writer who included a QR code in their script. How do you guys feel about the inclusion of a QR code that links you out to additional material?” I guess like songs or images. “I only fear that the reader would go into their phone, would disrupt the flow of the read, and potentially end it with distractions from the phone entirely.” Craig, a QR code in your script?

**Craig:** That is an odd-looking thing. My concern wouldn’t be that the QR code would disrupt their flow of the read. If it led to something really cool, then I think it’s fine. It only takes a second or two to grab your camera, see it, click on the link, and look. My problem about the inclusion of a QR code is that the QR code itself aesthetically is such a downer and it’s ugly. It’s just this big ugly blob on the page. I would so much rather that there was something where people could read and just simply tap on something and understood that it would take them to a little image, then they could tap it away. It’s ugly, ugly thing.

**John:** Here’s where we need to introduce Megana’s innovation, because she’s working on a musical and she’s including the songs in the script. Megana, talk to us about how you’re doing that.

**Megana:** I just included them as a link, which is something that’s very easy to do in Highland. I reference these songs that are on YouTube, because the song’s told in the same style, and so it’s like, click here if you want to listen. Then it just takes you to Safari and opens the link in YouTube.

**John:** I think what’s smart about this is it’s recognizing that most people are not going to be reading this screenplay printed out, the way that screenplays used to be. They’re going to read it as a pdf, and pdfs can include links. Just make that clickable and it’s a good stopgap. It doesn’t give you all the way what Craig wants, where it’s actually embedded within the document itself, but it’s pretty good.

**Craig:** That sounds like a perfectly good solution. I think that that’s a really smart way to go.

**John:** Craig, you use Fade In. Does Fade In allow you to put active links in your documents?

**Craig:** It does. Fade In, actually at my urging, there’s quite a few things that you can do in Fade In that are really cool. You can embed alts, which is a really interesting thing. You can create links. Because I’m working on something that’s proprietary, I don’t do that, but yes, Fade In does have the ability to do that.

**John:** Here would be my argument for maybe a QR code is, we always talk about the title page and then you can stick a dedication page or a first page before the actual screenplay starts. That might be a page where you could say, if you would like to see images related to this, or this thing, click here or scan this. I could understand why you might want to do that, because that way if someone is looking at the script in a way that didn’t have the clickable link, that QR code would be a way for them to get to it. I wouldn’t put a QR code in the middle of a script page.

**Craig:** It’d be a bummer.

**John:** That’d be bad. Hattie wrote in to say that, “I find Celtx is great for editing between multiple people. I use Celtx Educator, as I’m studying for a master’s in screenwriting. You can share your script with anyone who has Celtx and an email address, and those people can edit the doc.” We’re talking there about shared screenwriting experiences. I still have an old Celtx T-shirt from a zillion years ago, because I never throw out T-shirts. I never really dug Celtx. It was just web-based, and I found it kind of janky. The advantage of a web-based ting is it’s very easy to do that multiple user thing. If it’s working for you, great. Craig and I know nobody who actually uses Celtx in a professional way.

**Craig:** I have not heard the word Celtx in, I don’t know, a decade. WriterDuet I think does a very good job of this. There is a free version of WriterDuet, so definitely take a look at that. Celtx, it’s like Movie Magic Screenwriter.

**John:** This last week I had a run-in with Movie Magic Screenwriter.

**Craig:** A run-in?

**John:** I did have a run-in. I had a dark encounter with it. This last week when I posted the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory script, that was an old FDR, Final Draft, old format, that is able to reformat and put it on a proper pdf, so it’s up there in the John August Library. I had these other scripts that I was like, crap, these are so old. They’re Movie Magic Screenwriter things, because you used to ping-pong them back and forth between Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter. There’s not an app to open these. I didn’t have Screenwriter. It wasn’t even clear that the build of Screenwriter, which works on a Monterey system, because you can open these old files. I was involving nerd friends to help me crack these things open.

What was so embarrassing is that there’s a Barbarella script that I was trying to open up, was that I spent maybe three hours wrestling with this file, only to realize that it actually was a Final Draft file, that if I just actually added dot FDR, it would just open, because you remember back before OS X that files did not have extensions on them, so you had no idea what that file was. I just assumed it was a Movie Magic file, and actually it was a Final Draft file.

**Craig:** I remember when OS X came out that there was this hullabaloo about the fact that these file extensions meant that Mac was turning into Windows, and no, it was turning into Unix is what it was turning into. There were always file extensions. They just didn’t show them to you.

**John:** All that meta data was buried into the file system.

**Craig:** You have the option now of automatically seeing file extensions or not, depending on the kinds of files. I tend to want to see the file extensions myself.

**John:** I do too. Here’s an example. It’s that if I have Barbarella first draft dot fdr versus dot pdf. It’s good to see, oh, the one that ends in dot pdf is the pdf. That’s just good to see, if I see it in a list view. I could see the icon would be different, but that’s not the point. You just want to see in the list which one is the pdf.

**Megana:** When you click in to look at your files, it would give you that information, even if it wasn’t …

**Craig:** You can always Command I, but I don’t want to Command I.

**John:** I don’t want to Command I.

**Craig:** Command I means something’s gone really wrong, as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** Megana, I hope you have some stamina in you, because this is a long email, but I think it’s actually pretty good. This is the one from Jules.

**Megana:** Jules says, “I enjoyed listening to your discussion in Episode 532: Mistakes of Yes, about the importance of suffering and seeking meaningful work, rather than signifiers or supposed hallmarks of success in the path towards happiness. Your conversation made me think about a statement written by Albert Camus, ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ When we think about mythology, Sisyphus epitomizes infinite, unrelenting torture, pushing a boulder up a hill, only to have to repeat it again once he gets to the top. Camus in this essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, posits that life is inherently absurd and filled with bizarre routines and habits. We could be distressed or discouraged by how little anything really means or not want to live as a result, but Camus says we must revolt and not let that get us down. Sisyphus is constantly completing a task that challenges him greatly, and he achieves it, all while knowing that it will not get him anywhere, but he can find meaning and purpose and joy in the struggle. He could be happy.

“Sure, life can suck sometimes, even if you aren’t Sisyphus, but we can choose what we focus on as motivation. For any of us with ambitions, that applies that any striving to achieve comes at the expense of our happiness. I think the solution is to learn to love the struggle, no matter how successful you supposedly are, or even if by all accounts you’ve achieved nothing. No one can stop you from struggling and striving. If you truly embrace and enjoy the struggle and process of creating a script, a story, a book, a podcast, etc, I think that may be the best path towards happiness for those of us cursed with ambitious goals. If you can love writing when it’s the worst, then writing can make you happy.”

**Craig:** Yes. Amen, Jules.

**John:** Yeah. It struck me because this was also the week that, I’m going to butcher his name, so I apologize in advance, Thich Nhat Hanh, who was a Buddhist monk who died this past week, but who often wrote about the struggle and being present in it, and not putting off to later to be happy, but being present in it. That’s what I think Jules is writing here, is that it’s about understanding that the work you’re doing is not about the end goal, but about the actual work itself.

**Craig:** Yes, and that the struggle, and pointless struggle, is not a problem, because it’s all you’re going to get. I’ve always identified with the existentialists, but probably more Camus than Sartre. Sartre was such a downer, because Nausea. Camus, The Plague had a huge impact on me when I read it as a young man. Boy, if you want to read a book that drives home what we’re dealing with now, read The Plague again. What is the point? Especially if you’re a doctor and you’re working so hard, and there is an inefficient or stupid government and there are people who are moronic, and there is a disease that is destroying innocent and evil alike, and all you can do is stem the tide slightly until you just inevitably fail and also everyone dies anyway. Now what?

The answer is that’s where the human experience is. That’s the point. The point is the experience. The more we can disconnect ourselves from some notion that there is an answer to all of this, that there’s a right way, and that you’ve done it and you’ve achieved something, and therefore you have arrived at the end goal of all this, then the better off we’ll be, because none of that’s real, none of that’s true.

I think our culture, particularly American culture, is so goal-oriented. Everyone’s walking around feeling rather bad about it all, because what is the goal? Is the goal to be Jeff Bezos? You couldn’t pay me to be Jeff Bezos. You couldn’t pay me what Jeff Bezos owns to be Jeff Bezos. I don’t need, what, I’d say about $14 billion, probably 80 billion. I don’t know what it is.

**John:** It’s a lot of money.

**Craig:** I don’t need any of that. Honestly, the guy, I look at him and I just think, I don’t understand you at all. At all. I don’t know what you’re doing. I know what his ex-wife is doing. She’s doing good. I don’t know what he’s doing and I don’t know why and I don’t care. People show us who we’re supposed to be, and I don’t want to be that person. I’m stuck in my meat suit. I’ll just try and do this as best I can. I think that was a great thing to write in about, Jules.

**John:** The thing I want to distinguish between though is there’s suffering and things being difficult and needless suffering, or suffering that’s pointless. I do find people who are torturing themselves for no good reason. If it’s torture for you to write and you cannot enjoy writing and you don’t enjoy the end results of writing, I think it’s okay to stop writing. I think one of the things we try to be honest about in this podcast is there’s people who it’s just not going to be their thing. I see people who struggle to do it for no good reason. There’s no joy that they find in it. If you don’t find any joy, maybe look for something else that you can find joy in the actual process of doing, because that’s going to be more rewarding for you in the long term.

I just worry sometimes that people misunderstand. It’s like, enjoy the suffering, and they’re like, “Oh, then I have to suffer. There’s some reason why I need to beat myself up.” That’s not what this is saying.

**Craig:** I think we got into the notion of satisfaction, as opposed to happiness. I brought up Professor Scott Galloway and this thing about not following your passion, but rather finding your passion inside of the thing you’re really good at, that’s what makes you passionate about it. If you feel a sense of obligation, you’ve made a promise to someone that you’re going to be a great writer, or you’re supposed to be a great writer, and you’re not enjoy it at all, then no, you are not doing what you want in any way, shape, or form. That’s not even real struggle. That’s just a general sense of pointless obligation. If there is no sense of satisfaction in what you’re doing, then yes, absolutely, move on to another thing. You will not find something truly existentially purposeful to do, because there is no such thing. You will find something, I think, that is satisfying to do. Look for that.

**John:** Agreed. On the last episode we asked our listeners to write in their suggestions for read-aloud software, so software that could read a screenplay aloud and do a good job with the screenplay format, opposed to other things. We have a couple suggestions. People mentioned an iOS app called Tableread, which I’ve played with and I didn’t love, but it may be useful to some people. VoiceDream was an often suggested app. It does a pretty good job. It doesn’t know what a screenplay is necessarily, but it does a pretty good job of reading things aloud. Obviously most of the Mac and PC software programs can do some version of reading stuff allowed. On Windows and on Mac, you can find ways for your screenwriting software to read what’s on the screen aloud to you.

The most classic things that are designed specifically for people who are blind or have vision issues are JAWS and ZoomText. JAWS is having challenges with the current version of Final Draft, which is why Ryan Knighton and other folks are looking for better solutions for screenwriting software for blind users. These are all things that are out there that are helpful for people.

I think it’s always worth remembering that when you create things that are accessible for people who have specific issues, generally it ends up helping everybody, because just the same way that closed captioning was specifically designed for people who couldn’t hear, and it being tremendously useful for everybody around, especially when you just have a TV that didn’t have the sound turned on. I think as we look for solutions that are good for specific audiences, they tend to generalize out. Let’s just keep looking for ways to read scripts aloud and also make the work we do more accessible for everyone.

**Craig:** I did hear from Guy Goldstein, who is the founder and CEO of WriterDuet, which I mentioned just a few minutes ago. They have a new app called ReadThrough. It’s free, or there’s a free version. I watched their little demo videos. Rather impressive sounding. Another thing to throw on there. It is free. At the very least, if you are interested in text-to-voice, check out ReadThrough for free and maybe write in and let us know what you think.

**John:** Great. Megana, do you want to take Nicholas’s follow-up here?

**Megana:** Nicholas wrote in and said, “I really enjoyed the script breakdown this week of the select scenes from awards contenders. I had a question as I was going through them myself. Do you think the script is manipulated after the film is completed in order to ‘match’ the final product more perfectly? The reason I ask is because back when Borat’s subsequent movie film came out, the script was released as best adapted screenplay, and the dialog matched up perfectly, despite it being an improvised film that was made without a script and with real people. What’s up with that?”

**Craig:** What’s up with that?

**John:** What’s up with that?

**Craig:** What’s up with that? I wonder, do you think that just happens magically, or maybe there are-

**John:** It’s a magic thing.

**Craig:** Maybe there are people that work really, really hard to do that.

**John:** We could tell you that we actually know people whose job it is to match the final official script with the film as it is released. Generally when you’re getting those FYC scripts, someone has gone through that process and made all the dialog match up and stuff, taken out the scenes that got cut and that kind of stuff. I think Borat would be the most extreme example of that, where they basically had to write a screenplay that could encapsulate all these things. There was a script for Borat before it was filmed, but there was so much improvised stuff in the middle of it that they were writing that stuff after it had been actually filmed.

I do think that the For Your Consideration scripts are useful to read, because you’re seeeing what the author intent was, but you should always be mindful that you’re seeing the highlight reel, you’re seeing the perfected version of it. You’re not seeing the stuff that’s changed along the way. That’s why it’s also great if you can get early scripts of things and then compare them to the final shooting script to really see what drifted and what changed. I know reading Cameron’s original script for Aliens and then seeing the final film, you really can see, oh, this is how it shifted and expanded and changed to get to where we got to. When we did Big Fish, the Big Fish For Your Consideration script was actually the script that we went out with, we started production with. Not a lot had changed, but there were scenes that were different and things like that. I liked that. I think it’s always great to see small changes between what was on the page versus what was filmed.

**Craig:** Same with when we had to send in the scripts for Chernobyl. It was the same way, just sent the scripts. They were pretty close. They were very close. They were extraordinarily close. In fact, there was a couple of moments here or there where I was like, “Oh, that’s really, really cool,” and I don’t think I put them into the script. When the soldiers are walking along and we hear that eerie Russian tune, Black Raven, that was an improvised moment by that actor, who was Russian and had remembered that song. He just sang it and Johann recorded it, and then he put it over that little moment of those guys walking. I don’t think that’s in the script, because it wasn’t in the script. I agree with you. That’s interesting to see what’s new and created and what’s not.

**John:** Yes, those scripts tend to be a little bit optimized, but even looking back at the Sorkin script, that had weird page breaks. I think that really was the script they shot, because there’s no reason why they’d leave the A and B pages. They would’ve just taken that stuff out. If you see stuff that looks like leftover things from production, if you see stars in the margins, that’s more likely to be the script that was in production.

**Craig:** A and B pages, weird page breaks, and omitteds are a sign that you’re looking at an authentic, unadulterated production script.

**John:** Last week we talked about we see and we hear. Phil wrote in to say that, “John and Craig were right. The we see rule is number 15 on this list from Screenwriters University.” Let’s look through here, Craig, because that was 15, so that’s got to be a few other rules that really are-

**Craig:** Let’s see if they got anything right. First of all, sorry, I got to know, what is Script University? What is this?

**John:** We should look and see what they are. They have testimonials. We Have Questions. Click on We Have Questions.

**Craig:** Yeah, we have questions.

**John:** First question is, what is your refund policy?

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**John:** Oh boy.

**Craig:** What is this? It’s an online screenwriting university featuring affordable instruction from well-known film industry professionals. Basically you pay for it. It is what it is. Let’s take a look at those rules.

**John:** This is just all-

**Craig:** It’s all bad.

**John:** It’s all umbrage bait.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Here’s the thing. It’s not worth going through.

**Craig:** Aw. Come on.

**John:** Slug line versus scene header. Craig, what do you call the thing that starts with INT or EXT? What do you call that?

**Craig:** I call it both, slug line and scene header.

**John:** It’s a murky, middle ground thing. A slug line can also be the thing that doesn’t have that, that is breaking up inside stuff within a scene that’s like, “Over at the corner,” and that kind of thing. Slug line, scene header, sure, they’re both the same thing. This has a lot of rules about what you can put in a scene header and what you can’t put in a scene header. I think you figure that out in context, don’t need all these rules.

**Craig:** Slug lines have no times of day. Did you know that? Because I put that in all the time. I put in afternoon, morning, mid-afternoon, evening. I put in all of it. It says, “Writers do it all the time.” You say, “Yes, we do. Before a script gets shot, someone has to change it to day/night.” No. I do that, and they don’t change it to day/night. Idiots. Script University, idiots. “Don’t put years, detailed locations in the slug line.” I do that all the time. Idiots. What is wrong with these people? Why would they dare do this?

**John:** “Dialog never follows a slug line, not ever. Action always separates the two.”

**Craig:** It’s rare, but I’ve done it.

**John:** It’s rare, but it’s done. Here’s why you do it, because if you’re ping-ponging back and forth between places, then there’s a reason why we’re shooting in a new place, then you could do it. It’s not a not ever. It’s rare.

**Craig:** “Don’t use cut to.” Normally I don’t, but sometimes I do.

**John:** Sometimes it’s really helpful.

**Craig:** Because I want to. “Don’t use we see or have strange reveals.” Screw you. Screw you, Script University? Script University, oh Lord. Ridiculous. Ridiculous. What is this nonsense?

**John:** Someone actually just put this page up to annoy us. That’s really what it is.

**Craig:** “On sound effects.” Whatever. I hate this. I couldn’t hate this more. Script University, shut it down. Shut it down. You’re bad. You’re bad and you should be ashamed of this. It’s stupid.

**John:** Craig is requesting his refund.

**Craig:** I hate it. What is wrong with these fricking people? What is wrong with them?

**John:** Hey Megana, help us out of this tailspin here. What did John write in here?

**Craig:** Yeah, help us out.

**Megana:** John says, “After I wrote my first script in 1999, I went starry-eyed and fresh-faced to the internet for help, and boy oh boy, there were a lot of those ‘never write we see because whoever’s reading it will literally throw your script across the room and furthermore it means you’re a terrible writer’ kind of people. There’s an attitude so many aspiring writers have of, you’re not allowed to write like a professional until you are a professional, but in my experience when you’re dealing with professionals, they don’t care at all about any of those things. I’ve never had a TV writer, showrunner, producer, or rep who have mentioned any of those things ever, and I do them all the time, and I’m still aspiring. Write for the job you want, not the job you have.”

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** We don’t care, and we never cared. I never cared. I never cared about whether or not I should say we see, ever in my life. I had never heard of anyone caring about it until the internet came along to explain to me that I was doing it wrong. Where? How? Why?

**Megana:** I just don’t understand who all these people are who are throwing scripts across the room.

**Craig:** Script throwers.

**Megana:** They just have to pick that back up.

**Craig:** Do you know how fast you’d get fired if you throw a script across the room and then one year later they’re like, “That script just won an Oscar.” You’d be like, “Oh, but it said we see.” “Okay, let me eject you from our life.” That’s crazy. One last thing.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** One last thing that I think people need to hear. You need to hear this, people, because there’s a lot of Script Universities out there, but there are even more people on the internet doling out advice, for whatever reason. I guess it makes them feel good. People love to deal out advice as if they have achieved something worthy of advice dealing. I see this on Twitter constantly. People that I literally have never heard of, and no one’s ever heard of, and have accomplished almost nothing, almost nothing of note in our business, are cross-legged, floating in air, like an elevated yogi, delivering the wisdom of the ages to us. They don’t know anything. Who are they? Don’t listen to any of them. You don’t even have to listen to us. If you’re going to listen to somebody, you should pretty much start with us. We at least know what we’re doing. We’ve done this before.

**John:** We do know what we’re doing.

**Craig:** Come on.

**John:** Craig, I think we’ve reached the midpoint, but also you said that perfectly, because exactly what you described there was in a midpoint tweet that actually prompted this whole conversation. We’ll link to this actual tweet. It’s not actually that important. Adeep tweeted, “For newer writers, these can happen at the hashtag #midpoint. A false victory/defeat, a story reversal, new tactics, full commitment to the journey, the stakes are raised, discovery of new key info, a major ordeal, main character switches from reaction to action, the story’s most significant emotional moment.”

If they’re talking about the midpoint, I’m sure we’ve talked about the midpoint on the podcast before, but I don’t think the midpoint is as much of a thing as this tweet might make us believe that it’s a thing, because I understand the end of a first act, I understand the change that goes at the end of the first act. I understand the worst of a worst for a third act. The midpoint is not really a thing to me. In most of the scripts that I’ve written, I couldn’t point and say, “That’s the midpoint.” It’s not a thing that I’m writing towards or even necessarily mindful of as I’m putting together a script. Are you?

**Craig:** No. I don’t agree with any of this. How about that? Or rather, I agree with all of it. This is like, “For newer chefs, the following can happen while you’re cooking: food can get hot, food can get cold, things can boil, stuff can congeal, dough happens.” All of these things can happen. Yes. Congrats. What does any of it mean? This is what I talk about when I did the how do you write a movie. So much of this stuff is from the point of view of, it already happened, let me look back at it, not it has to happen, how do I write it.

**John:** Yeah, because there’s so many movies I can think of I would have a hard time pointing to the midpoint. Here’s a movie that has a midpoint. Gone Girl. I know what the midpoint is, because we have a dramatic shift of POV in the story. That’s the midpoint of the movie. I got that.

**Craig:** There’s a wonderful midpoint in Monty Python’s Holy Grail, where they have an intermission. It’s wonderful. I talk a little bit about the midpoint in that episode, whatever it was. It doesn’t have to happen in the middle. It’s rather I think what people often point at. It’s just that at times the character begins to question how they’ve been living and start wondering maybe if they ought to change. That is a very subtle thing. It can be a line. It can be a word. It can be a look. It can be a moment. Or it doesn’t have to happen at all. That’s the thing. It doesn’t have to happen at all.

**John:** I would say main character’s journey, somewhere around a midpoint would be there’s no going back, or we’ve crossed so far that there’s no way to get back to the earlier point, which is a little bit different than having your village burn down at the end of the first act. We’ve gotten to a place, only way out is forward. Sure, but that’s not going to be for all characters and all stories.

**Craig:** No. Some of the things, like main character switches from reaction to action, if your main character’s been reactive for the first half of your movie, oy vey. “Story’s most significant emotional moment.” If the story’s most significant emotional moment happens in the middle of the movie, can we walk out after that point, because what are we waiting for? Story reversal, new tactics, all of that should’ve been happening anyway already.

**John:** This week I dusted off an old stage musical that I’d been working on 10 years ago and then took out and updated. I’m really, really happy with it. It has two acts, because it’s a stage musical. I absolutely love the midpoint. I really love the act breaks in stage musicals, because they have a very specific form in terms of closing up some things and asking really big questions that you’re going to be discussing during the intermission, and you’ve obviously been drinking your drink, and you come back in the second act with new energy. There really is truly a midpoint that’s so important in a stage musical. That just is not a thing that happens in most movies, in most normal screenplays.

**Craig:** Maybe, if I may, let’s just stop talking about the midpoint. Let’s stop talking about the midpoint the way we should honestly stop talking about first acts, second acts, third acts. Really? Everything’s integrated. Generally speaking, also, just stop making lists on Twitter. Stop. Stop making lists on Twitter.

**John:** I get it. I probably won’t give up first act and second act breaks, just because they are useful in terms of thinking how it starts and how it ends, because every movie has a beginning, every movie has an ending, so you’re talking about how does all the beginning work, how does all the ending work. You’re going to have those things, but what the middle of it is going to be, eh.

**Craig:** It’s really interesting how liberating working in the hour-long drama format is when it comes to that stuff. Now the substantive difference between one hour of drama and 90 minutes of drama is, drum roll please, 30 minutes, but for some reason those extra 30 minutes require us to have this intense structural conversation about what happens in the middle and what happens at the end of the first act and what happens at the pinch point leading to the first act and what happens halfway through the third act. When you’re writing for 60 pages instead of 90 pages, none of that is discussed, ever. Ever. There is no first, second, third act discussed in an hour-long drama. At least I don’t discuss it. Maybe other people do. Maybe commercial break folks do, but I don’t.

**John:** They do. I would say in one-hour procedurals, they really will talk about this kind of stuff, but that’s not what you’re doing.

**Craig:** At this point I think it’s become the standard in our business, a streaming style or cable style, one-hour-long, uninterrupted drama. No one ever talks about any of that, ever. They just talk about the totality of the story you tell. I think that’s a nice thing. I think that all of this crap that gets pumped out there into the world is pumped out there generally by people who are trying to charge you money for something. They’re after something. I really do. In the end you scratch slightly, and underneath is a chart showing you how much money it costs per these services offered. It bums me out, because it’s unnecessary.

**John:** We’ve been addressing some follow-up and addressing previous things from our listeners. Let’s bring in some new stuff so we can keep the cycle going.

**Craig:** Yeah, new stuff.

**John:** Let’s start with a question about omitted scenes. Megana.

**Megana:** JP asks, “At which point in a script’s life do scenes start getting marked as omitted? Is it only after it’s entered production when scenes have been numbered? Is it when conforming the script to the final product? Otherwise, why leave a bread crumb trail saying, hey, there used to be a scene here, but now there isn’t, instead of just cutting all evidence of the bastard scene and letting the story flow?”

**John:** What a great question. I love a question that actually has an answer.

**Craig:** Yeah, this one is answerable.

**John:** Here’s the answer, is that once you have a production script that has numbers in it, if you need that omitted there, just make it clear to everybody else that there was a scene here, that scene no longer exists, let’s not talk about that scene, because that scene is not there and we’re not going to shoot it. It’s gone. It’s erased. We still have some evidence in the script that we really did cut this out, we’re not forgetting to shoot it.

**Craig:** JP, you’re absolutely right. It only enters into play once production’s begun and once scenes have been numbered and a white script has been issued. The white draft is the first draft. The pages are locked. The scene numbers are locked. At that point forward, if you do delete a scene, yes, you have to say omitted. Maybe the biggest reason is because if you don’t, then at some point, a thousand people are going to email you saying, “Wait, what happened to scene 83? Because it goes from 82 to 84.” You have to say, “It was there.” Because people show up after that happens. It’s not like everybody that works on the movie or the show was there when that white draft was issued. It’s a smart thing to do.

One nice thing also, I assume they have this in Final Draft, they certainly do in Fade In, and I bet you have it in Highland, if you omit a scene, there is a special thing to say Omit Scene, which turns it into an omitted but keeps everything. If you have to un-omit it, or if you just want to peek and see what was in there, it’s easy to do.

**John:** We have a whole format for doing that, which is basically commenting it out, which is helpful. Now a thing also about omitting scenes, and also sometimes the meat of what happened in that scene is still there. The story point is there, but the scene has changed so much. There’s a different location. There’s different characters in it. There could be a discussion about, are we just going to change the scene or are we going to omit that scene and put a new A scene in there to replace it? That’s a discussion writers and directors and first ADs might have. Craig, where do you come down on that? If the scene changes so radically that it’s really a different scene, will you keep the scene number for it, or will you omit it, put a new scene in there?

**Craig:** I just talk about it with the first AD, script supervisor. Because scene numbers are really there for everyone else, I just will do whatever they ask me to do in that regard. I’ll ask them, “Would you want this to be a new scene or do you want me to just change it around inside of the scene?” It seems like the general rule of thumb is if we’re changing a location, absolutely it’s a different scene. If we’re staying in the same location, but we’re changing a bunch of things, or the location is sort of the same, but not the same, then I just ask them, “What do you want me to do with it?” Then they tell me.

This happens all day long, by the way, when we’re shooting and it comes to lettering up. When you’re shooting a scene, every new angle and size gets a letter. You’re shooting scene 12, okay, the first shot is shot 12-A, and so on and so forth. Sometimes if you change a lens, but you keep things exactly where they are, and the lens doesn’t change dramatically, the camera system folks will come by and ask the script supervisor, “Are we lettering up or are we just calling this take 6?” Then the script supervisor will make that call. It’s all about, just generally speaking, what’s going to help everybody else down the line.

**John:** While we’re speaking about letting up, on your show, if let’s say there was a scene 19 and a scene 20, and there’s a new scene being entered between the two of those, is that new scene A-19?

**Craig:** No, it’s 19-A.

**John:** That’s a difference of opinion between different productions, because 19-A makes a lot of sense. The problem with 19-A is it gets confusing then on the slate. It’s like, “This is scene 19-A, take A.”

**Craig:** We just call it 19 Apple Apple.

**John:** Apple Apple.

**Craig:** That generally isn’t a problem for us. They do it differently in England. I think it’s the other way. I can’t quite remember theirs. There are different methods for that sort of thing. I don’t tend to have a lot of those, to be honest with you. I don’t.

**John:** Because Craig writes everything perfectly the first time and it just happens.

**Craig:** Yeah, or at least I get my scenes generally. I have some A scenes, I have some B scenes, but there’s not that many. Honestly, because I am in control of the flow of the screenplay, when you’re getting into production on movies and 15 different writers are coming in because Frank Capra needs 15 writers to give him the Frank Capra Touch, then yeah, you can get a big ole mess. It can get really weird. There are things like what happens when you’re putting a scene between 19 and 19-A? Then that does become 19-A or whatever the hell, I don’t know what they call it, or 19-a-A I think is what it would be. They start using lowercase versus capital. You can customize all that. The only real thing that I think is important to pay attention to is to not use I or O, as those look like one and zero.

**John:** Exactly. In the memo that I put out for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, if you want to look on the pages for that, I actually call that out in the memo, because it’s a natural question for why we’re doing it, is that’s why we’re omitting those things. Another thing you should keep in mind is that it’s not unheard of to put out a new white script. If a lot has changed between the production draft and the draft we thought we were going to production with, and then a bunch of stuff changes, a production might choose to say, “This is the new white draft, basically. Throw out your current script. This is the new script and this is what we’re using for the numbers.”

**Craig:** What we don’t want is every single page to be not a full page and 5,000 colors and we’re into salmon 8 and whatever it is. Yes, at some point, if it’s changed super dramatically, everybody just … There’s a point of no return. The point of no return really is when people get married to scene numbers. Crews and production teams really do talk about scene numbers constantly. I have to remind people all the time, I don’t know any scene numbers. I don’t remember any of those. I’m like, “Can you just tell me what that is? Because I don’t know what that is.” That’s the danger point is the scene numbers.

**John:** I have found my experience, especially on more complicated productions, some story stuff does get messed up when things go through multiple rounds. It’s not just bad writing happening, but when there have been so many revisions and so many colors stacked up on top of each other that a scene is being split between four different pages of different things and it’s just not clear, it’s hard to really focus on what is the point of the scene and what is actually happening in the scene, because it’s split across so many pages. That is a real thing that happens, because of production drafts and I think sometimes just bad choices from other people. I’ve been in circumstances where trying to do arbitration on a project that we were looking at the final shooting script, and you couldn’t even parse what the scene was, because it was divided between so many different things. That really is a challenge.

**Craig:** There’s a little trick that you can use sometimes. When it gets really bad with a scene, you can just say, “Okay, I’m just going to cut all the stuff from page 20-A, page 20-A-a, page 20-B, and just re-paste it into page 20 and just get a nice 20 and 20-A, and get rid of the other ones.”

**John:** Absolutely. Especially back in a time when we were putting out physical pages to production, you will have made some decisions about what’s going to make the most sense for a person reading this thing. It’d be better off to delete some pages and combine some stuff. Often it is just so people can actually see this is a scene, rather than a couple different paragraphs on a couple different pages.

**Craig:** Yah.

**John:** Yah. Let’s end on a question that you and I will actually love to discuss. This is Lydia’s question.

**Megana:** Lydia from New York writes, “My almost-10-year-old son has a great immersive imagination. I would love to introduce him to Dungeons and Dragons. I don’t know how I never had any friends who played it growing up, but I’m thinking it would be amazing for us to do it together. Where do I start?”

**John:** Oh Lydia, you are just the best mom.

**Craig:** Best mom.

**John:** That’s mom of the year. Best mom.

**Craig:** Best mom.

**John:** It’s awesome that your son has a great imagination. He would probably dig D&D. I’ll put links in the show notes for ways to get started playing D&D with your kids, because there’s good starter adventures that build upon each other and get their feet wet, without overwhelming them with too many stuff about the character sheet all at once. I’d also say keep your sessions short, keep them fun and involved, but not overwhelming. Try to find some kids his age who could play with him also, because you as a mom is fantastic, but it’s more fun when the kids are playing with their own age.

**Craig:** Yes. Sometimes 10-year-old boys who have great immersive imaginations also don’t have a lot of friends. These can go hand in hand. If your son is challenged in that area, if he has some social issues or has just a limited amount of friends, then just know there are a lot of 10-year-old boys just like him who are also limited and don’t have a lot of friends and would love to get to know him. My guess is that there are a lot of really good resources out there for parents. Maybe his school can help. There might be some guidance counselors who can identify some other kids like that, or if there’s some local neighborhood community organizations. You’re in New York, so there’s everything everywhere. Check out some online resources and put out the word. Put out the word on, I’m not on Facebook, but if there’s something like that or if you are on Facebook, to just say, hey, if you’re interested in putting together a group.

There are also some professional dungeon masters out there. They know exactly how to pitch and tone a session to the kids who are playing, and they might be a great way to introduce a group, because they will know everything, and they’re also really good at teaching. That’s part of what they do is teach kids how to play. The goal, Lydia, is for your son and the kids that he enjoys playing with to then not need that guy and to move on and one of them DMs and they do it themselves, which they absolutely can do.

I think it’s really important, Lydia, actually that you don’t play with him. I know. I know. I know you want to. I know you want to, but I think John is absolutely right. I’m just saying, as a former 10-year-old boy, and as somebody who raised a former 10-year-old boy, that there’s something that is irreproducible and magical about four or five 10-year-old boys with great, immersive imaginations doing it themselves, without parental supervision, and being free to explore and enjoy themselves and to find their own identities in that way. It’s really important. You can host it in your apartment or your home. Like I said, there are some really cool people out there that do these things professionally. That’s probably a good place to start poking around and looking.

**John:** I started playing when I was 4th grade, 5th grade. The DM was Diego Rodriguez, who had an older brother who played, and so we had picked up how to play from him. It’s going to be one kid or someone who has a little bit more experience about how it all works who is going to DM, but eventually you’re all going to get into it and get going. I think there’s a natural tension between people who are obsessed with the stats and optimizing the characters’ numbers and the players who are really focusing on role-playing the characters. That’s fine. That’s going to be a natural tension between the two of those. Whatever gets them wanting to sit down at the table is great. Just let them have fun.

**Craig:** Let them have fun. I think it’s a really great thing. Dungeons and Dragons, and role-playing games in general have always been a terrific, I’ll say safe space. Why not? Safe and nurturing space for kids who otherwise don’t have that elsewhere, whether they’re neurodivergent or they’re just a little nerdy or shy. That’s a place where they blossom, and where a bunch of them together can blossom. It’s a beautiful thing.

**John:** Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things. The first is Flee, which is an animated documentary that is up for all the award considerations this year. I watched it yesterday. It’s fantastic. It’s just really, really great. It’s the story of an Afghan refugee who’s trying to get out of Afghanistan as Afghanistan fell, and ends up on this wild expedition to try to get to safety. So well done. The reason why it’s animated is because to protect his anonymity, they animate all of his stuff. There’s live-action stuff in there as well, but he’s always an animated character, which works so well in terms of being able to move back into his childhood. It’s flawlessly done. I strongly recommend everyone check out Flee.

My other One Cool Thing is the Wikipedia history timeline game, Craig, which I sent to you earlier this week. Did you try playing it?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s really good. What it’s doing is it gives you a card at the top of the screen, which is some event in history, so either a famous person’s birth or death, or a company being founded, and you have to drag it into this timeline. It just keeps putting up new things for you to drag into the timeline. At first it’s really easy. Something happened in the modern era or it happened in BC times. Then it gets really tough. It’s basically how long of a streak you can keep going of getting these things right. You can play it endlessly. It’s not like a Wordle where it’s just one thing a day. It could be a giant time suck, but if you like history and organizing things, it will be great for you.

**Craig:** I do like history. I don’t love organizing things.

**John:** I think that question of, did this happen before or after this other thing, it’s not organizing. It’s just putting stuff in order.

**Craig:** This game is a nightmare for the kids who would be like, “Do we have to know dates on the test?”

**John:** Yeah, you have to know dates. You have to know dates-

**Craig:** “Do we have to know dates?”

**John:** … for this to work.

**Craig:** My one cool thing is ancient. It’s a game called Papers Please. Have you played it, John?

**John:** I recognize the title. I’m looking through here now to see what this actually was.

**Craig:** Papers Please. It was the first game by Lucas Pope. Lucas Pope is the guy who also did Return of the Obra Dinn, which I think was a One Cool Thing as well. This was his first game. It’s been around since 2014. At least on iOS it’s been around since 2014. It is the weirdest, most addicting and depressing and interesting game.

The functionality is very simple. You are a border patrol officer for some kind of obvious Eastern Bloc, Soviet era country. Your job is to decide whether or not to let immigrants in. The mechanics are you have some rules and then they give you documents, and then you have to check their documents, make sure that the documents comport with the rules, and then you either reject them or accept them. The rules get more and more complicated as things keep happening. It functions on days. That part is fun and tricky. The more people you process through accurately, the more money you make, which means your family will live, because they keep reporting on, you have this much money for gas and for food and for medicine. Also, interesting things start happening. People start begging to be let in, and they make really good cases, but their papers aren’t right, or there’s some sneaky spy people that want to overthrow the government. It’s all set against this very pixelated, brutalist background. Very simple, very fun to play. Gets really tricky really quickly. Strongly recommend. Works excellently on an iPad.

**John:** It feels like a perfect device for it.

**Craig:** It’s a weird one. I really enjoyed it. It’s old. It’s ancient, in terms of the internet. Papers Please.

**John:** Actually it’s a very good matchup with Flee, which is all about papers and documentation and fake passports.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Perfect. That was our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Actually this week it’s by William Phillipson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For shorter questions on Twitter, Craig is sometimes @clmazin. I’m always @johnaugust. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at Scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the ones we’re about to record on NFTs. Craig and Megana, thank you so much for a fun show.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** I am the person who talks about NFTs on this show. I think my first conversation about NFTs was pitching that Disney should absolutely do NFTs, and they have not done NFTs yet.

**Craig:** Good. Has a technology ever had a heel turn quicker than NFTs? They are loathed out there.

**John:** They are generally loathed. This last week Twitter announced people who have NFTs can use those as an avatar profile. They’ll have hexagons around them. Then obviously people writing scripts would block anybody who has a hexagon thing. They’re not well-loved.

**Craig:** No, they’re loathed. There’s a couple of reasons why. The first reason is I think an incredibly reasonable reason, which is that any of these things that require blockchain technology are prone to causing environmental disasters, because an enormous amount of energy can get used up by people who are trying to basically game the system. They want to mine a whole lot of Bitcoin or they want to process a whole whatever fricking NFT crap.

**John:** Ethereum.

**Craig:** China has just banned it all entirely. They just banned all that stuff, because it’s sucking up a mass amount of energy. Russia is about to get involved. Even Russia is like, “I don’t know, this feels janky as hell and also bad for the environment.” The other reason of course that NFTs are loathed is because fundamentally they’re stupid. At this point, what are they buying? They’re buying something that says, “I own a thing that everyone else can appreciate and experience in the exact same way that I, the owner, can.” That’s just stupid.

**John:** I’m going to link to three really good articles that came out in the last couple weeks that were talking about NFTs and bring up these criticisms. What I like about these articles is they point to these are the things that are more promising about them, and these are why the promises are not actually being kept.

One of the things that NFT or crypto proponents will pitch hard is that it’s decentralized, no one can shut it down, no one can stop it. The thing is, it’s actually not as decentralized as you would think it would be. Everything still is funneling through these different small deciders of OpenSea, which would say we’re going to show this piece of art or we’re not going to show this piece of art. It runs into all the libertarian issues of just, what are you going to do about child pornography, what are you going to do about actual criminal behavior that happens on here, what are you going to do about actual theft. When there have been thefts, they’re like, “Oh, we’ll cancel that thing.” Then was it really decentralized? Was there really no authority behind things? It’s trading on people who cannot be held accountable on some levels, but are very accountable on other levels.

**Craig:** All of it is nothing. No one’s even pretending it’s something. Just so I’m clear, if someone sells an NFT of a photo that is online, it’s a digital photo, and I buy that NFT, I now own that digital photo, or I own the file of that digital photo. That digital photo’s out there and everybody can look at it. The thing like that, a piece of art that Booble made, or whatever his name was. Was it Booble?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Boogle?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Is that it, Boogle?

**John:** Beeple.

**Craig:** Beeple.

**John:** Beeple.

**Craig:** I like Boogle better.

**John:** He was a previous One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Booble, I’m just going to keep calling him Booble, because it’s funny, somebody paid, whatever, $14 trillion for his picture, but I can look at it. It’s the same thing. It’s literally the same thing. I’m looking at the same thing.

**John:** Craig, yes. I think we need to acknowledge that all art has similar kinds of issues there, because I could sell you a painting, I sell you a van Gogh, and you’re like, “Okay, I own the van Gogh,” but you can also own a picture of it.

**Craig:** That’s different. That’s different.

**John:** It is different, but then the question of, how about a photograph, if I sell you an Ansel Adams photograph. There’s a limited number of them. There’s only a limited number because Ansel Adams chose to put a limit on things. Art is always this conflict between artificial scarcity and-

**Craig:** The problem is it becomes instantly different when you’re dealing with digital stuff, because digital stuff is reproducible flawlessly. If there was a technology where I could go into the Louvre, point my ray gun at the Mona Lisa, and have a copy of the Mona Lisa, a physical copy that was exactly the same, down to the atom, then I have another Mona Lisa, without question. That is exactly what’s going on with NFTs, so I don’t get it, and I’m never going to get it, ever. I’m old.

**John:** Can we think about another system that’s been designed to deal with the problem of reproducibility and artistic worth?

**Craig:** Copyright.

**John:** Copyright, yeah. Also this past week, a thing that happened, or it’s two weeks ago, some folks bought a copy of Jodorowsky’s Dune book.

**Craig:** No, these guys. They don’t listen to our show.

**John:** They set up a DAO, which is basically a collective financial organization to purchase this copy of the book. It’s like, okay, you bought it, and then they had these plans for what they were going to do with it, including develop spin-off merchandise and a TV series and stuff like that. Craig, is there any problem with that? I think they could see there being an obstacle there.

**Craig:** There is. There is.

**John:** What’s that?

**Craig:** The problem is that what they purchased was a derivative work. That derivative work was theoretically licensed by the Frank Herbert Estate to create a derivative work of his copyrighted original work, Dune. However, purchasing a book does not give you any underlying rights to anything in that book, much less anything in the books that it was based on. What they have is a book.

**John:** Craig, I have a copy of Harry Potter on my shelf, so I should just be able to make a new series.

**Craig:** JK Rowling, she has one handwritten copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. It’s out there, and I paid a billion dollars for that handwritten copy, which in and of itself would probably be worth something, but now it means we’re going to start now creating our own new stuff based on the handwriting. Oh my god. How? You said that this was an organization of people, so more than one idiot?

**John:** Basically it’s a bunch of people who came together to form this organization called a DAO, which could then go out and make this acquisition. They’re all putting in money basically to buy this thing together, and then they all have a share in it. It’s like a corporation. It’s like the closest equivalent to what a corporation would be in a purely NFT crypto space.

**Craig:** Nobody in that organization had even the slightest understanding of how copyright works? No one?

**John:** Apparently not.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Tell me, John, surely they didn’t spend more than $100,000 on this.

**John:** We can Google this now.

**Craig:** It’s $3 million.

**John:** $3 million.

**Craig:** They spent $3 million.

**John:** Whoever owned that physical copy of it in theory made $3 million, and good on them. We should also point out that Jodorowsky also has copyright on his unique interpretation of that underlying material too. Even if you bought the one copy of the thing that he did, that’s not necessarily granting you the right to reproduce it, just to do any other things to it, so that’s all done.

I was having a good, long conversation with a guy who’s in the crypto NFT space who’s also developing original story material. I was just really curious where he saw the opportunities here and what he thought could happen. What [inaudible 01:08:32] he thinks this is basically just a form of wealth transfer from really rich people to artists and writers. It’s like, oh, okay, on that level I kind of get it. The same way that MoviePass was a wealth transfer from venture capitalists to people who wanted to see movies. That’s basically assuming that it’s going to be failure. It’s assuming that it’s going to be a MoviePass 2.0. That’s all it is.

**Craig:** It’s going to be MoviePass 2.0. What am I missing, John?

**John:** I think what you’re missing is that there is enthusiasm and exuberance from people coming together to do a thing which feels exciting. I saw this when I was doing Kickstarter stuff. It’s like you get people together like, “Let’s make this thing happen.” It’s like, yeah, that’s really cool. The thing about a Kickstarter is at the end you have the thing. You have these really cool books that you and I have, like D&D books that we’ve gotten off Kickstarters, or cool figurines. There’s a thing I wanted that I actually got at the end of it. Here it’s just not clear whether people are enthusiastic about it because they want the thing to exist or because they want to speculate that it’s going to be worthwhile at the end.

**Craig:** I think it’s pure speculation, because how could you possibly be excited about any of this, properly excited? Is there anybody really that is getting a thrill, a tingle down their spine from the availability of an NFT? All those financial things, like whatever, credit default swaps, where somebody has to take time to explain to you how it works, and really what it comes down to is people are just betting money on money to see if money happens in a money way. It’s just math. At that point really the only excitement is purely financial. It’s just purely financial. This is all nuts and weird and empty and soulless. I honestly do hope that the general anger that is fire-hosed at people who announce that they’re now involved in NFTs will work, that people will just go, “Okay, yeah, sorry, I’m not … “

**John:** Here’s my last challenge for people. If you’re going to come to me with a thing saying it’s this great, innovative thing that’s going to be using NFTs or crypto, I want you to tell me why it needs to use NFTs or crypto, because in so many cases I see, oh yeah, it’s exciting to build this community, to do this thing, but couldn’t you do this in a web 2.0 way that doesn’t involve crazy servers in Malta to do this thing? Ultimately, I can’t find those reasons. I just feel like we’ve built out a web that works. We’ve built out copyright law, which is crazy, but works. You’re trying to reinvent something for no good reason other than there’s ways to make weird money on it.

**Craig:** It’s like they said, “We’re going to recreate the tulip market of old Holland,” which as we all know, was a speculative bubble that ended up crashing and destroying people. That’ll happen, but along the way you might be one of the people that makes a lot of money off of these fake tulips, that they’re just saying it kind of. Oh god.

**John:** You were ranting about Jeff Bezos earlier. Jeff Bezos, to his credit, he built a thing. He built a thing that works really well. There’s actually a company that the world is different because of the thing he was able to build. He built something with the money that he was able to raise.

**Craig:** It exists. It employs a whole lot of people. It does a thing. It is an integral part of our economy. It has purpose. We can all debate whether or not it has changed things for the better or worse, and probably has done both, but it is not just a shell game of nonsense. I think people hear NFT and blockchain, and their minds go somewhere. I don’t know what it is. They start to just go, “Yeah, blockchain.” Blockchain’s a great phrase. It sounds great. It’s got the word block and chain.

**John:** Doesn’t it?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Both. You have two Wordle words in one combination. Perfect. Love it.

**Craig:** Block and chain. Five, five, as we say in the puzzle business.

**John:** Thanks, Craig.

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

**Megana:** Thanks.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* Bo Yeon Kim’s Tweet on Bong Joon-Ho’s [MOTHER Script](https://twitter.com/extspace/status/1482482121335734273?)
* Script University’s [20 Common Sense Script Rules, in No Particular Order](https://www.screenwritersuniversity.com/pages/20-script-rules-1)
* Read Aloud Software Suggestions [Table Read](https://www.tablereadpro.com/), [ZoomText](https://www.zoomtext.com/), [JAWS](https://www.freedomscientific.com/products/software/jaws/), [VoiceDream](https://www.voicedream.com/)
* DnD for kids [Level 1 Geek](https://www.level1geek.com/dnd-for-kids-guide/) and [Being a Dungeon Master for Kids](https://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/being-dungeon-master-kids)
* [Flee](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8430054/) animated film
* [Wikipedia Timeline Game](https://kottke.org/22/01/wikipedia-history-timeline-game)
* [Papers, please](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papers,_Please) by Lucas Pope
* NFT Articles [Why it’s too early to get excited about Web3](https://www.oreilly.com/radar/why-its-too-early-to-get-excited-about-web3/) by Tim O’Reilly, [My First Impressions of Web3](https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html) on the Moxie Marlinspike Blog, [Blockchain-based systems are not what they say they are](https://blog.mollywhite.net/blockchains-are-not-what-they-say/) by Molly White
* [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 William Phillipson ([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/534standard.mp3).