Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/a-screenwriters-guide-to-bullshitting).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode uses one not particularly bad word that’s already in the title of the show, so you probably know it’s going to come up. But anyway we warned you.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 523 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we discuss the fundamental skill of bullshitting. Why and when screenwriters need to use it. We’ll also talk about the uses of expertise and answer some listener questions that have been stacked up for far too long. And in our bonus segment for premium members after Craig’s rant last week about college we’ll ask the question what should an American do between the ages of 18 and 22.

**Craig:** That’s a good one.

**John:** Yeah. Do some follow up there. But first some sort of news and follow up. That movie Dune, it made a ton of money.

**Craig:** Yeah. It did really well.

**John:** Good on Dune. So it made $41 million over the weekend. Same weekend it was also free on HBO Max, so that was good. Happy for Dune.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Box office is back, baby.

**Craig:** And I’m happy for Denis. He’s a spectacularly good guy.

**John:** I’m going to put a link in the show notes to this article by Branden Katz doing some of the movie math on it. Because we’ve talked about this on the show before. How do you measure success? We used to always measure success of a feature film based on what that box office was and what that was going to translate to down the road.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And we could sort of calculate all of that stuff. But when a movie opens on streaming and theatrical at the same time and in this case they’ve decided to make a sequel based on how successful it was, well how are they gauging success? And so he sort of walks through this is probably the number of viewers. This is the reception it got. This is the reviews it got. This is the amount of fan buzz it got. It’s tougher than it used to be.

**Craig:** And look it was always difficult in the sense that nobody ever really knew what movies cost, because the reported budgets were always nonsense. Nobody knew how much money was exactly spent on marketing. Everything was very opaque. That’s the way the studios like it. But in the case of Dune I think the best indicator we have that it is at least in a binary sense successful is that they have gone ahead and green lit Dune Part 2, or Dune Part 1.2.

**John:** Yeah. Exactly. More follow up. Man, we just really have forgotten things and sort of messed up things. So we have a couple things to knock out quickly.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Last week we talked about sex scenes and I said I’d never written a sex scene. And then people wrote in and were like what about Go your first movie has a three-way sex scene it. And I’m like, oh you know what, you’re right. My very first movie had an extensive sex scene that was on plot and was there. So, I have written sex scenes.

**Craig:** That’s how old we are. We forgot the shit we wrote.

**John:** Oh, you know what else you forgot?

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Which one was Mr. Roper and which one was Mr. Furley?

**Craig:** Totally screwed that one up. So Mr. Roper was Norman Fell. And he was the first one. And then he and Mrs. Roper left and they were replaced by swinging bachelor Don Knotts playing Mr. Furley. So that’s absolutely true. And, yeah, sorry.

**John:** We regret the error. Dean who wrote in about this said that “The Mr. Roper character was asexual to the chagrin of his wife.” I’m not sure if he was asexual. He just didn’t want to have sex with his wife.

**Craig:** Bingo.

**John:** And that’s not asexual. It was very much a trope of that time. He was Al Bundy before his time.

**Craig:** Yes. A very sort of Generation Z/Millennial interpretation of what was a classic ‘80s joke about a husband who is so tired of having sex with their wife that they no longer wanted to have sex with their wife at all. Then they were like, oh, clearly this is an asexual person. Nah. They didn’t know about that in 1970. At least not on TV.

**John:** We talked about blind spots last week and we were mentioning that it’s easy to think of our protagonists having blind spots in comedies, but it’s not as common in dramas. And just like when we talked about we can’t think of any examples of female characters making ethical choices, of course people wrote in with a bunch of good examples. So do you want to take Robert’s example here?

**Craig:** Yeah, Robert writes, “In The Remains of the Day, both the film and the novel, the protagonist, James Stevens, played by Anthony Hopkins in the movie, has so repressed his own emotions and needs in service to his employer, Lord Darlington,” best name ever, “he is incapable to recognize that he loves Sarah Kenton, played by Emma Thompson.” Side note from me, Craig. Everybody loves Emma Thompson.

**John:** Oh, how can you not love Emma Thompson?

**Craig:** She’s amazing. “He never breaks through his repression to understand the full depth of the affections. The novel is amazing as it is told from a first-person point of view and it is clear to the reader how Stevens feels, even as it remains hidden from the character.” That’s a pretty good example.

**John:** That’s a really good example and I like that, so thank you for writing in with that. And also good to bring up first-person versus third-person. So, movies are going to be kind of third-person because we’re watching these characters do these things. We don’t have access to their internal monologues, unless there is a voice over, which could also happen or work.

**Craig:** Or the talking to camera.

**John:** Yeah. They could just turn over their shoulder like a Fleabag situation.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Yeah. So, blind spots. They do exist in dramas. So, people keep bringing them up.

We talked a lot about Netflix’s numbers and how Netflix is changing how they’re reporting their numbers. Max wrote in to say, “In my house there are four different adults that watch Netflix shows. We all have different schedules. If each one of us watches the same program at different times then it’s four views, but what if we all watch at the same time, or two and two? The numbers will come out differently. How do you track that? If one of us watches a show for two minutes and turns it off, but later someone else returns to complete it in the same profile does that count as both metrics? And how many accounts are shared outside of the household? How do you track that? Use IP addresses? It will never be the same as ticket sales. Total hours of viewing or how many times it is watched, more than 75%, is probably the best metric.”

So what Max is bringing up here is a classic TV ratings problem. You kind of don’t know how many people are in the room to watch these things. Nielsen boxes over the time have tried to gauge how many folks are in the room, or asking you to punch in how many people are watching. And we always have to remember Nielsen was doing this measurement for a very specific reason which is they needed to be able to demonstrate to advertisers how many people were seeing their ads. That’s not quite what Netflix needs to do. They really want to know for their own purposes and I guess also for public reporting what shows are successful.

It comes back to the same question we had about Dune. What is success for one of these programs?

**Craig:** No one knows. I mean, Nielsen would have people fill out diaries. So Nielsen worked very different than Netflix does. So the streamers, they have the full population of data. Every single person that does anything on Netflix, that data is recorded by Netflix. The way it used to be for you youngsters is that it was done the way that polling was is done. You would pick a sample population that was meant to represent a large population like the United States. That sample population was, I don’t know, a couple of thousand different homes. I mean, it wasn’t a lot. And each one of those homes would not only have a little box that recorded what they watched and what channel it was on and for how long, but people would also be asked to fill out a diary that said I watched this and then I turned it off. Or I was in the room with myself and my daughter. And they understood how old everybody was and what everyone’s gender was and they could sort of break things out that way.

You’re right that Netflix doesn’t need to know necessarily how many people are watching at any given moment, but then you have to ask why are they measuring it then at all and why are they reporting it. And the truth is I don’t even know if they know. I don’t know why anyone is doing any of this. If the point is to get more subscribers, I don’t even know how you could argue that just because some people saw something a lot that’s why they subscribe or keep subscribing. It doesn’t even equate.

I mean, everybody watched Squid Games, except for me so far. I’ll get there. But is that why people – did people subscribe to Netflix to see Squid Games? Or did they subscribe to Netflix for something else that motivated them in a specific way? Was anybody thinking of canceling Netflix but then Squid Games came along? How does this work? I don’t know.

**John:** I just wanted you to say Squid Games a few more times so that our listeners who are shouting, “It’s Squid Game, without an S.”

**Craig:** Squid Games. No, no, I saw Squid Game. I’m talking Squid Games. Oh, you haven’t you seen Squid Games?

**John:** Oh, it’s much better. It’s the sequel.

**Craig:** I think it should have been called Squid Games. It’s funny.

**John:** It’s all about calamari.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, what’s more fun? Squid Game or Squid Games?

**John:** I want to see the Squid Games.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** And sometimes you can’t even talk about the official Squid Games. You just have to say the big games, because the Squid Game is a trademark like the Olympics and you sort of can’t do anything in that space.

**Craig:** Right. The Olympic.

**John:** The Olympic, yeah.

**Craig:** I really enjoyed the Olympic Game.

**John:** I love the Olympic Game.

**Craig:** There’s a point in your life where you cross over some number, I don’t know what it is, but maybe it’s 50, where what used to be embarrassing is now – I’m endearing myself to me by saying Squid Games. I am falling in love with myself as a cute older guy.

**John:** My mother-in-law would always add an apostrophe-S to the end of any business name or restaurant. And so it’s like we’re going down to Chipotle’s to get some food.

**Craig:** That’s a very Boston thing. They would add an S to everything. Dunkin’s. There’s no reason for Dunkin’s. There’s no guy named Dunkin. It’s not even spelled like the name. They don’t care. Dunkin’s. Going down to Dunkin’s. My god.

**John:** Ben Affleck and his Dunkin’s. I miss the Ben Affleck height of Covid pandemic and the deliveries and the paparazzi photos. That was a good time. That was some quality content. I miss that.

**Craig:** I don’t even know what you’re talking about. What happened?

**John:** So when Ben Affleck was dating Ana de Armas.

**Craig:** He was? I didn’t even know that.

**John:** Oh yeah. They were terrific together. And it ended poorly. And then the assistant was throwing out a standee of her in the trash and that was not a good sign.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** But when they were in their height they were always going to get Dunkin’ Donuts and basically iced coffees from Dunkin’ Donuts and it just felt wholesome and great. And Ana de Armas is fantastic.

**Craig:** We don’t know that. I mean, if you throw a standee of somebody out–

**John:** I don’t know what she’s like to date. I just know that as an actress, she is one of the best things of the Bond movie by far. I love her.

**Craig:** She’s a terrific actor. I just don’t know what it’s like to date her. If somebody is hurling a standee of you into the garbage, I don’t know. She might be great to date. My question is did they have one of those cute portmanteau names like – what was it with J-Lo? It was Benflo or something? I can’t remember–

**John:** Bennifer.

**Craig:** Bennifer, right. So with her was it–?

**John:** I’m going to invite on Megana Rao to see if she has any insight into what the portmanteau, or if there was a portmanteau to Ben and Ana.

**Megana Rao:** I don’t remember there being one. But Craig do you know that Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck are together again?

**Craig:** You know what? I did see a little bit of something about that. That much made it through my dumbness. My Squid Games obliviousness. Yeah, I got that much. You know, this is not new. When I was a kid I remember – and we would get TV Guide, which Megana was a book that had the list of shows that were across the four channels you got. They loved to go on and on about Elizabeth Taylor and her 19th husband or whatever and you know they would always come back to each other, then leave, and come back, and leave, and on again/off again. This has been going on forever. I like it.

**John:** I like it, too. All right, back to Netflix and the numbers. And so you’re talking about the Nielsen numbers. I was in a Nielsen family for a short time. I should say I wasn’t stolen by a Nielsen family. My family became a Nielsen family for about three months, and so we had to fill out the little diary log. And it was exciting. I felt like I had a job. I watched this show and I’m going to record it in this log. But it was before they even had – I don’t think we had the device to track, so we just had to fill out the log manually. And they paid you something, but it wasn’t a lot. And then eventually they stopped asking us, so I guess they were rotating their samples.

**Craig:** Or maybe they got the sense that you were really into it and they were like this is throwing our numbers off. There’s a human computer doing the log.

**John:** I was staying up extra late to watch the actual thing. Making sure that people could count my Fantasy Island viewing.

**Craig:** That is a problem.

**John:** Michael from LA writes, “Do you think Netflix’s pivot to ‘hours watched’ from ‘numbers of views’ has to do with an anticipated battle with the guilds over how to measure backend streaming compensation in the next round of negotiations? I would imagine an ‘hours watched’ metric would be more favorable to the streamers in calculations pertaining to the success of a movie/show since their entire business model is ‘keep them watching.’ Like Craig, I am suspicious of this and how it will ultimately be used to pay creatives as little as possible.”

**Craig:** Well they don’t need to make that switch to do that. It doesn’t matter how they report things. They have all of the data. So if the Writers Guild or the Directors Guild or SAG/AFTRA were interested in having them show us number of views versus hours watched they have that number, too. None of it matters. Whatever the data is, and again I don’t know how to skin this cat, it’s ridiculous, but whatever that data is they’re going to argue to pay as little per data point as possible.

**John:** Yeah. Here’s what it comes down to be I think the argument is that it’s clear that some shows/movies are incredibly popular and successful. And classically writers, and actors, and directors have been paid residuals when things are tremendously popular and successful. So for theatrical films it’s when it releases on home video and it reaches paid cable and other places, that’s how we get residuals is those successful things do a lot of business in those secondary markets and they therefore generate residuals.

When we don’t have a secondary market, when everything is made for Netflix and is sticking on Netflix or some other streamer, there still is a measure of success for those things. And we need to make sure that the writers, and actors, and directors, and other folks who would normally get residuals are rewarded for that success. And so there’s many ways you can calculate that and figure out what that actually means, but you’re going to have to figure out a way to do that that is fair. And that’s going to be a huge discussion.

So, I do wonder if Netflix is trying to – I don’t think it’s really about this guild negotiation – but I think they’re trying to frame the conversation by putting out this number as being a meaningful number.

**Craig:** I don’t think that’s why they did it. I think they did it because they knew that they had gotten feedback, I suspect, from their debt holders, because Netflix is a debt-burning company, that their numbers were bullshit. Because they are bullshit. And every new Netflix show is the most watched show in the history of mankind. You can’t hit that bell too many times. At some point people are like wait a second. Hold on. No, five billion didn’t watch such-and-such. Squid Games, yes. Squid Game, I don’t know.

But I think that they are making that change because some people asked them to do it, but it doesn’t matter. None of it matters. There is a very complicated math that needs to be figured out. There is a model for it. So in paid television, or I mean now that’s streaming too, but in the old days of HBO – HBO had a little bit of original programming and then it had a lot of movies that it showed. And you would get residuals from the showings of those movies. And how they figured out how many people watched that, I guess maybe it was a Nielsen-y thing because it was all linear.

**John:** I don’t think it was based on how many people were watching. I think it was based on the license fee that HBO paid. And so that’s the thing. There was a license fee paid and that same thing happened with broadcast television or pay cable or free cable.

**Craig:** There you go. So that’s something. Now that just covers the movies but it doesn’t cover the huge landfills full of original content that Netflix puts out there and how they carve that up, since they’re not licensing it. I don’t know.

**John:** Yeah. So there’s a concept called an imputed license fee which basically means how much this would be worth on an open market.

**Craig:** Oh god. But that just sounds like an endless series of lawsuits.

**John:** Yes. Here’s the most extreme example that will never actually come to pass but I’ll pitch it as a way of thinking about it. In the world of really expensive $100 million paintings it becomes this question of like how much is that painting worth. And really the way you can figure out how much that painting is worth is how much it would go for on an open market. If someone owns this thing and you want to put a wealth tax on it, you want to make them pay tax on owning this thing, you have to figure out how much that painting is worth. You say, OK, you tell us how much the painting is worth and we can choose to then put it on auction and see if someone wants to pay more for it.

Basically you can’t underestimate the value of it because if we think you’re underestimating it too much it has to go up to auction.

**Craig:** Assessment is a thing. I mean, we assess real estate in this way. And we assess art. We assess jewelry. But assessing content is not a field. Meaning there is not centuries’ worth of practice assessing these things. And I don’t know how you assess them, particularly when the data involved is almost – how do they assess homes, art, jewelry? They use comps.

**John:** Yeah. And so you’re looking for comps and that’s actually one of the big challenges. Classically we could say, because this has come up at other times, too. You know, someone might sell a package of films, like Sony might sell a package of films to ABC. And so, OK, how much are each of the individual films getting? You can look at the comps for a Charlie’s Angels and say this movie made this much money in the box office and had this on home video. It’s this kind of movie. Here are movies that are like that. This what percentage that should get.

So, that history of comps has been a thing, but when everything is made for streamers and there never is an open market on anything comps sort of go away.

**Craig:** Right. They mean nothing. And the data is all over the place. I don’t know how this is going to work out. All I do know is that Netflix will obviously work very hard to pay out as little as possible. And hopefully the unions work as hard as they can for us to get paid as much as possible.

**John:** Yeah. And we’re saying Netflix but of course we mean all the streamers that are doing the same.

**Craig:** But mostly Netflix, well, and Amazon.

**John:** Well Disney+.

**Craig:** Disney+ and HBO Max.

**John:** Paramount Plus.

**Craig:** Paramount Plus. The streamers that are tied to traditional film studios and networks have been doing this for a long time. And there is a practice of – even though we have had some very hard fought battles and they have not always treated us the way we would like, in fact they rarely do, we at least have gotten to some sort of equilibrium with them where they are used to paying out in a certain fashion for the stuff that we do. And this has always been a union town going back to the ‘40s.

Netflix and Amazon are from Silicon Valley which is the most anti-union industry probably in the world. When you look at the amount of money they make and their ability to handle unionized labor versus how many unions are actually there, I think they are the most anti-union. And they hate paying out money. They like sucking money up. Same even with Apple. So Apple, Netflix, and Amazon come from a very different culture and we’re dealing with that right now and we’re going to deal with that for a long time.

There was a moment in the 2000s where I think the unions were excited that these new entities were coming in because they were going to force the traditional companies to kind of have competition and pay more. And all I can say is LMAO.

**John:** At the high end I think rates probably do go up.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** If you look at the giant deals made for the giant things, yes. And there’s been more work overall, but the actual median pay of a person working as a writer I don’t think has increased because of them.

**Craig:** No. Big shock. Silicon Valley came to Hollywood and created a system whereby there is a dwindling amount of people who are becoming mega rich and everybody else is kind of getting the shaft. Someone get me my fainting couch. How could we have not seen this coming?

**John:** Well Craig but once we’re all writing for Meta, Facebook’s new–

**Craig:** You know, side note…

**John:** Umbrella project, it will be great.

**Craig:** I’m so upset because as you know I love puzzles. And meta puzzles are a thing. I’ve been doing meta puzzles for a long time. Remember the one we did at the – and we’ll bring it back now that Covid is, we have our vaccines to protect us against Covid. David Kwong and I did a puzzle hunt at the Magic Castle. You did one, you participated in one. And that had multiple meta puzzles.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And now fucking Facebook has taken it.

**John:** Taken the word meta.

**Craig:** And ruined it with their garbage company. Oh, god, did you watch that android? You know, I give you shit.

**John:** I’ve tried to watch pieces of it. I watched a supercut of him saying meta and saying world.

**Craig:** He makes you look like Zero Mostel in Fiddler on the Roof. Do you understand what I’m saying?

**John:** [laughs] I do. Yeah.

**Craig:** It is unreal.

**John:** I’m always really sympathetic towards people who come off a little robotic.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, no, he’s unreal. Literally. I think he was synthesized. What have we done? What have we done as a people? We’ve let this fucking weirdo – I mean we did a language warning. Anyway, now I’m going to get assassinated by the Meta police.

**John:** Or is it going to be a Meta assassination? So they’ll change what it means to be alive in a way that it’s like killing you.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. I will be disconnected from everybody. Exciting.

**John:** One last bit about blind spots. So also on the same episode we talked about our productivity because people were asking how are you so productive. Shauna from Vancouver wrote in a great piece. I’m going to sort of summarize it here, but saying it sounds like one of your blind spots might actually be that you’re acknowledging that you have Megana, for example, to help keep us focused and on tap. We have support staff. We have families. We have the resources to be able to do this stuff. And so the same way that Beyoncé has the same number of hours in the day that we do, yes, and she also has a really good support staff who do stuff.

**Craig:** Sorry, who is Megana?

**John:** Oh, you got Bo.

**Craig:** I’m sorry. We do have a Megana blind spot. I think about Megana all the time. I’m incredibly thankful for Megana.

**Megana:** You don’t have a blind spot.

**Craig:** You sound scared like, oh my god, no, no, no, you don’t—

**Megana:** No, you guys are great, yeah.

**Craig:** You’re like the Peloton lady. Now you’re a hostage. No blind spot. Please. Please sirs.

**Megana:** No, but I put that in there because you guys also have really incredible partners and you have amazing staff around you. And you support them really well. And I meant to bring that up during our discussion, too.

**Craig:** Well thank you. I am definitely very aware of what everyone does for me and with me. And I do think about it a lot. And I try and thank them and be as grateful as I can without being annoying about it, or weird. But, no, I’m extraordinarily aware of it. Though one blind spot that I think I do have in connection with this is sometimes it is easy for me to underestimate how much control I have over other people’s lives.

When you pay someone’s salary you have an enormous amount of control over their life. You can make decisions very casually that mean an enormous amount to them. So, I do try and remind myself of that to make sure that I am not just taking it all for granted. It’s a weird thing to employ a person, it’s an almost uncomfortable amount of influence over the quality of their life.

**John:** Yeah. An example I could think of is I have a personal trainer for many, many years. And so if I say, oh, I’m moving to Paris for the year, he’s like lost a client for a year and that’s a lot. Or if I just say, oh, I’m going on a three-week vacation, that’s three weeks he’s not getting an opportunity to train me. And so that is a kind of thing I do need to be sort of more aware of.

I guess my other blind spot is sometimes I forget people who have young children and having been a parent of a young child just remembering like oh my god that is just so much work and that’s hard for them. There’s periods of the day where they just cannot be doing anything other than parenting and now having a teenager who is sort of largely self-sufficient I can forget that at times.

**Craig:** That’s absolutely true. Children as we have said many times suck your life away.

**John:** They do. Lastly, we need a better term for this, because it’s not follow up. It’s sort of like a flash forward. It’s a set up for a future episode. We want to talk about whether screenwriting competitions are ever worth it. And so we have often on the show talked shit about screenwriting competitions that we feel are worthless, but are even like the big names, even like the Nicholl, is it worth it at all? And so we would love people to write in to Megana with the subject header “screenwriting competitions” so she knows it can go into the proper folder. If you have an experience winning one of these competitions or sort of first-hand experience that’s helpful for this conversation we would love to hear it.

If you are a person who loves to make spreadsheets of things and want to do some work figuring out these are the folks who won these things or were finalists in these competitions and where they are now, that would be also useful if you decide you want to do that. And if you’re deciding to do that and you want to help other people do that Megana might be able to coordinate that a little bit. So, we really want to take a look at whether screenwriting competitions are actually ever worth it for an aspiring screenwriter.

**Craig:** I’m not going to attempt to influence your answer.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** But I’m thinking an answer.

**John:** I know you’re thinking an answer.

**Craig:** I’m screaming it in my brain.

**John:** I want to be driven by data and not anecdotes.

**Craig:** 100%. I would expect nothing less from a lifeform such as yourself.

**John:** Let’s get into our marquee topic which is bullshitting. We have been bullshitting kind of the whole episode.

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**John:** But I want to be a little more specific and granular and jump off from this article I read in Spy Magazine. So Spy Magazine was this amazing magazine in the ‘80s that I absolutely loved that was a New York magazine that was really fun and gossipy about sort of New York media. It had a really specific point of view and tone that later informed Vanity Fair, but also Gawker and a lot of what we see as the voices of online media I think can trace some of their snark back to Spy Magazine. I absolutely loved it.

But one of the features they did which I saw recapped in this book was they invented this guy who was a show business manager named Jack Fine. And so they would use him as a fake person to try to set up, you know, De Niro really wants to be on Full House. And so he’d call Full House and try to get De Niro booked on Full House and record all that fun.

But they decided, you know what, we’re sick of Jack Fine. Let’s kill him. And so they sent out obituary notices to Variety and to all the other trades, Jack Fine, this amazing, legendary talent manager has died. And all these places ran the obituary with his clients he never represented as if it was truth and fact, which was great.

But they went one step further and went to this party where they were talking with all these comedians like did you hear that Jack Fine died. And oh my god, really? And so they were all responding to the death of this person who never existed and telling all these stories about him even though they’d never met him because he never was a person who existed in the world. And it just got me thinking about, oh yeah, I totally see how that happens because I’ve been in that situation and had to sort of bullshit my way through things. Craig, is it familiar to you?

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, it’s familiar. I’m sure everyone – you are in a spot where you feel like either because it would be polite for you to know something, or because you would be normally expected to know something and if you admit you don’t you will look like an idiot, that you attempt to sort of glide through. I mean, there isn’t a human being alive who has been asked and never responded in this fashion – hey, you’ve seen such and such? Oh yeah.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Like every human being has lied about seeing a movie or a television show. Every single one. Now, I haven’t seen Squid Games, but I’m saying–

**John:** But you have strong opinions on it regardless, which is great.

**Craig:** Yeah. And sometimes there’s answers you might get. I mean, Megana, you’re the one person who maybe never lied about this.

**Megana:** Yup. I’ve absolutely never lied about any of this. I’ve seen every movie and TV show and read every book that I’ve claimed to.

**Craig:** So you’ve done it.

**Megana:** Of course.

**John:** And just this week as we were making coffee I confessed I had never seen something and she expressed great relief that like, oh, I’ve never seen that, too. I keep having to pretend that I’ve seen that movie.

**Megana:** And in the sentence before he said he didn’t watch it I was pretending I had seen all seasons of this show.

**Craig:** So it’s The Wire. We’re talking about The Wire, obviously.

**John:** Are we talking about The Wire? Maybe we’re talking about The Wire. I don’t even remember – I mean, there’s so many shows I sort of like nod and don’t admit that I haven’t seen.

**Megana:** The Wire was one thing that came up but we can’t talk about this show because we will–

**Craig:** It’s Chernobyl. I get it.

**John:** All the time I’ve ever brought it up I’ve just been, yeah, because there’s a nuclear thing that happens in the show, right?

**Craig:** You can definitely fake your way through it. I mean, just go on YouTube, watch three clips, and you’ve got it. But sometimes you’ll say like of course I’ve seen it, but god, it’s been forever though. And that gets you off the hook of somebody going so that thing at the end where there was the thing. And you’re like, oh yeah, and then they’re like there was no such thing at the end. You’re a liar. And then you’re like, yup, I am a liar.

**John:** You caught me. So let’s talk about lying versus bullshitting because I would argue that bullshitting is not so much lying, it’s just sort of avoiding an uncomfortable truth. So you’re not trying to actively deceive someone. You’re just trying to get out of an uncomfortable situation that telling the truth would create. So that could be about liking someone’s movie that you didn’t really like very much. It could be about I kind of recognize that name but I don’t I actually have ever met that person. That’s a thing I end up sort of having to do a lot. My sort of go to is yeah I know that name but I don’t think I’ve ever met them. That’s a fair way out of it.

**Craig:** I think that a lot of times bullshitting comes down to trying to fit in. White lies are to avoid hurting someone’s feelings. But I’m not going to hurt anyone’s feelings if someone asks me if I’ve seen and then fill in the movie. I’m just trying to fit in. And I don’t want to look like an idiot and then have the conversation be what’s wrong with you. Because every one of us has failed to see something that apparently we are supposed to have seen.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All of us. It just happens. And we don’t want that conversation to then be like “What, you what?!” So you just fit in to go along, to get along, because ultimately it doesn’t matter. And bullshitting has always been part of the Hollywood currency. People have always overextended the truth, maybe overextended themselves, what they were capable of.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** There’s a whole category of bullshitting called I’m in a meeting, someone just asked me a question about what something in my story means. I don’t know and I’m going to start bullshitting.

**John:** Oh yeah. Craig, ring-ring, ring-ring.

**Craig:** Hello.

**John:** Craig, hey, it’s your executive on this project on this movie that you’re writing. I wanted to see how the writing is going. How’s it going? Are you going to be able to deliver on time?

**Craig:** Absolutely. It’s going great.

**John:** So, I know you had some concerns about those notes. Were you able to implement those notes? Any problems?

**Craig:** You know what? The concerns I had were entirely about whether I just could figure out how to get those things done, because I knew they were right. And it took me a little time but I think just about all of them have worked. A couple of them I want to talk to you about later, because I ran into some issues, but yeah overall it’s going really well.

**John:** And you’ll let me know if you have any concerns, any problems?

**Craig:** Well, I do have one concern. I haven’t written anything since you sent those. I hate you. I hate everything you said. And I also think I’m bad.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But other than that everything is going great.

**John:** Yeah. Your notes made me question whether I’m even in the right career. Other than that, everything is good.

**Craig:** I thought about walking into traffic yesterday. Yeah. You can’t tell people the truth at all about that stuff. You do bullshit. And god I don’t even know why they make those calls. They got to know they’re getting the shine, aren’t they?

**John:** Yeah. And now it’s an email so it’s a little bit easier. You’re not put on the spot so much. You can sort of calculate your answer back to stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Oy. So Megana actually brought this up this week. Do you want to talk about sort of like you’re in the room pitching and people ask the follow up questions?

**Megana:** Yeah, so Craig kind of covered this, but like say you’re in a pitch meeting and a producer or an executive asks you a question. I don’t think that they actually expect me or someone to know the answer. Is it better to bullshit it? Like is that what they’re testing? Or do they want me to just be honest and say I’m open to figuring that out with you?

**Craig:** I don’t think that they’re ever looking to see if you have bullshit skills, because ultimately those aren’t particularly valuable to them. I think they’re wondering if you have an answer to this. Somebody will probably ask them the question and they’ll need to pass the answer along. Sometimes when they’re asking those specific questions they’re just looking to add to the arsenal of things that they’re going to fire at somebody to get them to pay you to do a thing. Because they like it. And you can bullshit up to an extent. But once they see the fear and the tap dancing then you are in danger of knocking the Jenga tower over. And at that point it is better to say I don’t want to get out of ahead of myself and give you a bullshit answer. I want to think about that carefully. There is an answer. I have seven-eighths of an answer. Let me come up with the last eighth so that when I say it to you it doesn’t look like I’m just talking.

**John:** I agree with Craig and also what they want is confidence. They want confidence in your ability to find the answer. And so whether you have the answer right then or down the road, what they don’t want to see is panic. They don’t want to see you’re scrambling to get an answer out, or that you haven’t even thought about it at all. So they just want to see – they want to believe in you. And so it’s giving them an answer that makes them believe in you, even if you don’t have the exact right solution for that problem at that moment.

**Megana:** Because usually it is something that I have thought about, but I’m not completely tied down to, and I don’t know how to communicate that.

**Craig:** I think that’s a great way of expressing it. And they’ll know that’s true. They are so used to con artists coming through there. I always feel like if you get pulled over by the highway patrol for speeding just be honest right away. When they come up and they say do you know why I pulled you over? Yup, I was speeding. I was doing this speed. You got me. And they are often so startled that you are not doing the thing that every other person did to them that day, which is what, no, why, I was? Yeah, you know you were. All day long they’re listening to people going what? Me? Yeah.

So if you’re the person who comes in and doesn’t totally go down Bullshit Avenue you will enhance your own credibility in their eyes. It’s just that you can’t only do that. You have to have some answers.

**John:** Yeah. Now let’s talk about the flip side of this, when you realize that someone is bullshitting you and when to call them on it and when to sort of just internally acknowledge that that’s bullshit but I kind of get why they’re doing it and it’s OK. They’re just trying to make this all right. And an example I can think of from early in my career is there was an actor we really wanted for this project and she seemed perfect for it, she seemed she was going to do it, and then she said she’s going to pass because she’s working on a project with her husband who was a filmmaker. And we were like why would she do that because this is a much bigger role and he’s not a big director. And then we realized like, oh, she’s pregnant and didn’t want to say that she was pregnant. And it’s like, oh, that was bullshitting that was a good way out of this situation. And I think you have to sort of allow yourself to acknowledge that that’s bullshit but also be OK with it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Certainly if someone is going through the motions to give you something that’s a little bit nicer than, ah, I didn’t like it, then at least they cared enough to do that. But yeah people – this is what people do. People are liars. Human beings lie all the time. It’s why your characters should be liars. We are all liars. But the extent to which we lie and the impact of those lies and the purpose of those lies differ from person to person.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There is a class of people in Hollywood that I would just call the Lying Class. They don’t make things but they are in the process, they are between the layers of people that make things and the people that pay for things. And a lot of what they do is lie. And sometimes they need to do that because they’re serving two different masters and they have to somehow coordinate between two interests. A company wants to spend as little as possible. The artists want to spend as much as possible. The person in the middle needs to figure out how to get the artist what they need but not a dollar more and they have to sort of bullshit everybody to get to that balanced middle.

I understand it.

**John:** It’s frustrating when you don’t understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. I would say I’m always happier when I feel like someone is bullshitting a little but I can sort of get why they’re doing it. When I see people doing needless lies or just not even malicious lies but just like why would you lie about that. That makes me really nervous when someone has a thing on their resume that’s actually impossible. Then I’m nervous that you might be a bad person and not someone I want in my life.

**Craig:** Well that’s a fraud.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So bullshit is different than fraud. You must look out for fraud. It’s hard to tell the difference at times. But like I said the nature of the bullshitting is where you can look at somebody and go, OK, so you just can’t be trusted at all. There’s nothing real to you. There’s a sociopathic quality. And at times you’re bullshitting pointlessly.

OK, here’s an awesome story. When I was a young man, younger even than Megana, I know, OK, that’s impossible. I was 23 or 24. And I started working at Disney in their marketing department. This was my first real job as like a studio executive. I wasn’t really – I was a director. That’s the lowest level of executive there is. And there was another guy starting there who was working as a vice president and he was also very young. He was like 28. But older than me. And I had been given a task by our boss to do and I was struggling with it. And I was sitting there with this other guy and at one point I just said I don’t think I know what I’m doing here. And what I meant was on this task, like I’m trying to solve this problem but I’m not sure what I was doing. And he got up, walked to the door, closed it, came back over to me and said, “Never say that out loud.”

And I said never say what? And he said, “Never say I don’t know what I’m doing out loud. Ever. Because then people will know.” And I was like, no, no, no, I know what I’m doing, I just don’t know what I’m doing with this right now. Oh, no, I just learned something about you. And that is the terrifying level of bullshitting, when somebody is literally walking around all day going, fact, I have no idea what I’m doing. Answer, bullshit all day long. And there are people that do it.

**John:** Yeah. And what you’re describing is a great character tell and you can sort of imagine that as a character in one of your stories. I’m also thinking about like Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos because some of what she was doing early on felt like the kind of bullshitting you do when you are new startup and you’re trying to sell people on a vision. And so selling people on a vision is embellishing. It’s hyping. But at a certain point it crosses over to, oh, that you know this is not going to work and this is now fraud. Or do you know this? So I think that makes a compelling character. Do they recognize when they’ve crossed over from bullshitting into outright lies. And in this case being investigated for illegal things.

So, that’s an interesting way to talk about bullshitting as not just a thing that we have to do on a daily basis, to a great character arc, a dramatic character arc can be. It can be honestly a blind spot that they don’t realize that they’ve crossed over from bullshitting to outright lies.

**Craig:** You see it in incredibly successful people I think because they’re surrounded by other people who do nothing all day except bullshit, so they’re all bullshitting each other and they forget that it’s so evidently bullshit. And then what ends up happening is you put yourself in a video walking through a weird creepy office space talking about a meta universe and everyone listens to it and goes every single thing you said is bullshit. It’s all bullshit. You’re talking out of your ass. This is bullshit and they don’t know that it sounds like bullshit because other bullshitters are like, well, that’s quality bullshit right there.

**John:** Yeah. Because everyone has this vision of like Steve Jobs and his reality distortion field. And so if I wear a tight black sweater, too, then I must be Steve Jobs.

**Craig:** “At Facebook we’re not a company about technology. We’re a company about people.” Hey, shut up. You’re not. You’re not. You’re a company about neither. You’re a company about making as much money as possible. That is the most ridiculous bullshit I’ve ever heard in my life. And it just got worse and worse from there. Ruined the word meta.

**John:** Ugh.

**Craig:** So sour about it.

**John:** We have a question that’s sort of in the same space. So, Nick writes in to ask, “I am a military veteran and my brother is the type of veteran you see in movies. I’ll leave it there to keep my clearance. I was curious what is a good path for people with unique life experiences like that to become story consultants like R. Lee Ermey or Dale Dye? Is that a feature or a product? Meaning is there enough there that a military consultant or other specialist could make stories better and earn a living in Hollywood? Is there a market to do so remotely or is this something that writers, directors, producers expect to be on set standing by as needed?”

**Craig:** What a great question. Thank you for that.

**John:** It’s a great question, Nick.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is certainly a thing that people do. I am not sure if the flow of work is steady enough for it to be a full career. It may be something better suited to someone who is transitioning out of career and would like some part time work as an older person. With somebody like R. Lee Ermey what ends up happening is someone is making a movie somewhere and it’s very specific and they reach out and a friend of a friend says oh here’s a guy who used to be a drill sergeant and he can tell you exactly how a drill sergeant would talk, and act, and behave. And he was so good at it that they put him in the movie as the drill sergeant. But there’s so much content right now and people do need experts.

So the Writers Guild has a list of experts who are willing to offer their services gratis to a point, which might be a nice loss leader. And there’s also the Science and Entertainment Consortium that we’ve talked about. And so I’ve talked to scientists and they don’t charge or anything like that. But if I were to say, OK, we need you to now be on call, and yes it could absolutely be done remotely as is everything now, at that point you would arrange for a fee. And that’s reasonable. Is it enough to make a career? I would be thinking probably not.

**John:** Yeah. Maybe a challenge to make a career in it. Obviously thinking of Zoanne Clack who started as a medical consultant on Grey’s Anatomy and then became executive producer and a writer, but she was a writer who happened to be a medical consultant when she started. She’s now making a career as a writer and producer on that show.

Joe Weisberg, CIA agent, was one of the creators of The Americans. But again he knew the stuff but also could write.

I did a Clubhouse Q&A many months back ago with folks from Spy Craft Entertainment and they were CIA agents who were starting a production company. They were offering themselves out as consultants on Spy Craft stuff. And so they were experts who know how to do that.

But could Nick’s brother or Nick himself offer themselves as consultants for productions and would they be able to make a living at it? I think it would be tough. In the coming together of a story phase, yes, they could offer some advice. While they’re on set, yes, there could be consultants who are very good at being on set and saying like, no, those would not be the boots, these would be the boots. That’s possible. But it’s hard to string all those things together. Even Jack Horner who was the consultant for all the dinosaur stuff in Jurassic Park, he had a day job. He’s a person you could call to ask a question about dinosaur stuff, but he’s not there every frame being shot. He doesn’t make his living being the Jurassic Park dinosaur expert.

**Craig:** That would be tough to do. But, you know, if you put yourself out there, there’s social media, and you can make a website, and you can talk about what your experiences are. And see if anybody nibbles or bites. And as you grow a resume of content that you’ve advised on and consulted on then somebody big might come calling and then you may end up kind of installed as a consultant on a long-running series or a series of movies. That’s always possible.

**John:** Absolutely. Or we think back to Queen’s Gambit. Like there’s a chess expert who worked on Queen’s Gambit.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** Can that person make a living being a chess expert for movies?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. There are not enough of them.

**Craig:** I think Gary Kasparov was one of their chess experts.

**John:** Oh yeah. That’s true. But you know he’s doing fine for himself.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s Gary Kasparov. I think it’s Kasparov. More questions.

**John:** More questions. Megana, do you want to ask what Erin in North Hollywood wrote?

**Megana:** All right. So Erin asks, “I’m working on a script that involves an unusual animal sound. I’m hoping for some craft guidance on how best to integrate the sound into the script. It’s a specific and evocative sound from the natural world, but one that readers would be unlikely to be familiar with. Or would it be better to simply describe the sound through simile or onomatopoeia? PS the animal in the script is a puffin and puffins sound like this.”

**John:** Would you go for a low pitch siren? Or would you do some onomatopoeia to describe that sound?

**Craig:** In this case just to kind of keep people reading I would describe it as something like listening to an ambulance siren passing by in slow motion. And that might just be enough for them to understand. Oh, that’s weird. Whatever it is it’s weird. The other thing you can do is it sounds like this, and then you can put in parenthesis, or this, and then put a little tiny URL. And then they can copy-paste and listen to it for themselves if they want.

**John:** Yeah. If it was crucial that’s a thing you could do. I’ve done onomatopoeia for weird sounds that are actually really meaningful, and especially if things are going to be recurring. So there was a [makes sound] that was super important for one of my projects. And so I would spell it all out, and it was bold, and it took up the entire line because it was meant to be just so jarring and you couldn’t get away from it. But in this case I don’t think you need it.

**Craig:** No, I mean, I use onomatopoeia all the time. It’s fun. And I try and write sound as much as I can. In this case I think it just wouldn’t do the job. You would want to go with simile is my instinct, Erin. That doesn’t mean to say I’m right.

**John:** Let’s try one more question, Megana.

**Megana:** So Ben from Vancouver asks, “After your discussion about aphantasia and hyperphantasia and how clearly you both see the scenes you’re writing I began to wonder about your personal reactions to seeing scenes you’ve written on screen. Beyond whether they turned out better or worse than you hoped, are you ever distracted by the disconnect between what you imagined and the filmed version?”

**John:** Oh yes. There have been times where I wrote something and I was like wow that was not at all what I intended it to be. And sometimes it’s better and sometimes it’s worse. A specific example that I’ve brought up before on the show is that in Big Fish there is a moment after Edward dies and Will has told him the story. Will has to call home to his mom. And in my head the phone is on one side of the bed and in the movie it’s on the other side of the bed. And the movie completely ruins it for me because I so filmed it in my head with the phone being on one side that it looks completely wrong when I see it in the movie.

So, completely pointless, but it does end up mattering to me.

**Craig:** That doesn’t ruin anything for me because, and I kid you not, I almost always imagine things on the other side from what everybody else shoots them. Almost always. If I think of it on the left, it’ll be on the right. And I’m not kidding, every damn time. Which makes me think there’s something wrong with my brain. Or maybe there’s something right. Either way, I’ve gotten used to the mirror imaging. That’s not a problem for me.

The problem for me, so in movies you have these imaginations, you have these visions. And then you’re dismissed while a director comes and decides they know what all this means without ever talking to you again. And then eventually you see it and you go, oh, this is like a dream I had, but if it had been dreamed by an idiot. [laughs] That’s basically what it’s like. And what I love about television is while it doesn’t always work exactly the same, because I live in the reality of budgets and locations and other things, I can encompass enough and I can essentially create a bridge between the scene I saw and the place I’m in to achieve the same feelings I had. That to me is when it is successful.

And there are moments every now and again where I will stop, working on The Last of Us, I will stop and go this is literally exactly how I saw it.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** And that is so wonderful.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** I hope people like those moments.

**John:** Great questions. All right. Let’s get on to our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things that are both photo related. The first is a website called Cleanup.pictures. Craig click through this and see what it does. I think you’ll be impressed by it. It’s doing a thing that Photoshop introduced years ago where you can sort of paint over a thing and it will smartly fill in and remove that thing. But here it is doing it in the browser. So if there’s a rando person in the background of your photo you can just paint them out and it just magically fills in the space around them. It feels like some sort of witchcraft and it’s just really impressive.

**Craig:** I’m trying it right – oh, wow. Look at that. So, yeah, what do they call it, the blur tool or something?

**John:** Yeah. Unlike a blur tool where it’s just smudging it, here it’s actually creating new stuff to fill in the void of what’s being missed. So you can just paint out a street sign in the background or whatever you need to do and it’s pretty compelling.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** So for a free tool on the web–

**Craig:** This thing is awesome. Wow. What a great. They should market this as post-divorce picture cleanup dot com. People could just remove their ex from all these photos. I think it would be amazing. You know who would have loved this? You know who would have loved this?

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** Stalin.

**John:** Oh, yes.

**Craig:** He would have loved this.

**John:** Change history.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. Just removing people easily from photos. Would have been lovely.

**John:** Love it. Good stuff. My second photo related thing is a Live Text in photos.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** From the new iOS. It’s really good. So the article I posted through from Spy Magazine, I just took a photo of it from this book and just live texted it and copied and pasted and put it in the Workflowy. It really is great when you see some text out there in the world, you hold up your camera, see the little icon, tap it, and it’s letting you select all the text.

**Craig:** What is the icon I’m looking for? I’m doing it right now. I’m trying to do it.

**John:** It is generally down on the lower right hand corner and it’s a little box that has the lines inside.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. I just did it. Cool.

**John:** And so then any text you see in a photo is selectable now and it’s really good.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And it’s one of those things that would have been absolutely remarkable and impossible a few years ago, and now they just do it by default. So many good things. Craig, what you have got?

**Craig:** Somebody prompted me to put this as my One Cool Thing and I had actually intended to put as my One Cool Thing. And just to point out how beautifully humble Jack Thorne is he sent me an email after he saw that on Twitter and said, “Just saw on Twitter you are being pressured to say something about me. Please feel no pressure. You are awesome. You don’t need to mention anything.” And that’s just Jack for you. We could all live a thousand years and probably not be as nice as Jack Thorne. And one of the things that he did and this is my One Cool Thing is he delivered a lecture. This is the James Mactaggart lecture, so I believe this is at the Edinburgh TV festival. And the lecture that he delivered is about disability and the representation of disability in film and television and on stage.

And it is in typical Jack Thorne fashion beautifully written and passionately delivered. The entire thing is on YouTube and in keeping with the theme I did select the version that does come with captions and BSL. So, take a look at it or take a listen to it. It’s really well done. Jack himself has suffered from an invisible disability and is quite a call to action. I thought it was really terrific.

**John:** That’s excellent. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Henry Adler. 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 sometimes @clmazin. I’m always @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and 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 what people should do if they’re not going to college. Craig, Megana, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Megana:** Thank you.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** We’re back. So, Craig, last week you had a rant about colleges and the cost of colleges, the return on investment on colleges. We had people write in saying like is return on investment even the right way of thinking about it because it’s not just about money, there’s other things. My question to you though is let’s say undergraduate education is not what it’s cracked up to be, what is an alternative? Because I feel like that period between 18 and 22 is really important and vital and I don’t think I would have become the same person if I hadn’t gone away to a four-year school. How do you think about that period of time?

**Craig:** I think that the period between 18 and 22 is a perfectly good time for people to go to college if they are the sort of person who will get something out of it and particularly if they’re the sort of person who doesn’t need incur a massive amount of debt for it. And if we had free continuing education for everybody that would be everybody. We don’t. I think it is also a perfect time for people to start trying to see what they’re good at.

There’s a great video that Professor Scott Galloway has out where he talks about the shittiest advice there is to undergraduates which is follow your passion.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And what he talks about is what you really need to do is figure out what it is that you’re good at and do that. And the more you do it the better you are at it. And the more you will get for it in reward and esteem and encouragement. And that is what makes you passionate about it. I’ve always said a version of that to my own kids which is it doesn’t matter so much what you think you are here to give the world. The world is going to tell you what they want from you. And then you have a choice about what you do next. But listen. Keep your ears open for what the world is telling you.

So, for some people I think the time between 18 and 22 traditionally was a time to apprentice. You had a thought about what you might be able to do well and you would apprentice. Which means you are paid and you learn and if you take to it and show skill you will be encouraged and you will move up. And if you don’t, consider a different path.

**John:** A thing I think is crucial about that period of time, sort of like a wolf who needs to sort of move to a new pack, I think you should move away from home if it’s possible to move away from home.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** I think you should try to get outside of your home environment and start to learn about who you are as an individual. So college is a great excuse for doing that. But if college isn’t the right choice for you can you move somewhere else to do this thing, to take an internship, to take a vocational class, to do something else where you can find a new tribe and find new people and sort of discover who you are when you’re not in that same home environment.

If it’s not possible, something like community college or some other thing that’s getting you out of the house for a significant period of time and getting you to meet new people that are not the same peers you’ve had through high school is going to be really helpful because you got to figure out how to do all that stuff because it’s crucial and it’s important.

**Craig:** You’re learning how to become an adult. So that’s the other issue is that college insulates you from adulting to a large extent. You are sent to college and the rosiest most romantic point of view is that college is where you will become a well-rounded human being who is immersed in the great discussions of culture and science and art and religion. And then you will emerge on the other side a better person who will contribute more to society.

The less romantic point of view is it’s sex and drug camp. And you get to go to sex and drug camp and you get to sleep with a lot of people and get drunk or get high all the time. My guess is for more than half of the students who go to college it’s sex and drug camp primarily. You can have sex and drugs but also not be in camp. It’s the camp part that’s the problem. It is preventing people from adulting before they should. And I think learning certain skills like how to live on your own and pay for bills and show up for work are incredibly valuable for younger people. It does teach you that you are enough, that you can make it on your own.

It’s exciting and it’s emboldening to know these things. So, we are fooling ourselves if we think that college doesn’t come with a price. And that price is an increasingly delayed maturity in America. I mean, Megana, you look around at your cohort of graduates from Harvard. Would you say that there are at least a number of them who haven’t quite launched?

**Megana:** That is certainly a way of saying it. I think my friends who have gone to grad school or have been in academia for a longer time than I have definitely have a different way of being in the world and a different sense of what it means to be an adult and how to have a lifestyle. I do agree that it kind of inoculates you from having to understand what it means to be a working professional person.

But another point that I would say is I feel like this idea of leaving home is a very western individualistic idea. And in other countries kids go to college but they’re living at home. And I think that that’s fine because the three of us we’re not living anywhere close to where we grew up and I don’t know that that’s necessarily a good thing.

**Craig:** Well for me it is. I’ll tell you that much. [laughs]

**John:** Megana, I think you’re making a really good point. Obviously we’re approaching this with a Western American bias and we look at the East or we look at even Europe, and Europe which has apprentice programs, and there’s not that culture of moving away from home to do this thing. And you sort of keep your family ties. That can be good too. So we have the bias of our own experiences. Because you went from the Midwest to Harvard and then never went back to the Midwest.

**Megana:** Yeah.

**John:** I want to go back to what Craig was saying about sort of like that college is delaying you from adulting. And to me the best version of college is it’s an onramp to adulting. And you’re out from underneath your parents’ control and protection and in that first year you’re learning how to do some things but there’s a structure around you. The first two years you’re in the dorms and the third year you’re in an apartment. The fourth year you’re finishing school but you’re really kind of working while you’re doing that. And that’s a nice onramp. You’re picking up skills along the way.

I think when I’ve seen folks who didn’t go to college and who suddenly just like I’m going to get a job and I’m get an apartment, they weren’t ready for that. They didn’t have the skills and maturity to sort of do all of that. And so I think that 18 to 22 period ideally there is some ramp to it. It’s the same reason why I think folks who don’t go to college sometimes end up in the military. They need some structure. They need something there to get them organizing principles behind them so they can figure out how to be themselves.

**Craig:** There are plenty of ways to onramp other than spending $100,000 a year. I would say that you’re right that there are a lot of people who do use college, and when I say use I really mean use it, in the way it was intended in its purest form. But there are also people who enter what I would call a permanent childhood. And what I mean by that is even if they get jobs they go to college, they follow the rules for what they feel they need to do to then be hired by a large corporation which will now be their new mommy and daddy. And in that corporation they are taken care of. They know where they sit. They know where they stand. They know what they’re supposed to wear. There’s rules for lunch and there’s rules for travel. And there are memos. And they follow these things as a child of a company now.

And they will do so forever until they retire. They don’t have a sense of being able to be entrepreneurial, on their own, being disconnected from some structure that takes care of you completely. That is scary to me. There is no question that our current system is working beautifully for large corporations looking for compliant employees.

**John:** Yeah. But that of course is not – large corporations and compliant employees was a different time. The idea of working for one company for the next 20 years, 30 years just isn’t even a thing anymore. So we’re sort of training people for a way of working that isn’t going to exist and probably isn’t existing right now.

**Craig:** I don’t know if that’s true. I think that most people do work for large companies or at least midsized companies. And if they don’t work for let’s say Apple their whole lives they may move over to Microsoft. Or they move over to Amazon. Or they may move over to this tech company or that tech company. If they work in the financial business they are absolutely working for a large financial company and they will move from one to one to one. The advertising world, companies, one to one to one. Even people that work for movie studios. When you work at a movie studio as an employee you become taken care of. You are a child and you are given a structure. If you’re good you get to move up to this level. And then you get to move up to this level. And then you get to move up to this level. And this level you get a car. And it’s like your parents taking care of you.

And we’re the people who give you your health insurance. And we’re the people that are there for you. If you need two weeks off you get two weeks off, but you have to fill out these forms and follow these rules. And people are being trained for this. And if you look at the way they’re being trained to get into college you can see it clearly. What do you need to do to get into college? You need to study incredibly hard, work incredibly diligently for very long hours and above all else follow the rules.

It’s brilliant if you’re Goldman Sachs.

**John:** Now, we were talking about this at staff meeting and our friend Dustin brought up one of the best things about college for him, or art school in his case, was the stakes were lower, so it was like work, it was like being out there in the world, but there was the soft consequences of missed deadlines, of messing up. Basically you had permission to make mistakes without getting fired in ways that in the working world you wouldn’t be able to do. Because the training wheels were still on a little bit you could experiment a little bit more. You could enter in as one major and go to a different major and sort of experiment a little bit more. You had some freedom because everything wasn’t going to come crashing down on you.

**Craig:** No question. And again it really does come down to the person. There are people that really understand the purpose of the training wheels and then there are people who get used to the thought of training wheels and can’t bear to not have training wheels on. And that’s fine. Mostly I’m just advocating that if you are going to be that second kind of person don’t pay for the privilege of being that kind of person. Just be that kind of person.

**John:** Craig, what do you think you need to learn – so let’s say you wanted to be a screenwriter for example, what are the things you need to learn and get better at doing between 18 and 22? Because to me all the writing I did in college, even though it wasn’t screenwriting, was hugely helpful in being able to put words together in a way that made sense and were persuasive. But what are the things that you feel like an aspiring screenwriter from 18 to 22 needs to learn to get better at?

**Craig:** If I were running the screenwriting section of a college, like for instance let’s say Princeton hired me to be in charge of their screenwriting department, which they absolutely should not do.

**John:** Because Craig’s first thing would be to shut it down, but, I’m assuming.

**Craig:** Correct. And then the second thing I would do is say, OK, well here’s the good deal. For the next four years of your life here at Princeton in our screenwriting section you are not going to write one screenplay or even one scene. For the next four years you’re just going to learn how to write sentences. Because none of you know how to put a sentence together. None of you know how to translate a thought into words in a way where the words convey your thought. You are going to learn grammar. You’re going to learn punctuation. You are going to learn how to be concise. You are going to learn how to edit. And above all you will learn how to structure your language. And none of it will be what you think of as creative because until you know how to do this none of your creativity is going to matter because you’re not going to be able to get it across on the page. Ever.

And then I would get fired.

**John:** Yeah. I will say that a thing I did learn in college as opposed to high school is in high school we were taught to write these incredibly formulaic essays which were sort of like matched up to the SAT kind of essays. It was so boiler plate-y. And in college I actually had freedom to actually write good new things. And in my journalism program, yes, we had to learn how to write journalistic style, but also write magazine pieces and other things and advertising campaigns. And you learned how to write persuasive words. And so that’s the crucial thing I think you need to learn in that 18 to 22.

And I agree it shouldn’t be about writing scenes. I mean, if you want to write sketches for your sketch group, fantastic. Do that. And learn what’s funny. Learn what works. Take some acting classes, too. But you shouldn’t be coming out of this assuming that you’re going to have three scripts when you come out of undergrad because they’re going to be terrible.

**Craig:** They will absolutely be terrible. And don’t kid yourself that people who are in the other quad taking creative writing for novels, they might actually write a novel that people like. They might write a novel that’s good. You know why? Writing novels is easier than writing screenplays. That’s why there are so many more novelists. There’s a thousand great novelists out there selling tons of books. And there’s about 15 people doing what we do. It’s just harder. It’s so much harder as far as I’m concerned.

And if I were in charge I would be like you. I would be saying let’s all just start reading a lot of nonfiction or even if they are fictionalized essays and talking about what this person was thinking, what makes an interesting thought, what is an argument, how do you look at the world, what is your perspective on things, and now let’s look at how they turned it into words.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** All of that is so much more important than here’s what a script, Interior, and then you have a time of day. Oh, give me a break.

**John:** Craig, you have to study Casablanca scene by scene.

**Craig:** Oh god. Yeah, because that’s what people want today.

**John:** People want Casablanca.

**Craig:** If I show my daughter Casablanca she’s going to kick me out of the room. Because it’s not – and Casablanca is objectively a great film, but it is a great film of its time. It is no longer a lesson on how to write a movie now. And anyone who insists it is is just being a reactionary. That’s the other thing. Why you need to teach I’ll call 18 to 20 year olds young adults the nuts and bolts of conveying thoughts into words as opposed to writing screenplays is they are already the vanguard of culture. They don’t need you to tell them how to turn their vanguard of cultureness into Casa-fucking-blanca. They’ve got it already. They’re young and they’re so much cooler than you are, Professor Whatever. But what they don’t know how to do is put a sentence together. And this is how I would run my incredibly bad screenwriting school. [laughs] And it would be called Don’t Come Here Institute.

**John:** Love it. I think the sweatshirts are really what’s going to sell. I mean, that’s the merch.

**Craig:** And the sweatshirts would say Don’t Wear This.

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

**Craig:** Thanks guys.

**Megana:** Thanks.

Links:

* [Dune already made $41M](https://observer.com/2021/10/dune-is-getting-a-sequel-but-how-did-it-really-perform-lets-check-the-data/)
* [Spy Magzine](https://www.vulture.com/2011/02/spy_magazine_google_books.html)
* [Clean Up Pictures](https://cleanup.pictures)
* [Use Live Text and Visual Look Up on your iPhone](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212630)
* [Jack Thorne’s James Mactaggart Lecture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaxwlpbJbbg)
* [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 Henry Adler ([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/523standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/blindspots-and-natural-structures).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 522 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show what do characters not see about themselves and the world around them? We’ll talk about blind spots and how frustrating but useful they can be. We’ll also discuss natural structure, the way some events in real life have an inherent order. And how that can be very helpful for your fictional events.

And in our bonus segment for premium members we’ll talk about work-life balance. Is such a thing real? As we record this bonus topic on a Sunday morning at 10am because both of us were too busy to do it during the actual week.

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh, irony. Oh cruel fate.

**John:** Cruel fate.

**Craig:** Cruel fate.

**John:** But maybe it’s a lucky accident of success and things going well is that you don’t have time to actually do the things you want to do like talk to Craig.

**Craig:** There you go. There. Let’s turn that frown upside down.

**John:** We love it. We cannot talk about anything else in this podcast until we talk about the big news of the week which was the shooting on the set of the indie film Rust.

**Craig:** Oh god. Yeah.

**John:** So an accidental shooting killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and wounded the film’s director. That has been sort of all the discussion the last few days in town. More details are still coming out, so we don’t want this to be forensic what actually happened. But we need to talk about overall safety on sets, firearms on sets. Craig, you and I were playing D&D when the news first came out and I didn’t want to interrupt our D&D session to talk about it, but it’s sort of all I could think about for the few days after.

**Craig:** Yeah. So they do have a general sense of what happened now it seems. But the details as they emerged were that Alec Baldwin is starring in this movie and he was doing a scene where he had to shoot a gun which obviously was meant to be a prop gun. Prop guns are real guns. Generally speaking if they have to fire they are real guns. But they are loaded with blanks. Blanks are cartridges that don’t have the slugs. So a lot of people misunderstand what a bullet is. They think the bullet is the whole long thing with the tip. The bullet is just the little tip. The long thing is the cartridge. That’s got the powder in it. And so the blanks have no actual projectile. They just have the long cartridge and a little bit of powder. We’ll say quarter load or half load or a full load if we want to make a really big bang.

And apparently he was handed a gun with an actual bullet in it. And he fired that gun and killed Halyna Hutchins. Very often the people operating the cameras are the ones who are in the most danger. And there are not just a rule or rules, but a litany of rules and procedures that you should follow. And from what I read they were not followed here at all. No surprise.

So I want to be clear for people at home. Hollywood, and this is apart from judgments about whether or not Hollywood should be constantly portraying gun fire, Hollywood has shot off four trillion rounds in the making of television and movies. There have been a few notable incidents. Branden Lee was a very sad one many, many years ago. And there’s this one. It is incredibly rare. It is incredibly rare because we follow very clear procedures. And from what I understand based on what I read those procedures were not followed here.

**John:** Yeah. So as details started coming out I was following Twitter threads from people who work on sets who are prop masters, armorers, people who would be responsible for guns on sets, and they’re saying like, wait, how could this have happened because there are so many checks and protocols for sort of whenever there’s a weapon on set, how stuff needs to be done.

So let’s take a step back and talk about what we mean by a prop, what we mean by a gun, because there are many sort of conflated and confusing terms. A lot of times if you see a gun that is never going to be fired, no one is going to be touching it, it could just be a plastic or rubber thing. That’s obviously the safest thing because nothing can actually happen with that. There are things that are simply there to be seen but not actually be touched or used in any way. Those can be fakes and that’s great and safer for everybody. There are real guns that are being used when you need to have the actor shoot the gun and you need to see the kickback and you want to see the flame. But increasingly a lot of time the actual fire at the end of the gun is done digitally, so that is another choice that can be made. So you don’t get the kickback but you get the flame and that can be fine for certain circumstances.

There are also electronic and other replica guns that have no actual, don’t fire anything but sort of look like a real gun when they’re being used. Those are all choices. But what I think the sort of bigger discussion is is that guns on set are a safety issue but there are so many safety issues on set and that’s why any time you’re trying to do anything that is a stunt, that is involving a snowball being thrown at a person, you have to have a real culture of safety around the set. And it looks like that culture of safety was not happening on the set which is probably not unrelated to the hours, to it being a non-union shoot, to it being done in a rushed way that did not prioritize people’s safety.

**Craig:** Yeah. So there apparently have been some complaints and even a crew walkout at one point regarding safety issues which is startling enough. If you have a crew walk out over anything it’s rather serious of course and needs to be examined. But of all the things you need to worry about gun safety on set is primary.

Here’s the basic procedure. The prop master works with an armorer. And armorer is part of the prop team. And they’re in charge of securing and accounting for all weapons and all ammunition at all times. That means you show up with six guns, you leave with the same six guns. Everything is very carefully logged and archived. Then you are very clear when you’re handing somebody a fake gun. It has to be announced. The first AD will announce it to the set. There is a fake gun.

The fake gun is examined by both the armorer, the prop master, the first assistant director, and then the actor to whom it is handed. Everybody agrees this is a fake gun. At that point it’s put in your holster, or you carry it around, and everyone can relax.

If there is a real gun then that has to be announced. And it has to be announced that it is unloaded, if it is unloaded. And if it’s unloaded then the prop master and armorer show it to the first AD by removing the clip and then also sliding the slide or popping open the cylinder so that we can see that there is no ammunition in the chamber. The same thing is then done for the actor who carefully examines it and then accepts it. This gun is now known to be unloaded and everybody can relax.

We go on a much more alert level when we’re dealing with any kind of loads. We don’t fire real bullets ever. I’ve never known a production to fire a real bullet. But when we are using blanks we need to know it is a quarter load, it is a half load, is it a full load. Hot gun on set. That thing gets called out across everybody. The entire crew knows when it’s going to happen.

And that gun is carefully checked. The loads are carefully checked. Everybody signs on. Everybody. Because the chain of command is responsible. Meaning if something should happen like for instance what happened on this movie, on Rust, people can and likely will be charged criminally for what happened. So everybody follows those rules to the letter. The other safety rules, and I’m putting Covid aside, have to do with all sorts of things like how we harness people when they are elevated, or how many people are allowed to be standing on a particular platform, what’s the weight load for it. How do we secure cranes? What do we do when people are walking underneath heavy things that might possibly fall?

All of this safety culture is essential because the last thing you want is for anyone to get hurt. It’s a terrible, terrible feeling. I’ve been involved in movies where people have gotten hurt and thank god in all of those cases it was – thank god, you know whenever I thank god for people being hurt – but at least they were accidents. People made their own bad mistakes, or there was just an accident. Impossible to avoid completely.

**John:** People can trip and fall. A trip and fall accident feels like a very different scale than a gun accident. And so I think one of the first instincts coming out of this was like, OK, well situations where there’s a live gun on set, we can replace those with other things so that we don’t have live guns on set as much. Sure, that’s great. But that’s not going to take care of all of the potential problems and safety issues. So I want to make sure we don’t solve this one problem and still have more accidents and injuries on set that could be avoided by really looking at putting crew safety first, looking at the hours you’re shooting, looking at how you’re setting up these productions to emphasize safety. Because this was a horrible accident that happened here but we’ve also been talking about related to the IATSE thing all of the car accidents that happen driving away from incredibly long shoots.

And I think we need to make sure that we’re not overemphasizing this one problem and forgetting about the other problems.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I don’t think that the answer here is to eliminate the use of active firearms for film and television production any more than it would be to eliminate the use of active vehicles. Far more people are injured by vehicles when we’re making movies and television than by guns because in general people are really, really careful about the guns. What kind of blows my mind here is how when you’re dealing with low budget movies and you are dealing perhaps with non-union workers this is what happens. I mean, according to the Los Angeles Times prior to this incident there were three accidental weapon discharges. That’s three more than I have ever heard of on any production I’ve ever been involved in. And that was before this accident happened.

If there is one accidental discharge of a weapon someone needs to be fired. And everything needs to be re-examined. Also, apparently they didn’t have safety meetings. So every morning, every single morning – and so when you’re shooting nights you show up at 6pm, that’s you’re morning. You say good morning. It’s a very strange thing. Every single morning on our show, every day, our first AD will hold a safety meeting. The crew gathers around and we talk about the safety issues that are potentially emerging throughout the day. It is made clear where fire exits are for inside. And people are told if anything looks unsafe or sounds unsafe or feels unsafe please report it to a member of the AD team.

They didn’t have those meetings. That’s crazy.

**John:** Yeah. On a shoot that has guns.

**Craig:** Guns. That’s insane. And in this case nobody looked at this gun. Basically an armorer handed to a prop guy who handed it to an AD who handed it to Alec Baldwin. And while they were doing it people just kept yelling, “Cold gun.” That means it’s been clear of bullets. But they didn’t check. It’s crazy. It’s so tragic. And I feel so awful for Ms. Hutchins family and friends. It just makes you sick because that is so unnecessary. That is just wildly – unnecessary death. It reminds me of when that PA was killed on the railroad bridge. Do you remember that one?

**John:** I do. Absolutely. That’s another case where I believe there were criminal charges filed.

**Craig:** Yes there were.

**John:** You were not prioritizing safety. You were looking at getting the shot.

**Craig:** I believe people went to prison for that.

**John:** All right. Quite related, last week on the show we were talking about the potential for an IATSE strike. So we recorded our three scenarios for like oh there was a deal reached, so we didn’t record the fourth scenario which was like there’s a deal reached but some people are not especially happy about this deal.

**Craig:** Oh. That was folded into the scenario of there is a deal reached because that’s always true.

**John:** That’s true. There’s always going to be people who are not especially happy. I think I was surprised by the amount of IATSE members I heard talking afterwards about sort of, ah, this deal is not what we want it to be. The belief that IATSE caved too soon on things. We’ll never know what the actual possible deal that could have been reached was. And the details are still kind of coming out even as we’re recording this. We haven’t gotten a full accounting and a full picture of what the important gains were in this.

I do want to say as a podcast that’s been talking a lot about assistant pay and really looking at script coordinators and writer’s assistants, there was real progress made on that front. So the actual minimums that they are getting for that work went up from $17 to $23.50, which is progress, and that is meaningful. A concern would be that if they are not guaranteed the 60 hours they’re normally guaranteed that’s not really increasing their take home pay. So that’s going to be a thing to keep watching for is making sure they’re still being able to bill the same number of hours. But that’s progress and that’s progress at the lowest rung there, so that’s potentially really good.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s hard to say what the full picture of the reaction is. We won’t know until they take their vote. The people who are unhappy will always be rather vocal about it. And social media tends to distort these things.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** So it’s hard to tell. We will know when the vote happens. I would imagine it will be a yes by 85% or something like this.

**John:** And Craig you’ve seen that it’s not a straight normal vote. Each local is voting and it’s all added up together. So it’s a whole crazy parliamentary procedure. Actually like Electoral College basically voting system.

**Craig:** Right. So just sort of apply my 85% to the byzantine method. That’s a general sense of things. I think generally people will vote yes. Certainly as an overall union my mind would be blown if it came back no. And a lot of what happened was just trying to get everybody together on the same line. I mean, a lot of people already have the 10-hour turnaround, but some people didn’t. Now they all have it.

There’s been a lot made of the raises in relation to inflation. So inflation has been rolling along at like 1 or 2% for a long time, so the raises that we’ve been getting have been outstripping inflation, or outpacing inflation I should say. But we’ve had a spike in inflation this year where it’s hovering around 5%. So there is some concern that that kind of wage increase isn’t going to be enough. And that may be true. We have to kind of see. It’s too early to tell if we’re on an inflationary trend or not. Although, given the amount of money that the government has been spending it’s quite possible that it has all finally caught up to us. It’s been going on for quite some time. And that’s not like our rate is going to go lower.

So, it will be interesting to see what happens there. Overall IATSE wanted some things and they got some things. The most important thing they got I think out of all of this is a credible strike threat.

**John:** Yeah, absolutely. And it’s one of those classic examples of like, you know, by using power you gain power. And they actually were able to show that they could hold together and get the massive strike authorization vote and they had a union that was willing to go on strike for an important thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Gives them leverage in the next negotiation and the next negotiation after that. So I think it’s an important gain on those fronts.

Speaking of numbers, we actually got an important change. So Craig, Netflix listened to you and they’ve decided to change how they measure title views.

**Craig:** [laughs] Clearly.

**John:** Because that was your concern that you thought that the two minute rule was silly.

**Craig:** Was stupid. Yeah.

**John:** And so they announced this past week they’re going to change and talking more about total hours viewed for a title and for a program.

**Craig:** It is a little weird. I was like I’d like to ask Ted Sarandos why he thinks this two minute standard isn’t an embarrassment for his company. And days later they change it. Now, obviously it has nothing to do with us. I just like it.

So share the total hours watched for any given title. Congratulations Netflix. You’ve come up with another misleading statistic to lay upon us all. Because hours viewed, certainly it’s better. So their letter to their shareholders it says, “We think engagement is measured by hours viewed is a slightly better indicator than two minutes.”

**John:** Yeah. [laughs] Well, Craig, let’s ask the question then. So what do you think is the actual – what should count as a view for you? In the Craig Mazin universe, when you get the big CEO company?

**Craig:** And they can track everything. If somebody has watched let’s say more than 75% of an episode of television or a movie they’ve watched it. That’s it. They watched it. And what they’re doing now is they’re larding it all with people who rewatch things.

**John:** For a subscription service rewatching is great because it means that you’re still staying engaged with that program. That you want to keep up that service because you love watching Friends again. And you’ll watch it again and again.

**Craig:** I guess that’s helpful internally for them to know that you’re the sort of person that rewatches Friends over and over. But if somebody watches the same movie 12 times I don’t know how much benefit that is to them, as opposed to new things. Now, people can argue about that. Regardless, they’re still avoiding, conspicuously avoiding, the way everybody else does stuff which is did they watch it or not. Yes or no. This is how many people watched this show. Not this is how many hours were spent watching a show.

So, I got to tell you I just feel like they just keep avoiding the obvious thing. We all know what it means to say, hey, have you seen Squid Game? Yes, I have seen it. Really, how many times have you seen it? That’s what I want to know.

**John:** OK, well that’s a fair question then. So how much of Squid Game do you have to have watched in order to say you’ve watched Squid Game? If you watched the first episode have you watched Squid Game? Or do you need to watch more than half the episodes? What’s the criteria?

**Craig:** The traditional way you do it is you say I’ve watched episode one and episode two. Or I have watched all of the episodes. So when a broadcaster or streamer puts numbers up they’re like this is how many people watched the first episode of such and such. This is how many total viewers we had for the run of the series. This is a very typical thing.

So what they won’t do is – Netflix won’t tell you how many people watched Squid Game, the series, or how many people watched Squid Game episode one. They won’t do it. They’ll tell you how many people watched either two minutes of it or they’ll tell you how many hours of watching occurred. It’s really weird.

**John:** Yeah. I get that. I get that it’s different. I guess I’m standing up for it in the belief that the traditional way we report like did someone watch that episode of Friends, it was important because we had advertisers who needed to know did somebody actually see my commercial. That’s actually less important now. And so while I get the sense of like you want to be able to compare apples to apples to things, I just don’t think we’re in an apple universe anymore. I think we’ve moved on. We’re in a whole different orchard. And the traditional measures are just not as useful as they used to be. And so I get why they’re not reporting that.

And I don’t think they’re actually just trying to be shady or hide anything from us. I think it’s actually just not a useful thing for them to be able to say is like this is how many people watched this episode of a thing.

**Craig:** I will agree to disagree.

**John:** Which is fine.

**Craig:** I do think that they are being slightly shady with this.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** We’ll see.

**Craig:** But they are being vastly less shady than they were when they said if your eyeballs slid gently across your television screen as you walked from the kitchen to the bathroom you watched that show. This is vastly better than that.

**John:** We have a good follow up question from Matt. He writes, “What’s the difference between you too giving a script three pages and viewers and giving a show two minutes, asides approximately one minute? Just seems like short amount of time for both to come to a conclusion.”

**Craig:** Oh, that’s a – I would love to answer that question. Would you like to know Matt? The difference is we don’t charge you. That’s the difference. Matt, you’re not paying to hear us talk about the three pages. We’re not a paid service. So we do whatever the hell we want. We don’t have time to do all that stuff. That’s not our job.

**John:** I have a different answer. I think if I read three pages of a script I wouldn’t say I’d read the script. I would say I read three pages. But in reading those three pages I have made a decision whether I’m going to read more than three pages. And so it sort of is like in some ways tuning into that Netflix show and it’s like watching three minutes and deciding like, meh, I don’t want to watch it. And I think what we’re arguing is if I bail on that Netflix show after three minutes, Netflix you really shouldn’t count that as a view. You should count that as someone that is like, meh, this is not for me. Which is really the same experience of reading three pages of a script. Is this for me? Is this not for me? Do I get it? Do I want to read more?

So, it’s a sampler. And I don’t think it’s enough to call that a read or call that a view. Fair? Craig, why don’t you ask the next question?

**Craig:** Margaret tells us, oh, this is not a question. This is a statement. Margaret has stated, “There’s no such thing as bragging too much about kidney donation. I’m writing in because your discussion of the bad art friend kidney story missed a lot of the details that came out later that the New York Times story obscured probably to make both sides seem equally bad. Kidney donors are actively asked to promote their donations to encourage other donors. You can think that Dawn was needy and cringey, etc. but lambasting her for bragging too much about her kidney donation is actively harmful. From my sense of your values I don’t think you’d want to be part of discouraging non-directed donors that inspire kidney donor chains. Here’s an article. There’s no such thing as bragging too much about a kidney donation.” And then there’s a link to an article at Slate.

John, what is your response to this?

**John:** So my response is OK I get that. I get the point that you talk about your kidney donation to encourage other people to donate, to normalize it, and I think on the show you and I have done a lot of talking about bone marrow donation and bone marrow registry in part to sort of normalize it and get people thinking about it.

**Craig:** Bethematch.com.

**John:** Yeah. So yes I get that. And we should not overlook that as a thing. It didn’t come up in the original article so thank you for bringing it to our donation. Can something be a societal good and be cringey and annoying individually? Yes. And that’s sort of a truism that is useful for writers to be thinking about. That someone could be doing the right things and still be cringey.

**Craig:** Margaret, there is such a thing as bragging too much about a kidney donation and it has nothing to do with inspiring kidney donation or uninspiring people. Anybody that is sitting around going I’m thinking about donating a kidney but mostly because I get to brag for the next year. I just don’t think those people exist except maybe Dawn. First of all, the way to brag excessively about a kidney donation is saying that you’ve donated your third kidney. That is one kidney too many.

I think that the issue wasn’t so much that she was bragging. She set up a page and said look what I did and that to me was promotional. And hopefully inspirational to people. The problem that we had I think was that she was sending follow up emails to people saying I noticed you haven’t thanked me or acknowledged me and my kidney donation, you haven’t praised me for my kidney donation. That’s just thirsty and it has nothing to do with kidney donations.

So I think that this is a little perhaps overstated Margaret. Of course we are fully in support of organ donation. I have been a registered organ donor with my driver’s license since 1988. And we do promote and I have promoted Bethematch.com a million times. Honestly I’m not sure how I feel about just voluntarily pulling a kidney out. That’s a whole bioethical discussion that we can have on a different podcast called What Do I Do About My Kidneys. But I think maybe when you say that what we did was actively harmful is abusing the words actively and potentially also the word harmful.

**John:** Craig, a question. You are more the medical expert on the show. Of the two of us, or even the three of us, you’re the medical expert, although Megana–

**Craig:** I’m an unregistered doctor.

**John:** Megana’s family is actually all doctors. But you’re on the show.

**Craig:** It’s just that they’re licensed, I’m not. That’s the only difference.

**John:** That’s the only difference.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My question is I know that the kidneys are involved in producing urine and doing all the good stuff to get the toxins out of your body. And I wonder if her thirstiness may come from having lost the kidney she’s actually thirstier now and that’s why she was thirsty for praise?

**Craig:** [laughs] That is potentially, possibly true. That’s really good. Yes. Everything you just said is correct. Yes, the kidneys are involved in the formation of urine. And they also send out a lot of hormones. They control and do all sorts of fascinating things. Filtering of blood of so on is mostly the liver, but yeah your kidneys are connected to your thirstiness. No question. And your blood pressure.

**John:** And also this past week it was announced that the first pig kidney transplant happened. And so that’s exciting, too. So another option for trans-genetic. Trans-species organ donation? You can’t really call it donation because the pig didn’t want to donate the kidney. But still promising. Love that.

**Craig:** I have so much anger towards the kosher rules of my religion, of my [unintelligible] religion, that I will perhaps voluntarily receive a pig kidney just to say I have it.

**John:** You don’t need a kidney. You just want an extra one inside you.

**Craig:** I want a third kidney.

**John:** Yeah. It’s just better.

**Craig:** It’s better.

**John:** And then you could donate one and it would work out well for everybody.

**Craig:** Not the pig one.

**John:** One of our marquee topics this week is on natural structures. And this idea came to us from Chris Csont. He writes the Inneresting newsletter. And his newsletter this past week was about there are so many real life events that happen that have a natural order and a structure to them that can be really helpful in terms of the stories that we’re writing. So when we had Aline Brosh McKenna many episodes ago – she’s been on so many episodes – but there’s one episode where we talked about the structure of weddings and how there’s just so many events that lead up to a wedding and all the discreet moments that happen in this specific order. That can be a really helpful framework for your movie.

But that’s not the only thing out there. So some of the other examples that we were talking through, every sporting event has an order to it. Not just the game itself, but prepping for the game, what happens after the game. Diseases tend to have a very natural order. We sort of know what the progress of diseases are. School years. Seasons. Anything that is a production we sort of know the framework of how we get from this place to that place. Camp has an order, a structure. Prom. Any bet, when you sort of make a bet you know there’s going to be a payoff to that bet. So I wanted to talk a little bit about sort of natural structures and ways to think about them and how they can be useful for our storytelling purposes.

**Craig:** Well that’s a great idea. It’s incredibly useful. You know when you’re building plots that don’t have we’ll call it a built-in plot like one of these you have a lot of stuff to figure out. When you have one of these things sometimes the hardest thing to figure out is how to just not do the obvious things that this thing is demanding you do, like a wedding. The wedding process is incredibly structured by culture. If we’re talking about American culture there is a proposal, and then there’s a bachelor party, and there’s a bridal shower, and then there’s the planning of the wedding, and then there’s the wedding itself and then there’s the night of the wedding, then there’s the honeymoon. It’s like blerg-blerg-blerg-blerg.

You have a wealth of things telling you here’s what you need to do and it has to happen roughly within the next five or six pages or so. And it can be incredibly relaxing, but also a touch confining.

**John:** Absolutely. It can be a straitjacket because you can’t sort of like go off and do this other thing because you know this next thing has to happen. Craig, 20 years into my writing career I’ve never written a wedding and the thing I’m working on right now has a wedding in it. I’m very excited for the natural structural things that happen with a wedding. And just the fact that the audience can anticipate what’s going to happen and I don’t have to tell them. It’s so nice.

**Craig:** Can I tell you, I’ve been doing this so long that I just asked myself the question have you ever written a wedding scene. And the answer is maybe? I literally can’t remember.

**John:** The Hangover movies you worked on, did either of them have a wedding in it?

**Craig:** Oh, yes, of course. Duh. There we go. OK, there’s your answer. So there was a wedding in The Hangover Part 2 and so there was a bachelor party, there was a reception dinner, there was a wedding at which Mike Tyson. Yeah, so I have worked on a wedding. You know, I wrote my first sex scene ever.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve never written one.

**John:** You liked it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Not counting Charlie’s Angels, which sort of has a sex scene but not really a sex scene, have I written an actual sex scene? Maybe I haven’t. Weird.

**Craig:** This is how long we’ve been doing it. We can’t – there’s no way you can remember all. If you saw all of the stuff you’ve written that has been on the screen–

**John:** Oh, I remember a sex scene now I did. But it hasn’t filmed. That’s what it is. I wrote a sex scene that hasn’t filmed so it doesn’t count.

**Craig:** That’s just writing porn, John, for yourself.

**John:** That’s what it is. Absolutely. It was on my Wattpad.

**Craig:** Oh god. Is that still a thing? Is Wattpad still happening?

**John:** It still is a thing that is happening. It’s a lot of fan fiction and indie fiction is happening there.

**Craig:** All right. Anyway, back to this topic. So, all the ones you’ve listed are incredibly useful. The trick of them is to find a way to do them as I said that’s somewhat original. Now what you can sometimes do is if you’re dealing with plot, your story isn’t one of these things. You can borrow a kind of a structure and see if you maybe can make it analogous.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** If you have a story where you have some adventure exploring a new planet can you ask yourself is there a way to lay over the feeling of the big game onto this. Or summer camp? And use that strangely as a guide. It might help.

**John:** Absolutely. So you look at Rogue One which is structured kind of like a heist film.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We sort of know what the structural beats are of a heist film. And so we don’t have to do all the work of setting it up. You can build your story into a framework that makes sense. Let’s take a step back and think about what we mean by structure. Structure is when things happen. It’s the sequence, the order of events of your story. It is sort of the how we’re getting from this place to that place.

And part of structure tends to be letting the audience know kind of what to expect and what the characters are trying to do, what they hope to achieve, when they hope things are going to happen. So when you have characters saying like I’ll see you next week we have an expectation as an audience like, oh, we’re going to file that. At some point there’s going to be a next week and they’re going to see these characters again. If we see a character going into an office, they’re going to the office every day, we have an expectation like, oh, we’re going to come back to this set again because this is the normal, this is sort of how our story is going to work. And same if you set a story at Christmas time. We have an expectation we will get to Christmas. It’s very likely that there will be a Christmas celebration at some point because you’ve established this is the kind of story in which Christmas will happen.

So, always remember that the audience is looking for a structure. And they’re going to try to find one. And if you can make it very easy for them your job is much simpler down the road.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re also going to punish you if you don’t deliver certain things. If you are making a Christmas movie you have to have Christmas. You have to have Christmas morning. You have to have the gifts. There has to be some sense of connection to Christmas spirit. That means redemption, forgiveness, family togetherness, all the things that I hate the most in life. You can’t not deliver on that unless you right off the bat are like this is an anti-Christmas. Even if you were doing an ant-Christmas film it’s still going to end up there. That’s sort of the point of those things.

You know what? Megana, you were talking about Bollywood the other day. The big Bollywood musical, does it have a typical formula that would be easy to follow? If I watch 15 of the best Bollywood movies am I going to see certain elements repeating over and over? Or is it really just more like OK that’s a musical genre that any of these things could also be shoved into?

**Megana Rao:** Yeah, I would say the classic structure of a Bollywood film is that the two main characters meet in act one at a wedding and then there’s this big set piece of them seeing each other, meeting. And then the central conflict is that one of those characters is betrothed and already in the process of having an arranged marriage. So the sort of natural structure in Bollywood is usually that character’s upcoming wedding and whether they’ll go through with it or not. So, it’s just a lot of wedding in a Bollywood movie.

**Craig:** So Four Weddings and a Funeral in Bollywood is like 80 Weddings and 12 Funerals?

**Megana:** Basically.

**Craig:** I would actually watch that.

**John:** Yeah. The math works. You can see how it all happens. And what you’re describing is classically how a Bollywood movie works. And we should take a moment to think about natural structure as it applies to a film which is a one-time journey for a character or for a group of characters, versus a TV series which is generally the same kind of cycle happens again and again and again. And so a Christmas episode of The Office is a particular moment in those characters’ relationships. But it’s not going to have to be transformative, versus in a movie it will need to be a transformative journey. So we start one place and we come out to a completely new place at the end.

And so it’s a matter of matching what the overall needs of that genre are. Is this Christmas story going to be a complete transformation of a character by the end? They start at one moment and they come out a completely different character. Or is it going to be just like a reason for these characters to do Christmas-y things in the classic framework of that TV show?

**Craig:** And traditionally it’s the latter. So you don’t want your characters changing too much on shows that are meant to propel themselves forward year after year, like typical sitcoms, like Parks and Rec and things like that. You will have these episodes that engage in these kind of structural tropes but a lot of times it’s about the people who aren’t directly engaged. If you make a movie about baseball you need to focus typically on the baseball players and the big game at the end and who wins and who loses and how do you define winning and losing and all that. And if you’re doing a television show and everybody goes to the office picnic to play the office softball game it’s more about the people who aren’t particularly good at it and who don’t want to be there. And really the outcome of the game is utterly irrelevant because we understand that as soon as the episode ends everybody resets and goes right back to the who they were before the episode started.

**John:** We’ll also put a link in the show notes to a GQ article by James Grebey about why aren’t there more Thanksgiving movies, which is a good question to ask because we have so many, so many, so many Christmas movies, and Thanksgiving does not seem to have very many of them. Yes, there are a few which are generally about the road trip to get back to Thanksgiving, or everyone coming back to this house. I think his argument is that while we know how Thanksgiving works there aren’t enough beats to Thanksgiving. And there aren’t enough characters around Thanksgiving. It’s just sort of it’s a moment in time. It’s a meal. But it’s not actually – there aren’t enough discreet events around it as opposed to there’s all the traditions of Christmas that you can sort of build into. Or New Year’s, there’s all the stuff that goes around New Year’s. There’s just not that for Thanksgiving.

**Craig:** Yeah. And also nothing really happens on Thanksgiving. You just eat. Even on Halloween you dress up and you go out and you trick or treat and there’s I hate to say it an entire Spooky Season now.

**John:** Yes, there is. A whole Spooky Season.

**Craig:** So angry. It’s my Angry Season. I walked into CVS the other day and I’m like, ugh, Megana. [laughs] It’s happening.

**Megana:** Well I’m furious because they’ve already started putting out Christmas stuff.

**Craig:** Because they’ve got to get ready for a real holiday. You know, when god was born. Oh boy. Anyway, it’s ridiculous. So, there is a day, a single day. The day before Thanksgiving is meaningless, so there’s no Thanksgiving Eve. The day after Thanksgiving is meaningless. That’s just I don’t feel so good day. And then Thanksgiving itself is just a lot of cooking and eating.

**John:** But there’s so many Thanksgiving episodes of TV shows for exactly that same reason because it’s just one moment.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so it’s everyone coming together. It’s a good excuse for all of your characters to come together to have a disaster trying to make the turkey.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then watch the football games.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And then everybody goes back to exactly who they were before that. The Thanksgiving story itself has I think at this point crossed into deep problematic-ville. Yeah, we’re celebrating a holiday where people helped us and then we leave off the part where then we murdered all of them. So, America.

**John:** I still very much like this idea of Thanksgiving. I like the idea of taking a day to sort of be thankful for everything we have. I think we just need to maybe divorce it from the mythology of pilgrims and Native Americans all coming together. Because even if a meal happened it was not indicative of the overall experience.

**Craig:** And also nobody is giving thanks for anything on Thanksgiving. Legitimately.

**John:** I’m giving thanks. My family.

**Craig:** Sure. You guys do the thing. But I’m saying 98% of American families are watching football, eating too much, and yelling at each other.

**John:** Megana makes an absolutely amazing mac and cheese and green beans for Thanksgiving. And that’s why I love it so much.

**Craig:** That’s it?

**John:** Oh, those are two highlights of a Thanksgiving meal for me are Megana’s dishes.

**Craig:** Maybe I’ll steal Megana. I’ll steal her.

**Megana:** I can make enough green bean casserole for everyone.

**Craig:** It’s not the casserole Megana. It’s you. If one year John is like, oh, it’s Thanksgiving and you’re like, oh, oh my god I can’t make it this year, I’m so sorry. And then the next week I’m like, ugh, what a Thanksgiving I had.

**John:** [laughs] Megana cheated on me with Craig.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. Oh yeah. All right, I’ll work it out offline.

**John:** All right. The other topic I wanted to get into this week, this is based on an email that Megana and I got this past week. It was a real life person because we can actually apply what we learned from this email to many fictional characters is blind spots. And the person who wrote this letter clearly had a giant blind spot about sort of her place and her career and sort of things that were going on around her which we can very clearly see because we had eyes. And yet blind spots while frustrating for real life people are so helpful for our characters. And we think about the characters we use especially in movies, but also in TV as well, they tend to have these giant blind spots and through the course of the movie is getting them to see their blind spots, or in the course of a TV show like Michael Scott is him never actually acknowledging or having the insight to see his blind spots.

So I want to talk a little bit about blind spots today. And metaphorically we can talk about blind spots while driving which is that part, that space that you can’t see over your shoulder. On a strictly physical level it’s that space in your eye that actually gets no signal and so therefore your brain fills in the details and you don’t realize what you’re not seeing.

**Craig:** And do you know why that space is there, John?

**John:** Because it’s where the nerve connects, right?

**Craig:** Yes. Yes! Yes!

**John:** You’re so excited so that I have some basic – I remember that from like seventh grade biology.

**Craig:** Yes. It’s important that we retain these things.

**John:** But I also knew the APA definition of blind spot which I thought was actually great and very useful for our characters. They define it as a lack of insight or awareness, often persistent, about a specific area of one’s behavior or personality. Typically because recognition of one’s true feelings and motives would be painful. This is regarded as a defense against recognition of repressed impulses or memories that would threaten the patient’s ego.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I like it.

**Craig:** I think typically because recognition of one’s true feelings and motives would be painful is the part people could argue with. There are a lot of people who can’t see a certain aspect of who they are because they can’t see a fake aspect of who they are. The brain has trouble examining itself the way a microscope has trouble microscoping itself. And so I think for some people they’re missing these things because they just don’t realize. They just don’t hear it the way other people hear it. Somebody mentioned to me, and we all have phrases and things that we say all the time, and we’re not aware of them ourselves.

So Neil Druckmann the other day said, “You know, I’ve started saying correct like you. It’s really annoying.” And I said what do you mean. And he said you say correct all the time. And I’ve now started – I hear myself now saying correct. And I’m like I say correct. Really?

**John:** You do.

**Craig:** Apparently I do all the time. And now I hear myself saying it. So, after that I would say correct, oh fudge. It’s happening. But until it was pointed out to me I was not repressing anything. It wasn’t painful. I just didn’t see it. I wasn’t aware of it.

**John:** Craig, how much do you know about EST and the movement of sort of like because it’s kind of anti-self-help? My recollection of sort of people talking about it was that you go into a group setting and people just point out all your flaws to you and that is a way of helping you get past them, but also just breaking you down. What’s your relationship with that philosophy?

**Craig:** I hate it. EST was started by a guy named Warner Erhard who was a car salesman and an asshole. And it became a cult. And it got reformulated and repackaged into something called the Landmark Forum.

**John:** That’s right.

**Craig:** And Landmark Forum – there were some people I knew that were pushing the Landmark Forum pretty hard on me in the early 2000s or late 1990s. And they were like you’ve got to go, you’ve got to do it, and it’s free the first time. And I’m like then what happens? And how much do you pay for it? And then they would tell me and I’m like I’m not doing that. And they’re like but it changes your life. And I’m like I don’t agree. I can just tell you that if it truly changed your life everybody would be doing this and there would be a large company doing it.

It’s the same thing when people come to you and they’re like did you hear colloidal silver will cure Covid.

**John:** Ha-ha. Yeah.

**Craig:** No it won’t. Because if it did Merck would be selling colloidal silver. There are companies much larger than people who chase the money. So anyway EST, no. I don’t believe in tearing people down. I don’t believe in that. I think that that’s harmful.

**John:** I think the reason why it is successful to get people through the door and get them coming back the second time is it’s doing that thing where it’s pointing out to people things that they don’t see about themselves. And the fact that any mirror you look into is not an accurate reflection of you are and it’s not showing you how other people see you. And that really I think is inherent to that idea of blind spots is that you have an overconfidence of who you are and how you’re presenting yourself out there in the world. And so often I think we think about character flaws as being insecurities, that people are afraid to do things, but honestly overconfidence can be a really useful trait in our characters to let them go off into the world, explore, and get knocked down and get back up again.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I think about how I wrote Melissa McCarthy’s character in Identity Thief was she was brutally over-secure.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** She knew there was something wrong, was not going to look at it, and instead was going to paper over all of that with this other behavior. And she had a kind of moral certainty that if she wanted to do it then it was good to do. It was fine to do. And I find that characters with these very big, broad blind spots tend to be funny. They tend to work best in comedies. When characters cannot see things in dramas it’s very sad but you almost start to minimize their role in a drama because you can almost put that chess piece aside and say they are no longer capable of dealing with the drama we need to engage in because they’ve lost it.

**John:** So let’s talk about comedy and blind spots, because that’s a very natural fit. I’ve brought up The Office several times. Michael Scott thinks that everyone loves him and he needs them to love him and he doesn’t realize the degree to which his neediness is actually pushing people away and is the source of why people are so frustrated with him. That’s a great character with a great blind spot that he never actually gets over. He’s never going to actually achieve the insight that would let him move past that. He makes little nibbles at the edges, but he is never going to fundamentally get past that.

The characters on Succession. You can argue whether Succession is a comedy or a drama. They’re like fish swimming in the water and have no idea that there’s water around them. They just don’t understand sort of how toxic and dangerous they are to themselves and everybody else around them.

I Love Lucy. She always wants to be the center of the action. Every week she is getting herself into trouble because she just has this overconfidence that she’s going to be able to pull this thing off. And then every rom com, like Clueless which we talked about on the show, Cher cannot see that her actual real love interest is just in her blind spot. And that’s probably every rom com.

**Craig:** Is her much older step-brother. [laughs]

**John:** Yes. Her much older step-brother is the one she should be crushing on.

**Craig:** Oh boy. I think that when we present these things in comedies it’s very helpful for a lot of people, particularly people who are neuro-atypical, because it helps them see the other side of the conversation they never otherwise get to see. They get to see the way people talk about other people behind their backs. And this is very hard for a lot of people who are on the autism spectrum to process. Putting themselves in someone else’s shoes and seeing how things would look or feel from their perspective. So there’s a usefulness to this, to see how things might go wrong or bad, and perhaps then adjust – even if you’re adjusting somewhat synthetically and not naturally, there’s good training there.

I remember feeling like I was learning from watching shows where somebody would say something, like Three’s Company. So in Three’s Company Mr. Roper would walk in, played by Don Knotts, and he would say some ridiculous stuff, and basically all the stuff was like I’m sexy, I’m a crazy swinging bachelor. And then he would leave and then all the twenty-somethings were like blech. And I would think, ah-ha, I don’t want to be like that guy. I don’t want to be the person who leaves the room and everyone goes blech.

**John:** And when you leave the room no goes blech. They might talk about other things that they find frustrating and annoying, but no one is going blech. No one is thinking oh my god that Craig is a letch who keeps trying to be a swinging bachelor.

**Craig:** Yes. They don’t do that.

**John:** No one is saying that about you, Craig.

**Craig:** Good. I think they might say he’s an infuriating human being, but at that point as I’m walking away I’m thinking I’m an infuriating human being. I mean, I know what I’m doing, mostly.

**John:** Absolutely. Mostly.

**Craig:** Mostly.

**John:** We’re talking about Three’s Company and sort of the comedy blind-spotting, and Don Knott’s character in that is such a great example of like no self-awareness, but in drama it’s a little bit tougher. And so Megana and I were trying to think of examples. I was thinking about Queen Elizabeth in The Crown in that she actually seems to be aware that she cannot feel emotions or sort of project emotions that she should be able to do it. And the tragedy is that she kind of recognizes the things she should be able to do that she can’t do it and she’s frustrated. But her frustration is not actually getting her any closer to being able to do this thing that she feels she has to do, which is to feel the emotions of the nation.

**Craig:** You know, to me it feels like that might be more of the frustration of not having a blind spot, but not having ability. I know, I can see I need to do this. I just can’t.

**John:** Yeah. And that’s a very good point because I was trying to think about it for Big Fish as well, because both of the central characters in Big Fish, the father and the son, Edward and Will, both of them recognize that they kind of need to get over their frustrations with each other and we as the audience see they do, but they actually just don’t have the ability to do it. They literally don’t have the mechanisms to get past those things. So everyone around is like just get over it and they can’t.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like I said in drama watching somebody who is steeped in steady denial, who is incapable of accepting any other truth at some point they marginalize themselves from the story. They are no longer relevant because they’re not going to change, they’re not going to admit anything, and they become less and less integrated into the task at hand. It’s a sad thing. Usually it’s sad. We feel for that character. Whereas in comedy we laugh at them and make fun of them, in drama we accept them as just so hurt they can’t handle this.

**John:** I can also think of some villains in dramas that really if you were to dig down essentially they have a blind spot. They basically cannot see that in attempting to achieve one goal they are ruining everything else. And that is an example of a blind spot, too. They don’t recognize the consequences of their actions or that what they’re trying to do is going to have those negative impacts that we can clearly see.

**Craig:** But you know what they do recognize almost always?

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** Is that you and I are not so different after all.

**John:** Funny that way. That does happen quite a lot. And I’m trying to remember what the wording was in the most recent Bond movie, but it got really close to that at the end. It was a little bit…

**Craig:** You and I, we have so much in common. They’re now just avoiding saying you and I we’re not so different after all.

**John:** Lastly I want to bring up that it’s not just characters that can have blind spots. It can be whole organizations that have a blind spot. So Titanic, the blind spot is that it’s unsinkable. It’s just an unsinkable ship. It can’t possibly sink. And of course that’s going to happen. It’s a structural blind spot.

Chernobyl, that false confidence that like the system will figure it out. This cannot actually happen at one of these facilities. This meltdown would be impossible. It’s overconfidence.

**Craig:** Yes. And organizations who have that kind of overconfidence are usually represented by a kind of stonewalling attitude. It’s something that you establish and then get back to the people who are not overconfident and who are trying to fix it. Those people are just more interesting than the people who keep saying, nope, everything is fine.

**John:** Yeah. Megana, yes?

**Megana:** So would you agree that in a comedy the audience is ahead of the character’s blind spot? And in a drama the character is ahead of the audience?

**Craig:** That’s interesting.

**John:** That is really interesting. I absolutely agree with the first part. I think in a comedy we as the audience see the character’s blind spot pretty clearly pretty early on because that’s a source of a lot of the comedy. In the second example if it’s a character’s blind spot or even an organization’s blind spot maybe we do delay that and we discover it with our central character. That we expose the blind spot.

**Megana:** Or maybe it’s heartbreaking that they are aware of their blind spot but can’t overcome it.

**John:** I feel like if a character is aware of their blind spot in some ways they are – it’s not really a blind spot anymore. It’s a spot they recognize they’re not seeing properly and maybe they’re looking for an alternative way of dealing with it. What do you think, Craig?

**Craig:** I think that in general Megana your structure sounds right. Comedic characters, we laugh at them because we know way more than they do. We know how ridiculous they sound and look and act. And also we get access to people talking about them. In drama having somebody behave in a certain way and having us wonder why and then we discover why. And then we realize, oh, they have a terrible blind spot because of X, Y, or Z. That is pretty typical. So, yeah, I kind of like the way you phrased it.

**John:** And another thing I think this phrasing brings up is that it can be so tempting to have supporting characters have blind spots because that makes them funny. And I think you can run into that classic problem where the supporting characters are more interesting than you’re central character because your central character is too perfect. And so be looking for ways that your central character can have the blind spot and be the source of the comedy or the drama because of their lack of understand versus putting it all off on the supporting characters.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Cool. Thank you for that. I think it is time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** OK!

**John:** My One Cool Thing is about blind spots I think as well. It’s The Premise by BJ Novak.

**Craig:** Never heard of him.

**John:** He’s a guest on the show. We’ve done so many episodes of the show you wouldn’t remember that he’s ever been on the show.

**Craig:** What show was he on?

**John:** He was on one of our live shows I know for sure. I remember him being on stage with us.

**Craig:** No. No. No. [laughs] I love BJ. He’s the best.

**John:** He has a five-episode series. And what is five episodes? That’s a crazy number of episodes. It doesn’t make sense.

**Craig:** I disagree.

**John:** I guess Chernobyl did it. Maybe he’s trying to pull a Mazin and do five episodes.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** They’re five short episodes though. They’re about half an hour long. It’s on FX on Hulu, so it’s basically Hulu in the US. I’ve watched two of the five. I really enjoyed both of them. The first episode I watched was about a sex tape and racial justice and it was very, very funny. The second episode I watched was the final of the five called Butt Plug and it was about sort of this long childhood bet. And the way it kept going back and forth I thought was just terrific.

I think what I like most about this series is that it’s kind of like nothing else. It just feels like short stories that are filmed. Completely an anthology. There’s no series connections behind anything at all. But I just really loved it. And there’s just nothing else like it on TV. So, check out The Premise by BJ Novak.

**Craig:** Awesome. My One Cool Thing this week is an article in the New York Times, an opinion piece, written by Peter Coy and it is entitled College Degrees Are Overrated.

**John:** I can’t believe you posted this for us.

**Craig:** If you designed it in a lab you would have a hard time coming out with a better headline that would attract me than College Degrees Are Overrated. What he specifically gets into is the impact that college degrees have in the workforce. And this is why people essentially are told to go to college. They’re told to go to college largely so that you can get a well-paying job of your choice I suppose.

And what they have kind of found is that the idea of college degrees as a screening criterion is damaging. Because when you open up your process to look for somebody to hire for a specific job the screening of must have a college degree immediately eliminates a lot of people that would probably be better than the people that you’re going to get. Not all the people will be better than the people you’re going to get, but you’re losing people that are good. And for no good reason at all. You’ve just hit the wrong filter because college degree doesn’t say much of anything.

He’s written another article called Demanding a Bachelor’s Degree for a Middle Skilled Job is Just Plain Dumb. Correct. In fact, a lot of companies would be better served by simply promoting from within regardless of that person’s level of formal education because those people know the system, know the company, know the products or the methods, and have learned a lot of things and have already proved they can work with everybody.

The notion that we attach status to a Bachelor’s Degree is corrosive to our society and it is corrosive to people who don’t go to colleges, or who couldn’t afford to go to colleges, and for everybody else it is ladening them with debt that doesn’t actually convert. He talks to one person who talks about how his father didn’t have a college degree but was hired by a company called Detroit Edison and as he says that’s where our family’s trajectory into the American middle class began. And so this he’s talking by Byron Auguste, not August, but Auguste – much better name. You should switch over. And Byron Auguste whose dad left a job on a shipping dock to study computer programming and got hired, even though he didn’t have a college degree, had a son and Byron, his son, got a Bachelor’s Degree from Yale and a Doctorate in Economics from the University of Oxford and then eventually worked for President Barack Obama as Deputy Assistant to the President for Economic Policy.

We don’t get there if originally Detroit Edison says, “Meh, no college degree, no. We don’t care if you’re good at computer programming. Even though we’re hiring you for computer programming.” So this is its own little mini bonus episode. I think I’ve done it before. I’ll keep doing it again. We have to just stop this nonsense. Companies need to look at the skills that they require for a job and then look at the skills the applicants have. That’s the way to go.

**John:** So Craig I put another piece of bait in the Workflowy there for you. This is a piece done by Flourish and basically they’ve looked at 30,000 people with Bachelor’s degrees and looked at the return on investment for those Bachelor degrees from different universities and for different degrees.

**Craig:** Oh wow. That’s a whole lot of negatives. Woo.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** So I’ve just ruined the rest of your day because you’re going to spend a lot of time probably digging through that and looking for – so you can search for your actual degree that you got from Princeton and see what the return on investment was for that.

Clearly there was a time where you could say like a person with a Bachelor’s degree earns this much more money. And that was probably true. All the other biases were sort of a part of that, too. It’s like the people who could afford Bachelor’s degrees were going to make more money anyway. It’s not so clear now. And I think people really need to be thinking about whether it makes sense for them to get this degree, but also especially when you’re hiring do you need to have a person with a degree in that job. Because there are people who work for me who do not have college degrees who are invaluable and just terrific. So I think we need to move past our conceptions about a college degree being required.

**Craig:** Yes. Let’s leave the certification Ponzi scheme behind.

**John:** All right. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Andrew Ryan. 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 sometimes. And I am @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts. And you can sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on structuring your free time and work/life balance, which is not a thing we have.

Craig, Megana, thank you so much.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right, Megana, start us off. You have a question here to kick off our conversation.

**Megana:** Yes. So Ted asks, “How do you balance your work and personal lives? In addition to writing, Craig plays videogames and does his crosswords. John watches movies, TV, and reads books. You both play D&D. You both have families with kids, participate in speaking events, and give your time to charity. How on earth do you do all of that and still focus your mind to write and do it well? What advice can you give writers to better structure their days? I’m specifically interested in knowing what your day to day looks like.”

**John:** So as I said in the setup for this we are recording this on a Sunday because both of us were too busy to record on a normal weekday.

I don’t know that I have terrific work/life balance. I guess having a family forces me into a little bit more of a schedule, so I can’t work all the time. But Craig you are so busy right now. So do you feel like you have any work/life balance?

**Craig:** Well yeah, I have a balance. Is it a good balance?

**John:** Is it healthy?

**Craig:** You know, I find that it’s not so much the time. I mean, things like production are extraordinary and you’re not in production all the time if you’re a writer. If you’re a first AD, oh boy, you sure are. If you’re working on a crew you’re in production all the time. That is a question I’d like to ask those folks how they manage these things. But for us when we’re not in those crazy periods I think after all these years the answer is I don’t think about it.

What happens is at some point there’s something in me that says you’re in trouble. You have to write. I don’t know what you call that. Super ego? Whatever it is, my need to please or just my need to accomplish something, but at some point something happens and I say I cannot, absolutely cannot do this nonsense.

There are also times where I say I’m doing nonsense today because I want to. I earned it and I deserve it.

**John:** And by nonsense you mean like play a videogame and do your crosswords?

**Craig:** Fun. Exactly. I want fun. I’m being cutesy about nonsense. It’s just as important as everything else. But I want to have fun. I deserve to have fun. If I don’t then what’s the point? I’m not here to fulfill other human being’s demands of me. I’m here to fulfill myself. And I do derive quite a bit of fulfillment from writing. But in the way I derive fulfillment of it.

I will say the most toxic aspect of being a writer is how intrusive it is in your mind. And I find myself on a drive with my wife going somewhere and suddenly it just happens. Like my brain goes wandering into a scene and I figure something out. And then she’s like you’re not – did you hear anything I just said? And I didn’t.

**John:** And from my experience in television that is much more pervasive, because you’re constantly responsible for keeping that world going in your head 24/7 because you’re always writing new stuff, which is different than a feature which you’re going to be on, but then you’re going to be off and then you’re going to be on and then you’re going to be off. I remember when I was doing my first TV show I was just this giant filtering mechanism. Everything that would come to me like could that be in the show? That song, could that be in the show? I was always gathering for this. And as writers we are always gathering but I think it is especially attenuated when you are doing your job right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. A lot of what I do, the whole story is laid out, but a lot of what I find myself doing is when I’m not writing is just thinking in the back of my mind I don’t think I have the right opening moment. I don’t know why I don’t like it, but I don’t like it. And until I like it I’m going to be a bit miserable. Because it’s like a thorn in my side that I need to remove and replace.

So the dangerous part for me is less about the time that I spend doing one thing or another, and more about how attentive and present I am at any given point. It’s scary sometimes.

**John:** Now one of the things I think you and I both do is we prioritize some free time, non-work time. So an example would be D&D. So we’re playing D&D almost every week. That hasn’t always happened because of this, but that’s three to four hours where we are just doing that and 100% of our focus is on that because you’re DMing this and I’m playing and we’re not doing the other stuff. And it’s OK partly because there’s a social contract that we’re going to try to play every week it becomes a priority and we’re not going to sort of bail on it.

So I will even on my daily schedule I’ll try to make sure it’s not just all crap I have to do, but there’s things on that daily schedule of things I want to do. So looking at my list today, I need to watch What We Do in the Shadows. And it’s like do I have to watch it? No, but I really want to watch it. And I want to watch that last episode. So that’s going on the list of like a thing that’s on my daily to do list. And it’s not just work stuff. It’s stuff that is fun for me.

**Craig:** I think we can lose sight of what brings us joy because writing is a little bit like – it’s the way carbon monoxide can take over all your red blood cells, hijack them. Our red blood cells like carbon monoxide much more than they like oxygen. And that’s why it’ll kill you. And writing in your mind can be a little carbon monoxidic – I just made up a word – because it can just choke out every other interest. The dopamine hit you get from solving a writing problem is really intense. And we have to be careful to not let it just weed through the garden of our life. We have to put it aside at times. And I mean mentally. Because everyone is sitting there going it’s easy for me to not write. Yeah, but is it easy for you to not think about the thing you’re supposed to be writing? Is it easier for you to not think about the characters or the situations or why they aren’t working or what you’re supposed to do? To me that part is the tricky part.

**John:** Some other useful advice I would offer to Ted who asked the question is having some structure in your life that gets you away from work. And so that could be that you’re going to have dinner with your family every night, which I’m able to do. That you’re going to exercise a certain amount of times per week and that you’re going to prioritize that and you’re not going to bail on those things. Because those are things that keep you present in the actual moment where you’re having to be doing the thing right now and not be off in your head writing that thing or worrying about writing that thing can be super helpful.

And as we said on the show many times don’t expect that you’re going to do eight hours of writing a day. You and I know many writers and very few people are actually writing eight hours a day. That’s just too much for your brain. You’re going to write in blocks and then you’re going to do other stuff. And make sure that the time you’re giving yourself to do other stuff is actually free time where it’s not just that pause. It’s not just the coffee break before you have to go back to it. Let yourself have some joy in those moments as well.

We’re also doing a very solitary job sometimes. Like Craig is there with a crew, but most writers are working by themselves. Make sure you’re finding some time for social interaction with friends and going out to get a drink or do whatever you need to do to get out of your head.

**Craig:** Megana, you have a writing life and a work life. Let’s hear it.

**Megana:** Oh, that is true. But I have also spent the past couple of years observing you, both of you, because it feels like you’re bending physics to do all of the things that you guys accomplish in a day. I think something that is maybe your guy’s blind spot is you both have a really strong sense of yourself. You have a strong sense of what you care about, what you don’t care about, and John doesn’t have any mugs in his house that don’t look exactly the same and it kind of like simplifies things.

**Craig:** That’s terrifying.

**Megana:** But I wonder because you guys have such clarity about the things that you want to focus on by not just wasting energy on worrying about what clothes you’re going to wear or stuff like that you guys are able to channel more energy into – no offense.

**Craig:** None taken.

**John:** None taken.

**Craig:** I have zero worry about the clothes that I wear. Zero.

**Megana:** Yeah. Like every morning when I get dressed I’m like, ugh, how am I going to wear something that’s going to reflect my internal state of being? And you guys don’t necessarily have that.

**Craig:** No.

**Megana:** But it’s nice. And you’re able to express yourselves more creatively through your writing.

**Craig:** That’s fascinating. Here’s what I have Megana. What I have is I’m looking at the Workflowy and I see that this segment is called Time Management. And while you’re talking I notice that your name is in it backwards. So that’s what happens to me. That’s where I waste my time and my energy on things like – and I didn’t ask for that. I didn’t for Megana to appear in the backwards in management. But there it is.

**John:** Oh yeah. Now I see it. That’s all your crosswording, sorry, all of your puzzling has gotten you to that.

**Craig:** Thank you. I’ve got a real problem. But I think that’s really interesting Megana that you have these other things – and by the way I would say to you that’s OK. I don’t think you should be beating yourself up for the fact that you put care and interest into what you wear because you derive joy from it one would imagine.

**Megana:** Well I mostly derive joy when John’s daughter compliments my outfits.

**Craig:** Well there you go.

**John:** Because I have no idea what she’s wearing. I could not tell you anything about her clothes.

**Craig:** No.

**Megana:** Yeah. John recently asked me if I have gotten a haircut since I started working for him. And I just cut off eight inches of my hair—

**John:** No idea.

**Megana:** And he had no clue.

**Craig:** I did notice when – so Bo had her full Covid hair, it was like past her butt. And then she did cut it and I was like, OK, I did notice that. I noticed that like a foot or two of hair—

**Megana:** Yes, she has a very cute bob now.

**Craig:** OK, I wouldn’t have known how to describe it. I would have said shorter. Her hair is shorter. But I don’t notice what she wears. I don’t notice what anyone wears. I just don’t.

**John:** So I want to circle back to a point that Megana made about blind spots is that I think I do have a blind spot and someone on Twitter was pointing out that I can have a blind spot where I assume that everyone else can do the things that I can do. Things that are easy for me I assume are easy for everybody else. And I need to recognize that it’s not easy for everyone else. And sometimes my ability to get a lot of stuff done or to juggle 15 things at once is not normal for other people and I need to not expect that of other people. And so I think I can have too high of expectations because I just have really high expectations of myself. It sounds self-congratulatory, but like Megana what do you think about that?

**Megana:** Well I would also say something that I admire in both of you is that you have really good executive decision-making where you will make a decision and use the information that you have at the time and then you don’t beat yourself up about it or waste time spiraling about that decision. You kind of like move on. And I think that momentum helps keep you guys juggling all of these things.

**Craig:** That’s an interesting point.

**Megana:** I have decision remorse about every single decision I make. And you guys are just powering through.

**Craig:** I feel like therapy is in order.

**Megana:** [laughs] I think it’s probably a generational thing. No, I can’t blame everything on generational stuff.

**John:** I see a lot of folks in your generation describing that same thing. There’s a self-confidence in your generation but there’s also a sort of weird self-doubt or an after the fact self-doubt. Or it may just be not even your generation. Just at our age you just don’t kind of worry about that stuff especially.

**Megana:** And you guys both have very different writing schedules.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Megana:** John, I am very familiar with your writing schedule, and Craig I’m sort of familiar with yours from Bo. Like when you’re not in production some days it’s just puzzles and some days it’s doing a lot of writing, whereas John is a little more every day has a little bit of both. And I think because you guys are a couple of years older than me you have–

**Craig:** Couple decades older than you. Go on.

**Megana:** You just know what your process is and then you can plan around that. And you do a good job of planning around that. Whereas I think for people starting out you kind of have to figure out what time of day your mind works best for certain things.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you do as you go on give yourself a break because you have had the experience of taking a day or two off and coming back and the world doesn’t fall apart. Megana, your generation does have this challenge that is somewhat new that I don’t think we had, John. And that is you’ve grown up in an era or an age of optimization. Where you can go on YouTube and find a “hack” for anything. And everybody is constantly sharing tips of how they do things better than everyone else to improve the way you peel an apple, take out the garbage. Everything is designed to be optimized.

So of course as you move through your day you’re constantly asking yourself was that the best decision, was that an optimal decision, could I have made a better decision? Should I have done it more like this? Should I have done it more like that? And I wish I could, and maybe this will work, free all of you from that. The answer is you can’t. You cannot optimize your life. You are inherently flawed. You are going to do the best you can which means you have to accept the failure aspect of who you are, which is really hard to do.

And you must embrace the following quote from the great Dennis Palumbo who is our friend from Episode 99. “There is no perfectible you.” And that is the opposite of what everyone in our culture tells you. There is no perfectible you. That means you make decisions, they might be wrong. Well that’s going to happen. Keep on moving.

**Megana:** Well also to your One Cool Thing, have you guys read this book The Kids Are All Right? Or The Kids Are Not All Right I think.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s a different book. That’s a very different book.

**John:** It was really a response to The Kids Are All Right. Basically it was the pro and the con. They had a heated argument on the page.

**Megana:** Basically the premise is that millennials and the generations younger than us have been primed to be these productivity machines so that they can go to the best college and optimize their resumes and then once they go to college they can get the best jobs.

**Craig:** Yes, I’ve read this. I read this and obviously you know how I feel about this. This is not new. It has accelerated and worsened, but when I was in high school there was still this intense pressure to take all these AP classes and to get a perfect 1600 on your SAT which was what it was back then. The standardized tests were incredibly important. There was really only one that anyone cared about, so you didn’t even have choices.

Your grades were incredibly important. And it was a miserable process and you were meant to feel like an absolute failure if you did not get into the school of your choice. It has only accelerated since because in part an industry grew up around this to optimize it. They optimized how you apply. They optimized what your essay is. They optimized which schools–

**John:** US News and World Report rankings. Now they’re doing it for public schools which is just crazy.

**Craig:** It’s disgusting. And I say this as somebody who went to a college that US News and World Report repeatedly lists as number one. And I’m saying no it’s not. And US New and World Report should stop it. It’s just corrosive and meaningless. What the hell does that even mean? All of it is designed to rank-ify. It is very Internet. It is very Silicon Valley. Rank everything. Status-ify everything. And then game-ify everything. And that will make you sick I do believe.

**John:** My last point on time management is that time management is impossible. You can’t manage time. Time will just keep going. So all you can manage is your choices. And so Ted’s question could be rephrased as like how do you make good choices with the very limited amount of time you have. And I think you’re picking how much of your life you’re going to spend doing the work and hopefully making meaningful work, and how much of your life you’re going to spend having fun, which is playing D&D and chatting with friends. And that’s the best you can hope to do.

**Megana:** Aw.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** Craig, Megana, thank you so much.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you [management spelled backwards].

**Megana:** I’m never going to be able to look at management again.

**Craig:** Good. I’ve done my job.

**Megana:** I do like that my name is backwards though, because it does showcase that I’m bad at management. [laughs]

Links:

* [Rust Movie Set Shooting](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/21/us/alec-baldwin-shooting-rust-movie.html)
* [Netflix to Change How It Measures a Title’s Viewers Post-‘Squid Game’](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/netflix-change-public-viewer-reporting-1235033741/)
* [There Is No Such Thing as Bragging Too Much About a Kidney Donation](https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/bad-art-friend-kidney-crisis-donation-altruism.amp)
* [Episode 480, The Wedding Episode](https://johnaugust.com/2020/the-wedding-episode)
* [The Premise by BJ Novak](https://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/the-premise)
* [College Degrees are Overrated](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/18/opinion/college-degrees-employers.html)
* [What is the Financial Value of my Degree?](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/7583742/)
* [Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials](https://www.amazon.com/Kids-These-Days-Making-Millennials/) by Malcolm Harris (not the Kids are Alright!)
* [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 Andrew Ryan ([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/522standard.mp3).