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)
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* [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
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