The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: You’re listening to Episode 701 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, how do you leverage connections to get work and help others get work? We’ll discuss the sometimes uncomfortable aspects of getting writing jobs and really almost any kind of job. We’ll also talk about the surprisingly good news for future writers in the recently released WJ numbers.
Then we’ll answer more listener questions we didn’t get to in last week’s live show. In our bonus segment for premium members, Craig, let’s continue our discussion of connections with literal connections, this being Lego. Here, we are looking at some Lego flowers. We’ve talked about Lego in a general sense over the 700 episodes of the podcast. I want to have a deep dive discussion on Lego and our philosophies regarding Lego because there’s the Lego we grew up with, and then there’s the Lego now, and how you’re treating these bricks we’re assembling.
Craig: I’m always here to discuss Lego, the plural of which is apparently Lego.
John: Which I love. Some news. The Scriptnotes book is now up on Goodreads. If you’re a person who uses Goodreads to review your books, you can mark that as a want to read and just helps people remember that, “Oh, this is a book that people want to read.” We look forward to hopefully some very positive Goodreads reviews once the book is out there in the world.
For now, a thing you can do is mark it as want to read. You can also preorder the book and send Drew the receipt. Right before we got on microphones, we were talking through a special thing we’re doing for all those people who sent us their receipts.
Drew Marquardt: We don’t have enough.
John: No, we do. We have a lot. It’s been a chore for Drew to sort them, but it’s a chore you love, right?
Drew: I love it.
Craig: Oh, yes. I can tell he loves it.
Drew: You see the twinkle in my eyes?
Craig: It’s always fun when you’re like, “But you love it, right?”
John: Don’t you just love it?
Drew: So good.
Craig: I said you love it.
Drew: I’m very excited.
Craig: Keep loving it.
John: We have a bit of follow-up here because last week was our 700th episode. It was a live show. It was so much fun to do. It was on YouTube, so thank you for everybody who participated in that. We forgot one thing from last week, which was that we actually had a thing we were supposed to do. It was something that had been set up a year in advance. Drew forgot the thing.
Craig: Oh, well, that’s all right. You’re only human.
Drew: Thank you.
Craig: You’re welcome.
John: People decided to see Drew on the livestream because everyone thought Drew was a child.
Craig: Why would they think he’s a child?
John: I don’t know.
Craig: First of all, that violates labor law.
John: Absolutely.
Drew: That feels like you guys, though.
Craig: Oh, that we would do that?
Drew: Yes.
Craig: It feels like we might. It feels like the kind of really good hypocrisy. Oh, we’re talking about the union and getting assistance paid. Now we make our seven-year-olds put this all together. We keep them in a room the way the musical Oliver! begins.
John: Yes, absolutely. It is a hard-knock life.
Craig: No, that’s Annie.
John: Oh, that’s right. I’ve confused my musicals. Well, they’re both about ragamuffin food.
Craig: Food. Glorious food.
John: I don’t know all of that.
Craig: Oh my God. We have to have an entire Oliver! podcast.
John: Right. Before we do that, we need to talk through this bit of follow-up here. Way back episode 645?
Craig: 645.
John: 645. Meredith Scardino was a guest along with Jen Statsky. We opened up an envelope that I had sent to Jen Statsky with my prediction for what was going to happen on the upcoming season of Hacks. I had written the prediction and sealed it and mailed it to her. She opened it live on recording. Meredith Scardino was like, “Well, I want to do that.” She made a prediction for what was going to happen on the 700th episode of Script Notes. Drew, will you open this and read what Meredith Scardino– this is a sealed envelope that Drew is opening.
Craig: I can confirm this. 700th show prediction, Meredith Scardino, June 1st, 2024. Over a year ago.
John: We were living in a different universe.
Craig: I hope it says something like, you both died.
Drew: “700th show prediction. One, compilation of best advice from guests,” which we kind of did.
Craig: Did we?
John: No. We brought people in for some advice.
Drew: “Two, then you go into an interview with special guest, one but not both Coen brothers.”
Craig: Wow.
John: No, we’ve not gotten the Coen brothers on this.
Craig: Oh my God, that would have been amazing. I’m not saying it would have been better than what we did, but we really should get one if not both. Did you say one but not both?
John: Yes, one but not both Coen brothers. She still think we can do it? She think we can bring the brothers back together for our podcast episode.
Craig: We’d like at least to get a Coen brother in here at some point. Oh, we could do a deep dive on a Coen brother movie.
John: Totally.
Craig: That might be fun.
John: They have one or two good movies.
Craig: They just have a few. Just a few, literally all of them. Miller’s Crossing, by the way, is one of my favorites.
John: I like Miller’s Crossing. I love some Fargo. I love–
Craig: Fargo, of course, Raising Arizona, No Country for Old Men. It goes on. You know Barton Fink is the one I really want to do. We’ve been talking about Barton Fink for a long time.
John: It’s a screenwriter movie.
Craig: It has that Barton Fink feeling.
John: Funny that a Barton Fink movie has Barton Fink.
Craig: Where would I find another writer? Kidding. Go to the commissary. Throw a rock, you’ll hit one. And Fink? When you throw it, throw it hard.
John: Meredith Scardino, thank you for this card. Also, your handwriting is fantastic. It almost feels like architect handwriting. It’s tidy and neat. It’s printed. It’s all uppercase.
Craig: You know what I like? It’s not gendered handwriting. I wouldn’t know if this was a man or a woman. There could theoretically be a slight serial killer aspect to this handwriting. If you look at it, the kerning is really chaotic. It’s very ordered and yet it’s also saying, I might murder.
John: The I is very close to the P.
Craig: You see what I’m saying?
John: There’s some weird spacing there.
Craig: There’s signals there. If you are close with Meredith, just keep an eye open, is really all we’re saying. Just keep one eye open.
John: She makes the both and the brothers, they’re very different Bs too. It’s like she’s just choosing–
Craig: Like there’s a lot of different people up in there.
John: She’s cutting and pasting things out from a magazine.
Craig: There’s a little bit of a ransom note.
John: I love it. Thank you very much for sending it.
Craig: Also, she has great– her cardstock here is a great imprint on it. It says–
John: It says, from the drywall experts of Scardino & Sons, established 1859s. Awesome. So fantastic. We have some more follow-up on streaming services and creator pay.
Drew: Jeffrey writes, “A couple under-the-radar platforms worth mentioning. Vimeo On Demand. Not a subscription streaming service and very few consumers know about it or use it, which is a shame because the revenue split is extremely favorable for filmmakers.
Another one is Kanopy, which is the library and university-based streaming platform. When your film is on Kanopy, the residuals are decent compared to other streaming services. Best of all, you need is a library card to use it.”
John: It’s Kanopy with a K because, of course, it’s Kanopy with a K. Vimeo On Demand I have used for things. Not for things I’ve made, but to watch other people’s things. It’s good. I’m glad Vimeo has persisted in the world of YouTube.
Craig: I go there when it’s a result. I never think about going to places. I just go where–
John: Another reason I end up on Vimeo is when people have a trailer that’s not released yet, they want me to see it. A password-protected thing.
Craig: I will see some things there. Sometimes when I’m looking at, they’ll send me, “Oh, hey, here’s a director if you want to hire them for your show.” Then they’ll send a movie that they did or another episode. They’ll put it on Vimeo.
John: Exactly.
Craig: It’s password-protected.
John: It’s good stuff. Last bit of follow-up here from Dan who’s asking, “In regards to renting a movie on Apple TV or Prime, does one service provide higher residual payments or are they both the same?” They’re essentially the same. I think because it’s based on the actual price they’re charging, I think it does not matter.
Craig: The price that they charge is relevant, but the formula that we use is applied across all of the companies because it is a collective bargaining agreement term.
John: If you choose to pay $4.99 versus $3.99, that’s technically a little bit more. Also, just thank you for actually doing that and not pirating it.
Craig: That’s the most important thing. Don’t feel like you need to shop around for the highest price.
John: No. Not at all. Please don’t. Continuing the discussion of writers and money, last week, the Writers Guild sent out the Screen Compensation Guide, which was synthesizing data from 800 screen deals, feature deals, for high-budget features, which is high-budget features or anything with a budget of $5 billion or more, that was made during the term of the 2023 MBA.
We negotiated this new contract, and there were 800 screen deals made since that time. They looked through all the deals, and this is how you get a bird’s-eye view of what writers are actually being paid for the work that they’re doing. Craig, can you remind us of some of the terms we’re going to hear here? Talk to us about scale and what does scale mean for feature writers? How important is scale for feature writers?
Craig: Scale is the minimum amount that a WGA writer can be paid under a WGA agreement. Typically, we don’t see a ton of it in features. Scale is the rule of the day in television because so much of television compensation is moved over into producing numbers and things like that. For feature writing, you’re paid entirely as a writer, typically.
The lowest you’ll usually see is scale plus 10, so the company agrees to add 10% on so that you’re not losing money to your agent and going below that. Scale for original scripts is probably something like $130,000 now or something like that.
John: It’s over $100,000, so it depends on whether there’s an attribute or outline involved.
Craig: Generally speaking, if you’re going to be hired to do something as a screenwriter, you’re probably looking at six figures. Low six figures, at least to start, but not below scale.
John: As you and I, and this predates Script Notes, as we were going around meeting with studio bosses saying, “You need to really look at how you’re paying feature writers to make sure that you’re paying them better,” one of the things we were talking about is, it’s not just that you’re being paid a certain amount for this draft, but if you’re only being paid for one step, that is a crisis.
That was a real problem that we were seeing was that writers are being paid X dollars for one draft and there was no guarantee of a second draft. Therefore, they were being held hostage to these situations. As we talk about one-step deals, we would often describe that it’s an issue if they’re paying you or me for a one-step deal as higher-paid writers, but it’s really debilitating to younger, newer, lower-income writers.
Craig: The part of the problem was that studio executives were used to paying big writers, A-list writers, a lot of money, and not worrying about steps. If you hire somebody to fix a movie, “It’s a rewrite, fix this.” “Okay, well, it’s going to cost you $1 million.” You’re going to get a draft and be like, “Hey, well, blah, blah, blah. Okay, let me fix that,” or, “First, I could use some work. Okay, let me fix that. You paid me $1 million.”
They get used to that. They get used to not worrying about the paperwork of like, “Oh, sorry, the amount of yogurt you put in your cup went over the medium size. Now you have to pay the large.” Nobody likes to deal with it. The problem is, when you’re paying people a little bit, if you make them do more than one step, they are effectively getting shoved under scale.
All the way back in 2004, the last time that they were silly enough to put my dumb ass on a negotiating committee, what I asked was that, if a writer was being paid less than twice scale, they should be guaranteed two steps. In this way, the writer gets a chance to get the studio notes, get paid to write something else officially. The producer doesn’t have quite as much anxiety about that first draft and quite as much meddling to do. That request went nowhere until 2023.
John: In the 2023 MBA negotiations, that’s the thing we actually won. Future writers earning less than 200% of scale, you’re guaranteed a second step. That was designed so that it’s helping the writers who are most hurt by one-step deals.
Craig: It protects, in a way, the studio. This is why I never understood why the studios, why it took them 20 years and a strike to agree to this, it doesn’t cost them anymore. Okay, I pay you $200,000 for one step, or I pay you $200,000 for two steps. You see what I mean? Anyway, I hope that that has made life a little bit better and has retrained the studios a bit to see that two steps are helpful.
John: Anecdotally, based on what you were experiencing in these 10 years leading up to this, how many writers did you feel were encountering one-step deals in the future land? What percentage?
Craig: I would have guessed it would have been over 50. I would have said 60%.
John: That’s my guess too. At least over half, maybe two thirds. The good news is one-step deals now account for only 3 in 10.
Craig: That is definitely a reduction. It has to be.
John: It has to be. The better news is, when they actually break it down by the amount that the writers are earning, the median pay for one-step deals went from $250,000 to $450,000 over the course of this term.
Craig: What that tells us is they’re still reserving the one-steps for the people who are being paid a lot. They’re being paid enough that, really, doing two steps or even three isn’t going to push them below scale. In short, we protected scale. That was what this was always about. Sounds like it’s working great.
John: Looking through the numbers, at least one screenwriter got $2.25 million for a one-step deal. Good for them.
Craig: I get that. That’s fine.
John: The other factors in here, the other–
Craig: I wanted 2.7, but they only gave me 2.25.
John: 2.25.
Craig: 2.25. It’s a nice number. I like 2.25. You could tell that that’s a negotiated number. Nobody wants to be there.
John: No. It was between 2 and 2.25.
Craig: They were like, “Fine.”
John: Members with two-plus credits got the biggest bump of $100,000 for the last three years. Even new members with no credits were receiving $25,000 more than they were in 2021. It’s progress in future pay across. That matches anecdotally with what I’ve been hearing from people.
Craig: This was always a quality-of-life thing. The question that I am interested in is, again, it would be anecdotally, survey-style, do writers feel like they are doing more or less “free work”? I would hope that it would be a little bit yes. I mean, a little bit, yes, I’m doing less free work because, in my mind, this term was never going to increase the earnings that much. It was really quality of life.
John: That’s the hope, too. One way, if you are a future writer who is encountering these things and want to help figure out what it looks like on the ground, is that they’ve started sending out the survey leading into the negotiation cycle. It’s a good chance to fill out that form and let us know really where you’re at and what the biggest issues are for you. If there’s a thing that we’re not catching here, this is the time to speak up.
All right. Let’s get to our main topic here, which is connections, which is not just a fantastic New York Times game. Do you still play Connections?
Craig: Of course, played it this morning.
Drew: It’s great.
John: I’m trying to remember, today’s Connections involved– what was the purple category of this one? It was–
Craig: Well, there was Blank Land.
John: Blank Land, yes.
Craig: There were things with the antennae.
John: Like in Teletubbies.
Craig: There were Blank Doodle.
John: Yes, Blank Doodle, I think, was the-
Craig: It was Blank Doodle was the thing.
John: -the purple.
Craig: Oh, yes, and the other things were Blenders.
John: Dipsy Doodle. I didn’t know what Dipsy Doodle was.
Craig: Oh, you didn’t know about Dipsy Doodle?
John: What’s Dipsy Doodle?
Craig: The first thing I thought when I saw Dipsy Doodle, I knew that she was trying to fool us into heading towards the Teletubbies. Nice try, Wyna.
John: Wouldn’t happen.
Craig: Nope, not today.
John: I love Wyna Liu.
Craig: What’s that?
John: Wyna Liu.
Craig: Wyna Liu. By the way, I don’t even know what Wyna Liu looks like. I’m looking up Wyna Liu right now.
John: There’s an interview with her, and she’s a woman in her 30s, maybe early 40s. She seems to love what she’s doing.
Craig: She’s got a great name. Wyna is a– oh, look how happy she is.
John: Doesn’t she look happy?
Craig: Oh my God, she looks thrilled. She looks thrilled.
John: I also love the discussion around Connections. People will have whole TikToks on, let’s break down the most insane connections of them all, and they’ll talk to you.
Craig: Somebody said to me early on, I won’t say who it was. They were like, “It’s good, but there’s no way Wyna Liu can keep this up day after day.” I was like, “I have faith,” and she has.
John: It’s justified. That’s Connections the game, which is fantastic and we all love, but let’s talk about connections in real life. Connections between people, and especially people who need a thing from each other, and how we handle those connections in our town, and how we use connections, but even just saying use connections feels gross.
Craig: It’s a better word than exploit. How do you exploit your connections?
John: The good use of connections implies a reciprocity, a generosity, a good-for-everyone quality to it.
Craig: I think sometimes we feel like we are begging or that we’re charity cases. In fact, if the connection works, it’s not because the person that you begged took pity upon you. It’s because they thought that your thing is good and it will reflect well upon them. That’s really what that is. Otherwise, sometimes your connections, “Oh, my mom is best friends with your mom.” That’s going to get you a 20-minute chit-chat. Is it going to change your life or career? No.
John: No. Craig, you spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, I can tell.
Craig: Love LinkedIn.
John: How many connections do you have on LinkedIn?
Craig: I have zero connections on LinkedIn, John.
John: As do I. We’re not talking about LinkedIn connections or any of that performative networking. I think we’re talking about the casual stuff that does happen all the time, and this is the thing I’m sure happens with you, is that a friend asks you to put in a good word on a show that they’re trying to step on. That’s a valid, accepted part of the practice.
Craig: Absolutely.
John: Let’s talk about the specific kinds of connections, when it’s okay to reach out, when you should step back a little bit. You were talking about our moms, our friends kind of thing. Weak connections are things like acquaintances, your dad’s friend’s friend, the guy you went to high school with but you don’t keep up with. If you’re reaching out to them specifically for this thing but you wouldn’t talk to them otherwise, that’s a weak connection.
Craig: It’s important to be mindful if you are the one that is being connected to, that the person that is asking you to talk or consult or advice, you’re their thing. You are probably the sum total, in many cases, of their connection to Hollywood. There’s an importance that they’re putting on this that you’re not. At least be mindful of it. I try and be as respectful as I can and I try to remember what it was like when I was grasping for crumbs, little hints of threads of things. Everything is high stakes, everything.
John: Let’s talk about strong connections. Close friends, collaborators, your writing partners, all that kind of stuff. Employers, supervisors, classmates in a program is good. Drew and I both went through the Stark program. The real advantage of going through a film school is you have 25 connections who actually you can get information from, they can help you out and stuff, and that is super invaluable. Those are the people who you should feel like you can count on and they can count on you. Again, it’s that reciprocity thing feels so crucial.
I think another aspect of reaching out to somebody is intent. Are you trying to exchange information? Are you trying to extract something from them? Are you asking someone that will take five minutes of their time or is it a lot more than that? If you’re asking someone to read something, that’s a lot to do. If you’re asking for advice on a specific situation, that’s a thing I’m more happy to take some time to do. Tell me about being a screenwriter in Hollywood, it’s like, “I got a podcast. Listen to this.” Now there’ll be a book.
Craig: We have a book. Advice for people reaching out, the more specific you can be about what you want, the more likely it is that the connection will at least happen initially. The hardest ones are the, “Can I just pick your brain podcast.” You can go pick my brain for 701 hours, but when they say, “I have three questions I need to get answered somehow,” or, “I have one situation that I’m wondering if you can help me with,” then it’s practical, it’s targeted, it feels a little bit like a mission.
It’s not an open-ended quest. When it’s an open-ended quest of just like, “Hey, I just want to talk with you about–“ then we’re just going to talk. It’s not great.
Craig: An example of the former, which is the specific thing, a friend reached out to say like, “Hey, there’s a thing they’re trying to put in my contract for this deal. Can I talk to you about it?” “Yes.”
John: Oh my God, yes.
Craig: 100%. To me, that’s not even connections at that point. That’s like, okay, we’re colleagues. We’re in the same business. That’s different.
John: It’s in the category of generosity, but a thing I do, which some friends do and other colleagues do, but I don’t see people do enough and I think that people should do more is, if I see a friend written up a deadline, like they sold a show or they did a thing, I’m always right there with an email saying, congratulations. I’m making it clear that I’m rooting for that person.
Craig: You’ve never sent me that email, not once.
John: Then I’ve said something like that to you.
Craig: I don’t think you have.
John: You probably have.
Craig: I’m different, I know. You know why? Because you just take me for granted. That’s why. I’m just the guy that’s there. I get it. I know how Mike feel.
John: Actually, you had a show that you were producing that was announced in Deadline, I didn’t email you [unintelligible 00:21:54].
Craig: You didn’t. Exactly.
John: How many other people– did other people email you about it?
Craig: Yes. They texts, mostly texts.
John: Texts, yes.
Craig: I don’t expect it. I don’t expect it, and also, I never do it because I don’t read Deadline.
John: That’s good for your sanity.
Craig: I think it might be.
John: Here’s what I’ll say about the dropping the email or the text. The email is good in the sense that there’s less of a pressure to respond to a thing sometimes, or like an Instagram congratulations to somebody. It’s just reestablishing. It’s making it clear that I’m rooting for you and some good things have happened in my life because that.
Like, “Oh, this is a good chance for me to catch up with this person,” or there’s actually a project I ended up doing when I sent through the congratulatory email. The guy said right back, like, “Oh, you should do this other thing.” I’m like, “Oh, yes, I should do this other thing,” and I ended up selling a project. Do those. It takes a minute to do and do it at the time.
Craig: Generally speaking, when it’s people in our business, if you’re already inside the business, I feel like you have a very specific need, want, that another person can help you with. Some friend that you and I both know called me the other day with this exact situation. “I have a problem. I think you’ve had this problem before. Let’s talk.” Those things are great. Then, of course, great job and so forth. I’m very texty about that sort of thing because I’m a teenage girl. I don’t know. Text is better.
John: Text is better for a friend or somebody if you regularly keep in touch with, or semi-regularly. For example, writer friends who I haven’t seen in six years but then I see that they sold a show.
Craig: Really?
John: I want to drop them a note.
Craig: I go text.
John: I think it was maybe I’ve actually never texted these people.
Craig: You may not even have their number. You may only have their email. That’s a different situation. Even then, I try and do the thing with text where it’s like, “Oh, can I text you via your email?” If it turns blue, just like that.
John: That works.
Craig: I always say, “This is Craig.” Never text somebody that you are not in an active conversation with.
John: If there’s not a thread back and forth.
Craig: There are a few, I have to say, that I occasionally get. It’ll happen once every two years. I’m like, “Thank you,” and I don’t know who it is because it’s a number. I’m saying this quietly like no one’s going to hear me. I can look back over six years of these. It’s too late now.
John: It’s not too late.
Craig: Can your phone do this?
John: Sorry, your name isn’t showing up.
Craig: They’re like, “Has it ever been showing up? Have you ever known who I was?” That’s what I would say. I wouldn’t. I am so against making people embarrassed for not knowing something about me. We need to have a whole podcast about how to handle the, I don’t know who you are. That’s like a whole situation. It’s a real life situation.
John: It’s in real life, for sure, too.
Craig: It’s a massive situation. It wasn’t when we started. The older you get, the more people you know.
John: There’s just more people.
Craig: It just becomes a real issue.
John: A situation that happened, we were at a restaurant way out on the west side, a place I never would have been. We’re sitting at this big table and having a good conversation. There’s a guy who’s in my eyesight who waves to me. It’s like, crap, I know I must know who that person is, but I don’t.
It was the challenge of I’m more recognizable than he is. He’s seeing me repeated in deadline stories and other things. I have no idea who he was. Fortunately, at the end, he did come over and reintroduce himself. Of course, an agent I had 15 years ago who I hadn’t seen in person in so long.
Craig: They all look the same. They wear the same clothes.
John: He did a very gracious thing. I think that’s the right approach.
Craig: He said, “Hey, it’s so and so.” There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s so much right with that. This is why it’s hard to go somewhere when your spouse, this is the case for both of us, is not in the business because they’re not going to know who the person is. When that person goes over, you are now supposed to go, “Oh, hey, Melissa, this is blah-di-di-blah.”
When I know who somebody is, I’m so proud. I’m like, trumpets, red carpet, this is so and so. Here’s what he’s done. Here’s what he did. Here’s where he came from. I’m like a Wikipedia article all of a sudden. Then the other people, I’m like, “Oh my God.”
John: Obviously, this is advice. If you’re the plus one going into one of these situations, get in there.
Craig: Get in there fast.
John: 100%. Let’s talk about other connection outreaches. Make sure to give people an out so that you’re not boxing them in. If you’re too busy, no sweat at all. Recognize when someone might be stretched thin. The last thing I’ll say is close the loop. Thank them for doing it. If there’s an update, give them the update because so often, I’ll give someone advice, I have no idea what happened. Just a follow-up email, “I just wanted to let you know this is what happened. It was great, and thank you for this.”
Craig: I can think of a couple of people that have emailed me years after I spoke with them, and did it perfectly. Reminded me of who they were. Acknowledged that I might not even remember it because it was just 30 minutes two years ago. Give me some context that might help me remember. Tell me why they’re updating me because this good thing happened. A lovely sentiment of thanks or gratitude.
John: My day is better because of it.
Craig: Then, thank you, goodbye. Perfect.
John: Perfectly done.
Craig: Perfect.
John: Wrap this up with an example of a connection that ends up paying off for everybody involved. Years ago, we were hiring a designer for the company, and I met with a bunch of people. One guy was great, but he wasn’t quite the right fit. He asked, “Hey, can I stay in touch?” I’m like, “For sure. You’re great.”
He was really good about dropping an email once a year to keeping up with where things were at. He ended up getting a job at Amazon and working on a very specific top-secret project. It was a once-a-year email and sometimes a short Zoom to catch up on stuff. We ran into a problem with our emergency pack, which is sold on Amazon, where we suddenly weren’t able to sell it because Germany was requiring this authorization. Basically, our whole account was shut down until we verified with Germany, but there were no appointments to actually do this video.
Craig: I immediately feel a pang of fear when you tell me that Germany, because of new regulations, is shutting something down. I start to panic.
John: For two months, it was this bureaucracy nightmare. Finally, I’m like, Jared works at Amazon. I don’t think he works anywhere in that department. It’s like, “Can you help?” He’s like, “Yes, I think I can help.” He was able, because he just knew people, was able to connect the things and thoughts.
I still had to do the stupid German interview, but I got it bumped up so I could, at 3:00 in the morning, talk to some German person. He made the thing happen. That’s because he was a smart person who was like, “Oh, I’m rooting for you.” He could help me out down the road.
Craig: You could make an interesting graph of how much you’re going to be helped by connections in your life. The graph will start with a line that is very low to the X-axis, and then it will not rise linearly. It will rise exponentially.
John: There’s a compounding effect to that.
Craig: The more you achieve, the closer the proximity to other people who are achieving, which means the more likely it is that you can help each other, and that grows and expands. It is very easy, I think, and reasonable to be close to the X-axis and look upwards at the people who are high on the Y-axis and go, “Well, this is unfair.” It is, but it is also just a function of reality.
I’ve thought about that a lot, actually. There’s really no way to create equity there. It’s just something that’s going to happen. At least, if you are high on the Y-axis, try to not just shut down the X-axis people completely.
John: 100%. I think I found myself doing during the WGA negotiations is we have all these big member meetings. We have them with strike captains and with members and all these forums. I wasn’t answering a lot of questions, but I was up there on the stage or I was in the audience. When people come up to the microphone, they say their name and they ask their question.
In my little notebook, I wrote down people’s names and I wrote down their question and put a star by them. That is a smart person. Sometimes afterwards, I would come up to them and thank them for asking a smart question. Just to establish a radar for, these are good people who are going to be the leaders of tomorrow, it’s always easy to remember the jerks and the idiots. When somebody is like, “Oh, that is a smart person who is asking a good question,” it’s helping you understand through the invisible mesh of trust and smartness that’s out there.
Craig: I try with the connection thing to also look for institutions. These are mentorships that aren’t already dealing with people that have other legs up. It’s not that I don’t talk to people who email me from Princeton because they get my name from the Princeton Alumni Guide. It’s just that I’m not as motivated. They’re Princeton. You got a lot going on. I’ve done my charitable work there.
It’s more interesting when other groups come and you have a chance to talk to people who don’t have– okay, well, that one didn’t pan out, but here’s 40 other people in the alumni handbag. I don’t know. I’d rather talk to other people. Sorry, my Princeton [unintelligible 00:31:51].
John: You’re setting some boundaries, too, which is a helpful way to–
Craig: Prioritizing.
John: Prioritizing. I think the final bit of advice we would probably both agree on is paying it forward. The degree to which you are benefiting from connections, make sure you’re creating connections with other people that can help lift them up.
Craig: Everybody who achieves a certain status in our business is going to get hit up by people. That’s inevitable. It’s not like you’re going to have any shortage of opportunity. Don’t never do it. Do it. You can’t do it all the time. You have to gatekeep somehow. You just have to because you have a job and you have a life.
The other thing is, sometimes, I remember thinking when I was starting out, this person just needs to give me 10 minutes of their life. I know that they’re wasting 10 minutes all the time. That is true. I am constantly wasting time. Also, I’m sorry, I can’t. If I just talk to people, then that’d be a rough life.
John: That’s one of the things. It’s like, I can’t have this conversation with each individual person, but I can have a conversation in aggregate among all these people.
Craig: Just listen to the 701–
John: Or buy the book.
Craig: Or buy the book. I keep forgetting we wrote a book. I wonder how I could forget that.
John: Let’s answer some new listener questions. Can we start here at the bottom of the list with Michael Neal?
Drew: Michael writes, “I had my first kid at the beginning of the year.”
John: Congratulations.
Drew: “Well, my wife had the kid. I was the cheerleader.”
Craig: Well done.
Drew: “When I watch film and TV now, I find myself having much stronger reactions to scenes, even ones I’d seen before. They don’t even have to involve kids. When I talked to my mom, she said she had to stop watching horror movies for years after I was born, and I was her second kid. After you both had your kids, was there anything that changed about your viewing habits or how you reacted to film and TV? Was there something specific that surprised you?”
John: I’m trying to think whether my viewing habits changed greatly. Obviously, at a certain point when she started watching TV shows, I was watching a bunch of inane TV shows with her. I think we talked about it on the show. I used to swear a fair amount, and it just stopped completely suddenly. It really is awkward for me to swear now.
Craig: Whoa. I started swearing more.
John: You did?
Craig: Yes, because of those effing babies. I don’t think there was anything that changed in terms of taste. My threshold for, yes, I want to see that, went way higher because I had a kid. That is a question of, would you like to not be with your baby and see this movie that, whatever? Just because people are like, “Oh, it might be–“ It just changed. It changed.
I used to see movies all the time. I would watch a lot of different shows and things, and then it just changed after that. It does change you. This is why critics are unreliable. Think about what he’s saying. It changes. As your life changes, you change, your taste changes, your ability to appreciate or not appreciate something changes. The rhetoric of, I have deemed this good or bad, just doesn’t make sense. It’s an odd thing.
John: My sensitivity towards onscreen when children are in danger probably shifted a little bit. It’s not like I was like, “Oh, I want that kid in peril.”
Craig: You used to love it.
John: I think there’s always the aspect of watching something is that you’re imagining yourself in that situation. When you have a kid, that kid is an extension of you and you’re imagining that kid being hurt. It feels like it’s a part of you.
Craig: I think maybe I probably did also empathize more with parental characters whose children were in danger. It is a different feeling. It’s a bit intellectual prior to that, and it becomes incredibly middle brain when you’ve had a kid and your limbic system is getting triggered by Liam Neeson getting a phone call and taken.
John: My eyes are on Mike. Watching the end of Toy Story 3 when the kid is going off to college, just broke him. He couldn’t even think about it without sobbing.
Craig: Interesting.
John: That was directly a factor of having a kid and not being able to imagine our daughter going to college. Then the teenage years make you really ready to leave.
Craig: Get out. It’s almost like it’s all planned. They make it so that you finally are like– although my youngest is living with us right now, which is great. She could get her own place, but you know why she’s living with us? She’s like, “It’s better here.”
John: Honestly, it’s better.
Craig: Yes, it is. It’s cool. We’re good. You’re all right. Just stop making a mess.
John: Let’s answer a question that actually ties back into our initial connections question. We have a question here from Tara Garwood, which is related to connections.
Drew: “I’m almost finished with my first screenplay, a horror comedy, which I wrote under the mentorship of two well-known Hollywood horror screenwriters. As someone living outside LA, how can I best proceed with my first screenplay and mentors who are presumably willing to help me out?”
John: Great. Tara, congrats on this project. We don’t know how you got it to these horror screenwriters, but if they’re actually working in the business, they’re great connections for you here. The real issue is, how do you let them help you in a way that they’re going to be able to help you and not be too much of a hassle to them? They can connect you to other people, including a rep, a manager, somebody else. They can just get your script in front of people, and that’s going to be the most helpful thing to you going forward.
Craig: Sounds like you know what to do. You’ve got two people. They’re your mentors. You’ve written something. Depending on how close that mentorship is, you might want to say, “Hey, I’ve written the script. I’m not going to make you read the whole thing. Unless you really want to, just read the first 10 pages. Just read the first 10. You don’t even have to respond. If you do, I’ll send the rest.”
John: Assuming they like it– I went into this question assuming that they had read the whole thing, which would be great, but if they haven’t, that’s also fine. If they can help you find other people to talk to so it’s not just them all the time, will be good. That’s why I was trying to look for a manager or just like, who else do you think I should talk to? Who else could be a good connection here because that feels useful and important?
You’re outside of LA, which is great and it’s fine, but I think you need to find some other writers, people in this space who you can talk to so it’s not just on the backs of these two mentor people because they will burn out if they’re getting an email from you every two weeks.
Craig: Yes, eventually they will burn out, no question.
John: Cool. Let’s do a question here from Reid.
Drew: “John and Craig compared being hired on a weekly project as making a corpse presentable enough for an open casket funeral.”
John: That was Craig’s.
Craig: That’s me. It’s not always like that. Sometimes it’s like that, yes.
Drew: “Well, when you’re in a situation like this or in the throes of rewriting a scene for the fifth or sixth time, how can you tell if you’re actually improving it or are you just making it different?”
John: Sometimes you’re just making it different for the sake of freshness and just dealing with people’s egos and needs and situation. You have to be honest with yourself when it’s like, this is not a better version of the scene, it’s just a different version of the scene that starts in a different place, it goes to a different place, it has different words, but hopefully it’s serving the same function.
When you’re actually trying to improve a thing, I think you need to step back and look at, what is the function this is trying to serve? Is it consistent with the tone and the voice and the spirit of the movie, and especially the section of the movie or the section of the storytelling? Is it fresher? Is it more exciting for an audience to encounter? That’s hard. We’ve talked a lot about it in comedy. Sometimes you forget that things are funny because you’re just exposed to them so many times.
Craig: I remember reading about Mozart when I was a kid and how he was able to learn some classical piece when he was seven, and then just sort of extemporaneously create seven versions of it. I just thought, “Well, what are those versions?” Well, turns out if you are a writer, you could do seven versions of something. You understand, then, what versioning is. When you’re in a situation where you’re on one of these deals, you’re usually trying to make one person happy. Sometimes that one person is happy because you’ve made somebody else happy. You’re trying to make the head of the studio happy.
They say, “What would make me happy is if this star agrees to get on the plane and fly there to do the movie. Right now, this is what he or she wants.” Great. How would this do? “Almost, but they want this or they don’t want that.” Got it. What about this version? Really, you’re not writing anything that is expressive of you. You are versioning until someone goes that because you actually don’t know. Nobody knows. You’re just trying to get people to say, “Oh, yes. Okay, that. That’s what I think this should all be.” Then it is useful because then everybody can go, “Oh, we were making Meatloaf, but you wanted Baked Alaska. Okay. Let’s realign.
John: That is the frustration is often they’ll focus on the script because that script is the thing they can control, but the issue isn’t the script at all. The issue is the actor, the director, the location-
Craig: Always.
John: -the budget, it’s all this other stuff. The problem never was the words on the page, but the words on the page are the only thing that can change. That’s what they’re focusing on. You’re getting paid, hopefully well to do impossible things and do the least damage possible while you’re doing it.
Craig: There are, I think, a lot of situations where studios like an idea that is inherent to a script, and they find an actor that means something and a director that means something who also really like the idea of that script. Everybody agrees the script could “use work,” meaning the execution of that idea isn’t thrilling to them. There be dragons because what happens then is a parade of highly paid, extremely competent writers all versioning to figure it well, is it this? Is it this?
John: The truth is there’s no one decision maker. It gets off like a consensus situation. There’s not a king to please.
Craig: There is no king to please. Everybody’s fighting with everybody over it. Everybody wants it to be something, and none of them have the ability to write two words together, not two, and there’s the problem. You go in, as we’ve talked about this before, in those situations, you are a surgeon, you are a mortician. You are also a therapist, you are a diplomat, you are a priest, confessor, you are so many things to so many different people.
It is one of the great ironies of the feature side of our business that those are some of the highest-paid people in Hollywood who are still treated like crap in their own way. It’s like, “Well, we’re not treating you like crap, we’re giving you all this money.” Also, change everything because somebody that shouldn’t have any power whatsoever doesn’t like the word blue.
John: Oh, yes. Their notes are like, “I don’t like seeing people eat on screen.” Sure. I recognize that you’re number seven on the power structure here, but also if I don’t yield on this, you’re going to dig in your heels to the other side. I’m going to need you to fight on my side for something else.
Craig: Also, I’m not going to be here in two weeks. I’m gone, right? One actor, his issue was he just didn’t like dialogue when he was standing. He wanted to be moving. Well, I’ve got a director and a producer who are like, “This is a scene where there’s nowhere to go.” I don’t know. What if? Now, this is the problem I’m trying to solve. This is not a writing problem.
John: No.
Craig: It’s really not. Now it’s just this weird puzzle of like, oh, well, I still want this lovely scene where Vito Corleone is talking to Michael Corleone in the garden and explaining to him the innermost truths of running a mafia family. Let’s say Al Pacino was like, “But I don’t want to sit. I want to be walking.” Marlon Brando was like, “Well, I don’t want to be walking. I want to sit.” Now I’m not doing art at all.
John: No.
Craig: Now it’s Lego.
John: It is Lego. How does it assemble properly? All right. Let’s draw one cool thing. Mine is an article by Cate Hall in her newsletter, Useful Fictions, called 50 Things I Know. There’s an industry out of this newsletter like lists of stuff I’ve learned over the course of the years. They’re skimmable, but I thought hers were really good. I’m just going to hit the first three here, Craig, and see how you respond.
She says, “You are allowed to care about people who don’t care about you and even people who dislike you. The way you feel about someone can be totally decoupled from how they feel about you. In fact, uncovering your capacity to love people who will never fully reciprocate it is the definition of grace.”
Craig: Yes, that’s a beautiful thought.
John: It’s also a good theme for a screenplay. That’s a good dramatic question.
Craig: Yes, it is. The idea of unrequited love implies an unfairness and a wound. Here’s something that changes when you’re a parent. It’s unrequited love. Their love for you is not like your love for them, nor will it ever be.
John: It’s never going to be perfectly reciprocal.
Craig: Never. You don’t really, nor should you really require it to. That’s an example where you just go, “I’m going to care about you.” There’s no quid pro quo. This is how it goes. Yes, there are people that you can do that with.
John: Second point, if you’re unsure how to have better opinions, try just having fewer of them for a start.
Craig: Well, first of all, what is a better opinion? [laughs] I’m not sure what that means.
John: What is a better opinion? I guess you pull that apart. To me, it’s–
Craig: Maybe justified.
John: Justified opinion, yes.
Craig: Instead of just saying stuff because.
John: I feel like sometimes you have this instinct of like, “Well, I have to have an opinion on something.”
Craig: No, you don’t.
John: I don’t have an opinion. No.
Craig: I don’t know, and I’m not sure are wonderful phrases.
John: “The most dangerous people have an exquisitely tuned sense of just how much they can get away with when it comes to how they treat different people, so pay special attention when others have sharply diverging opinions of someone’s character. Lots of variance in opinion about whether an idea is good means there’s a good chance the idea is good. Lots of variance in opinion about whether a person is good is a warning sign. If you’re hearing a lot of diverging reports about a person, that’s a red flag, and that feels true to me.”
Craig: Yes, I can understand her point that people that you would want to treat well are saying, “Oh, this person’s wonderful.” Well, yes, because they’re probably wonderful to you. Then, ‘Oh, these are people for which there is no reward if you treat them well, and all of those people are saying this person’s a monster.” The agent that a big star loves but all the assistants loathe, yes, that’s going to be a person who’s probably not great.
John: Going back to connections, I got a call from a writer who was asking about an actor who I’d worked with, and I could tell him that obviously this should be on a phone call. Don’t text this. Don’t email this. I can say, I had a really good experience with them, and I know that other people have not had good experiences with them. I personally did not encounter that at all. I would say keep asking and check on people, but I also wonder if there’s just a bad mix of personalities and types.
Craig: Yes, qualifying, things like that, all the time. Absolutely. I’m very nervous about saying, “Oh, this person is “bad.” It’s best to talk about your experience with somebody. I try to lead with, I’m just one person. I do think that there are people about whom I’ve been warned who turned out to be great. Then my question is, “What’s the deal with you? You warned me about this person.” There are people who warn you, and they warn you in a careful way.
They go, look, here’s the context. The truth is all of us can be warned about. We all have something that isn’t going to work with someone else. We’re not compatible with everyone. The warning should be not something abusive, horrible, racist, whatever. It’s just these are the ins and outs of this person. If you don’t mind a person like this, great.
John: Those are 3 of the 50 recommendations on Cate Hall’s Useful Fictions. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that. Craig, what do you have for us?
Craig: Well, it’s fun. We were talking about connections today. My one cool thing is a new game, Pips. Love it. Have you been playing it?
John: I tried the demo and did not click for me. Tell me what’s working for you about Pips in your brain.
Craig: First, let me admire the puzzle that I did this morning. Pips, it’s pretty simple. It’s a dominoes-style game. Unlike dominoes, where every square of a domino has to match up to another one, what they do is they give you a little grid, a little snaky grid, in which to place the collection of dominoes they’ve given you for that puzzle. They’ve created regions inside of the grid that have constrictions. For instance, in today’s, there was an area where the numbers in this one region had to equal 10. There’s another area where a plus sign region had to all have the same number.
I played it on hard because I got to be honest with you, it’s a pretty easy game. It’s a lovely little easy logic puzzle. When it clicks, there’s a very odd satisfaction to it. What I also like is, as much as I love words, there’s a lot of word-letter-based stuff here, connections, spelling bee, Wordle. I do the Sudoku occasionally. Sudoku is just Sudoku. It’s so number, crunchy, simple in its own way. It’s just straight dead logic. This at least requires me to move shapes around, which is not my strong suit. I like the spatial aspect. It’s fun and it’s quick.
John: Their games are quick. It’s interesting because The New York Times games were originally just digital versions of things that could be done on paper and pencil. This is an example of the thing that couldn’t happen on paper and pencil. Wordle couldn’t happen on paper and pencil.
Craig: No. Wordle could not happen on paper and pencil. Now, this is my chance to decry the removal of the acrostics. I don’t understand. I will never understand why The New York Times just– Mike, how much could it have cost to pay Henry Cox and Emily Rathvon every two weeks to bring acrostic? Come on. It was perfect for digital. If ever they were a puzzle made for digital, it was that. I don’t care if 12 people did it. I was one of them. Boo.
John: Boo.
Craig: Boo.
John: It wasn’t bad enough to make you cancel your account, which is why they didn’t do it.
Craig: I know, but I’m still–
John: There’s still time.
Craig: I’m still out here being– you know what? They’ve never encountered a cranky, rigid customer in the top of [crosstalk]. Listen to me, I’m still the most flexible customer I have.
John: That is our show for this week. It’s produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today on the show.
You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes. We are also scriptnotespodcast on Instagram. We’re posting stuff about the show and the book, and new vertical videos on there too.
We have T-shirts and hoodies, and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today, and the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to those premium subscribers who make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Lego.
Craig, thanks for a good connections episode.
Craig: Thank you, John.
[Bonus Segment]
John: All right. We are looking at a vase full of– vase or vase? Are you a vase or vase person?
Craig: I’m a vase person.
John: I’m vase as well.
Craig: That’s a very New York way of doing it.
John: Yes. Full of Lego flowers. Can you describe it for the listeners at home?
Craig: Yes. It’s actually quite beautiful. I’ve made Lego flowers of a more chunky, tulipy kind. These are more delicate. It’s like a lovely bouquet with a couple of orange blossoms, some pink ones, some rose-looking ones. Then they even got that baby’s breath vibe going on and some nice stem work.
John: Yes. My daughter assembled these before she headed off to college this semester. It’s Lego. Things snap together, but there’s no blocks to this. There’s no three-by-two, the classic Lego block, to this all.
Craig: I will be honest, if you asked me, is this a Lego brand thing, I’d have to look close. I know that these little nubs, for instance, are very Lego-y, but this could be another brand of assembled plastic pieces.
John: I want to talk about that a little bit because I love Lego. I’ve loved Lego as a kid. I’ve built some things. I was looking around the office here. I have my Lego R2-D2. I have my Lego typewriter. I love them. Yet, at a certain point, the kits became so specific. The pieces are so bespoke. The flower here is the most recent example of these are not things you could apply to anything else. Basically, the kits are just to resemble this one specific thing. If you were to try to pull this apart and use them in other ways, they wouldn’t be useful. The joy of Lego growing up was just there’s a trash bag full of blocks, and we would just build houses out of them.
Craig: The Titanic does mostly have useful items.
John: Yes. You said on the show that you built a Lego Titanic.
Craig: I built the Lego Titanic.
John: The Lego Death Star, Millennium Falcon?
Craig: I built the Lego Death Star, the Lego Millennium Falcon, the big ones. Those I ended up just breaking down and giving them to my kids to play with.
John: [unintelligible 00:54:47].
Craig: Yes, because they were young and they wanted to. I’m not going to be that guy who’s like, “No, this is my Millennium Falcon.” I’m an adult here. The Titanic is in my office. This is awesome. It’s the biggest Legos out there. It’s huge. Then I built a lot of– this is what I do in prep usually when I go home. I did the Pac-Man arcade one and the Mario on TV, the Nintendo one. There’s a lot of fun things like that. I agree with you when they get too bespoke. For instance, I did Rivendell, the Lord of the Rings setting.
John: Yes, I saw that. It was on your table, yes.
Craig: That one’s a D&D one. The Rivendell one, I ended up breaking down. Like you said, it was too– by the way, it’s why I haven’t finished the D&D one. I just left it on the table because it’s sort of too far into not Lego.
John: There’s the spectrum of– there’s the model kits that you assemble, which are like, growing up, you glue together the thing, and it perfectly forms this one thing, which is exactly the replica of this thing. There was a classic Lego, which is just a bunch of blocks you can assemble any way you want to do. I just feel like we’ve gone so far over towards the assemble this perfectly to this thing.
It is a skill to follow those instructions and be able to do the engineering feats of what these new things can do, like what this typewriter can do, are remarkable. I’m sure it’s good for our visual intelligence, but also I worry that it robs us of some of our– it’s not a new thought. This is in the Lego movie, too, but it robs us of some of our individual agency to build things ourselves. Which is why our friend Phil, who’s just building this giant ship out of just a block seat himself, I’m inspired by.
Craig: If I weren’t imaginative as part of my job, but this is actually a weird refuge from that where I don’t have to create anything. I don’t have to worry about variations. I don’t have puzzles to solve about architecture. My job is to zen out and do something that I can do perfectly.
John: That’s what I miss about standardized tests where actually like there’s a correct answer to things because everything we do in our writing lives, there’s just like, is that the right way to do it? Sure.
Craig: There’s no [unintelligible 00:57:07]. It’s even worse. Sometimes there is a right way to do something, and everyone is like, “Yes, but do it differently,” which is the worst feeling. You want me to do the test wrong.
John: Yes, absolutely. I gave you the right version of the scene. Now you want me to start from the heart. It’s frustrating.
Craig: It’s frustrating. Yes, I still do love following instructions. It’s such a nice, simple–
John: Well, I think it appeals to your puzzle brain, too. There’s an answer, there’s a conclusion, it can be done.
Craig: Yes. Puzzles, the fun part is I have the pieces. I just need to understand how they fit together, whether it’s words, or numbers, or anything. With Lego, I actually am not thinking at all. It’s a way to stop thinking. I’m just obeying in a safe way.
John: This is actually interesting because you hate jigsaw puzzles. Jigsaw puzzles, it’s ambiguous for a long time, that things click together. While there is that state of completion, there’s no instruction manual. It’s like this piece could be one of a thousand things in it.
Craig: Yes. A jigsaw “puzzle” is a bit like if I said, here is a Lego typewriter, here are all the pieces, here’s the instruction guide, but I’ve jumbled the pages and I haven’t numbered them. Well, let’s look through these pages. Do you think this maybe is where it starts? This is busy work. For what? A picture of a hamburger or a cat jumping over a thing?
John: I will say, building the Lego R2-D2, there were some ambiguous sections. I think the assembly books are really good, but there were some ambiguous situations where I don’t know if I did this right, and it’s going to take 20 steps before I realize if I did it right.
Craig: That is part of the process, is the, uh-oh, flip back and go, “Oh my God, I was supposed to put the dark gray piece and not the black piece. Okay, let’s undo, undo, undo because it must be right.” It drives me crazy. The one thing that I wish Lego would do– so they’re very good in a way now about supplying you with extra bits of little tiny things. The problem is they don’t tell you what the extra bits are. They should say at the end of a chapter, “By the way, we were hoping that you would have these extra bits, so if you do, don’t panic.”
John: So you didn’t make the mistakes.
Craig: If you have two extra bits of something, you probably screwed up. One thing that I know is true is the piece that you need to make it is there. You might think it’s not there. You might be panicking. It’s there. Either you’re not seeing it, or you don’t understand what the shape is, or it’s on the floor, or it’s in the box. It’s there.
John: It’s Scott Frank’s advice. Don’t move until you see it. It’s there.
Craig: That’s Steve Zaillian.
John: Oh, Steve Zaillian. You’re right.
Craig: Yes. Don’t move until you see it.
John: All right. Lego flowers, I guess we’re going to keep them. The weird thing about this bouquet is it’s really pretty from a distance, and it’s actually pretty up close. There’s a middle range where it’s just like, ugh.
Craig: I think I’m in that middle range, and I’m still appreciating it because– you know what? It’s arranged very nicely because I don’t imagine the arrangement was dictated quite that.
John: It’s going to be a different vase for each.
Craig: Right. Your daughter put that together. She has an eye for arranging flowers, so she’ll never be hungry.
John: Absolutely, because there’s always going to be a market.
Craig: People love flowers.
John: People love flowers. I used to buy flowers, and then I realized, this is dumb. I don’t really enjoy having them.
Craig: Or horrible. You know who loves flowers?
John: Elsa. Yes, sorry. I can appreciate watching a Martha Stewart where halfway the flowers are like, “Oh, that’s beautiful, but I don’t want it there.”
Craig: There’s a bunch of vegetables, and then they’re dead within minutes. It doesn’t matter what you do, they’re dead, and they smell. They smell while they die, and then the bugs come.
John: Absolutely.
Craig: What is this– and it’s, “Ooh, look at the sad flowers, they’re all dead.” Yes, that’s why I don’t like clowns either.
John: Oh, flowers die.
Craig: Like, oh, happy? No, no, scary.
John: Which reminds me, I think my daughter has a bouquet of flowers up in her room, which is she’s probably-
Craig: Oh dear God.
John: -going to get rid of because she’s just gone.
Craig: Oh, yes.
John: I’ll smell it, so yes.
Craig: That needs to go.
John: Quickly.
Craig: Oh, yes.
John: Right. Thanks, Craig.
Craig: Thank you.
John: Thanks, Drew.
Links:
- Scriptnotes Book is now on Goodreads!
- Scriptnotes 700 on YouTube
- Episode 645 with Meredith Scardino
- Vimeo on Demand
- Kanopy
- WGAw Screen Compensation Guide
- NYT Connections
- Pips
- 50 Things I Know by Cate Hall
- Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Scriptnotes on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
