Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/there-is-no-conspiracy).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 512 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show it’s a new round of the Three Page Challenge where we take a look at the first three pages of scripts submitted by you, our listeners, and give our honest feedback. We’ll also be looking at lecture scenes, mega deals for creators, and the ethics of writing conspiracy thrillers. And in our bonus segment for premium members I’ll be taking with comedian Sara Schaefer about her three simple steps for getting your TV show on the air.

**Craig:** Oh man.

**John:** Craig, you’ll want to listen to this.

**Craig:** Yeah. There are only three? I’ve been doing like six steps.

**John:** Yeah. Spoiler, there are many more than three. It’s sort of part of the joke is that it’s incredibly hard and frustrating at every step.

**Craig:** Yup. Yup. It is.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** So that’s an extra from the Schaefer Shakedown podcast which you should also listen to, but really it’s a great little bonus segment if you are a premium member. Stick around and listen to that after the credits.

But first Craig it’s great to have you back. We’ve been sort of hit or miss the last couple of weeks because you’ve been working, I’ve been traveling. But now we are back recording the show.

**Craig:** Yup. So it’s going to be a little bit like this while we’re making The Last of Us just because it’s hard to produce a television show. It’s a fulltime job, and then some. So every now and then I will be amiss. But hopefully I can get into a good rhythm and stick with you guys regularly.

**John:** Very cool. Now over the past couple of weeks it’s been a very good time to be a creator of television shows, or at least a very successful creator of television shows. Because you are that kind of person you are going to be able to make a mega deal with one of the streamers. There were three of them just in the last two weeks which were pretty exciting.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Courtney Kemp, creator of Power over at Starz, made a new deal at Netflix listed as high eight figures, possibly rising to nine figures. I had to actually do the math to figure out like oh that’s a lot of zeroes.

**Craig:** It sure is.

**John:** That’s a lot of money.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s amazing news for Courtney who is a fantastic person. I got to know her a little bit a year or so ago. And this is – I guess we can call it the Netflix Effect. I mean, Netflix has definitely driven the price of the reliable showrunner up quite a bit. When we get these reports of high figures, possible rising to nine figures, it’s a little bit like dealing with these big sports contracts. You do have to look at how many years it covers. Typically it is about exclusivity. Sometimes inside of those deals there are incentives. They rely on the continuation of a show being produced, or such and such.

But generally speaking I think we can say that Courtney Kemp just made a massive mega truckload full of money and I am thrilled for her. I think it’s fantastic. As long as this lasts let’s just keep doing it.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** It’s a good time to be a showrunner in television.

**John:** Indeed. People who have been doing this for quite a long time, Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park fame, reached a $935 million deal that will keep them at – what’s crazy it’s not actually for South Park. It’s for like things related to South Park. So they’ll be making 13 or 14 South Park movies for Paramount+ which is good.

Here’s the point where I think I’ve said this before on the podcast but back when I first starting out in Hollywood, so I was still in the Stark program. I was at a bar called Three of Clubs which still exists and a friend introduced me to this other guy who was also from Boulder, Colorado. I was talking to him. He seemed kind of down on his luck. I said what are you working on. He’s like oh I’m doing this Christmas card for this guy who works at MTV. I felt kind of bad for him because he seemed to really be sort of struggling. But that Christmas card was of course South Park and that was Trey Parker.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I said, “Troy, it was nice to meet you,” at the end of our conversation. That’s the last time I talked to Trey Parker. But you know what? Things are going great for those duos.

**Craig:** He’s doing OK. Yeah, so Trey and Matt have created an empire and what’s fascinating about what’s happened over the last few years is that something like South Park is – it’s the perfect storm for deal-making in the modern era. Friends we all know was this enormous drive for Netflix. And it was probably one of the reasons that HBO/Warner Bros suddenly said what are we doing. Why are we giving all of our stuff to Netflix? Let’s just make our own thing.

South Park, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, the things that they make, the world they’ve created has a library that’s enormous already and it will continue to grow. That is a perfect situation for a new streamer like HBO Max because it just creates tremendous value for everybody who is showing up and promises tremendous value to come.

We are starting to see what our work is worth. And that is exciting. Part of the deal that they made has to do with revenue sharing and ad sharing. It’s very complicated. Every time one of these things happens everybody else stops, looks at it, and goes well why don’t I have that. It will also continue to drive things up. It’s exciting.

I’m excited. I’m looking ahead to things. I am not worth a billion dollars. I can assure you of that. But those guys are.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So congratulations to Trey and Matt. It’s exciting. And they are brilliant. And the work they do is brilliant. And I have to believe – I’ve just heard that they’re good guys. I’ve never met them personally but I’ve heard they’re really solid guys. I have to hope and believe that the people that are important to the creation of their stuff are also being taken care of well.

**John:** Well I’ll tell you when I met Trey 25 years ago he seemed perfectly nice in the five minutes I had.

**Craig:** Oh, well, nothing changes, right? Yeah, hundreds of millions of dollars and success doesn’t change anyone.

**John:** Has never changed anybody.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Not a bit.

**Craig:** Nah.

**John:** All the people we knew back when are exactly the same people they are now.

**Craig:** I have to say if there were a person to bet on not changing I feel like it’s those guys. Because you know so much of what they do is about taking the piss out of people and not being too serious and not being too self-important. So I hope.

**John:** So, you mentioned the Friends at Warners kind of situation, and the South Park situation is kind of weird and interesting because HBO and HBO Max/Warners had bought the library of rights to South Park and so they have it on HBO Max. But, this deal is with Paramount+. And so it’s a weird thing where they’re not getting the library back yet. So they can get all of the future sort of South Parky things.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So it’s honestly sort of more like when the cast of Friends renegotiated their deals for a million dollars apiece, to keep them there in the family.

**Craig:** That makes total sense. They seem incredibly reliable. I mean, year after year after year they just keep putting content out. And people like it. So, it’s a good blue chip story even as you say if the entirety of the library isn’t there, what’s coming is going to be there.

**John:** And plus they’re buying Casa Bonita in Denver which is very exciting for me as a Coloradoan.

**Craig:** That is so awesome. Awesome. Oh my god. Casa Bonita.

**John:** Finally we should talk about the $900 billion sale of Hello Sunshine which is the Reese Witherspoon production entity which has made a ton of really well regarded shows, some of which star Reese Witherspoon but some of which don’t. We have other friends who work for that company. Good on them.

**Craig:** Yeah, totally good on them. This one is a little confusing because they have made a lot of good shows but they don’t own those shows. So, this was an outside investment. This is private equity coming in and purchasing the company. And there must be a plan beyond just the show Hello Sunshine and I guess they also have a little bit of ownership in Little Fires Everywhere. But I have to believe that this is really about Reese Witherspoon expanding her brand the way that for instance Jessica Alba became a billionaire by expanding her brand. That has to be what’s going on here. That this is not just about television shows but about more.

**John:** Yeah. Because Reese Witherspoon is an influencer in the literary space as well, so her book club is successful. In many ways she’s kind of an Oprah for a new generation and that could be really sort of what this investment is for to enable more stuff along those lines to happen. So, this is a situation where it’s not about a writer-creator-showrunner but really a place that could make stuff for your entity.

**Craig:** In retrospect all will be kind of judged and evaluated when there are big gold rushes in Hollywood, and this is not the first time there’s been a big gold rush, there are winners and there are losers. There are good bets, there are bad bets. Sometimes the good ones turn out bad. Sometimes the ones that seem bad will turn out great. I don’t envy anybody that’s making billion dollar bets on things. I’m glad I don’t have to do that sort of thing. I just have to sit here and right.

**John:** Yeah. Back in our day when we were first starting out to make an overall deal at a place was kind of a big deal. We were very excited to do it. Actually I first got to know you because you and I made a deal for a bunch of writers over at Fox. We sort of pitched around town about doing this writers deal at various places and Fox was the one that took us up. And that was really exciting and important.

I think what’s changed so much is that with the rise of these streamers and they need so much content that outside of the feature space it does really make sense to lock down some creators to make sure they’re making stuff for you.

**Craig:** Yeah. And to take care of the ones you have. I hope HBO is listening. No, they’ve been very nice to me. When you and I were starting in the feature business I think you probably had at least a few moments like I did where you look over at the people in the television business and went, “What? You’re making how much?” It just seemed like these insane numbers. And oftentimes they wouldn’t have to do anything for those insane numbers. They were just like sitting in an office and, I don’t know, getting high and earning crazy amounts of money.

Well, it’s still that way except more. More money. The deals that were always good for television writers have become vastly better. The numbers are eye-popping. And this is going to continue while Hollywood is building a new kind of business. And that is excellent for creators. It’s important for us all as we go through this, and as I just mentioned with Matt and Trey, to continue to think about the people who are not creators, that are not showrunners, but who are doing creative labor in our business because it is fairly typical of Hollywood to start handing out crazy amounts of money to individuals and then sort of recoup some of that on the margin by cheaping out on everyone else.

So, hopefully that’s not what happens here and it’s important for showrunners to make sure that people are being compensated fairly.

**John:** What was different as we started is that a lot of producers would have deals at studios. And so you’d say like, oh, Mace Neufeld would have a deal over at Paramount and so you’d go there to make your movie there. There’s much less of that now. And so this is really taking the place of producers doing those things. The challenge is a lot of these writer-creator-showrunners they have limited capacity.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** If they’re actually creating shows they can’t sort of also do a bunch of other stuff. And so as a person right now who is taking out a project or looking at places to go with this project I’m really mindful of like, oh, I really like that person as a writer but I don’t think they actually have the capacity to produce this thing. And that’s going to be – I think we’re going to see more challenges around that area coming up in the next couple of years where people have these great deals and they’re so talented but they cannot actually make stuff with other people.

**Craig:** I suspect that for most of these deals these companies are actually paying for shows. They are not paying for empires. There are a few people that can empire run. So our friend Greg Berlanti is just the king of empire running. I think there’s no amount of shows that he’s not capable of producing. Courtney is the power behind Power.

**John:** And all the spinoffs of Power.

**Craig:** Correct. That franchise is kind of I think really what they’re paying for there. Although of course they would be thrilled to get even more from her and I have no doubt that she has more coming. And we know kind of what they’re looking for from Trey and Matt. They’re looking for the sort of things that Trey and Matt do, whatever is that next show. This is kind of a good thing I think. There was a time when the best paid people in the business were people that were not writing or acting or directing, which is crazy.

I think when we all look back on it we’ll go, “What? Why? Why those people?” It’s good that the money is now flowing into the pockets of the people who are creating the shows, who are key elements of those shows, like Mike Schur for instance. He has his show, and then he has another show. And that’s how it’s going to function. That’s what they’re paying for.

**John:** But he can also help out on other people’s – he seems to have the capability to help out on other people’s stuff as well. And Mindy Kaling has other shows as well. There are some of those people who are talented creators themselves who can also help out, but it’s different than sort of the old days where you had just a producer who was sort of running a fiefdom.

**Craig:** Yeah. And one thing that I think is really positive about writers and writer-producers being the people that get paid the most is that writer-producers really do care mostly – I would say most of them really do care about the show they’re making, or the two shows they’re making. They care less about amassing insane amounts. Nobody gets into the writing business to become a billionaire. If you want to be a billionaire go into the hedge fund business. We care about things.

So, that’s positive. Whereas I think the non-writing, non-directing, non-acting producers, a few of them truly did care, truly do care. Lindsay Doran is my favorite example. A whole bunch of them just wanted more. They were just amassing money and clout. And I will not miss those. There are people that I think became very powerful and also really were – like Jerry Bruckheimer is in many ways a creator. He’s like a showrunner of the movies. I mean, that’s why there’s this continuity among Jerry Bruckheimer films. But you and I know a lot of producers where it’s like, “What? Really? You?”

**John:** They’re really good scrappy – they’re good at attaching themselves to things. They don’t actually add a lot of value.

**Craig:** No. Their genius is in convincing people that they’re necessary and worth a lot of money when they’re not. So, bye.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** All right. Let’s take a little bit of follow up here. This is a listener question, a listener suggestion. So let’s take a listen to what Greg Beam wrote in.

**Greg Beam:** Hey John and Craig. This is Greg from El Paso. I thoroughly enjoyed the rebroadcast of The Worst of the Worst. As a relatively new listener I didn’t catch it the first time around and I was glad to hear your thoughts on why protagonists need to suffer so much. But I did want to suggest that – I think you could have taken your analysis one step further and to demonstrate how I’m afraid I’ll have to invoke the hero’s journey.

According to Joseph Campbell the outward transformation and corresponding triumph that heroes of myth experience is the external representation of a deeper inner transformation. The hero not only overcomes their personal shortcomings or the evils of their society but transcends all limitations of the human condition.

Doing so requires a stripping away, not just of all they have, but of all they are. The death of their individual identity. Their sense of self. Their ego. And only once the hero’s whole self has been hallowed out can they become a vessel to be filled with the light of god to recognize the oneness of all things. It’s a radical conversion of root and branch break with their previous mode of being and one that is only possible following a total loss of self.

Now this isn’t meant to critique or diminish narratives that don’t have overt spiritual content. They’re perfectly valid and valuable as they are. But being aware of the transcendental sources from which their patterns spring can in my mind and Campbell’s add some depth to our understanding of what these stories represent and how they work in our minds and hearts.

Anyway, no question here. Just a thought. Thanks guys.

**Craig:** Well, thank you Greg.

**John:** Yeah. So we were talking I think two episodes ago about you mentioned Song of Roland as that sort of first mythic quest in sort of a modern context idea. How do you respond – how do you feel about Greg’s suggestion that really the worst we should be thinking back to the archetypal, the demigod level of everything being not just destroyed externally but destroyed internally for that journey to begin?

**Craig:** Well interesting. The Chanson de Roland I don’t think he has any change whatsoever. He’s awesome. He continues to be awesome. And then he finishes awesome. There were some very simple things like that. But Greg is right. I mean, the old, very traditional, very basic narratives were far more broad in the character swings that occurred. You had to die to live. It’s kind of how it works. Jesus had to die to live. He didn’t have to get super sick. Whereas in Unforgiven William Money gets a fever. And he has fever dreams. And then he wakes up and he’s sort of a different guy.

The important thing is that the concept of being reborn – I think everybody is fairly familiar with the notion that that is a flexible and extendable concept. You can mush it around and drag it around and metaphorize it however you want. But killing something within you and having something being reborn in you, yeah, that’s basically underneath it.

I think the modern narrative tends to avoid full hallowing outs. But if Greg’s point is that you kind of need to know where it all comes from I don’t disagree. Look back at the old stories. You know, you don’t send a flood to kill a third of the people. You send a flood to kill everyone. And that’s how it used to be.

**John:** Yeah. It’s not hard for me to think of examples of non – well, they’re mythic movies but they’re contemporary movies, or contemporary-ish movies that do sort of destroy everything about the characters and rebuild them. So you look at Terminator and sort of what happens to Linda Hamilton’s character. She’s living a normal life and everything about her normal life has to be stripped away and destroyed and she has to become a completely new person because of what’s happened.

You look at The Matrix and Neo and everything he believed about his life can no longer exist. He cannot be the same person he was at the start of the movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So that transformation is complete. I agree that it’s good to understand that in the archetypal, epic versions of these characters it’s going to happen. I think we cannot have that be the litmus test for most heroes in most movies. Because I think the audience just won’t accept that in a rom-com or some other sort of contemporary movie that a character would really go through such a huge transformation where everything actually has to be destroyed in their lives, or they have to be completely divorced from where they are because in many ways in our modern films we do want the characters to change and to grow, but we want them to be able to go back to the place where they began, you know, as a person who has learned something but not necessarily with everything they knew before destroyed.

**Craig:** I think that’s perfectly said.

**John:** Cool. All right. Let’s go to a question from Sarah Folks. Megana, could you read this for us?

**Megana Rao:** Sarah writes in, “I have a question about writing the ‘professor gives a lecture’ scene in movies. I’ve seen a number of films in which a high school or college student sits in a classroom and listens to a lecture, participates in a class discussion. Sometimes it’s math and the student looks bored. Sometimes the professor is reading poetry and the student looks enraptured. I’ve also watched scenes in which the professor is giving a lecture on the subtext of the film. For example this is a film about colonialism so the professor is giving a lecture on colonialism.

“Sometimes this works as in I would argue Kenneth Lonergan’s fantastic scenes in Margaret and sometimes it really doesn’t. But what is it that doesn’t work and what is it that does? How can a seminar/classroom scene build character and mood even if the student is just listening and when is it just lazy writing?”

**John:** That’s actually a really great question. And I think it’s actually a specific case or the general case of whenever you have your hero listening rather than talking, so there could be situations where there’s a coach talking, a pastor, a commanding officer. And those are scenes that are common and I don’t think we’ve really spoken about them very much on the show. They can be good. They can be bad, as Sarah points out. But maybe Craig and I we can figure out what are the characteristics of that kind of scene that work well and what are the kinds of characteristics or like oh you need to really rewrite that or rethink why you’re doing this scene.

**Craig:** Well, it’s easy to write the scene where the student is bored. You just write the professor being boring. And that’s the point. And you also know just by definition that that scene is not going to go on that long. Otherwise the audience will be bored. You just need enough to know that our character, our hero, is bored.

When you’re writing the version where they are enraptured/inspired/moved it requires you to write well. You need to write something that actually inspires and moves the people in the audience. So if you want to put Robin Williams in front of a classroom and have him talk about poetry it’s got to be awesome. And Tom Schulman made it awesome.

And that’s how you get them. Isn’t that awful? You need to write well. It’s such a pain in the ass.

**John:** Well here’s I think what you’re describing though is that the hero, the established hero of the film who is sitting in that audience is a proxy for us as the audience. So we have to be with our hero in experiencing this. And so if it’s boring then we’re bored with him. But more likely we’re enraptured or compelled or feeling confrontational to the speaker. We’re there with him. We’re responding the same way that he’s responding to what is being said. And that’s just going to be writing.

In many cases it’s like responding to a monologue. So, it’s a situation where whoever is talking is going to be largely uninterrupted and is going to be presenting this information. Now if that information feels like an info dump, that it’s exposition, there’s a ticking clock for how much exposition we’re willing to take. But if it’s something that is actually meant to engage and transform our listener, great, we just have to be able to see it. And so I think you should always be thinking about those scenes, not just focused on the person who’s talking but how and when is the camera going to be aimed at our hero taking in this information and processing this information. What is the reaction that we are seeing on the hero’s face as this is happening?

**Craig:** Yeah. And that means that that person who is hearing this needed to hear it. There was something in them that was missing and this lecture is filling it. Or there was something in them that they were wobbling on and this lecture is challenging it. But there has to be context. It can’t just be well this is a great freaking speech. It has to turn on whatever the character needed so that we understand this is the moment that matters. Now the character is changing.

**John:** Another thing that distinguishes some of these scenes from other scenes is like is that person who is speaking, the lecturer, is that a recurring character? Is that a character who is going to show up later on in the story or is this the one shot they have? If it’s the one shot they have then who that person is is not so important down the road. But in many cases that teacher character will recur and so be thinking about what are the beats and how are we going to see them in this way in this context in this classroom scene versus later on in the film. And what is the relationship really between your hero and this lecturer? That matters a lot.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let me play a clip from Frankenweenie because Frankenweenie has a teacher character I created called Mr. Rzykruski who challenges the classroom and I think it’s an example of the kinds of things we’re talking about. So this is early on Frankenweenie, the character will appear twice more, but this is his first scene.

[Clip plays]

**Mr. Rzykruski:** Lightening is simply electricity. The cloud is angry. Yes, we make it storm. All the electrons are saying I am leaving you. I go to the land of opportunity. The ground says yes we need the electrons trained in science just like you. Come! Come! Welcome! So both sides start to build a ladder. This man, he comes out to look at the storm. He does not see the invisible ladders. When the two ladders meet, BOOM! The circuit is complete and all of the electrons rush to the land of opportunity. This man is in the way. Yiii!

[Clip ends]

**John:** So in this scene what was important is that we’re introducing this scary new substitute science teacher and he’s going to be doing an info dump about what electricity is because electricity has been powering these monster creations. But it’s really about the kids’ reaction to him. And they are so excited to have this scary man as their science teacher and how inspiring it is to Victor who is going to be the kid character that we’re following. So it’s setting up that there’s a new character here, but also that they’re responding to him sort of the way that we would respond to him. The kids in the classroom are the same place that we are in terms of like oh my gosh this guy is crazy.

**Craig:** And you needed those kids to be scared. It was important.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So that kind of guides the way that person is going to do what they do. So, I suppose if we had some kind of sum up advice for Sarah it would be boring is boring, that’s easy. And inspiring means there must be a space in the character that needs inspiration, that needs to have some kind of impact. Fear. Excitement. Enrapture. Shame. Whatever it is. They needed to hear this and then you have to write it well on the other side.

**John:** Yeah. So with Frankenweenie that scene had to exist in the movie or else a lot of the other dominoes wouldn’t have fallen correctly. But it needed to be a good scene that actually would last in the movie. So that’s the crucial thing.

All right, speaking of crucial scenes that need to stay in their movies. Let’s take a look at the first three pages–

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Of some of our different scripts here. We have three entries here. So for people who are new to the Three Page Challenge if you go to johnaugust.com/threepage you can submit the first three pages of a script. It could be a TV script or a feature script. It goes into a big bucket and every once and a while Megana goes through all those scripts in that big bucket and picks several of them for us to discuss on the show. This is not a competition. This is just an exhibition. We are looking at pages that people submitted.

Sometimes they’re great. Sometimes they have real challenges. We tend to focus on the ones that have things that we can talk about, so either things that they’re doing really, really well on the page, or things that could be done better. So we have three of them to talk through. If you want to read along with us you can follow the link in the show notes to the PDFs you can download and go with us. But Megana if you could start us out with a summary of this first one. Trickster: Night of Kitsune by Hiroshi Mori.

**Megana Rao:** In 1920s Japan Tsuneko, a woman in her 20s, hides with her daughter, Etsuko, 13, in the backroom of a house as a mob of angry villagers accuse Tsuneko of being a fox devil. Her husband, Mongaku, relents to the crowd’s demands and the villagers drag her away. The villagers bury up to her neck in the middle of the town square. She’s then ripped apart by dogs. They tell Mongaku to behead her with a blessed spear, but when he approaches the body has already disappeared. We then cut to a Manga comic page.

**John:** Craig, what’s your response to Trickster: Night of the Kitsune?

**Craig:** I am a big fan of Japanese historical fiction. I just love the Samurai Era. I love the Meiji Restoration. I love all of it. So I was excited. I had many, many, many, many problems and all of them I think ultimately turned on Hiroshi Mori’s issue with action. And I don’t mean action as in the stuff that’s happening. I mean the things that aren’t dialogue. I had some dialogue issues, too. But this is a good example of a script that needs to be re-approached from the point of view of description and visuals. And it begins with the very first line, “SUPER: OVER IMAGES OF A RURAL JAPANESE VILLAGE. JAPAN, TAISHO ERA, 1920’S.”

First of all, if you’re going to put a super and there’s a date it must be a year at the minimum. It can’t be a decade. 1920s makes no sense. It’s 1921, it’s 1923. But be specific so that we understand that you cared enough to place it in a year. But most importantly “over images of a rural Japanese village.” That’s useless.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** It’s useless. You’ve got to paint the picture. You must fill my mind. And I know what – I happen to know what those villages look like, and they’re gorgeous, and they’re fascinating. And Japanese landscape is often beautiful because it’s an earthquake and volcano prone Pacific Rim nation. So is it kind of terraced? Is it on the shore? Is it among the mountains? Tell me. I need to know.

The house, “In the storage area of a wood farm house,” wood farm houses in 1920s Japan do not look like wood farm houses in 1970 the US. We need to know what. “TSUNEKO, late 20’s, with haunting, piercing eyes,” we don’t know if she’s male or female unless you are Japanese.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Right?

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** We don’t know if Tsuneko is a female or male name, so give us a sense of gender.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s talk about how you would do this, because I was looking for how is the easy way to do this, because you’re not going to say female. That feels clunky. So I think as quickly as you can in that next sentence find a way to flip stuff around so you can get a she or a her in there so we know a gender on this character who is so important.

**Craig:** Absolutely. So Tsuneko, late 20s, with haunting, piercing eyes. She crouches down next to…right.

**John:** That would do it.

**Craig:** That would do it. Tsuneko throughout is going to confuse me, emotionally. I don’t know why she isn’t more scared. She seems super calm. Then she’s screaming. Then she’s grumpy. And we go outside to a mob of ten villagers. Just so you know ten villagers isn’t a lot. Ten people on screen looks like three people. It’s kind of weird how that works.

And I want to know more about the mob. Because if you don’t tell me more about the mob then I’m just going to assume it’s like cliché mob.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk about villagers and mobs, because there’s happy villagers and there’s angry mob, but they’re so cliché. You do need to just be specific. So one guy is identified as being a shopkeeper or something. Great. But I just need a better sense of what this is because I don’t really quite have a sense of the period either. Because you can say 1920s but I’m not quite sure what that looks like in Japan. How rural is this? Are these farmers? Is this a city? I don’t really know where I am.

**Craig:** Correct. The villagers are going to sort of tell you too much now. Villager 1, and Villager 1 and Villager 2, we talked about before not our favorite thing to see in a script. Villager 1 delivers one of the more expository speeches a villager can deliver. He says, “She is a fox-devil. She is a shape shifter. You had no money until you found her in the forest. You brought her here, made her your wife, and used her fox-devil tricks to make you rich.” Unless this villagers job is literally the village summarizer this is not how people talk, particularly in a high pressure violent riotous scene.

**John:** And Craig I kept wanting this to be night and it’s day throughout.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It feels strange to me that it’s daytime. It’s OK that it’s day. It can totally work in daytime. But it feels like a night scene to me and I feel like maybe I just have the expectations of torches or something. It feels strange. What was the inciting incident that got us to this moment right where we are? And I think all these problems sort of come back to a point of view problem. It’s the point of view, who are we supposed to follow? The husband who is the one who is ultimately going to go out there with the spear to decapitate his wife? Is it the little daughter? Is it–?

**Craig:** Tsuneko?

**John:** Who are we actually supposed to be following here? Because if we knew that then this whole thing could probably be shorter, tighter, and better.

**Craig:** I agree. And one reason to set it in the day counter to the typical mob at the front door of a home, and it’s very hard to do that scene in a way that hasn’t been done four billion times before, is perhaps to have Tsuneko look through a slat of wood or something and see them outside. Right now everyone is so disconnected. And Mongaku – what Mongaku says here, it’s really important to think always, just a simple question, what would someone say?

So villager one outlines in quite startling detail why the mob is here. And villager two confirms that. Adds on she made us poor. She tricked us out of our money. Get her. And Mongaku says, “Please. This is a misunderstanding.” Does that seem like something that would work?

**John:** No. Not in this moment. Not when there’s actually a mob there. You know, early on as things just begin to escalate a little bit, sure, but not when the actual mob shows up there to take your wife and kill her.

**Craig:** Yes. You would beg. You would tell them you’re sorry. You would tell them it wasn’t her. You would accuse somebody else. What you wouldn’t do is talk to them like they were grouching at you because they think you took their latte order at Starbucks when it was really theirs. “Move or we’ll burn your house down.” Um, they want to kill his wife. And what they’re saying is don’t make us burn your house. But it’s like well the house is not the big issue right now. I could build another one of those. I think it’s move or we’ll kill you. Right? Or we’ll burn you and your daughter alive, right? Or we’ll kill your daughter. It can’t just be the house.

So what’s happening, Hiroshi, is there’s just a lot of lapses in what I would call logical human psychology. You have to just really ask yourself every step of the way what would work. What would make sense? What would actually be said here?

**John:** Yeah. I want to pitch, going through this sequence and taking out all the dialogue until we get to, “This forest demon isn’t human. She can’t replace your mom. Forget you ever saw her.” If we took out all the actual real dialogue there other than maybe some pleading just to get to that point. Because it looks like they’re just trying to capture this woman and then you find out they actually think she’s a demon. That’s really exciting.

And so if we saw this action and the first time we get that they don’t think she’s even human is there that’s kind of interesting to me.

**Craig:** I agree. In fact here’s my – I like this, here’s our pitch. Here’s my pitch. My pitch is this thing opens with a woman buried up to her neck and she is swollen and she is dying and she’s looking at this little girl. And this guy sits down next to her and he says, “I know this is upsetting but I want to explain why we did this. She’s a forest demon. She’s not human. You need to forget you ever saw her. This is all good for the village. Here’s what she did.” He just calmly explains the whole thing and then says, “And above all she definitely was not your mother.” And you go, oh, that was her mom.

There’s got to be something about relationship that matters to the girl. It all has to be contextualized in terms of relationship or else it’s just stuff happening and it’s not particularly surprising or interesting.

**John:** Yeah. And that same dialogue delivered by a woman could be more compelling than by a man.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** There’s choices that could sort of make this feel more specific. And it all depends on sort of like what is it really tying into because at the bottom of page three we’re jumping forward and seeing there’s a Manga connection. So this may be a story within a story. Even so it needs to be–

**Craig:** It’s got to be a good story.

**John:** It needs to be super compelling. It’s got to be a good story because this is how you’re starting your movie.

**Craig:** 100%. It has to be awesome. Especially if the idea is that this is a story that somebody is actually drawing in a manga. Or it just happens that we jump ahead in time and that girl has been reincarnated as a young woman who draws manga. It doesn’t matter. Either way the opening here has to be incredibly compelling. That’s just how it goes.

**John:** Two little craft notes here. On page 2, “EXT. Village, Tsuneko’s dragged into a large two-story building.” So it’s apostrophe-S Tsuneko’s. I would say it’s a bad choice to do the apostrophe-S on things that aren’t a possession, especially in this case. Because you’re not saving anything and it’s just confusing. I can’t tell is it a thing that’s being dragged. It’s just confusing. Tsuneko is dragged. Or better yet, someone drags Tsuneko. Just show the active thing.

The next paragraph, “Tsuneko’s head bloodied and bruised sticks out of the ground.” Tsuneko’s bloodied and bruised head sticks out of the ground. Moving the head after the adjectives just makes the whole thing clearer.

**Craig:** Or making it a positive phrase and putting commas around bloodied and bruised.

**John:** Bloodied and bruised, yes.

**Craig:** But Tsuneko’s head, bloodied and bruised, shouldn’t run together. Also she opens her eyes and then she opens them again. There’s a continuity error even within the writing which is something you really want to avoid.

**John:** Yeah. And when you hear like “Tsuneko opens her swollen red eyes. Makes eye contact with Etsuko.” But what is the purpose? What is she trying to communicate?

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** This is a case where tell us why she’s doing it. Tell us what we’re supposed to feel because right now I don’t know. And that’s not helpful.

**Craig:** It’s not. And it also veers us away from this next bit which is pretty disgusting but I suppose where dogs eat her face. But if we understood that Etsuko was watching this happen then I would understand why I’m watching it. But if you take away the point of view of her daughter and just show her getting her face eaten which is a weird transition by the way from I’m looking at you to now my face is being eaten, then it just seems like you just want to show me her face being eaten.

Also, if someone’s face gets eaten by dogs they die.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t understand how she’s alive after that. Maybe because she’s a fox-demon.

**Craig:** But then if she’s a fox-demon then everybody should freaking the F out. Like apparently the fox-demon you can eat her face and she still lives. So, it just – yeah, there were multiple issues here and I think the most important thing to take away from this, Hiroshi, is fill the visual picture in. Ground all of the moments in relationships. Think about perspective always. And make sure that everyone says and does things that comport logically with normal human psychology in extraordinary, abnormal moments.

**John:** Yup. Agreed.

**Craig:** All right. What’s next?

**John:** All right. Let’s move on to Martha. If you could give us a summary, Miss Megana.

**Megana:** Great. So we meet plump 45-year-old Martha alone on Ladies’ Night at a Midtown Manhattan strip club. Martha is an enthusiastic and generous regular. She slips $100 bills into G-strings and everyone seems to know her by name. Martha asks Bobby who is “working tonight” and Bobby points him in the direction of the new go-go dancer, Derek. Derek’s friend tells him that Martha is a good time but she’s strong, so he should definitely have a safe word. Martha leads Derek out to her driver and car making several off-color jokes about how this might be the last time Derek sees his friends. In the back of the car Martha pours Derek scotch and condoms fall from the ceiling.

**John:** Great. So this is Martha by Caroline O’Riordan.

**Craig:** John, what did you think?

**John:** I liked that this was a big character. A big introduction on a big character. Martha is sort of brash and brassy and unapologetic and sort of seems very comfortable in her skin in a way that was interesting and compelling. I felt like the men in this story were not nearly as compelling and they didn’t need to be such bright spotlights. But I didn’t know really who Bobby was at all and this last stripper who got in the car. I wanted to have a sense of who he was just so I could sense what is the drama/comedy that’s going to be possible to happen next.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wonder just from the name Martha, I wonder if this is Caroline’s tricky way of saying Arthur. Because it reminds me so much of Arthur. A boozy bachelor who has a butler. And who goes around and lives the life of an utter reprobate. And then is going to meet somebody that kind of sets them straight. And so here we’re doing the distaff version of that. And I thought honestly what was working really well was I understood where I was. I could see the room. Geography made sense. Caroline was making sure that when somebody talked to somebody that they go there first.

The only thing I really would suggest she kind of look at is there’s a broadness in the rest of the world. I like how broad Martha is, but the rest of the world feels broad. So the guys, the issue with the male strippers is that they kind of feel like the waiters in Hello Dolly. Do you know what I mean?

**John:** I do. Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re like, ah, Martha. They don’t seem–

**John:** They’re not in reality. And they’re in sort of her heightened reality and they’re not real to us.

**Craig:** Particularly because they all behave equally the same. Like they all do the same thing in unison. I also think that her largesse should be larger. A wad of $100 – you know, when she got $100 bills from her bra. Generally it’s hard to see, you’ve got to really hit that number. When she throws money you’ve got to realize those are hundreds. That’s a big deal. She’s also been there for a while so it seems like she suddenly pulled that out and started throwing them around.

**John:** A line like, “Don’t worry, I’ve got a second one.” Basically she’s into her second bra roll.

**Craig:** Right. She finishes this wad of $20s and she’s like, “Sorry guys, that’s it. No more $20s.” And they’re like, “Aw,” and she goes, “And so I guess I’ll use these hundreds.”

**John:** Hundreds. Yeah.

**Craig:** Something to just really sell that this is like kind of a life-changing lady to be around when you’re a stripper because there’s a lot of money coming around. But keeping the rest of the world, like Bobby I think needs to be more grounded. The strippers need to be more grounded. Condoms should not fall from the ceiling.

**John:** I don’t understand where they came from the ceiling. I don’t get that.

**Craig:** Also how many condoms do you need?

**John:** You don’t need a lot.

**Craig:** Maybe like maximum three? You know, three seems a lot. Just, whoosh, condoms drop from the ceiling just seems a little broad. So, keep her broad, and keep the rest of the world super unbroad. Because what made Arthur wonderful, and I’m just again assuming that Caroline is kind of going in that direction, I could be totally wrong, is that he was pathetic. That ultimately he was sad. And you knew that because we were putting this life of the party guy in the middle of very regular New York. And that’s why it worked.

**John:** So a couple little small things on the page, just pickups, because I really didn’t mark this up very much because I thought it largely worked. First line, “It’s Sunday night at the “ultimate ladies night” in Midtown Manhattan. It’s not Friday, and this isn’t Vegas.”

**Craig:** I circled that myself.

**John:** I just thought I don’t know what that means. It’s not Friday, it’s not Vegas.

**Craig:** Also, you just told us it was Sunday in Manhattan. So why do we need the rest of this?

**John:** And the next line is great without it. So just drop that out. Third line, “Perched on a stool and cheering on the DANCERS like a blackout proud parent is MARTHA (45, white, big-eyed, plump).” I don’t get the blackout proud parent.

**Craig:** I don’t either.

**John:** So take out blackout. Proud parent, great. Because I get what you’re going for here is that she’s just really into it. She’s like a super fan here. 45, white, big-eyed, plump. Great. I got a visual for that. I would love to know a little bit more, I’m going to talk like Craig here, hair, makeup, and wardrobe. We can get a little bit more specific here. What is her purse?

**Craig:** Definitely.

**John:** How is she styled? If you want to go back and listen to my conversation with Lorene and Mitch about Hustlers, really sort of what these characters are wearing in these clubs is so important to tell us about who they are and why they’re there. I feel like you have the space here on page one to give us more about Martha because this is her movie.

**Craig:** That’s great advice. I also think Martha doesn’t really get a reveal. And with somebody like her you want one. She deserves one. To go back to Hello, Dolly, one of the great reveals in Broadway history when Dolly, even though we’ve seen her before, we haven’t seen her in her full glory. When she comes down the staircase at the restaurant. You want Martha’s reveal to be wow. To really be something. So I completely agree with those bumps there.

Here’s a moment where I think the first red flag on the kind of too broad rest of the world was when she tosses crumpled bills over her shoulder and stumbles away. “The boys lunge like bridesmaids vying for the bouquet.” Nah.

**John:** They can still have some pride, yeah.

**Craig:** And also because what you want is to see that behind her there is no party. The party is around her and what she sees through her eyes. And behind her is actually – they made an agreement to just divide it up. It’s cleaning for them. It’s sad.

**John:** Yeah. We’ve seen both Magic Mike movies and, yes, those guys are working hard for the money. But they’re not–

**Craig:** It’s work.

**John:** But it’s work. And they’re not just going to scrape or pounce on things.

**Craig:** Correct. Exactly. Bobby – I’d love to get a little bit more of a sense of his feeling about Martha. I don’t know what he thinks of her. “Martha,” she goes, “Bobby, great show. Your boys got me dripping as always,” which is pretty funny. “Martha, the reason I’m open on Sundays.” Well that just feels like a couplet designed to tell me that her name is Martha and his name is Bobby. You know? And Bobby has got to have – there’s no reason he should be matching his tone. He’s got to be like, “Mm, Martha.” You know, wow, I can’t throw you out. I wish I could, but I can’t.” It’s like you’re a huge pain in the ass and you’re just extra.

So we just need to see how the rest of the world is reacting to her. Even if he matches her energy, and then when she looks away he and the bartender look at each other like “oh my god, Martha.”

**John:** Yeah. The other woman in his club, like how are they responding to this high roller who is throwing all this stuff? And what is it like to be in her little bottle service area? There’s all sorts of fascinating things you could do here and you don’t have to do all of them, but I feel like it comes back to just making sure that the rest of the world feels realistic so that her bigness can really stand out.

**Craig:** Yeah. Last little thing I wanted to point out to you Caroline is that there’s no reason for Derek, the selected dancer, to not already know about Martha. Even if he’s new, he’s been watching her all night. So at some point earlier one of the guys would have said something. So, what could work is when they get into the car she’s like, “What did your friends tell you? What did the other guys tell you?” And he could be like, “Um, they said that you were a good time but that you’re stronger than you look and I should get a safe word.” Do you know what I mean? And then she sort of laughs and she’s like it’s so true. So that you don’t have to have this kind of feeling that Derek was just apparently checked out all night while this was going on.

**John:** Yeah. On page three he’s described as “half-naked, Derek shivering from the November air.” Be more specific about half-naked. Because is he still just in his G-string? Does he have his phone with him? Some of that information is kind of great because how vulnerable is he is a great thing to see.

**Craig:** Yeah, and again when Derek drinks the scotch, and you should point out by the way that he drinks, you don’t actually say that, he says, “Whoa, this stuff is intense.” That also feels like he’s from Iowa in 1920. He’s a male stripper. He’s drank before. Even if he doesn’t drink much or whatever, it just seems like he’s, again, he’s a waiter from Hello, Dolly. And you want him to be a guy who strips for a living in Manhattan. You know?

**John:** This is not Schmigadoon.

**Craig:** Correct. It’s not Schmigadoon. Bingo.

**John:** All right. Our final entry. The Many Lives of Newton Thomas by Sean Frost. Megana, can you give us the summary?

**Megana:** A mother and father carry a baby boy in a wicker basket out of a station wagon. They leave him in the basket at the entrance of a children’s home at night. They share a tearful goodbye with the father leaving several small trinkets for the boy before the parents drive away in the car. A voice over tells us that he’s imagined this night hundreds of different ways with the parents crying, held at gunpoint, or stopped before they can leave the baby.

We see the different iterations of the scene until the voice over tells us that he suspects that he’s afraid the truth is that his parents were sad but not distraught and decided to leave the baby of their own volition.

**John:** All right. Craig, what was your take on The Many Lives of Newton Thomas?

**Craig:** I really enjoyed this. I liked this, Sean. I thought that there was a really interesting concept here. There were a couple of little bumps in the road that I want to talk about that are somewhat technical. And I think the idea gets across faster and more effective than you might realize, because I think it was probably a bit too much of it.

I’ll start with the real simple things. “A tired looking MUTLI-STOREY BUILDING.” So we’ve got a type on the fourth word which makes us crazy. You also spell story “storey” which is in the British way.

**John:** So maybe he’s British.

**Craig:** Except that he says a parking lot and the British say a car park. So, you either have to be British or you have to be American. You can’t be both. What was interesting was I was confused at first and then when I got to Newton’s line, “I’ve imagined this night a hundred different ways,” I went ah-ha. And that’s fine, except for one bit of confusion and that is she’s holding a baby, wrapped in blankets, and she’s going to put that baby in a basket.

We understand that that baby is an infant. That’s what that is. But the baby says, “Vroom, vroom.” Babies don’t do that. They don’t talk and when they do talk it’s a lot of mama, baba, bebe, but it’s not vroom, vroom about a car. That’s more like a 1.5 or two-year-old, which is definitely not the sort of like I’m going to put you in a little blanket and put you in a little basket. You say baby boy. So I would change that bit.

But I thought it was interesting that the first part seemed kind of off and unrealistic. And then you found out why.

**John:** I took the vroom, vroom as being magical realism. It was impossible for the baby to say that, but it was sort of an imagined.

**Craig:** I would acknowledge that. That’s perfectly fine. But then I would acknowledge that somewhat improbably the baby says. But I thought there was a really interesting kind of iteration of things that happened. The one I would strongly suggest to get rid of is you say sometimes they cry, and so they’re sobbing as they put the baby down. Sometimes they don’t. And there’s a kind of the dad is stone faced and the mom is sad, but noticeably not crying. But the version that you propose is the one that’s probably real is the version where you say, “I do this cause I’m afraid what really happened was more like this.” And then you see that they are not crying and they are just sort of neutral.

And so I wouldn’t step on that. I would keep them happy or sad or scared or Iron Man comes in. And I would strongly recommend that in the bit where at the end, the reveal, Newton says – here’s what Newton says in voice over, “I do this cause I’m afraid what really happened was more like this. No tears. No guy running down the street – and definitely no Iron Man trying to stop a guy from shooting my Dad. Which is why I like to imagine it differently.” And I think maybe all you need is “I do this because I’m afraid what really happened was more like this.”

And then you just see them put the baby down, they don’t really care, and they drive away. And then you go back to the little baby. So the rest of it we’re seeing it. We get it.

**John:** Yeah. So as I was reading it the parents are so vaguely described, and it sort of makes sense that they be vaguely described, sort of generic versions, because he doesn’t necessarily know who they are.

**Craig:** He doesn’t know them.

**John:** But I went back and forth in terms of like should we see their faces or not see their faces. There’s a version of this where we don’t actually ever fully see their faces. But then we can’t really tell if they’re crying or not. So I guess you do have to cast people that you are seeing this. But maybe you just call out early in the scene description a somewhat generic like white man, white woman just so we get a sense of like they’re deliberately not specific. That he’s just sort of remembering them or imagining them as these people.

A bigger issue is I had is Craig how old is Newton our narrator?

**Craig:** Well, that’s a great question. I have no clue.

**John:** I have no clue. And it really does matter because if it’s being told by a ten-year-old versus a 30-year-old it’s a very different feel. And so I think we need to find a place on page one, either after Newton’s first line, or after his second line just to give us a sense of the age of the narrator because it really does change the read, sort of how we’re reading this. If it’s a kid narrating versus an adult narrating it.

**Craig:** That’s a fantastic point. I think in my mind I must have defaulted to young adult. But you’re absolutely right. We do need to know what we’re hearing there. And I don’t know if this is a movie or meant to be a show. It feels like a movie. And The Many Lives of Newton Thomas perhaps implies that here’s somebody who is imagining Walter Mitty style the different paths his life might have taken had it gone different ways. But it’s a really nice start.

**John:** Agreed. It’s a nice start.

**Craig:** It’s a nice start. Oh, one last thing, Sean. New Beginnings Children’s Home. Mm, we can see what you’re doing there. It’s too much. You don’t need that. You can back off the gas pedal on that one I think.

**John:** Yeah. Here’s the other thing. Beyond the name of it, every time we see a slug line with that, because it’s a really slug line and we’re going to be coming back to this a lot, even though we’re not going to really read it every time a shorter slug line I think will just get us through the page a little bit faster.

I would also cut on page two the masked figure says, “Do it or I’ll shoot.” The Mom reluctantly lays the Baby in the basket. The Masked Figure lowers their gun. The Dad sighs in relief. What? Just “do it or I’ll shoot.” Just get out of there on that line. You don’t need the rest of it.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** So both this script and our first script had draft dates on those. Don’t do those. Not necessary.

**Craig:** Don’t need them.

**John:** Have one date on your script. That’s great. But don’t tell us this is the second draft. We don’t care. It should be your best draft. This is the draft we’re reading. That’s all that matters is the draft we’re reading. So on the title page you don’t need to put what draft this is. Just put a date.

**Craig:** I agree. We don’t need to see your paperwork.

**John:** Nope. Not required.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** So I want to thank our three entrants this week. Thank you for sending this out. And everybody else who sent in all of these Three Page Challenges, Megana went through a zillion of them. So thank you Megana for reading through all of these.

**Craig:** Thank you, Megana.

**John:** And if you have your own three pages you want to submit go to johnaugust.com/threepage. And we might talk about your pages on a future episode.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Craig, we’re running long but I want to get to one question. A question from Chris. If Megana you could ask that.

**Megana:** Chris asks, “In light of so many Americans believing that the COVID-19 vaccine injects sinister tracking technologies into the body or that the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting victims are all paid crisis actors I find myself wondering is it morally wrong to be writing conspiracy theory stories in this day and age? Have writers been inadvertently conditioning the public to think that massively coordinated government misdeeds are commonplace and that it’s good to always mistrust the government and the media because they’re all in on it? Could QAnon have happened without 11 seasons of the X-Files conditioning its viewers to be paranoid? And are we as writers making things worse every time we work a dark conspiracy into one of our stories?”

**John:** Oh, Chris asking a big question.

**Craig:** That’s an amazing question.

**John:** I think it’s a great question. I think we have some complicity in sort of narrativizing conspiracies and building a universe in which there’s always a twist and there’s always a secret bad guy organization behind stuff. So, yes, and here’s I guess the degree to which there’s any evidence to back this up is when you talk to prosecutors or defense attorneys for that matter when juries are in the courtroom and they’re seeing evidence they believe that CSI is real. They believe that all the stuff that they can do on CSI is the standards of how stuff should be working. And so they’re expecting evidence that is actually just impossible. And I think conspiracies are sort of a related thing to that in that people see things on TV and they start to believe oh maybe that’s how the world really works.

So I think I would be nervous writing a conspiracy thriller right now. But Craig I’m curious what you think.

**Craig:** Yeah. So I think we had talked in an earlier episode about the phenomenon of copaganda.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And presenting cops as kind of, I don’t know, just wildly differently than many of them are in the street and not paying any attention to the phenomenon of police brutality and cops as flawed or sometimes completely embedded with ultra-right wing philosophies.

The reason I love this question so much Chris is because I think it is at this point something that is – I’m not going to go all the way and say morally wrong. I’m going to say it ought to give strong, clear pause if you are thinking about writing a conspiracy theory story. Because we have absolutely fed into this. The insistence that the government is portrayed with The Shop. That’s my favorite phrase. The Shop. It’s even behind the CIA. It’s some secret thing behind the CIA and the NSA that basically can do whatever they want. They hear everything. They see everything. They’re completely all-knowing, all-seeing. They can do all this stuff.

Look at The Bourne Identity. The entire concept of The Bourne Identity is insane. It’s insane. And unaccomplishable. And we take that as commonplace. And the insistence that everything that happens in the world has occurred because humans wanted it to happen and that anybody that thinks otherwise is naïve and foolish that’s a problem. It has absolutely fed into this stuff.

I would at this point be so wary of writing a narrative that attempted to undermine what I think is the typical explanation and reason for things going wrong and that is stuff happening, stupidity as opposed to maliciousness. Confusion. Cowardice. Clumsiness. I mean, that’s why Chernobyl fascinated me. It was so human. There was no conspiracy. It was just human.

**John:** And to the degree that there was a conspiracy it was to try to cover up human mistakes.

**Craig:** It was just this mundane don’t blame me. You know? Which seems so true to all of this stuff. You know, I used to laugh at these people who insisted that George Bush did 9/11. And I’m like the same George Bush that couldn’t figure out how to plant one nuclear missile in the desert in Iraq? That guy? Really? No.

And the more we learn about government functions the more we realize that, you know, it’s not always well run. Sometimes it’s no better run than a bad job you had when you were 28. I’m really glad Chris asked this question. If people in Hollywood are writing these kinds of things right now I think they need to stop. And they need to really look at themselves and what they are encouraging.

There are conspiracies. We do know that Russia sends god knows how many bots to try to influence people. That’s a real story. Then investigate it like a real story. Do that. But don’t do the hyper-fictionalized government that knows all, sees all, and controls all.

**John:** Related I think we tend to create stories that are sort of one person against the system. And so the system is corrupt and only one person can bring it down.

**Craig:** Only I can fix this.

**John:** Yes. And I think that only I can fix this problem spills into real life because they start to believe like, oh, they don’t want you to believe this thing, they don’t want you to see this thing. You have to do your own research and really learn for yourself and basically don’t trust anybody. And I think what we’ve learned in this pandemic is that you do need to actually cooperate and work together to get stuff to happen and to get stuff resolved. And so beyond just the out-and-out conspiracy thriller thinking I think we need to just be aware of the degree to which we are feeding into this myth of one person alone makes a difference and that you cannot trust anybody else because the human condition is about trusting other people. That’s what makes us human.

**Craig:** And also just from a creative point of view robs you of relationships, partnerships, people coming together. We love that sort of thing for good reason. Because it mirrors our lives. Problems are not solved by one person. They are solved by people working together.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I’d love to see this change. And I’ve got to believe it is. Like I can’t imagine somebody sitting in a studio right now going, “Ooh, you know what we should do is a conspiracy theory. What really happened to those two planes that crashed, the Boeings?” No, no, it was because Boeing screwed up and they put the thing on the thing.

Yeah, you know, so hopefully.

**John:** I agree with you. I do think there is an awareness of this and I think we should just be vigilant about it and maybe just ask ourselves and ask the folks who are making our entertainment to really think twice before going full conspiracy.

**Craig:** Please think twice.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing comes from listener Tara and she sent through a link to a great collection of TV scripts and not just pilots. And so I will put a link in the show notes to this site. But basically it’s gathering up all of the TV scripts that this person could find online. And it’s really easy to find movie scripts because they’re out for award season. TV scripts, can be pretty easy to find pilots but not easy to find like here’s a random episode from the third season.

So, so helpful if you want to be writing television to just read the scripts and really understand how these scripts work on the page, how shows are formatted. You’ll find that showrunners tend to have a very similar format from year to year, season to season. If you want to copy a style copy the style of the shows that are actually produced. And I think you could spend many hours of your life reading these scripts and be a better education than probably any screenwriting book you could possibly pick up.

**Craig:** That’s a terrific resource. Thank you, Tara. My One Cool Thing is another game. I’ve just been hunting around. Sometimes I go through these dry spells where there’s just nothing good on the app store and then I picked up a couple. You know, the algorithm occasionally coughs up something at me and I go, ooh that.

This game has been around for a little bit. It’s called Circulous. It’s by Chain Reaction Games. It’s for iOS. It might be for Android. I don’t know. I don’t care about Android. And it’s sort of a puzzle game. You play a woman who has just been hired by a company called Circulous. It’s kind of like a Google/Apple corporation. And there is some sort of hacker enemy that’s trying to do stuff and you have to solve a whole bunch of problems.

So it’s kind of escape roomy in that regard. The puzzles are quite fair. They’re difficult but fair. What I love about it is the interface. It does this thing that a lot of games have tried to do and failed. You have your own laptop in the game. And you can tap on a thing that gets you to your laptop and you get notifications and you get emails and there’s like a little mini-browser inside to look up websites. And normally those are just awful in games, it’s almost like they had never seen. And in Circulous they’re quite good. They’ve actually done a really good job of creating that space that we’re really familiar with and making it feel quite functional and good.

So, I’m almost through with it. I think I’m creeping up towards the end but it’s really well done. I play a little bit each night before I pass out. So I highly recommend Circulous. Circulous from Chain Reaction Games.

**John:** Very nice. I will step in. It’s available at least on the Mac and iOS. So it may be available on other platforms as well.

And that is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Andrew Hart and it is the first appearance by Megana in an outro.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a good one. 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 I am @johnaugust. Craig also sometimes answers questions, but he’s not officially on Twitter anymore.

**Craig:** True.

**John:** We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the Three Page Challenges we talked through so you can download PDFs and read along with us. You’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter also at johnaugust.com. Inneresting has bunch of links to things about writing. So that comes out every Friday.

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 you’re about to hear with me and Sara Schaefer talking about three tips to getting your TV show on the air and the heartbreak that will follow thereafter.

Craig, it is a pleasure chatting with you.

**Craig:** Thanks. Good to be back, John.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Sara Schaeffer is a writer-producer-comedian and standup comic who has worked on a gazillion comedy variety shows, a lot of them on Comedy Central. Nikki and Sara Live. I’m literally going through your IMDb and you have so many credits Sara.

**Sara Schaefer:** It’s actually ridiculous.

**John:** So you know we’ve had people on the show before who have worked on a late night show, on a late night show for years and years and years, but you’ve popped around so many different things and sort of special events where it sounds like you’re getting together to put on one special event. Do you enjoy that?

**Sara:** Yes and no. So, I’ve hopped around so much in part because I’ve always been trying to get my own projects going, which is the big prize. I’ve done it once with Nikki and Sara Live on MTV. And that was an incredible experience and I’m always trying to sell another project that’s my own idea all the way to fruition. And so in order to do that because it is such a long haul to do that I’ve always taken jobs that are a little more short term. Well, I mean, a lot of times it’s not my choice. I will get hired on a show and it just doesn’t get renewed. Like talk shows. New talk shows are really hard to get going now if you’re not one of the institutional shows, or if you didn’t come from an institution. So I’ll just point to John Oliver and Sam Bee. They have been probably one of the only couple long-running shows. Even Amber Ruffin were talent that were incubated on another institution, like The Daily Show, or Seth Meyers. So that’s part of it.

But also I will hop around because I’m also a touring standup comedian. I’ve just always got my hand in so many different things. And so I like can’t be tied down, man.

**John:** No. We had Jen Statsky on the show recently and she was talking about her time.

**Sara:** Oh yeah.

**John:** I think she was on Fallon as well.

**Sara:** Yeah. She started right before I left the show. And I had a little goodbye drinks after my last day and she was there. And she was like, “I feel like we were going to become friends.” And I was like I know. I mean, and we’re still friendly with each other but like we didn’t have that long term working together friendship thing take place. But yeah.

**John:** One new show that you’re working on right now that will not get canceled because it’s entirely your show is the Schaefer Shakedown, the podcast.

**Sara:** That’s right. Nobody can cancel it. Because I’m the only person that works on it. There’s no money on the line. And there’s literally nothing involved other than my own desire to do it, so that’s good.

**John:** So Episode 7 of your show you shared your secrets for getting a TV series to air in three easy steps. And I thought we might listen to a little clip.

**Sara:** Sure.

[Clip plays]

**Sara:** Hi everyone. For today’s tutorial I’ll be showing you how to sell a TV show in just three simple steps. Step one, come up with an original idea or recycle an old idea that’s been done one million times, whatever your personal preference. Step 1A, tell your agent about the idea. Now if you’re curious how to get an agent I recommend checking out my other YouTube video entitled How To Get A Hollywood Agent in 600 Easy Steps.

So now that you’ve got your agent it’s time to tell them about your idea. Step 1B. Get feedback from your agent who will change the idea until it is good enough to pitch. To a network? No, not yet. You must first complete Step 1C. Finding a production. Now you will pitch your idea to various production companies. If one of them likes your idea you will work with them. Step 1D. Prepare the pitch with the production company. They will help you change the idea until it’s good enough for pitching. This can take several months to several years because they’ll also be insistent on finding a big name director or celebrity to attach. Sometimes big name directors and actors go on long vacations or are shooting a movie in New Zealand, so this can take time. While you’re waiting, I recommend taking up a hobby, like drinking.

[Clip ends]

**Sara:** That’s only the beginning.

**John:** Yes. So, I guess I’ll start with a question. Sara, how dare you? Because Craig and I have been doing this for 506 episodes and you just came out and just said it. You just laid the whole thing out. And what’s weird is that there are jokes in there. There’s funny writing within it but it’s also actually just honest about what the whole process is. And it’s just, ugh, I felt sick but seen as I listened to it.

**Sara:** You know, I always write, I fully write my podcast out. And then will riff as I go with it. But I was writing this episode and at first, I mean, I didn’t have this idea in my head. I always usually do on each episode I’ll do at least one little audio sketch like that one. And a lot of times I have the idea and then I’ll build the episode around it. But this time I was just writing my feelings about just being so frustrated with my career at this point. And so I decided to explain like you got to do this and this, because I was talking about how it’s hard for everyone in this business to make it, but if you have like just a little leg in, like if you’ve got fame, power, if you know somebody, if your dad is somebody important that it just greases the wheels a little bit.

**John:** Yeah.

**Sara:** And I was like if I could just get past the first step. And so I started to write that out. And then I was like oh this could be a funny YouTube tutorial. And I had to stop and rewrite that whole part and really think it through. So it really came from me just wanting to explain to people what you go through and it just worked very well in that format with the sort of monotone cheerfulness.

**John:** Step 1H part of it all. What I think is helpful is it’s a useful thing for young writers or people who are trying to make it in this business to send back to their parents to explain this is what I’m going through. Because there are so many steps where it’s like, yay, and I had a really good meeting, and they’re going to make an offer. Or you got a yes but there’s not an official offer. And you’re like what does that actually mean. And you explain it’s like, no, you’re waiting for the official offer even though you have the yes. It could be months and months and months before there’s anything like a deal. And that’s just to go to the next place which is to pitch to the next people.

**Sara:** Yeah. I think that is also why sometimes I feel defensive about that I’ve quit on my ideas sometimes. I go I didn’t quit. I got to a major obstacle that was so heartbreaking that I couldn’t move forward with it on my own anymore. It was too sad. Or I don’t even go out the gate with some ideas I have because I don’t have the energy to go through all those steps again and it’s so frustrating. And I think that I’ve had a lot of people, I had no idea that this video was going to go as far as it did. And I was like, oh, I really hit a nerve with people.

And I got a lot of people saying all those things you said like this is painful, I hate you, why are you trying to murder me. And then I got a lot of like I sent this to my family so they can understand. And everyone is talking about how far in the steps they’ve gone. I’m like I’ve gone all the way to the end once. And I’ve done every step between. And it’s just I think it’s the length of time it takes and how – and I say this at the end, at any moment it can just go away with no explanation. [laughs]

**John:** So in this pandemic, in this age of Zoom, I had a project which we were about to take out and then the pandemic hit, so it became all Zoom pitches. And there were so many times where we’d go out and we’d be pitching to a production entity or to a network or streamer and it would go through and it was like, yay, that was fantastic. And like, oh, they’re going to make a deal. And then, oh no, they changed the entire regime. It’s like twice we went to the same place and it’s like, oh no, the entire management structure has changed, which you referenced in this video. You could actually shoot your entire show and just like it never airs because the new people don’t want it on the air.

**Sara:** Yeah. That’s happened to multiple people I know where they went all the way, and it doesn’t make sense to me still, but even especially to someone who is not in this business. Why would a company spend so much money on something, it’s made, it’s in the can, and then to not put it on TV? It just is wild to me.

And I think you and I know reasons why. There is more money that has to be spent to take it all the way to that final step. And they maybe just want to cut their losses at that point. But it’s so demoralizing and just absurd.

**John:** Yeah. So in some ways it makes me nostalgic for Quibi and just the fact that anybody could get a show on Quibi. It was literally like “Are you alive? Here’s your show on Quibi.” But you actually talk to people who tried to do the Quibi shows and it was incredibly heartbreaking. And then to make one of those shows and like, oh, your network doesn’t exist anymore. Who knows when someone will ever see this thing again?

**Sara:** The tales of heartbreak that I’ve heard from putting this video out, and just from people – it was also, like you said, you feel seen and not alone. I felt seen back because so many people – major stars that I like love and I’m like what problem do you have in your life, Seth Rogan, like why – he retweeted it. And I’m like, oh, this spoke to him. And that just really made me go you know what it’s hard for everybody and it is easier for some people to get the wheels turning, but it’s crazy for everyone. And dreams die all the time. It is just a testament to how – you know, so many people were like oh I’m not even at Step 1C. And I’m like do you understand how hard it is to even get to Step 1A?

You have an agent. That’s why I said at the beginning I was like oh I know if I put this out people are going to go how do I get an agent. And I’m like that’s a whole other thing.

**John:** It is a very, very different thing. A thing I think I would add to a future incarnation, or if you ever make the book version of this is that same giant celebrity who you want to get on your project will make it so much easier to sell. That giant celebrity is a giant celebrity because he’s attached to every other project as well. And so trying to get that person’s sole attention, that’s a thing, too.

And so it’s not just the movie they’re shooting in New Zealand. It’s just will you be his or her first priority ever? And that’s really tough. And so, yeah, even this afternoon I was on a pitch to a production company. And I’m trying to get this production company onboard. And it’s just – you know, at every level you’re still just kind of hustling and you’re looking for that extra element that sort of makes it like, oh, it’s sort of impossible to say no to. And there never is an impossible to say no to.

**Sara:** Yeah. Got to be undeniable! There’s always a way to deny somebody the goods. I’ve learned to take every victory and every yes – to take every yes in this process as a huge victory, knowing that even if it doesn’t go all the way and no one ever sees it, you know, you did something. And it’s hard to do when you’re not getting – in those very first steps you’re not getting paid for a long time, so that’s tough.

And so it’s always a balance between finding a way to make – I always say this to people. You’ve got to have your money maker lane and your dream lane. Sometimes those lanes converge and sometimes they don’t. And, you know, that’s always been my way. It’s tough though because sometimes I have said no to jobs, money on the table, because it was just money and I had a dream that I wanted to work on. And sometimes that doesn’t pay off.

But, you know, I wrote a book. It came out a year ago. And a lot of people were like, oh, this sucks, I’m just going to just stick to books instead. And I’m like what?

**John:** Oh god. No.

**Sara:** It’s just as hard, if not harder.

**John:** Sara, I wrote a trilogy and just the pushing the boulder up the hill for a trilogy is like, oh, you think you’re done. It’s like, no, no, you’ve got two more of those to do. And support. And put it out there in the world. So, it’s tough.

**Sara:** When I went into writing a book I had no idea. And then I was like I wrote eight books in the course of this process. And when the book was done and it came out people were like are you going to make this into a TV show or movie? And I’m like, sure, I’d love to. But do you understand – and that has stalled that process.

But I had one really amazing actress who I loved who I had no idea that it had gotten into her hands. And she read it, loved it, and was like I want to star, produce, direct, I want it all. And I’m like, oh my god, here we go, but knowing this is probably never going to happen. But just the fact that she read it and liked it and I didn’t force it in her hands. Like somebody just gave it to her I think. I don’t know how it happened but I was just like this would be so amazing.

And I had a little celebration just for that moment knowing that it wasn’t probably going to go anywhere. And it hasn’t. [laughs] You know?

**John:** At least this went someplace. So, thank you again for this explanation of the steps of this which I think will live on for many, many years. It will keep getting passed around. So that is a thing we know will exist out there in the world. You’ve explained it once. It never needs to be explained again.

**Sara:** Yeah.

**John:** Sara Schaefer. Thank you so much. I would love to have you back on the show for a full episode.

**Sara:** Anytime.

**John:** Fantastic. Thanks Sara.

**Sara:** All right, thanks John.

**John:** Bye.

**Sara:** Bye.

Links:

* [Courtney Kemp’s Deal at Netflix](https://deadline.com/2021/08/power-creator-courtney-kemp-signs-netflix-deal-lionsgate-1234813246/)
* [Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park Deal](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/south-park-deals-trey-parker-matt-stone-1234995748/)
* [Hello Sunshine Sale](https://deadline.com/2021/08/reese-witherspoon-hello-sunshine-acquired-blackstone-venture-r-kevin-mayer-tom-staggs-1234807439/?fbclid=IwAR2BTj1Qpmgxv7-1rQIDJFObtsTE7noAIKfXqTX3FVaZ1p-s5qUN79BODGQ)
* [Frankenweenie](https://www.disneyplus.com/movies/frankenweenie/msxVowQvL18k)
* [Trickster: Night of the Kitsune by Hiroshi Mori](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2021%2F05%2FTrickster-Night-Of-The-Kitsune_3Page.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=1a05c101fbb1b815b66977e9a5a07369a818c6fa2e8e28426a6d08949f1fd148)
* [Martha by Caroline O’Riordan](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2021%2F06%2FMartha_Caroline-ORiordan3.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=b0776dca79a91180707f676b8f2900eaa4f962fedaedefde4cf9d6d4aee9578d)
* [The Many Lives of Newton Thomas by Sean Frost](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2021%2F05%2FTMLONT-Three-Pages.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=1e7a0d0abf0e46eb4b9f25ccead6588a5a7850829a1f50e6aa1bf69c717ad53d)
* [Collection of TV Scripts](https://sites.google.com/site/tvwriting/)
* [Circulous Game](https://www.chainreactiongames.org/circulous/)
* [Sara Schaefer’s Twitter Clip](https://twitter.com/saraschaefer1/status/1421622886574395393)
* [Schaefer Shakedown](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-schaefer-shakedown/id1565766154)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Andrew Hart ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/512standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/513-writing-for-stars).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 513 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig is off somewhere in the Canadian wilderness this week, but I am very excited to welcome back a writer whose career we’ve followed from Saving Mr. Banks to 50 Shades of Gray, and the upcoming Venom: Let There Be Carnage. I speak, of course, of Kelly Marcel. Kelly Marcel, welcome back.

**Kelly Marcel:** Hello. Hello.

**John:** It is such a delight. And thank you so much for coming in to fill in for Craig while he’s gone.

**Kelly:** My absolute pleasure.

**John:** So last I spoke with you you were in England I think because you were working on Venom. But I talked to you this week and you are in Louisiana?

**Kelly:** Yes. I’m here in New Orleans which is an incredible city because I have a TV show that’s probably about to shoot here.

**John:** Oh great.

**Kelly:** We’re actually trying to decide whether it’s going to be here or New York. And I happen to have family in New Orleans, so in the pandemic I came here knowing that I was potentially going to be here or New York at the end of the year. And they’re very close to one another.

**John:** So I was surprised and delighted to have you in a closer time zone which makes this much easier to do. But last I texted with you or spoke with you I was asking you a very writerly question in that I had a character who needed to live in a London neighborhood. I needed to know what London neighborhood this specific character would live in. So thank you very much for weighing in on that. Because how am I going to know London neighborhoods if I don’t have great London friends.

**Kelly:** I’ll always help you with anything British-y.

**John:** Excellent. Well, you can help us out on the podcast today because we have a lot to talk through. I want to talk about the experience you and I have had which is a little unusual which is writing with and for an actor, when you know who is going to be in that role and that person is helping you work on the script.

**Kelly:** Right.

**John:** I also want to talk about translating action on the page to the screen, which is something that you and I have had a lot of experience with and you have had really firsthand experience with both the first and second Venom. So really going from what three pages look like in your script to what the experience is of shooting those pages and producing those.

And in our bonus segment for premium members I want to talk about visas for international writers. We have a blog post that’s up where we asked some writers to contribute their experiences about getting a US work visa as an international writer. And Kelly Marcel has experience on that, too. So I’m going to ask her what she can tell us about that process.

**Kelly:** That’s something I definitely have experience. I’d love to talk about.

**John:** Wonderful. Thank you so much. Unlike the people who want to listen to the back episodes, we have one episode where you and Craig and I were playing this roleplaying game where my character ended up being killed. I don’t think I will die in this episode. But there’s no promises this time.

**Kelly:** That episode was so fun and I’ll also add that we were all quite drunk.

**John:** We were. I think the ideal amount of alcohol for a Scriptnotes recording is like one to 1.5 glasses of wine. More than that was consumed during the recording of that episode.

**Kelly:** Definitely more.

**John:** But first we actually have some news to talk about. So this was in Variety, an article by Kevin Tran, where they’re looking at a report based on how theatrical movies are streaming online. Basically the movies that were supposed to go to the big screens but actually showed up on streaming services, how they really did. And the answer is they seemed to do pretty well. They actually outperformed a lot of the series that were there. And it’s the first kind of insight we’ve had into what these big movies that were supposed to go on the big screen but showed up on the small screen during the pandemic, the numbers they actually generated.

So, with Venom, you have a movie that at this point is planning to come out theatrically, but I’m sure as a producer there were discussions the whole time through about whether you were going to get your theatrical release.

**Kelly:** Yeah. I mean, look, I’ll say that I think that Tom Rothman is really sticking to his guns on this. And I kind of admire for it. I think he’s really invested in preserving and protecting the theatrical experience for audiences. And there are just some movies that you have to see in a room, on a big screen, with a bucket of warm popcorn on your lap. And, you know, he is such a cinephile and a true movie lover that I think he believes in that religiously. And so actually with Venom 2: Let There Be Carnage he has always said it will be a theatrical release.

I mean, obviously the world is changing and we’ve had to move the date a couple of times because of COVID. And we’ll see, you know, if we are able to stick to that. But I kind of love him for really, really, really holding firm on allowing audiences to see this in the theater.

**John:** Well you’ve had experiences earlier on with Cruella. So basically every writer who worked on Cruella has been a Scriptnotes guest, which I’m really proud of. But with Cruella that was both a day-and-date. So people could watch it on Disney+ as a premium entry or they could see it in theaters. And so you had the chance to do both. And you were saying you actually got to see it on a big screen in New Orleans because you got yourself a theater for it.

**Kelly:** We did. And Cruella is actually one of those movies that did well streaming. And so who knows. But I definitely wanted people that I knew to see it on a big screen. And I wanted to see it on a big screen, too. And there is this incredible little one screen movie theater in New Orleans called the Prytania Theater which is actually the oldest operating theater in New Orleans that dates back to 1915. It was the first theater to come back after Katrina. And the only theater that they had for a while. And it’s been made famous in books and it’s just this gorgeous kind of magical place.

And it had been badly hit, you know, during the pandemic because it had had to close as did everything. So, I rented it out for an evening and invited all of – this was during a period where everything was open and high vaccination rates, etc. Invited all of our friends, 50 of them, to come and see the movie on a big screen. And it was so lovely and magical to get to experience it that way in this small theater in this little part of town.

And, again, that’s an experience that can’t be recreated in your home I don’t think. And so I’m really glad that we were able to do that and I hopefully will do it again with Venom 2.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve had a chance to see some movies in the theater since started opening back up. The first thing I saw on a big screen was a test screening of a friend’s movie and that was still like really locked down and everyone was incredibly socially distanced and it was still at the time that we were putting on hand sanitizer a lot.

**Kelly:** Right.

**John:** But then I got to see A Quiet Place in theaters which was terrific to see there. I saw In the Heights on a giant screen at the Chinese which was just amazing and it’s a movie you want to see on a big screen. And I got to see Free Guy on a big screen, too, which was all terrific. And yet data like this coming out of this report shows that the studios are making some good money, or at least getting good viewership when they put stuff on streaming. So it’s going to be really interesting to see as we move out of this next wave which of these films sort of keep to they’re strictly theatrical and long windows and which ones go back to this 45-day window which seems to be sort of where we’re settling on now, where 45 days after the theatrical release it’s showing up on these services.

It’s really an open question how much we’re going to move back to the pre-pandemic way of releasing movies.

**Kelly:** Is it 45 days after the theatrical release that it goes to streaming? Because I thought it was a much shorter window now between the theatrical release and then putting it on streaming.

**John:** From what I understand it sounds like the Free Guy model was still 45 days, which I think they’re also trying to do for the next Shang-Chi Marvel movie. But I think there’s still open questions for that. And I think it also matters whether it’s free streaming versus the $20 whatever–

**Kelly:** Paid streaming.

**John:** Yeah. The paid streaming. And we haven’t talked a lot about paid streaming on the show, but premium video on demand, which is what Cruella was when it came out there, is a really good deal for you as the screenwriter. You got actual real money on that that you wouldn’t have gotten off of just theatrical.

**Kelly:** Right.

**John:** So it’s an interesting balance for screenwriters as well.

**Kelly:** Yeah. And I was reading that it wasn’t so brilliant actors. I don’t know what the Scarlet thing is with Black Widow. I haven’t really followed it closely, but I’m wondering why it’s not as great for actors because box office bonuses I guess?

**John:** Yeah. Really it comes down to box office bonuses which you and I would probably have in our contract as well, but hers are a lot bigger.

**Kelly:** Right.

**John:** And so I say the premium video on demand is good for a WGA residual, sort of that automatically calculated thing. But her argument is that by releasing it on streaming and theatrically it lowered how much it could make theatrically and therefore she should be compensated for the money she lost out of that.

**Kelly:** Right. And I think that’s why Netflix just paid Daniel Craig a big bunch of money, right, because he won’t make those theatrical bonuses.

**John:** Those negotiations are going to be tough. And it really comes back down to knowing how many people saw this movie which the studios and streamers have been loath to sort of share. And this report that came out in Variety Premium talks through basically another way to get at those numbers which is doing kind of like what Nielsen does. It’s called T-Vision which is surveying 5,000 US households to see what they’re actually watching. And through that they can see that, oh, Raya and the Last Dragon was a big hit in terms of viewership.

**Kelly:** Right.

**John:** Or that Luca was a huge hit for viewership, which is not surprising. These are the animated movies that would generally be big family drivers of viewership.

**Kelly:** I’ve been hearing a lot about these short term windows that we were just talking about and wondering actually if that’s going to be good for creators because the shorter the window now between a theatrical release and streaming means that theaters will probably need more content. And so my hope, I guess, is that we see more content being needed to go into theaters. And my hope for that would be smaller indie movies going into these slots and us kind of trying to claw that back a bit.

**John:** It would be fantastic if some of these smaller movies that kind of can only now get a streaming release can find some big screen time, just because there are available screens for it. We’ll see if that happens. It’s going to be challenging. But it’s possible.

You know, if you look back to the rise of indie films in the ‘90s and sort of what happened there, it was because there was capacity. There were actually screens that they could show these on. And so the movies that would have otherwise never made out to other than New York and Los Angeles could actually make it out to deeper markets. And that’s why you have Clerks being able to shown at theaters across America which 10 years earlier would never have happened.

**Kelly:** Right.

**John:** So it’s hard to predict what’s going to happen, but things will definitely change as we move out of this pandemic. And it’s important that we have some people actually finding the data to see who is watching these things because obviously Disney and Netflix and HBO Max know these things but they’re not sharing that.

**Kelly:** Why don’t they share that?

**John:** Because it’s their secret sauce. Because if they were able to show how much people were watching these things you and me and Ryan Reynolds and Tom Hardy would be insisting on a bigger cut of that. [laughs] Which is a natural segue to writing for and with some actors, because this is an experience that you and I have that not a lot of friends do. Because you and I have definitely come into movies for rewrite situations where a script was written and then a star is attached and we have to sort of tailor the part towards that star. And that’s common, but you and I have had the experience of from scratch we are working on a project that we know is going to a certain actor and that actor is involved in the development process, which can be great, but it can also be challenging.

So I thought we might spend a few minutes talking through the pros and cons and best practices for writers who find themselves in that situation. For you Tom Hardy was a friend from way back, from way back in London days, right?

**Kelly:** Mm-hmm. Tom and I have known each other for nearly 20 years.

**John:** And so when it came time to work on something with him, because you came in on the first Venom, but it’s really Venom 2 was the first time you were coming in from scratch. What is that relationship like? What is that discussion like? Because he obviously knows a lot about the character, but you know a lot about the character and you know a lot about writing. How did you first sort of approach that process of figuring out how you’re going to do the sequel?

**Kelly:** Well it’s important to know that Tom and I have always been collaborators. So how we came together is he was setting up a theater company in London. He asked me to come and write for that theater company. So we’ve always worked together in this capacity. So we know it very well. Venom wasn’t the first thing that I came into rewrite specifically for him. We worked on Bronson together. We worked on Mad Max together. And he’s always been an extremely creative powerhouse. He’s always had ideas.

So when it came to Venom 1, having worked with him before I knew coming in that he would have a lot of ideas and that he would have creative input, which he does. And, you know, Venom 1 was kind of a scramble and there was a preexisting script and we were rewriting on set. And we were kind of like making that movie as we made that movie. And kind of finding out what it was along the way. So when it came to Venom 2 we really knew that it had this very strange tone, sort of this balance between comedy, kind of horror, and typical Marvel action. And we kind of knew as well what the audience had loved about Venom 1. And so we very much wanted to double down on those things.

Tom immediately sort of came to the table and said, “Look I’ve got an idea for the story for Venom 2 and a character that I would love to bring into Venom 2.” And we kind of started there. And we were breaking the story together over FaceTime because I was in LA and he was in London. So, poor guy was doing some very, very late nights. And as we started to break the story together it became obvious that this was half his story and he needed a Story by credit. And so we immediately kind of made sure that he would have that credit, which is unusual for actors. Although I think Ryan has one, right?

**John:** He does. And so he actually had a writing credit on Deadpool stuff before then. So as we started this project we’re working on now we actually negotiated for him to be a writer on the project as well as being an actor and a producer from the start, which was important for this.

But my actual first experience with writing with and for an actor was on the first Charlie’s Angels. So Drew Barrymore was attached to star and to produce. And with that, you know, she had a clear sense of the tone we were going for and really the initial conversations were all about tone and what it should feel like. And so that collaboration was very much a let’s describe the world. Let’s paint what this ultimate movie should feel like. It wasn’t so plot intensive. It wasn’t so down to the nitty gritty details of this thing. It ultimately got there, but in the blue sky stage of it she was really important because I would have probably written a different movie if it hadn’t been Drew Barrymore involved. The tone of it would have been really different. And the vision for what we’re headed for.

So that is definitely a huge advantage to having that actor, that performer, involved from the very start is because you can sort of sense what it is you’re headed towards. Having a director onboard obviously early on is also a similar kind of experience because you know what they are aiming for in terms of the movie they want to shoot and in terms of what they actually feel like they can deliver. Challenging to have both, in my experience, having both the actor and the director onboard, because their visions may not match and then whose lead you’re following can be really difficult.

**Kelly:** Yeah, that can get very confusing. And very tricky because you’re very much in the middle as the writer at that point. I think we were very lucky on Venom 2 because we sort of had the freedom to write the script first before we had attached a director. So when Andy Serkis came onboard he came onboard with a full script. And that was kind of great that there weren’t kind of two voices. Although Ruben Fleischer on the first movie and Tom I think saw the movie very similarly, so we didn’t really have any of those problems on Venom 1. But it can be like that. I’ve experienced that elsewhere and that can be very tricky.

**John:** Let’s talk some other cons of the actor being involved. Because there have been times where I’ve had conversations where someone is objecting to a thing or feeling nervous about a thing and it can be hard to suss out whether are they talking as the producer of the film, are they talking as the actor in the film. Are they talking about this character as a character or as someone they’re going to be playing? And that balance between there can be really challenging. They very reasonably see everything in the story through the eyes of their character because that’s the character they’re going to be playing. But it can challenging to sort of get them to focus on this is everything else that’s around this.

And I don’t know if you’ve had that experience, not necessarily with Tom, but on other projects which you had to come on and help. It can be challenging as the writer who is responsible for the whole movie to make sure that their focus on their own character doesn’t dominate things.

**Kelly:** Yeah, absolutely. There have definitely been rewrites on other projects where I’ve experienced that. With Tom it’s more about I think things that he thinks are going to be really fun to play. And you’re like but does it fit in the movie? And also don’t forget that Tom is seeing through the lens of two characters, not just one.

**John:** Yes. Because he’s playing both himself as the human, but also playing Venom, the actual alien symbiote who has a completely different personality.

**Kelly:** Completely different personality, which by the way, this is one of the pros of working particularly with this actor is that when I write a scene Tom is literally there on FaceTime performing it back to me, as both Venom and Eddie. It’s quite extraordinary actually watching him do it. He does both voices and he plays against himself. But it means that I immediately know if those lines are working. Or if they don’t, which is an incredible gift.

But, yeah, there are definitely things that are like oh you want to do that because that’s just really fun kind of like action, but actually you know what why not put things in that are fun? Why not go to work and actually have a great day because you got to do something so crazy and amazing? I have to say that Sony were incredibly generous with us in the freedom that they gave us to play in this Venom sandbox and this Venom 2 movie I think you’ll watch it thinking oh my god they had so much fun doing that.

**John:** Yeah. You’re making the kind of movie where you really want to have that feeling. And so that’s great that you could actually do that.

Let’s talk some downsides of writing with and working with actors or with the star. Because – and this is not necessarily about, well it can be about their involvement in the writing, but also one of the blessings of big stars is that people want to make movies with big stars. And they’re attached and that movie will get made more likely. One of the challenges of big stars is that they are so busy and they’re offered so much that the project you’re working on could get pushed and pushed and pushed until you just don’t know where you are on their dance card.

Obviously it’s better with something like this where he is the main star and there’s a huge priority to make it. And having him invested in the writing of it probably pushes it further ahead. But it’s always a thing I warn newer writers about who are like, oh, I have this star attached. I’m like, wow, that’s exciting, and could be a challenge when Leonardo DiCaprio has 10 movies stacked up that he can pick between.

**Kelly:** Right. So many friend of mine, directors, big directors and big writers who have big stars attached to their movies and have had them attached to their movies for years. And their movies keep getting pushed and pushed and pushed because these people are very much in demand. I mean, you know, we just to push a little bit on a TV show that I’m doing because it has a very, very big star in it. And he got offered a massive movie. And that movie is very – it’s not Tom – but you know that movie is very appealing.

And so he’s going to do that first and it pushes the entire shoot. We’re really lucky that he’ll definitely come onto ours next, but I’ve seen movies sit around for years.

**John:** Oh absolutely. Things that are on the edge of production and it’s about one actor’s availability, or suddenly this movie is running long and then you’re going to lose the other actor because of this thing. It becomes really challenging. And so having an actor attached is a blessing, but it can also be a curse. And you’re always asking yourself is it worth it. When is it worth it? And when do you need to move on to another actor to sort of get the thing to happen?

**Kelly:** I know. I know. And that’s always such a tricky decision because you’ve lived with the idea of this person in your head. And it’s very hard to let that go. I would say as well the power of having a big actor like Tom or Leonardo or anybody really of that caliber, and Ryan, particularly if they are involved in the creation of your movie it means that they are really, really, really attached to that movie and invested in it. And so they protect the work. And when you have a star that’s protective of the script then, you know, you’re in a really great position.

**John:** They’re invested in the movie, but they’re also invested in the movie’s success, which is hugely important, too. Because having a giant star in a movie that they don’t really care about or like does you no good when it comes time to promote the movie, when it comes time to do everything else. When you have the star who has been in there since day one making the movie work when it comes time to promote it they will promote the hell out of it. And that really pays off. I mean, there’s a reason why Ryan Reynolds is sort of marketer of the year. He’s really good and works really hard at pushing things out there in the world. And that is worth more than anything in terms of the publicity and promotion you’re able to get out of them is crucial.

**Kelly:** Yeah. He’s particularly brilliant at it.

**John:** Yeah. And not every actor is going to be that way. But let’s talk about one thing which is that I think there’s this perception that if you write something for a specific actor then that role is inevitably locked to that actor. In my experience there have been so many times where I’ve worked on something where really it was tailored for one actor and then that person can’t do it and someone else does it and it works brilliantly.

**Kelly:** Yeah.

**John:** And in some ways just the fact that one actor could play a thing makes the character work enough that you could swap somebody else in and it actually just does brilliantly.

**Kelly:** Absolutely. I mean, that happens all of the time. I don’t know about you, John, but for me it’s really helpful to have somebody in mind when you’re writing. I really love to kind of plaster my walls with pictures of who I think this character is, whether it’ll actually be that actor or not, and think about cadences and tones of voices and facial expressions and body movement and the whole sort of being of a person as I’m putting the words that they’re going to speak and the actions that they’re going to do on a page.

I did it on Saving Mr. Banks. 50 Shades of Gray. And it really, really helps me to have that visual in my head to really know who it is. And then, you know, inevitably it doesn’t end up being that actor. But I still know who that character is having sort of seen them play it out in my head if you know what I mean.

**John:** But I think it also translates to the page. There’s something about the scripts you read that really work you sort of feel like you saw the movie. If you ask two years later did you see that movie it’s like I’m not sure. Wait, did I just read it? Because with really good scripts you feel like you saw it. And it’s because there’s just a consistency of that character and you really felt like you saw an actor in that role even though there was no actor. It was just the words on the page.

So, yeah, I think it’s great to pick actors you want to be in this thing, even if they’re unrealistic choices for the small indie drama you’re going to make.

**Kelly:** Of course.

**John:** Just having the consistency of voice and tone and body movement and just approach can be really, really helpful. And so I always – I do sort of cast out my movies as I’m writing them knowing that they’re not likely to be those actors in the final roles.

**Kelly:** I think you should think big because I think those big actors that you know so well are the ones that you can imagine more easily as you write these things because you’ve seen them do a million different movies. You’ve seen the way that they walk, the way that they talk, and different characters that they’ve been able to play.

**John:** Julia Roberts has played a ton of different characters, but I do have a sense of how her face works and how her energy is. And it’s useful to be able to write to that. Same with Will Smith. I’ve gotten to work on two movies with Will Smith and I do have a sense of what is going to be funny coming out of him. But if it’s somebody else put in that role I think it will still work because there’s a consistent thought and approach to it.

**Kelly:** Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know and that’s how it is with Tom. It’s really like a shorthand writing for him now because I’ve seen him do so many different things. And I kind of know his cadences and his tones and how something is going to come out of his mouth and his body as he moves it. And so it’s really a joy.

**John:** So you were working on the script from the very start and so you delivered a script, you got a director, and all that worked. But I suspect there was also a lot of writing on the set, or things that would come up. What was the relationship between you and Tom writing stuff during production?

**Kelly:** Well, it’s a really unique experience on Venom. So how Venom works is Tom starts his day in the makeup trailer obviously and then he comes onto set. And the first thing that he does is record Venom. So we have this sound guy, Patrick, who basically plays Venom back to Tom through his ear on the set. So Tom has an ear wig. And the Venom lines, which we treat, so it sounds like Venom in his head.

**John:** Oh that’s great.

**Kelly:** Are played to him so that he has himself to kind of play off of on the set. And we’ll have Venom in our cans. So everybody can hear what Tom is hearing. And then Andy will have a mic and I will have a mic. And those mics are directly connected to Tommy’s earpiece. No one else can hear what we’re saying to Tom through his earpiece.

As you know, it’s all very well sitting reading a script and reading out the lines, but you stand it on its feet and you start moving it around a set and it somehow just doesn’t work because now you’re up on your feet and now you have to put physical movement into this scene, or the blocking doesn’t fit the line, or there’s a million things that cannot work about a scene because it’s now suddenly a physical, living, breathing thing. And Tom really is a perfectionist and he wants every scene and every line to be the best line that it can be. And there’s a lot of comedy in Venom as well. So we’re always trying to beat ourselves. We’re always trying to beat the line. And so the luxury of him having this earpiece means that he has this incredible ability to follow you live in a scene and respond if you jump in with new lines for him. So, you can keep the camera rolling and I can throw new lines into his earpiece as Venom, which he’ll respond to, or give him Eddie lines so he’ll take a beat and then he’ll start the scene again with the new Eddie lines.

And we got so used to it on Venom 1 that it was kind of like second nature. But on Venom 2 when we had Andy come in and we had Bob Richardson who is this incredible DP. He’s Quentin Tarantino’s DP. Incredible.

**John:** An icon.

**Kelly:** A new producer coming in. They were like oh my god how is he doing that? And Andy would be able to say, “Tom, walk over to that draw and open it.” And then we’d plant things in there for him so that he had surprises and was kept on his toes through scenes. I really have never seen another actor do it. And weirdly there is this scene in Bronson where he does play two characters. He plays a nurse and himself and he turns his face to the makeup side of the nurse when he’s doing the nurse lines, and the Charlie Bronson side of his face when he’s doing the Bronson lines. And he did that all in one take and it’s incredible.

And so when we came to Venom it really reminded me of that scene in Bronson. And I was like, yeah, I know he can do this. Like I know he has this unique ability to switch between characters right there in the moment live and can take lines from you while he’s acting. It’s extraordinary.

**John:** That sounds great. Now my question is as you’re doing these improv bits where you’re changing stuff around, you have to make decisions about I think that worked or I think that didn’t work just in terms of coverage, right? Probably you’re doing some of that stuff in a master, but then you have to decide which of those things worked well enough that we want to make sure we get coverage on that. Was that ever a factor you had to remember, oh, we need to get more of that so we can actually make that work? Or are these really master decisions?

**Kelly:** You know, it’s sort of a bit of both. If something is really, really working and we know that it got the right response on the set then that’s the thing that we’re going to come in and collect. We’re going to collect as much as we possibly can. And so if we’ve shot something in a master and we’ve shot it a bunch of different ways and we’re going to try and shoot it again in the close-ups with the different lines as well. And he’ll just roll those out.

And by the way sometimes it isn’t live through his mic. Sometimes a scene isn’t working and you know how this goes. Then it’s a huddle in video village. Everybody is around the laptop. And we’re all there scrambling to fix a scene. Often Tom and I will write a scene three different ways and know that we’re going to go in there and shoot it three different ways and then decide having done it which one we think works best.

It’s quite fast paced this shooting of these kinds of movies. And we do find the time to be able to do it different ways.

**John:** Cool. So Venom is of course an action-comedy, but the action part of it is incredibly important, too. So I thought we might take a look at the script for the first Venom and take a look at a couple of pages early on in the first act of this. And just sort of see what an action sequence looks like on the page and talk through sort of how that translates to what we’re finally seeing on the screen. So, we’ll start with what was there in Courier and what that becomes on the day. And then where the choices that have to happen in post and sort of figuring out what the final version of this is.

So, we’re going to put a link in the show notes to just these three pages, page 31 to page 33 of the Venom script. And let’s talk through what’s happening here.

In the first movie Eddie is finding Maria, this journalist he’s been looking for. She’s in this detention cell.

**Kelly:** She’s actually the homeless–

**John:** That’s the homeless person. That’s right. So she is in this detention cell and clearly something is very wrong with her. He’s trying to break her out of this and she is actually infected by this thing we’re going to find out more about. And Eddie is also infected and doesn’t sort of know it at this point.

The action writing here is really good. And it’s kind of dense on the page and yet I’m never struggling to get through it. And all caps. You’re using italics. You’re using underlines to sort of keep us focused on what is important happening moment by moment.

“Maria LEAPS ON EDDIE, knocks him down and with surprising strength, PUNCHES HIM repeatedly in the chest and face. Maria, atop Eddie, wraps her hands around his throat, CHOKING HIM. Eddie struggles, gasping for air—“

That’s all one paragraph and yet it doesn’t feel like too much. And it probably is an accurate reflection of the amount of time we would be seeing onscreen.

**Kelly:** Right.

**John:** So talk to us about this sequence. Were you on set for this sequence?

**Kelly:** I was on set. I was on set every day.

**John:** Every day. Tell me what you can remember about this as you wrote it, then the discussions with blocking and how this came from just the page to talking with stunts, talking with director, figuring out how to shoot this thing. Figuring out what you’re actually going to build here. Can you just describe this environment and the decisions that went into shooting this action sequence, the stuff that’s happening here in this complex?

**Kelly:** Yes. Well this was an incredible set that was built with all these kind of lasers and crazy strobe lights. And so as you can see on the page none of that is indicated. That’s all done by our incredible production designer imagining what this thing will end up looking like and working with Ruben to build that set.

We also had the amazing DP Matthew Libatique on this movie who with this movie kind of kept the camera moving the whole time. He really brought an energy to the entire movie by constantly keeping it moving. So we knew that Matty would be moving the camera around during the scene. We knew that he had all of these strobe lights going. And crazy colors. And then we also had this brilliant actress, Melora Walters, playing Maria, who worked really well with Tom.

And so they’re friends in the movie, so they have a history prior to this scene. He cares about her. We’ve established that. And as we started to talk through this scene we realized that she having been infected would be incredibly powerful. And completely different to the Maria that Eddie already knows. So we knew that there would be shock, fear. You know, Eddie is not your typical action hero either. The way that Tom decided to play him was not a tall, this big–

**John:** Dashing knight. He’s sort of not mousy but he has a–

**Kelly:** He’s scared.

**John:** Yeah. He’s scared. He’s a coward.

**Kelly:** Yeah. He was like the reality of being taken over by an alien is that you will be completely terrified. And not know what is going on. And so he gets into this very physical fight with this woman who is incredibly strong. And of course she’s winning. Because Eddie Brock is a journalist, you know. And so we definitely wanted to play with that. We definitely wanted him not to be able to win easily. We knew that Matty wanted to move in and out of whatever the action was taking place in this scene. And then once he had been infected by the symbiote we really wanted to see a complete change in Eddie’s physicality and to see that suddenly he can climb up walls. Suddenly he can run faster than he has ever run before. And climb a great, big, huge tree as well.

And so in this scene as we were writing this scene these were all thoughts that have been right there at the beginning of writing this script. And I’ll add that Jeff Pinkner and Scott Rosenberg also wrote this script. And so some of this scene preexisted and some of it didn’t. And so this is definitely a mismatch of all of our writing, as is the whole script. And those guys are amazing and they’re actually really brilliant at action.

And so I took a lot of inspiration from action that they had written for this movie, because I loved the way they write action. It’s concise. It’s clear. I really think they’re absolutely brilliant at it.

**John:** Some things I want to point out that are good on the page, too, is on page 32 about two-thirds of the way down, “The Guards drop. Eddie stands there for a moment, incredulous at his own fighting skills– “Did I just do that?!” In quotation marks and italics. And it’s a thing we talk about on Scriptnotes a lot is that sometimes you have to sort of speak the thought because that is a very playable moment. So he doesn’t need to say that, but we can see that in his face. But if can see it on his face it needs to actually be in the script. So it was so important to put that there.

**Kelly:** Yeah. You’ll see a lot of WTFs in the descriptive passages of Venom 2 if we ever get to release that script. Yeah, I really like to do that. I think it’s really helpful for the actor. I think it’s really helpful for the reader. And it’s just very clear and concise. Rather than writing a whole sentence about he can’t believe he just did that.

**John:** So let’s talk about, we’ll just go on this sequence with Maria and Eddie, just that sort of first moment. So this is where he’s breaking her out of the cage and then the first time the symbiote is sort of going into Eddie here.

On the day, or on the days because this was probably more than a single day of shooting, talk to us about how you figure out the blocking for who is going to be where. Was all that blocking done in advance? How much was handled on the set as people were first showing up? What was the decision process there?

**Kelly:** Well obviously this is stunts. So, first of all Melora is a very athletic actress. So all the way back to casting you’re thinking about casting somebody that can do the physicality of this part. It’s very important. So then Melora is brought in as is Tom and as is Tom’s double, Jacob, into fight rehearsals. And so a lot of this blocking is done not on the day but weeks prior. When you’re looking at an action sequence it isn’t just blocked in the morning and then you shoot it. It’s very thoroughly and carefully and safely worked out weeks in advance. And so what will happen generally is you will have stunt coordinators with their own stunt people doing sort of a practice version of the scene which you will then see. They will film, they’ll show it to you, or you can see it live if we all happen to be in the same building.

And then once that is signed off on by the director you, and producers, you will then bring the actors in to see what that scene is. And generally Jacob and Tom who have worked together for years, and years, and years will have their own ideas that come from character. And then they will kind of incorporate those ideas into the fight sequence. And then Melora will be there also with her ideas and then they will start to work this thing through, beat by beat. But it will take days, maybe even a week to really fully flesh out this scene from top to bottom and the fight from top to bottom which is always done in a kind of slow-mo, you know, up until the last minute when you can move it to real speed.

Then once that’s worked out they’ll bring it onto the set. And that’s when we’ll show Matty and the rest of the crew what this is going to look like so that he can then light it and decide where his camera is going to be. And obviously that’s very important because you’re in an action sequence. You know, you have to think about safety all the time. And so Matty needs to see where he can get in and where he can get out with his camera.

And we’ll run through that and block it a couple of times in the morning and then hopefully we’ve added the dialogue to it as well. And then we’ll shoot it and we’ll shoot it a bunch of different ways. And this scene is how many pages, three pages. This probably took us – I think this probably took us two full days to shoot.

**John:** There’s a lot happening here. And there’s visual effects happening here as well.

**Kelly:** Right.

**John:** There’s the symbiote, there’s the goo. Stuff like that is happening, too. And so on a production design decision there was probably a discussion of visual effects in terms of like what set you’re building versus what’s going to be virtual beyond a certain point. But then with all the creature effects what’s practical, what is CG, how you’re going to do this, where is the handoff between this, how much is makeup on her before she sort of fully goes out obviously. And very early on in visual development you had to figure out how you’re going to handle Eddie and Venom and the manifestation of Venom, what is that all going to look like. So all that had to happen, which is informing the decisions you’re making as you get there to shoot just this one small sequence at the top of this bigger action sequence.

**Kelly:** Yes. You have all of our effects people in there as well. There are these incredible things they can do where they sort of bring in these iPads but place Venom in a scene so you can look at the iPad and see Venom moving around the scene even though he isn’t actually there in real life. And it’s kind of crazy, but obviously we have fake Venoms and, you know, all kinds of stuff that–

**John:** You probably have folks who were in the costumes and the little tracking balls and things like that, too, for placement. So there’s lot of tools there at your disposal.

**Kelly:** Complete hysteria when the tongue gets brought in, because you have this enormous silicon Venom tongue. Yeah, and that gem really causes a little bit of shutdown on the set. It’s hilarious.

**John:** So I bring all this up because we don’t talk very much about the nuts and bolts details of shooting action sequences because it all started with the writing and then it goes into all these other decisions and yet it’s so important that you are there along with director and Tom who has been involved from the start to remember like, oh that’s right, this action sequence is actually serving a story purpose that goes all the way back to the script you started writing. And that can be one of the things I’ve found to be frustrating sometimes working on big action movies is that you sort of forget what was the actual story point we were trying to tell in this action sequence and it’s so important that you’re there to help remind those folks.

And you’re reminding them again as you go into post. Because you’ve shot this thing 15 different ways but with that same footage one editor could make a sequence that works a certain way. A different editor would make a completely different sequence. The thing we learn as writers working with editors is how transformative a skilled editor can be on the exact footage, the exact same thing that we saw being shot.

**Kelly:** Absolutely. Look, you’ve always got to be pushing story as well. But you can’t have an action sequence for an action sequences sake. And obviously we’ve seen that in movies. But this is actually a really sad moment in the movie. It’s a really upsetting moment. She dies and she’s his friend. And she infects him. This is the moment that he gets Venom. So it’s a very important scene within an action sequence. But the story is still the most important thing in these three pages.

**John:** Absolutely. So, Kelly, thank you so much for talking us through Venom, both sort of the initial kind of thinking about it, but also the really nuts and bolts of shooting stuff. It’s really cool to get that full education.

**Kelly:** Oh, my pleasure. I could talk about Venom all day.

**John:** All right. Now it is time for our One Cool Things. So my One Cool Thing is a really useful but useless thing called Meet the Ipsums. So if you’ve ever done graphic design you’re probably used to Lorem ipsum text which is fake Latin that you put in as text for layouts. And so it’s just gibberish Latin that takes the place of stuff so you’re not actually reading real copy. You’re reading fake copy. And so Lorem ipsum is fine and good. But my friend Nima pointed me to a site called Meet the Ipsums which is alternate Ipsums. It’s bogus text you can put in that’s in different flavors.

And so my favorite one is called Corporate Ipsum. It’s done by Cameron Brister and SquarePlan. And it’s ridiculous and it’s just so funny. So here’s an example of a Corporate Ipsum. “Leverage agile frameworks to provide a robust synopsis for high level overviews. Iterative approaches to corporate strategy foster collaborative thinking to further the overall value proposition. Organically grow the holistic world view of disruptive innovation via workplace diversity and empowerment.”

So it’s just paragraphs and paragraphs of nonsense boilerplate corporate nonsense. And I just love it. I just love that it exists. I love that someone took the time to actually write it and make a website so we can download it and stick it in our layouts.

We’re working on Highland for the iPad and so we have a lot of screens where we have to have bogus text in it. And it’s just been a joy to kind of half-read this in all the different Highland versions we’re working on.

**Kelly:** Yeah. I looked at it and it kind of exploded my brain. I was like oh god. I don’t know what this is.

**John:** And there’s all sort of other weird flavors, too. So you can just find something that fits the project you’re working on. Kelly, you got a One Cool Thing for us?

**Kelly:** I do have a One Cool Thing. It’s called the Loóna App. Well I guess you’ll put the link up. And it won the Apple Design Awards. And I don’t know about you, or anybody else, but I’ve found this past year, year and a half, a little bit challenging. And I’ve been going through this weird thing where I’ve been waking up at 2 and staying awake till 4.

**John:** Yeah, that’s me.

**Kelly:** What is that? It’s bizarre.

**John:** It may be the changing of seasons a bit of that, too. But, yeah, I’ve definitely felt that. Especially this last couple weeks. So yeah.

**Kelly:** I just haven’t been able to figure it out. Anyway, I was looking at meditation apps and sleep apps and I came across this thing called Loóna which is basically a sleep scape. And I like to do it in the dark. So I turn the lights off and I load the sleep scape and they basically tell you a story as you find these particular things in the sleep scape that they’ve drawn for you that is beautiful, by the way, absolutely gorgeous. They’ve designed for you. And you find each thing that they’re talking about and you tap it and it sort of comes alive.

And at the end you have this beautiful landscape that you’ve created. But you’ve also been lulled into this very kind of sleepy state. And so it’s really working for me. I think it’s beautiful. There’s one that is set in Brooklyn that I think is my favorite. And I love that story. And it’s just gorgeous.

**John:** That’s great. Previously on Scriptnotes we’ve talked about the sleep casts that are part of the Head Space App, which are deliberately so kind of boring. They cram so many details that your brain just sort of gives up and you fall asleep. But this seems very, very cool, too. I’m eager to try it out. Are you doing this before you go to bed or if you wake up at two in the morning?

**Kelly:** I’ve been doing it before I go to bed and it’s been helping me not wake up at two o’clock in the morning.

**John:** That’s what you want.

**Kelly:** That’s what you want.

**John:** Hooray. And that is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is a classic outro by our own Matthew Chilelli. But if you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For shorter questions on Twitter I am @johnaugust. Kelly, I don’t know if you check Twitter. Are you on Twitter?

**Kelly:** I am. I very rarely check it. But I am @missmarcel.

**John:** All right. We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. We have our anniversary.

**Kelly:** Ah, t-shirts.

**John:** Are you wearing your t-shirt?

**Kelly:** I want a t-shirt.

**John:** Oh, well we’ll send you a t-shirt because we have our 10th Anniversary t-shirt. Our 10th Anniversary is next week. We’re so excited. So you can wear your 10th Anniversary t-shirt as you listen to the podcast.

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

You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments. You can listen to Kelly and Craig and I play fiasco and get a little too drunk, if that’s appealing. And other episodes where Kelly Marcel has been wise as always.

Kelly, thank you so much for joining us here on Scriptnotes. It’s so great to chat with you again.

**Kelly:** Oh, it’s so nice. So nice. It feels like it’s been forever.

**John:** It has been too, too long. So we won’t have you gone for so long.

**Kelly:** Yes, please don’t. It was great.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** OK, we’re back. So Kelly Marcel, if people couldn’t guess by your accent you are not from the United States.

**Kelly:** I am not from the United States.

**John:** So how did you become legally eligible to work here in the United States? I assume you’re not just sneaking in.

**Kelly:** No, I’m not. I’m actually allowed to be here. So I did the visa application. I’ve been here for nearly a decade. Initially I was here on an O1 visa and now obviously I have a green card. But it is a real process. And the O1 was a lot. It’s a lot of paperwork and a lot of time and can be very stressful.

And so I think the O1 is the one that you get if you have extraordinary abilities.

**John:** So not like Venom, but extraordinary abilities as a writer, as an artist, as a unique talent.

**Kelly:** You have to prove that only you can do the thing that you need the visa to do. And, of course, with writing it is very specific to your voice, so only I can write what I write. And so with the O1 I think I had actually – had I been nominated for a BAFTA at that point? Because that really helps as well if you have any kind of nominations or awards or stuff like that. I can’t remember whether I had it or not.

But what I did have was Terra Nova. It had been sold here in the states. And another show that I had at Showtime. And I was very lucky in that I had an incredibly famous producer on Terra Nova and was able to get a letter of recommendation from Mr. Spielberg. And so that kind of did it for me on the O1.

But I’ve written those letters for other people as well. And I’m certainly not that person. And those letters have worked as well. Where you talk about somebody’s extraordinary ability. You talk about how you know them in the industry. And kind of just how brilliant and unique they are. And so that’s one way to come into the United States to work.

**John:** We get so many questions at the website about working in the US as an international writer that we decided to reach out to a bunch of our colleagues who are international writers and ask them if they could anonymously tell us about their journey and their experience getting that O1 visa which seems to be the visa that almost everybody is using to get.

Some writers will come here on student visas. And if you’re here on a student visa there’s ways you can get an extra year after your student visa which is super helpful because then you can actually get work experience and get those connections so you can actually gather together all the materials and recommendations you need to get that O1 visa.

The biggest piece of advice we got from everybody is that you have to have a lawyer do it. Because it’s just not a thing a person can do. How did you find a lawyer? Was it something that the producers you were working for could steer you towards? What was your process of finding an immigration lawyer?

**Kelly:** It was London agents, Casarotto, who have a ton of British writers who were working in the states. And this was a lawyer that they had used a number of times. I’ll email you his name so that anyone can call him if they’re looking for someone to represent them in getting a visa. He is brilliant. And he actually got me my green card, too, which was a much different process. It was actually easier to go from the O1 to the green card.

**John:** Tell us about that, because I don’t have a great sense of how green cards work.

**Kelly:** I got my green card as a result of having – so I had my O1 – I think you can have the O1 for is it three years?

**John:** And it has to be renewed every three years apparently.

**Kelly:** Yes, I think it’s three years. So it was coming to the end of my three years. You know, I was very much living in Los Angeles at the time in the house that we did Fiasco in. It was time to either renew or get a green card. And I decided to get a green card, or try to get a green card. You know, that was when I had had the BAFTA nomination and at the time I was doing 50 Shades of Gray and so quite high profile work.

And I think Alan, who is my lawyer, Alan Klein, I think really didn’t have much of a problem moving the O1 into a green card. You do have to go for these sort of in-person interviews where they ask you all sorts of questions about what you’re doing in the US. With the O1 you actually have to be in your home country to be able to get that visa. So you have to go to an American embassy. You have to have your passport stamped in my case in the UK. With the green card you don’t have to return to your country to get that done. You can do it from within the states.

It took about, I think it probably took about eight months for the visa to turn into the green card. I know it’s taking so much longer during the pandemic. I know a ton of people whose visas have been kind of stalled because of what’s going on in the world right now. So, I know it’s much, much, much more difficult unfortunately.

**John:** Now with your green card situation can studios hire you just like any American writers? Is there anything different that a studio needs to do to hire you as a writer with a green card?

**Kelly:** No, nothing. I’m now a permanent resident of the US. Well, you have ten years on your green card. And then after that you either apply to become a citizen, or you renew – I think you renew your green card. But I think if you’ve been here ten years they like you to then decide to become–

**John:** To officially become a US citizen. So at that point you’ll be on Venom 9. You’ll have a pretty big work history there and things will be set.

**Kelly:** I think it’s going to be OK. I think it’s going to be OK.

**John:** And one thing we should clarify. Sometimes I know folks who deal with casting. And there’s a process for getting actors over here for a movie, which is a little bit different than the other things. And so the advice we’re giving is for people who want to work as writers. There are other ways, sneaky ways, to do things if you’re just coming in for one thing. But it’s not quite the same process.

**Kelly:** No, it isn’t. And also, look, I would also say the pandemic has changed a lot. You know, before I would have said you have to be in LA. You absolutely have to because you do the water tour and there are so many in-person meetings. But I think the world has changed.

You know, I have a great friend, brilliant screenwriter Jack Thorne, who has a very, very active American career, but he lives in the UK, and always has, and has never moved to Los Angeles. And has continued to work consistently in America without needing a visa or a green card because he doesn’t live or work within the US.

**John:** That’s a really good point. Because I think coming out of this pandemic it became clear that needing to actually go in to sit in a room to talk with people is so much less important than it was even for you and Tom working on this script. That was a FaceTime conversation. So it was challenging to be in different time zones, but it could absolutely work.

And I think are there some advantages to being in Los Angeles at the start of your career? Yes. Is it essential? No. And certainly not as essential as it was even ten years ago.

**Kelly:** And maybe that’s different for TV writers and as writer’s rooms start to come back then I would say that may be different. But definitely for movie writing I don’t think you need to be in LA anymore.

**John:** Well Kelly Marcel I’m glad you were in LA for a time so I at least got to know you here while you were in Los Angeles. And drink too much wine at your house.

**Kelly:** I mean, having said that, I’ll always have to come in and out of Los Angeles, so I will always have a place there. But I just think for new writers and people worrying about whether that’s something they need to do, they should worry less.

**John:** Sounds good. Kelly, thanks so much for your guidance here.

**Kelly:** Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Links:

* [Original Movies Are Becoming Streaming’s Most Popular Content, Led By Disney+](https://variety.com/vip/original-movies-are-becoming-streamings-most-popular-content-led-by-disney-1235037636/) by Kevin Tran for Variety
* [Foreign Writers on Getting a Visa](https://johnaugust.com/2021/getting-a-visa)
* [Venom Excerpt](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/venom-excerpt.pdf)
* [Meet the Ipsums](https://meettheipsums.com/)
* [Loóna Sleep App](https://loona.app/)
* [Kelly Marcel](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0545150/) and on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/missmarcel)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast), check out our special [10th Anniversary Shirts!](https://cottonbureau.com/products/for-all-time#/10278066/tee-men-standard-tee-military-green-tri-blend-s)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Michael O’Konis ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/513standard.mp3).

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 510 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today we are revisiting earlier conversations about the craft of screenwriting, start with what characters want, then looking at establishing point of view, and finally how we get our characters driving the story.

Craig, this is a clip show.

**Craig:** Ah.

**John:** Some of our younger listeners I’m realizing they may have never experienced the joy of a broadcast clip show.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Talk to us about what clip shows are.

**Craig:** Back in the day when we were young lads in the ‘70s and ‘80s the only television shows were network television shows. And the network pumped out, what, 22 something?

**John:** Sometimes 24. Sometimes 30. Yeah.

**Craig:** And enormous amount – for people who are young now – an enormous amount of episodes a season. And that still happens with shows like for instance our friend Derek’s Chicago Fire. So, what happened eventually is everybody would get exhausted. They would need a break, or they needed time, or an actor needed a break or got sick or something. And so what they would do is a clip show which basically if you were in season four of One Day at a Time you could just do a little thing like we’re doing right now. You and I get stuck in an elevator and we start saying, “Remember when we…”

And then they would show a flashback, but it was really just a clip from a show that had aired previously. And people liked it. That’s the crazy part. If you went to a restaurant expecting to get your usual and they were like, “We don’t have our usual but we have this garbage from six weeks ago,” and you went, “Yay!”

**John:** Yes! Now, I’m thinking about it and part of the reason why it was probably not so terrible to have clip shows back then is reruns were not the same thing. You couldn’t just go on streaming and find all the back episodes like you can in the Scriptnotes catalog. And so the only chance to see those moments again would be to have a clip show compilation.

So, “We’ve taken a lot of great vacations over the years, haven’t we dear…,” and then a montage of clips of how it all works together.

**Craig:** Great point. There was no YouTube. So you couldn’t just randomly access them. There was no back catalog to stream. If you missed an episode the only way you were going to see – there wasn’t even a VCR in the ‘70s.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** So that was it. You had to wait for the clip show.

**John:** Yeah. And the clip show also would be showing you things you maybe never had seen because you just had never seen that episode for whatever reason.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So it was somewhat new to you. So for some of our listeners some of this information may be new because we’re stretching all the way back to Episode 279. We’ll have Episode 358, 307. And so we’re going to send people off to listen to these three back-to-back extended segments of clips that Megana has picked out.

But at the end of the show we’ll be back to wrap up and sort of frame some stuff. We’ll do our One Cool Things. And for our premium members stick around after the credits when we’re going to discuss what we want versus what we need in our real lives.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So, enjoy the show.

[Post Clips]

**John:** So Craig, listening to these segments about craft got me thinking about what elements of craft I’m still learning or still working on or at least have changed for me over the, god, 30 years whatever I’ve been doing as screenwriting. And one of the things that this pointed out to me I think in my conversation with Jen Statsky about Hacks she was talking about this one scene and she had done some kind of defensive writing. Basically it was a little bit overwritten, but it was overwritten to make sure she would have the runway to get the scene to land that way.

And I feel like I’m still sometimes stuck in a little bit of defensive writing, where like I’m trying to write scenes that are kind of idiot proof in a way, or at least are the safest versions of scenes. And I’m trying to get myself out of that defensive writing. Do you ever feel that?

**Craig:** No. That one I don’t have. I just try and write the scene as I think it should be and I don’t worry about anything else. But that’s if I’m writing for television, because I’ll be there. The difference between writing for something where you know you’ll be there and writing for something where you know you won’t is dramatic.

**John:** And that’s really I think where defensive writing comes in. You and I have both been in situations on features where it needs to be absolutely clear what is going to happen here and everyone knows what is important. And so in some ways you and I are anticipating it’s going to get cut down to this version of the scene, but I need to actually provide those little extra handles on it, then what we get will actually get shot.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think craft wise I’m probably still struggling a little bit with my need to understand the scene and see the scene and hear the scene completely before I start writing. I don’t know if it’s a struggle. Maybe that’s just the way I have to do it and that’s it. I wish that I could maybe be a little less self-conscious about that and just be willing to kind of sit down and write. But I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s a bug or a feature. That’s the god’s honest truth.

**John:** I completely get that. It’s that sense of like trusting that you’re going to be able to figure that out in the middle of writing it versus having a clear, cohesive plan going into the scene of how to do it.

And I’ve done both and I go through both ways. And sometimes I just know like, you know what, I’ll figure out what that is once I sort of hear the characters talking and sort of see how the jigsaw pieces fit together. But then again you hate jigsaw puzzles, so.

**Craig:** No, because they’re not puzzles. They’re just broken pictures. But I do find that even when I – really what it comes down to is psychology. I am comforted enough by own certainty that I now feel I can write. Once I start writing then all sorts of improvisation and discovery occurs regardless. But maybe that’s the blend I need is just to know what the rigorous structure, purpose, and place of the scene is and then inside of that safe confine I can play around.

**John:** Over the last few weeks I’ve had a chance to go back through some scripts that I’d written years ago because they’re sort of coming up to be shot now and it’s been interesting watching the decisions I made then versus the decisions I would make right now. And sometimes it’s that I felt I needed all of this connective tissue to make every little point sort of connect. And I was like, wow, I don’t think that’s going to survive through the edit and I don’t think I actually need it right now. So I was able to trim pages out and it wasn’t just like, you know, moving periods around and stretching margins. It’s literally I don’t need that link between those two things because it’s never going to actually make it into the movie.

So I think that’s just a thing you realize over time, too. It’s not even defensive writing, it’s just like I was being a little bit too perfection-y. I was making sure everything was just tied up with a nice little bow and I was like that’s not really what the writing is.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, we live and learn. I think we finally figure it all out just as we become completely detached from culture and start to get so old we don’t even know how people talk anymore in the real world. And then we die.

So, there’s probably ten seconds. Ten seconds where we’re perfect.

**John:** Pinnacle. At the acme.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And then it’s all downhill.

**Craig:** Yup. And then we just fall.

**John:** Coasting away. Time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Speaking of old things, I’m reading this book on extinctions and it’s great, which I’ll probably recommend as a One Cool Thing down the road. But in this last chapter they were talking about monsters from – I shouldn’t call them monsters – they’re creatures/animals from the age before dinosaurs. And the dinosaurs get all the attention because they look so cool, but there were other creatures that existed way before the dinosaurs which were perhaps actually cooler.

The two I’m going to single out are Dunkleosteus and the Carolina Butcher. Craig, you’re clicking through, can you describe what you’re seeing with Dunkleosteus?

**Craig:** Sure. Dunkleosteus looks a little like the war forged race in Dungeons & Dragons 5E.

**John:** Very much.

**Craig:** That of course is the race from Eberron, which is a different plane than your forgotten realms. I know everybody knows this. But it basically looks like a robot turtle fish.

**John:** Yeah. Or sort of like an armored shark, but if a pug if it were an armored shark, because it doesn’t have the snout. It’s just got an almost completely flat face. What you don’t see probably in this thing if you read the descriptions is it doesn’t actually have teeth. It has these two giant snapping bones. It’s like a nutcracker. It looks absolutely terrifying.

**Craig:** Yeah. That fish is on ‘roids. It is gorgeous.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Do not screw with that fish. I bet it tasted good, though.

**John:** Oh, so good.

**Craig:** And then there’s the Carolina Butcher.

**John:** The Carolina Butcher is – give us a description because this also seems like a Dungeons & Dragons creature.

**Craig:** Right. So the Carolina Butcher has a certain T-Rex like quality but it’s about the size of a very tall person, like the tallest, like Yao Ming-ish. And sort of stands on two feet. So it’s a bit like the lizard folk race from 5E, or maybe even the dragon born.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So it looks like a man that could run over to you, slap your face with its arms which are somewhat useless, but because it’s so tall it’s about the size or your arms, and then just devour you in three gulps.

**John:** Yeah. So it is a relative of the crocodile. So the crocodiles are the distant cousins of what these things are, but there are whole species of these. And before there were dinosaurs these were the Apex predators.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And they were just running around on their back feet in many cases just chomping down on everything. And they are just wonderful nightmare creatures. And if we didn’t have dinosaurs this is what all the young kids would be playing with.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, this is – again, I just want to point out that’s what’s so cool about Dungeons & Dragons. Megana, you really need to, you know, you just need to start. You just need to start, Megana. You’ve got to just dive in.

**John:** It’s more fun when everyone does it.

**Craig:** I feel like Megana just literally disconnected her microphone, threw her headphones off. I just want to hear the sound of a car driving away.

**John:** [laughs] Craig, do you have any One Cool Things to share with us?

**Craig:** I do. My One Cool Thing is the town of Fort Macleod in Alberta. We came in – you know, when you’re shooting stuff you just think about yourself the whole time. It’s a selfish act to do. Because you have so much to do and everything is about what you’re going to see onscreen, and so you’re like why is that there, and how do I make this look like that. And it’s easy to forget that when you’re shooting on a location you are disrupting everyone’s lives. Granted, you know, of course we do everything legally and there are permits and permissions and all the rest of it. But you’re still disrupting people’s lives.

So, I just wanted to thank the town of Fort Macleod, Alberta for being such a lovely host. This is a pretty small town. It is closer to Montana than to Calgary. And there is in fact an old fort there. And it’s a lovely place and we came and disrupted their lives for a week plus. And we had a great time there doing what we needed to do and so thank you to Fort Macleod.

**John:** Very nice. So you arrived there with a village full of trailers and other things. You have to dress stuff. It’s just – I mean, for people who haven’t seen when a film comes to town, especially comes to a small town, it’s huge.

**Craig:** An army rolls in and we have, you know, multiple areas where we have our set location. We have our work trucks. We have our base camp which they call the circus up here in Canada.

**John:** The circus is pretty common.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s a very sizable set and lots of background actors/performers who I believe we pulled in largely from the surrounding area and from Fort Macleod itself. And they were all terrific and worked really hard. And so I don’t know why – this can’t possibly end up being an article on Kotaku, right? What I’m just saying right now. This can’t – IGN, please, you can’t make this into an article. There’s nothing there.

**John:** Craig, what’s so frustrating is they will go now through old episodes and things you said a zillion years ago and it’s like oh that will become an article now. I just feel like there’s some lazy stringers there who are sifting through the articles, the old transcripts.

**Craig:** I think they’ve got somebody who is just like whenever he talks about The Last of Us just wave a flag. I mean, I love the attention. It’s just like I have to be so careful now about what I say. I didn’t get yelled at or anything. I yelled at myself. I yelled at myself.

**John:** That’s what it is.

**Craig:** I just didn’t realize that the number of episodes would be a story. Anyway, Fort Macleod wonderful. Thank you very much for hosting us. You were lovely folks. And we appreciate it. And I hope that everybody there enjoys what they see on TV when it comes out.

**John:** That would be great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, with segments produced by Godwin Jabangwe and Megan McDonnell. Going back in time.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** It is edited, as always, by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by William Brink. 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 I am on Twitter @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 the 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, including the new 10th anniversary shirt.

You can also sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all of the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on want versus need. And if you were a subscriber to the back episodes you could actually listen to these original segments in their proper episodes and really know what the context was for these conversations. But I’m not going to pressure you.

Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I’m so relaxed.

**John:** Craig, what do you want, what do you need? Is that a meaningful question for me to be asking a human being in real life?

**Craig:** Of course. Of course. Those are maybe the two most important questions we ask people. What do you want and what do you need?

**John:** I wonder if want vs. need is a thing you see a lot in screenwriting books and a character wants a thing but they actually need a thing. And I wonder if it’s kind of a trap because it suggests that there’s a clean binary between sort of the [speaks French], like what you should – suddenly I’m pulling out the French here. But it’s a murky boundary between want and need. Sometimes it’s sort of hard to know the difference. But you think it is a useful framework sometimes for thinking want vs. need?

**Craig:** I actually think it’s a useful framework just for moving through life. When you’re dealing with people to understand what it is that they want and what it is that they need. It is important to at least understand where they’re coming from. The most important question to ask is what do you need because it’s going to be hard to do anything if you don’t understand what people need. I’m just talking about life now.

In screenwriting I’m with you. If we get super focused on need and want then we can – the scenes and the moments can get too purposeful. Too purposeful, weirdly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because part of the want and need thing is we actually don’t actually think about it much. We just feel it. It drives us subconsciously. We have to take time to stop and say what it is I want and what it is I need. That’s why people go to therapy.

**John:** That’s a good point.

**Craig:** Yeah. The fun part is the gap for me between what people want and need, or what characters want and need, and what they think they want and what they think they need. That’s an interesting space.

**John:** Absolutely. So it’s sorting out those urges and drives and instincts and behaviors and like what’s really propelling those. And that, I think, is useful analysis both for our characters and for real life. So, think about the decisions you make in your life and especially the bigger decisions about dating, about relationships, about where to go to college and like what do you want to do with your career. Should you stay in this city or should you leave this city?

Ask those questions in wants vs. needs in terms of what are your overall goals. But you also have to be introspective of like why am I even asking the questions. What am I hoping to get out of this decision? What are the real things I’m trying to achieve? Do I want money? Well why do you want money? Are you envious of people who have more money? Do you not feel safety and security? Are there primal things that are driving those decisions? And I think that kind of introspection is useful, divorced from just a clear want vs. need.

**Craig:** Yeah. We definitely hear from people when we’re writing that we need to know what our character wants. There’s some sort of like large wants, you know, I guess that cover the movie. But that’s really more for us to know. It’s kind of behind the scenes/backstage stuff. A lot of times the character just isn’t aware of it until they become aware of it. I like to look at Shrek because it’s such a clean, elegant storyline. What he thinks he wants is not what he really ends up wanting. It wasn’t even what he wanted in the beginning. What he wanted, of course, was to be loved. He just didn’t know that that was an option so he just went to a new want which is I want to be alone.

That’s not really – so there’s like the pre-want. There’s the want that you’ve lost. There’s the want that you think you want. It changes. I mean, what we want changes as we move through our lives and things smash into us. And maybe that’s what growth is. When we talk about growth it’s redefining what we want and also redefining what it was that we thought we needed, which turns out to be just something we wanted.

**John:** Got it. Craig, that’s very spiritual of you. I think you could be a spiritual adviser.

**Craig:** Oh god no. Is that what spirituality is?

**John:** That’s what spirituality is.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** I think you actually just delivered some spirituality right there.

**Craig:** There’s just psychology. There’s no energy. There’s no god or purple quartz.

**John:** So, I think about people who have obsessions or who try to optimize things and I feel like I really question why they’re optimizing. I’m thinking about my friend, Yurgin, who for the last 20 years has always been obsessed with getting the perfect audio setup for his home. And so it’s not just the turntable, but it’s like oh this speaker and this thing. And why are you doing this? Because I don’t think you will be able to hear the difference. And you’re not going to be able to enjoy the difference. Instead you’re going to spend tens of thousands of dollars and a lot of time and aggravation for something that is not going to bring you extra joy. And that’s sort of a fundamental framework for thinking about why you’re doing this thing that you’re doing. Is it actually increasing the joy in your life? Because that’s all you can sort of get out of doing that.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is something that we need or want with a character let’s say, and then there’s the manifestation of it. Sometimes what we need or want is something that we don’t understand or it’s socially unacceptable or it’s wrapped up in a weird self-loathing that we cannot acknowledge. And so it just comes out in this other strange way.

A character who is chasing the perfect audio sound that’s basically Moby Dick. It’s the same thing. And it’s a wonderful character to contemplate. And it’s a wonderful problem to contemplate. I love that sort of thing. Sometimes I think obsession is you want or need A but you can’t acknowledge it or understand it, so you decide you want to need B, which is unattainable by definition. And then you pursue it. That’s lovely.

**John:** Have you ever tried this reframing where instead of saying I have to do blank it’s like I want to do blank? And I do find it useful and sometimes just saying it aloud reveals sometimes that if I want to do something it’s actually stupid because I don’t actually want to do that. I don’t have to do that. I’m just doing this because either I feel like I have to or there’s some extrinsic force that’s telling me to do it even though it’s not important. I think reframing have-tos as choices can be useful for real life situations you’re encountering.

**Craig:** Yeah. I worry about if I start doing that I’ll never stop. Well, if you’re saying I’m only going to do it if I want to do it.

**John:** So here’s an example. I have to work out tonight. And it’s like, no, I want to work out tonight. And if I say I want to work out tonight the question is like well why do I want to work out tonight. Well, these are the reasons why. Great. It makes sense to do it. And therefore I enter into the workout with a different headspace.

**Craig:** A different space. There are certain parts of things where like I want to do a particular project, I truly, truly do. but while I’m doing it there are going to be days where I’m just like I don’t want to do it.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** So there’s like the large want, there’s the mini wants inside, and sometimes you just have to discipline yourself because, you know, you got to.

**John:** We’ve talked about this a hundred times on the show about our characters. That you have the grand I Want song stuff, but within scenes, within the actual choices you’re making minute-by-minute in real life you’re making smaller want decisions. And those are right there.

**Craig:** Yeah. And sometimes the little wants smash into the big wants and they contradict. And so that’s, you know, conflict.

**John:** Yeah. You want to be healthy and thin and you also want to eat five chocolate donuts. And that’s the tension.

**Craig:** That doesn’t actually seem like a real problem for me. I don’t see healthy and – we’re going to die. Right? We’re going to die. But, donuts.

**John:** Donuts.

**Craig:** Donuts are good right now.

**John:** Donuts are delicious.

**Craig:** Five is a lot.

**John:** If we go back to a really early episode, like Episode 5, How Not to be Fat as a Screenwriter, so you yourself have made certain choices to limit certain things.

**Craig:** Yes. I just want to live a little bit longer. That’s all. Just a little bit.

**John:** Last bit of advice I would offer to people is consider the value of satisfying, which is basically deciding what is good enough, and like good enough is good. And better is not generally better. And so look for what is the standard you want to hit and hit that standard and then not try to exceed it unless there’s a real good reason to exceed it.

**Craig:** I think we’ve done that with this bonus episode.

**John:** That’s really, for example, this was a clip show that was good for the people who wanted this stuff, but it met our time constraint needs. Craig, we’ve done it again.

**Craig:** We’ve done it again.

**John:** Thank you, sir.

**Craig:** Thanks, John. See you next time.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Episode 279, What Do They Want?](https://johnaugust.com/2016/what-do-they-want)
* [Episode 358, Point of View](https://johnaugust.com/2018/point-of-view)
* [Episode 307, Teaching Your Heroes to Drive](https://johnaugust.com/2017/teaching-your-heroes-to-drive)
* For more on character wants check out John’s blogposts: [Rethinking Motivation](https://johnaugust.com/2008/rethinking-motivation) and [What Does He Want](https://johnaugust.com/2007/what-does-he-want).
* Creatures before Dinosaurs: [Dunkleosteus](https://www.fossilguy.com/gallery/vert/placoderm/dunkleosteus/index.htm) and the [Carolina Butcher](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/new-species-crocodiles-there-was-carolina-butcher-180954636/)
* [Fort Macleod](https://fortmacleod.com/play-here/tourism/)
* [Get our new 10th Anniversary T-Shirts](https://cottonbureau.com/products/for-all-time#/10278066/tee-men-standard-tee-military-green-tri-blend-s)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by William Brink ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) (with segments by Godwin Jabangwe and Megan McDonnell!) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/510standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/framing-the-story).

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

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

**John:** And this Episode 511 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we’re looking not just at the story but the story around the story, how framing effects the perception of a movie, and the choices writers have to make. We’ll also look at vaccine mandates for production and answer listener questions about cheesy writing, zombies, and diversity fellowships. And in our bonus segment for premium members we’ll discuss the Black Widow lawsuit and what it means for backend bonuses.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Craig, it’s August. It’s finally my month. I’ve been waiting all year for this month and it’s my month. A month named after me.

**Craig:** A month named after you. A month that I think everybody generally agrees is sweltering and miserable.

**John:** It can be sweltering and miserable. It could also be delightful. It is a month full of stone fruit. And this trip on the east coast has made me remember how much I really do appreciate stone fruit, especially nectarines, which I think are overlooked because they’re just ready to eat. You don’t have to peel them. You don’t have to do anything. You just bit into them and then you throw away the pit. They are delicious.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, a peach is the ultimate. You don’t like peaches?

**John:** Peaches are great for – I like peaches, too. But peaches, like you can not peel them, but I just don’t like the fuzzy texture if you are eating a peach peel. Do you like the fuzziness?

**Craig:** Who peels peaches?

**John:** I know a lot of people who peel peaches.

**Craig:** Really? Megana?

**Megana Rao:** I’ve never heard of that. And I feel strange about it.

**Craig:** I think he made it up. John just made it up. Maybe people shave their peaches. I mean, I like the fuzzy part. I think it’s nice. It’s sort of a nice warm reminder.

**John:** It’s extra fiber.

**Craig:** It’s extra fiber. Do you know, John, there’s a wonderful puzzle word. Puzzle words are words that most people don’t know but they happen to be useful for crosswords and things like that. A puzzle word, it’s the botany word for stone fruit.

**John:** Oh what is that?

**Craig:** A drupe.

**John:** Droop?

**Craig:** Drupe. Drupe.

**John:** Ah. Drupe.

**Craig:** A drupe.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** So cherries, nectarines, peaches, etc. Drupes.

**John:** Oh, yeah, I don’t think of cherries as being stone fruits, but of course they are stone fruit.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** All this season. So this is basically the summer of stone fruit. It’s a Hot Vax Summer and it’s stone fruit season.

**Craig:** The two of us talking about this, it’s a bit like the ladies on NPR, the Saturday Night Live sketch.

**John:** [laughs] Absolutely. Schweddy Balls.

**Craig:** Shweddy Balls. Mm, good things. Mm, love stone fruit. Mm.

**John:** Craig, we have some follow up. I’m wondering if you could David from Iceland.

**Craig:** Sure. He writes, “The Icelandic sagas, which are often considered some of the earliest novels, are usually full of explicit foreshadowing in the form of dreams, dreams that women usually interpret correctly as terrible events that the men who are fated to live those events dismiss either blithely or in desperate denial of destiny. This literary device hangs a sense of dread over the proceedings from the outset while also giving these stories of damp farmers murdering each other a mythic, heightened quality. That is one sense in which ‘spoiling’ the broad strokes of a narrative at the beginning can enhance the story. It frames it, letting the story comment on itself as a story turning happenstance into destiny.”

**John:** I’m really glad that David wrote in with this reminder, because I really do like that kind of foreshadowing – that foretelling and sort of the sage foretelling of like doom is about to happen. And we see that in a lot of movies. We see that in any story that begins with like “let me tell you how I died.” It’s told by a narrator who is no longer living. Sunset Boulevard. American Beauty. Casino to some degree. I love that as a quality, basically when you know that the narration is not happening in the same time period as the movie itself. Therefore there’s an aspect of foreshadowing just by the fact that this narrator is talking to you.

**Craig:** Absolutely Correct. And I should add that somewhat happily we’ve got our second puzzle word here coming up, the Icelandic saga. The term for Icelandic saga, the Norse term is Edda, which we love to see in puzzles.

There’s another kind of foreshadowing of this sort that I really enjoy which is the I guess we call it ironic foreshadow, where somebody says this is how it’s going to end, and you think, OK. And it does end that way but in a way you didn’t expect. One of my favorite examples is an episode called X-Files called Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose. And the story involves – Peter Boyle plays a psychic of a sort. He only has one psychic ability and that is that when he meets somebody he sees how they are going to die. And leading aside all the other bits and parts of the story, and spoiler alert – it’s what, 20 years old now – Scully says, “Well have you seen your own death?” And he says, “Yes.”

And he’s lying in a bed and she’s sitting sort of on a chair near the bed. And he says, “Actually when I die we are going to be together in bed.” And she’s like, “Hmm, really? Really Peter Boyle?” And he’s like, “Yeah, I don’t mean any offense, but we’ll be in bed and you’re going to be holding my hand and you’re looking at my face and there are tears streaming down my face.” And she’s a bit skeptical because she’s a skeptic.

And later in the episode, or at the end of the episode, it is revealed that he has committed suicide. And he is in a bed and he’s got that plastic bag over his head, that method of going, with pills and such. And she sits down next to him and she holds his hand and they close in on the bag over his face and the moisture from his breath has turned to little rivulets of water that are kind of rolling down the inside of the plastic as if tears were streaming down his face.

So they told you how it would end, but you really did not know how it would end. And I thought it’s just one of those moments in television storytelling where I just thought that was just so smart.

**John:** Yeah. It’s really smart. And it’s a very classic technique. It’s a new show, but it’s a classic technique, that inescapable fate.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** No matter what you try to do you are cursed to live in this. And useful for storytelling because by setting out that sort of expectation or the characters pushing against those expectations you’re really establishing a through line for the audience. The audience is looking for ways it’s going to cue back to what that original statement was.

**Craig:** Yes. You know, there’s a whole other podcast that we could do just about these old stories. You know, like every culture has this epic tale that they go through. All of them. The Edda and Mahabharata and Gilgamesh and there’s so many and I don’t enough, but I think there’s a podcast where you just do the stories. You just read the stories and you kind of – Song of Roland is considered the first – Chanson de Roland – is the first “novel” in western literature. And it’s like Rocky. It’s like reading Rocky basically.

**John:** You know, Craig, I honestly think like maybe we could come up with a way in which all stories are essentially the same story and that really create a theory for like how all movie stories should work the same way. It could be stages of like heroes get a call to adventure. I know we could do this.

**Craig:** Can we make designs?

**John:** Designs or pivot off like Joseph Campbell. I really think we could sell books on it. I think we could do a lot here.

**Craig:** It doesn’t work if we don’t have a design. It needs to be not a triangle, they’ve already stolen the snail shape.

**John:** Yeah. We’ve got to have a shape.

**Craig:** 20-sided die. Of course.

**John:** Oh my gosh. Do like a [Hedron] theory of storytelling. It would have to have like 20 plot points and each plot point has to connect, but it has to be at opposite faces that add up to 21, right? Is that how 20-sided dies work?

**Craig:** It’s an Icosagon, by the way. Dodecahedron is a 12-sided die.

**John:** Oh, you’re absolutely right.

**Craig:** The barbarians’ best friend is the dodecahedron.

**John:** It is. I know. I’m so embarrassed.

**Craig:** You know, I think the icosagon, I think probably it is that they – well, except, yeah, they would have to add up to 21, right? So nine would be across from 12. 11 is across from 10. Yeah, that makes sense.

**John:** Yeah. We solved storytelling and math in just one podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah. Wow.

**John:** So good. So good.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** Let’s get to our first topic today and this is coming off of two things that people have written in about. We’ll start with [Olafemme] who wrote in to say, “With Simone Biles’ withdrawal from her Olympic events the Twitterverse has been revisiting a moment from the 1996 Olympics which was Kerry Strug’s historic vault on an injured ankle. It earned the US the gold in the event. I’m old enough to remember the imagery of Strug successfully completing the vault, saluting the judges, then instantly collapsing to her knees in pain, having to be carried off the mat by her team. It was an unforgettable moment of Olympic history and an inspirational story of triumph in the face of adversity.”

Craig, you remember this moment?

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** This was a big photographic moment.

**Craig:** It was almost like it was scripted.

**John:** Yes. It was a very narrative moment. It felt like, oh, this is the end of the story. Well, it’s not quite the very end, because there would also be then a celebration after. But this was the final sort of moment of victory here.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And then we’re going to get to see her hugging her coach and he’s proud of her. But Olafemme reminds us that “in recent years numerous pieces of information have come to light that have completely changed the context of this story. In particular the facts that her trainer had miscalculated and the US would have won the gold even without Strug performing the vault. And that the very people helping her off the mat, Bela Karolyi and Larry Nassar, were abusive psychologically, physically, and in the last case sexually.

“What seemed like a story about victory has been revealed in truth to be one about the toxic pursuit of victory. How it can be so toxic that we overlook and justify traumatic abuses. I don’t mean to make light of real world tragedy, but I’m fascinated by how a powerful story can be turned on its head this way.”

I like what Olafemme is reminding us that we could tell the story of Kerri Strug and it would be a certain story if we leave out certain facts. But now with the new framing it’s a very different moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. Our narrative maturity has accelerated, just as a culture. We used to have very, very simple narratives. Morality plays, Aesop’s fables, and the aforementioned Edda, and Mahabharata, and all of that other stuff. And what’s happened over time is – especially the last 30 years, there’s so much culture. So many stories are being told that we’ve gotten wise to all the tricks. Everyone has pretty good story horse sense.

My daughter, your daughter, have watched enough television at this point to probably be able to predict halfway through a typical average episode of ‘90s TV how it’s going to turn out.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So over the last 30 years there’s been an acceleration of the subversion of narrative, or an interest in exploring hyper-reality. To insist that our narratives cover a lot of uncomfortable things. What we want, of course, is a very simple story on some level. We need Kerri Strug to make that vault in order to win the gold. She is deeply hurt but she makes one last vault, sacrificing herself, her body. And performs it brilliantly. And we win and she’s carried off by the men who inspired her to do so. And then now all these years later we’re a bit more grown up and what we want is the truth. And the truth does not diminish what Kerri Strug did. Nor by the way does the truth of what Kerri Strug did have anything to do with what Simone Biles did.

So, what I like about the way things are going now is that we are apparently grown up enough to face facts and in doing so we don’t lose heroes. Simone Biles remains a hero as does Kerri Strug. We just see the picture fully for what it is and we don’t sacrifice facts at the altar of simple narrative.

**John:** Now way back in the Austin Film Festival a couple of years ago we talked about the Zola Twitter thread. I’ve seen the movie. I don’t think you’ve seen the movie yet, Craig.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But one of the interesting choices that the filmmakers make is it’s largely framed around Zola’s tweets to the degree that which when a line of dialogue is actually from a tweet there’s a little Twitter sound to show that it’s from that tweet. But there’s a moment in the movie, and this is not a spoiler, where it reframes everything from the other girl’s point of view and you see like, oh, there’s a completely different context behind what could actually be happening in these moments which I think is interesting.

Now those are choices that the filmmakers are making. And so the same way we could have made a certain Kerri Strug movie in 1996 and a different Kerri Strug movie in 2021, I’m really more curious about how the outside events really change the perception of a given piece of art. And so let’s not talk about changing the story, but the world around the story changes it, even if it’s the same piece of art.

So not the piece of art, but the frame around it. So with visual arts it’s literally the gilded frame you’re putting around it changes how we see the work itself. Because that’s the thing we sort of have less control over as artists, and we as writers, but we have to sort of be aware of it. Because if we are making a Naked Gun movie that has OJ Simpson in it we have no control over the fact that OJ Simpson was going to be the person he became.

**Craig:** Right. We just have to keep up. I feel like that’s the important thing. We have to keep up. We can’t go back in time and change the things we’ve done, or made. We have to keep up with culture. We certainly can go back and reevaluate. Here’s a moment where I didn’t even realize that Larry Nassar was one of the people helping Kerri Strug off the mat. That’s just so upsetting. It’s important to go back and look at those things and acknowledge them.

However I think our primary task as artists is to keep up with culture as best we can while we are creating it. And learn. And adapt. It’s crucial.

**John:** Yeah. And I think part of that awareness is recognizing that generally we’re looking at things from a North American cultural point of view. And that framing might be vastly different in other parts of the world. We’ve talked about how some of our movies see big changes overseas, especially in China. Some of it is political pressure, but some of it is also just cultural understanding. Things that would work a certain way here just don’t come across the same way overseas.

**Craig:** Yeah. Every culture is at a different place in their narrative growing process, and I don’t even mean to imply that more complicated narrative is inherently better. The French, I think, have always felt that their narrative sense was better than ours, because it was more complicated, more subtle, more French cinema. I don’t that’s true. I don’t think it means it’s better. But if you like that sort of thing then it’s wonderful. The important thing is that the French were making films for the French for their taste. French comedies, on the other hand, are so – generally speaking – I’m going to generalize here are really broad.

So, famously the French loved Jerry Lewis. So even within narratives there’s certain kinds where there’s what we’ll call a grown up, or very mature, complicated point of view on narrative. And then in other genres there’s a bit of a younger point of view. In other parts of the world there’s an appreciation for some of our simpler movies that we make because people are still kind of catching up to all the movies that there are. Not everybody has access to all of the stuff that we’ve had access to. So it is different all across the world and it is different because people are seeing things through their own filters.

One thing though that I try and keep in mind as an active participant in Hollywood is that despite all of the differences that exist across the globe in terms of culture and the way people create and process narrative Hollywood still does kind of change things. People literally learn to speak English from the things we make and do. They are watching very, very carefully. So, it is important for us, particularly for us, to keep up.

**John:** I think I’ve mentioned on the podcast before one of my favorite movies of all time is the Talented Mr. Ripley. I think it is just phenomenal.

**Craig:** Amazing. Love it.

**John:** But on this trip it was the first time I saw Purple Noon, which is the French adaptation, the much earlier French adaptation of the same source material.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Vastly different. And absolutely worth watching for just all the places where one movie goes right and one movie goes left. But one of the things that you can make this movie, when Minghella is making Talented Mr. Ripley in – I’m looking up the year – in 1999 versus the original film is that the subtext of sort of why Ripley is doing the things he’s doing and his attraction to Dickie Greenleaf can be more overt. So it’s not just he wants Dickie Greenleaf’s life, but he wants Dickie Greenleaf. And the sexuality is possible just because of the years that had passed between it. And it’s interesting how filmmakers have to be aware of the context in which they make their pieces. Minghella could just make a different movie than he could have made 30 years earlier in France.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I love those strange evolutions. I think it’s great. There’s a movie out right now, The Green Knight, which is – I haven’t seen it, I’ve just been reading discussion of it so far, but I’d like to catch it in a theater here in Canada. And it is a retelling of an incredibly old and super simple story of Gawain and the Green Knight and, you know, he comes – it’s like Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable with a bit of magic in it. It’s a fable.

And by all accounts the story that is being told in this new version is quite mature. And somewhat profound. So I love that sort of thing. I think it’s great.

**John:** Now the other prompt for this framing discussion was Stillwater. So Tom McCarthy’s new movie, Stillwater, it tells the story of Bill Baker who is an Oklahoma oil rigger played by Matt Damon, also from Talented Mr. Ripley, and this character travels to Marseilles to visit his daughter Allison. She is a one-time exchange student who is now serving a nine-year prison sentence for killing her lover. If that last part sounds familiar that’s because it’s reminiscent of the situation of Amanda Knox who found herself arrested and later acquitted of a murder in Italy in 2007.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So the challenge here is in interviews McCarthy says the story is completely fictionalized because “there’s no similarity in our stories beyond an American student in jail.” And on Twitter and on Medium Amanda Knox herself, who is now a journalist, says kind of, well, “Bullshit.” And it raises the issue that we’ve been discussing a lot on the show recently is sort of who owns a story. And to what degree do we take things from real life in sort of How Would This Be a Movie segments and fictionalize them. And there’s legal implications. There’s moral and ethical implications. And real narrative implications.

And so even if McCarthy and team feel that they are fictionalizing the story every article written about it says Amanda Knox “is perceived as being the Amanda Knox story.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** How are you feeling about this situation?

**Craig:** Let’s talk about just the easy part first, which is the legal part. The deal here is it doesn’t sound like anything illegal is occurring. Even if you were to tell the Amanda Knox story specifically in your own way, if you were basing it on existing news articles and reporting and interviews, public interviews that Amanda Knox herself did, you can do that. And you can even cast an actor and make her look like Amanda Knox. You can put a bunch of makeup on and such. That’s entirely legal.

What you can’t do is defame people, at least in the US you can’t defame living people. So, what you can’t do is imply, for instance, that Amanda Knox is in fact a murderer. Because by all accounts and from everything I’ve read it seems quite clear she was not. And certainly at the very least she was acquitted. That is different than the moral standing question.

So, I think this kind of working out the way it should. I believe that if you’re going to make a movie that is inspired by someone’s life, and in particular inspired by a very traumatic thing they went through, then it’s sensible to talk to them. And it is sensible to listen and to communicate in some way. It doesn’t always work out. Sometimes you talk to people, you communicate with them, and then they stop. Sometimes they stop communicating back. Sometimes they claim you never communicated with them at all. It’s an interesting that can occur. But you do your best to try.

You have to know that the balance is that that person has the exact same pulpit you do. And they can go and say I don’t like this and here’s why. And in this case that’s what Amanda Knox has done. And it sort of works out the way it does and some people get upset, some people don’t, but everybody gets their day in public court, especially now because everybody has a pulpit.

I do think it’s important for us to at least try if we’re really going to be kind of expanding and going in a different direction in particular than what somebody actually lived, in this case sounds like they did, it just seems like maybe you should talk to that person or make enough changes that there isn’t really a concern about it.

**John:** Yeah. The issue of like they have access to the same pulpit, yes I think Twitter makes some of these things more possible, but the power differential between a giant movie starring Matt Damon and Amanda Knox is significant. In her own essay she cites for so long we were calling it the Monica Lewinsky affair when we really we should call it the Clinton affair. Basically the power differential between who Monica Lewinsky was and the forces against her was so vast that we needed to really think about how we were framing that.

Also Amanda Knox, she is a journalist who can speak up and defend herself, not everyone could do that. And so I’m trying to think of some guidelines we could offer filmmakers to think about when you’re using a person who exists in real life, someone who is going to be perceived as being the character in your story, how do we treat that person the respect? It’s also – you missed out on this conversation, but when we were talking about Cat Person a few weeks back, which was that short story that was–

**Craig:** Yes, I remember.

**John:** And then there was a discourse because it really came out that like, OK, it wasn’t about the own writer’s life, but it’s about this other woman’s life and she could speak up and say like, “Hey, this was actually my life, and it feels really strange.” Ownership of that becomes complicated.

**Craig:** Well, I am going to stick up for the writers of the world here in the sense that we do need to be free to create art. Sometimes art is inspired by life. There are hard rules in place to protect people from being damaged legally. When we say damaged legally it’s not like there’s some number that you hit on a meter and suddenly the legal thing goes up. Those laws are there to reflect our moral stances and our moral points of view. We can always, of course, adjust those laws through legislature and so forth. But I do think that artists need to be free to work.

If we are going to say that people who might be unintended victims or collateral damage of artworks, if that is the rule that we use to not write the work of art we have just eliminated most great works of art, at least when it comes to novels in particular. It’s a really sticky area.

**John:** It is. But Craig I think you laid out some of the remedies earlier which is that you might look for like what are the things that are absolutely to identify those people and what are the things you could change so that it’s not so clearly one person. So that was the issue with Cat Person is that the original writer could have changed some small details that would have made it more clear, it would have helped distinguish this fictionalized relationship from the real relationship that happened.

**Craig:** Yeah. But maybe it wouldn’t have been as good.

**John:** Maybe? Maybe.

**Craig:** You know, the thing is I was not aware that that story was based on a real person. If the real person hadn’t said this was based on a real person then would I have even known that it was based on a real person? I don’t know.

You know, I’m a little bit more – certainly you’re intention is never to hurt anybody. But if a woman is in an abusive relationship with a man, he abuses her, and he torments her, and then she writes a roman a clef, right, she writes a novel that’s basically inspired by the things that she experienced with that person, she’s supposed to respect him too? Does she have to change things so that we don’t know it’s him? I think there’s the legal line and that’s the line. And the rest you have to kind of just feel. I understand why Amanda Knox is upset. The people I think she should be most upset with are all of the lazy journalists who just keep going, “Look, it’s Amanda Knox,” because that is kind of easy.

But I’m not sure there’s a remedy here beyond just saying hey everybody just to be clear if you think that that movie that is sort of like my life is actually like my life it is not at all like my life, at all. But I don’t think there’s any stricter kind of remedy than that.

**John:** So we talk a lot about our How Would This Be a Movie and to what degree we would need to get life rights from a person or just use publically available facts to do something. Obviously one of the reasons why you sometimes want life rights is because it’s going to be very difficult to do this work without access to information they have. Or to protect yourself from defamation lawsuits, libel lawsuits that could come up.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And there’s reasons why you may want to protect yourself. Even if you think you are in the clear you may still want those life rights because it’s better not to have that lawsuit and have something hanging over you. And to have that person be publically on the side of the film rather than against the film. Those can be very useful things independent of kind of the moral and ethical issues.

**Craig:** Almost no one is going to go get life rights for a fictionalized version of something. They will get life rights if they are telling the so-and-so story. They’re using your actual name. But if we’re into the roman a clef world where we are drawing from reality but changing some names and doing a parallel fictionalized version of it it would probably not be advisable to go get the life rights. You are essentially opening yourself up to even more trouble I think. Because at that point you’re saying, “Oh yeah, this is definitely you.”

Whereas right now Tom McCarthy and the studio can say, “No, I mean, it’s not her. We’re not telling the Amanda Knox story.”

**John:** Yeah. So Craig on Saturday I got to go see Mike Birbiglia’s new comedy show.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** It was delightful. So Mike Birbiglia, a frequent guest on the show, friend of the podcast. And it was my first time having to show proof of vaccination to get into a venue to see his show.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I was just absolutely delighted to show my vaccination card and to be in a space full of vaccinated people. I still wore my mask and I was one of the few people wearing my mask. I kind of felt like more people should have been wearing their masks. Still, I was delighted to be using my vaccination card and be in a space to see Mike do his new show, which is going to be obviously a stage adaptation and is going to be just terrific.

But I wanted to talk about required vaccinations because it’s not just comedy venues like this. It’s actually a big thing in the industry as of the last two weeks. More and more places are requiring crews to be vaccinated. So Netflix led the way. They were the first major Hollywood studio to do it. It’s basically everyone in Zone A has to have proof of vaccination for their productions. Craig, can you talk to me about what Zone A means?

**Craig:** Zone A, which is my zone on my show, is the zone where you are working with actors. You were working in general proximity to actors. And the reason that is its own zone is because the actors are required at various points throughout the day to have their masks off. They have to act without masks. So all of the people around them need to be masked and tested and evaluated regularly. I myself am tested three times a week. And so far I’ve aced every test.

**John:** Yes. So you are vaccinated but you are also tested.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Because even though the vaccination will protect you from serious disease you could theoretically get a breakthrough infection and I know folks who have gotten breakthrough infections.

**Craig:** Yes, absolutely. Happily what we’re seeing with breakthrough infections is for the most part it is a mild illness, almost no hospitalizations, and almost no death, thank god. There’s a little bit concern about some of the long haul Covid symptoms showing up in some of those folks, so vaccinations are not a magic shield against being ill. But we’ve always been ill. I mean, we’ve been sick our whole lives with flus and colds. I mean, every year we would get a cold until the last two years, rather nice.

So we’re used to being sick. We’re just not used to having to go into the hospital, get intubated, and die.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So that’s what the vaccines have accomplished. I’m thrilled that they are starting to require these vaccinations for people working in Zone A. Along with those new rules, the unions also agreed to loosen some things up. For union productions if you are fully vaccinated you don’t necessarily have to wear the mask all the time, I think, or when you’re outside I believe you don’t have to wear the mask.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So they’re starting to loosen things up. Unfortunately up here in Canada we don’t get the full benefit of those easing of restrictions because quite a few people here in Canada are vaccinated with Astra-Zeneca which the US has not approved. So it’s sort of like it doesn’t count for those rules which is annoying. Because I just read, by the way, I mean the whole thing about Astra-Zeneca was the danger of blood clots, and they’ve just come out with a study no more danger of blood clots with Astra-Zeneca than with nothing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So we’ll see what happens next.

**John:** So as we’re recording this Disney was requiring all salaried and non-union hourly employees in the US to be vaccinated, which is great. And so you have to do it within 60 days. And all new folks have to be vaccinated it looks like before they even start.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I’m sure other studios will have the same thing. Google and other places are laying that in. As you said the unions are saying yes it’s OK to mandate vaccines. They have stipulations about who can have access to the vaccine information, but great, that’s good.

For writers we’re in sort of a unique place because you as a writer, and many showrunners, need to be in Zone A because they have to be on set around the actors, but if you’re a writer in a writer’s room, eh, do we need writer’s rooms to be in person right now? WGA came out and said if you are going to have an in-person writing room basically your employer is responsible for protecting your safety. They strongly recommend everyone be vaccinated and that you still need to give the option/accommodation for writers who don’t want to be in-person for services in a writer’s room. And that just makes sense because we are lucky that we don’t have to be in-person to do a lot of our jobs unless it’s something involving the set.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t use a writer’s room, but if I did I would imagine I would love to have it back in person just because there is a certain interpersonal magic that occurs and the ease and speed of communication that Zoom can disrupt. But if it were my room I would say you’re not getting in this room if you’re not fully vaccinated and also you have to wear a mask.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If everybody is fully vaccinated and wearing a mask then I’m more than happy to sit in a room with all those folks. That would be no problem for me.

**John:** So for personally and for sort of my own small business we are back in person sometimes. We’re outside as much as we can be. We’re all vaccinated. We’re trying to be safe and smart. On this trip Mike and I have been the two guys with masks in places where a lot of other people weren’t wearing masks, but it just felt like I don’t want to be indoors places without a mask if I don’t need to be indoors without a mask, especially because we’ve had other friends on this trip who have gotten breakthrough Covid-19 infections. That’s just the reality that we’re living in.

Coming back to the city after being on Fire Island we went and got PCR tests, which you can get at any Walgreens. So the drive-through PCR test. But we also got the cheap do-it-yourself kits, the BinaxNOW kits, which are actually surprisingly easy to use and are useful in the sense of something that was promised kind of very early in the pandemic, the test that is not perfectly accurate but shows are you infectious right now, and they’re really good for that, so I would recommend those for folks. And they’re behind the counter at the pharmacy. And they’re cheap.

**Craig:** Yeah. So just a couple years after anyone who wants a test can get them and they’re beautiful tests.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So one of the things I’ve read about the Delta variant, which makes it interesting, and I think is part of what’s happening here is that the Delta variant seems to work primarily through the nose as opposed to the lungs. It really wants to get inside your nose. That’s where it does its business. And the nose is in a fully vaccinated person the least vaccinated part of you. There’s just not a lot of blood flow in there, which is weird for anyone who has ever gotten a nosebleed, but it just doesn’t have the same kind of constant flow around.

So when you do get fully vaccinated all those wonderful immune cells are living in the rest of your body, but not so much in the nose, and that’s where Delta is going in and doing a number. Now, eventually what happens is it crawls down your throat and into your lungs at which point the vaccine says, ah-ha, I’ve got this, and then it wins. Which is why you can get sick with Delta but not fatally so, which is good news. But that’s what’s going on.

**John:** I’ve just decided I’m treating myself as my own Zone A. I’m going to be careful about myself and I’m going to protect myself, because I am my own actor. I’ve got to protect the production and the production is me.

**Craig:** Yeah. I worry about this all the time. You know, we have hundreds of people working on this show, maybe a thousand, more.

**John:** And you and I both know so many shows that have had to start up and shut down and start up and shut down. And you don’t want that.

**Craig:** No. Yeah, we have not had to shut down, which is wonderful, and I’m hoping we don’t. We have a lot of people. So, of course, I think about it all the time. I worry about it all the time. But what I am pretty happy about is that we’re vaccinated. I think basically everybody – I believe everybody in Zone A is vaccinated. And so if something should happen, shutting down is never the thing that should freak you out the most. What should freak you out the most is people getting really sick.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And to that extent I’m way less nervous about life than I was a year ago, that’s for sure. So thank you science.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** I will say that before we started our trip was the first time I got a Covid exposure notification and it’s basically we went to go see a movie in a theater in Koreatown and the next day got a notification that someone had tested positive for Covid-19. It’s like, OK, well we’re all vaccinated. 100% of the people in the theater were wearing masks. And we were spaced out widely. I’m not worried and nobody got sick.

But the advice for what you’re supposed to do next reminded me of the signs you see in restaurants about Covid safety but they’re like six months out of date. I hate the ones that are all about it’s really important to wash your hands and that stuff. I’m like, yeah, washing your hands is important, but by far the most important thing is to be vaccinated and to wear a mask. And the instructions I got from this exposure notification were sort of the same. They were kind of vague about isolation, but didn’t sort of say the actual things we know you really should do. So, frustrating. Like getting tested.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. Well, our government is struggling.

**John:** It does struggle at times. But we never struggle with listener questions because we get the best ones.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** And so Megana Rao, if you could come on and share some questions from our listeners with us.

**Megana Rao:** All right. Dan from Baltimore asks, “I found myself watching a clip from a movie about a particular turtleneck-wearing technology figure and someone in the comments said, ‘This part is so cheesy.’ While I agreed with them it was hard for me to put my finger on exactly what made it cheesy. Was it the acting? The writing? Or was it that the moment itself was unearned? I’ve searched the podcast and maybe I’m using the wrong term, but have you guys ever talked about cheese and how to avoid it?”

**John:** You know, I don’t know if we’ve really used the word cheese much on this podcast.

**Craig:** I don’t think we have.

**John:** But I mean I get it. I know what Dan is describing. And those moments that set up this wincing feeling like, oh, that is so cheesy. And it sort of feels like fake earnest. It feels forced. And so let’s talk about some of the reasons why those things feel forced. And sometimes it is the writing. But sometimes I think it really is the acting and the staging that is what’s making a moment that doesn’t have to feel cheesy feel cheesy. So Craig what’s your instinct on where cheese comes from?

**Craig:** I think cheesiness happens when the people who are performing or the scene, whatever, any of the things that you’re witnessing feel unaware of the complexities of life. So, you see this a lot on sitcoms for children, although you used to see it a lot on sitcoms for adults, where you’re like, OK, well in real life nothing like that happens like that. That’s insane. It’s like somebody walks into a wall and goes, “D’oh, my head,” and someone else is like, “Oh man, you’re so clumsy.” And they’re like, “I know.” That’s so divorced from the reality of what’s true.

It’s a little bit like what we were talking about earlier, the complexity of narrative, and the maturity of narrative. Cheesiness is the least mature narrative. It’s narrative that is just unaware. A little bit like a hyper formalized and hyper imagined human behavior.

**John:** Yeah. You’re describing something that feels unnatural. And so it can feel unnatural because it’s just written unnatural, like characters are doing things that they just wouldn’t do, but sometimes the [unnaturality] feels like the motion-smoothing that’s being left on a hotel room TV, which I encountered way too much on this trip. It just feels weird and gross and sometimes it’s because of the staging, because it’s just forced camera movements that don’t make sense, or eye lines that don’t match. It just feels like, oh, this is just not good. We’re staying way too wide for no good reason.

We have a sense of what it is and I think there’s a vicious circle where the kinds of camera work and staging that we see in children’s sitcoms, which is cheesy material, whenever we see that kind of staging in things that aren’t written cheesy it feel cheesy because we’re associated the cheese with it. So you sort of have that sprinkling of parmesan over anything if it’s used in that same kind of blocking and staging and shot selection. It’s strange.

Also, the difference between camp and cheesy.

**Craig:** Oh sure.

**John:** Because camp kind of knows that it’s cheesy and it’s leaning into the cheese and sort of celebrating the cheesiness of it, which can be great and delightful.

**Craig:** Something about cheesiness is connected to indicating. The cheesy material is always over-explaining what it’s about and how somebody feels. Somebody puts their hand out and gestures to a thing and says, “What is this?” It’s so weird.

My sister and I loved Brady Bunch but we knew how cheesy it was. So part of our enjoyment of The Brady Bunch was giggling about how those parents just seemed like they were on drugs because if we had done any of the things those kids did, you know, we would have been screamed at. Any of that stuff.

**John:** I guess you really are describing the awareness or unawareness of cheesiness is camp versus cheese. And that’s why The Brady Bunch movies are terrific because they are fully aware. They’re doing the same tropes but they’re fully aware that they’re doing the tropes and that’s what makes them work.

**Craig:** Yes, the movie is aware. And the characters who are the Bradys are not, which is wonderful. I love those movies. The second one is really good. Both of those movies are great. I love them.

**John:** Love them to death. Megana, what else you got for us?

**Megana:** OK, Lydia asks, “I’m writing a script right now that has an extensive discussion about zombies and the plan for surviving the apocalypse when it comes, because, well, it is. My characters are discussing the different types of zombies in the existing film universe and how each are better or worse in relation to their ability to survive. I want to call them out specifically. I was going to say Cillian Murphy/Brad Pitt zombies or Romero Slow Pokes. That’s OK right? How far can I go in referencing or quoting without infringement?”

**John:** My instinct is that I’m nervous for your scene. I’m nervous for your scene because I feel like characters discussing things in other movies is not generally going to work out great, but there’s exceptions. I think Kevin Smith’s Clerks does a really good job of that. But, Craig, I have no issues with referencing Romero zombies versus 28 Days Later zombies. I think that’s all fine. You’re not infringing on somebody to say – you can talk about those things without using those things in a copyright sense.

**Craig:** You can talk about anything you want. People in movies are allowed to have seen movies. Somebody can sit down in a movie and explain the entire plot of Ghostbusters 2 if they want. That’s perfectly fine. So, there’s no problem here with that. If that’s what you want to do you can do it.

**John:** Craig, I want to see the movie where someone just explains the plot of Ghostbusters, because that could be phenomenal.

**Craig:** It would be really funny.

**John:** I can imagine a version of that that’s absolutely great. And at some point you would cross some line where it’s like, wait, are you actually just – is there enough of a narrative adaptation to it? But it’s still great.

**Craig:** Are you just reading the script for Ghostbusters?

**John:** The same way that that Gone with the Wind parody was considered not to be enough of a parody to be its own, to not be copyright infringement.

**Craig:** Ah, yes.

**John:** There’s some line you’re going to cross, but if it’s characters in a scene doing it you’re not going to cross that line.

**Craig:** You can reference every zombie that’s ever been made. You can reference the people who were in it. You can reference the people who created it. No problem.

**John:** Craig, I think we’re at a fascinating moment right now with also the superhero genre and basically we have the DC Universe, we have the Marvel Universe, but then we have both Amazon’s The Boys and Invincible which are really closely quoting sort of those characters. There’s sort of one-for-one parity between the characters in the DC universe and the characters in these other universes. And it’s just gotten to be sort of weird.

I mean, I don’t think there’s going to be any lawsuits, but it’s strange that we have these ideas of like well what if Superman was evil in both of these shows.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s too much. I feel like this is – we’ve gone through these. We’ve talked about this before. There was a time when everything that was on a screen was a western. And there was a time when everything that was on a screen was a car chase movie, or an action movie. And let’s see where this all goes. But Marvel in particular is experiencing so much success that everybody else now – I think people tried to chase them and then most people said, “Well, this is all based on characters, other than Warner Bros. and DC none of us have characters that people know, so yeah, let’s just start inventing characters and commenting.”

And to that extent if they’re good shows, great, fantastic. All for it. But, yeah, we’re getting into levels now.

**John:** Levels over levels.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Megana, let’s try one last question.

**Megana:** Great. Kevin asks, “My partner applied for a diversity fellowship and admitted to me that he submitted a script we co-wrote together as one of his two samples, but with just his name on it since I don’t meet the qualifications for diversity that the fellowship asks for. That’s wrong, right? I’m not sure what my next step should be or if I should just let it go.”

**John:** Oh Kevin. Kevin.

**Craig:** Now, wait, is Kevin’s partner a life partner or writing partner? Probably writing partner is what we’re thinking here.

**John:** I’m assuming just writing partner.

**Craig:** OK, it’s just writing partner.

**Megana:** It’s writing partner.

**Craig:** Man, if it had been actual cohabitation romance partner.

**John:** My wife. Yeah.

**Craig:** Ooh, damn. That would have been rough. But it’s still rough.

**John:** To stipulate it’s wrong to change the title page to take your cowriter off. That’s just wrong. That’s absolutely wrong. That’s actually–

**Craig:** It’s wrong and–

**John:** Legally…yeah. There’s liability. I don’t want to say – it’s not like criminal, but…

**Craig:** No. But you have considered – what you have done is committed a tort as the law [unintelligible]. That is a civil wrong. You have violated another person’s right in their own shared copyright of that material. You cannot do that. It is wrong. And, yeah, you’re absolutely legally liable. And even worse if Kevin wants to he can just drop the dime on you to the diversity program and they’re going to be like, “Oh yeah, no, you’re out,” because it’s dishonest. And it’s also not fair to everybody else applying for that diversity fellowship.

Everyone is supposed to be applying representing their own work. So, Kevin, your partner has done a very wrong thing and they should undo it.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s imagine that the question came not from Kevin but from Kevin’s writing partner saying like I did this thing, what should I do. I think the choice is to own up to it, to say, “Hey, I sent this in, my name on it, but it’s actually me and my partner. I need to resubmit the script.” You need to apologize the hell out to Kevin.

There are going to be situations where you’ve co-written a script and one of you is eligible for a thing and the other one isn’t. Ask. There’s going to be some frequently asked questions about like how you submit this, because there’s going to be a way to do this. Most likely the best choice for this, and this happens also with representation, is you need to have something that you wrote by yourself and something you wrote with a partner. That’s representative of your work. But just taking the other person’s name off of it is not cool or kosher. And that just cannot be done.

**Craig:** Yeah. Generally when you use the phrase “he admitted to me” then you know that he did something wrong. Like John says if he had asked that’s entirely different. You’re allowed to ask permission. And if you grant that permission, fine, that’s up to you. And it’s entirely your prerogative. But, no, what he did was wrong. And as far as what your next step should be, I’d get a different writing partner. I mean, I don’t trust this dude at all.

**John:** Uh-uh.

**Craig:** And I’ve got to be honest with you. Kevin, there’s so many untrustworthy people in this business. So many liars that the thought of self-inflicting one of them upon your person and your soul is no good.

**John:** You need to trust your writing partner. You just do.

**Craig:** You have to.

**John:** Not only are you sharing a mind space with them, but you are making business decisions together.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** Your lives are going to be entangled. Don’t do this.

**Craig:** What does Oprah say? When somebody shows you who they are believe them. Is that Oprah?

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I choose to believe it’s Oprah.

**John:** I’m sure she said it, even if she didn’t say it originally.

**Craig:** In Oprah we trust.

**Megana:** Can I ask you a question? Because Craig said something like if you ask their permission and they give it to you. Can you give your permission to have your credit revoked?

**Craig:** Absolutely. So this is not a Writers Guild awarded credited. This is your work. And you have control over how your work is reproduced, assigned. And so, yes, they would have to ask permission. There would have to be something written. You would have to sign it. And it basically says in this limited circumstance you are allowed to present this work without my name. But you’d have to really limit that and make sure it’s defined carefully. But that’s one of the rights of copyright is that you can waive it or reassign it, which is what happens when you sell a script to a studio. You reassign it.

**John:** That’s true. I think there could still be a moral/ethical issue between you and the contest, or the fellowship you’re trying to enter into.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** I think there’s an issue there for misrepresenting that this is your own work.

**Craig:** I think that in the case of Kevin and his untrustworthy writing partner if the writing partner had said, “Can I do this,” and Kevin said, “Mm, OK, fine, let’s have a lawyer draw up a little thing, we sign it.” And then the partner does it. The partner is still committing the crime. The partner is misrepresenting something to this program. Kevin has merely created a condition that allows the partner to do the wrong thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is Judge Mazin. Slam.

**John:** Chun-chun.

**Craig:** Tunk-tunk.

**John:** All right. It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a place I’ve visited today which is Little Island in NYC. It is a new floating park. I guess it’s not actually floating. It is built on piers. It is on the west side. I just thought it was delightful.

**Craig:** Oh, look at this thing.

**John:** I’d read stories about it and it was sort of controversial as it was being planned and people were opposed to it. And Barry Diller provided a lot of money for it, which I don’t really love billionaires, but if you’re going to be a billionaire and you want to build something build a public park that people can go and enjoy and is free for the world. And I really dug it. It’s super pretty and it’s just like this little space you could wander around. They have an amphitheater for concerts and outdoor shows. And I just like when there’s – it reminds me of the High Line.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s just an outdoor place of joy. And so I would recommend anybody who is visiting NYC or living here to check it out when you get a chance. It’s limited entry, or it’s like timed entry during the weeks. It’s going to keep changing. But if you get there early you can just wander in and it’s just really nicely done.

**Craig:** It looks beautiful and I’m all in favor of this. We stopped building stuff at some point. All we decided we were going to ever build again were shopping malls and square office park buildings. So New York, all these wonderful buildings there, the whole skyline with the exception – one notable exception as the result of terrorism – it’s essentially kind of unchanged. Like all the great buildings are still there. But where’s the new Chrysler Building? Where’s the new World Trade Center? Where are all these wonderful things?

And so the High Line was an example of something new in New York that felt wonderful and so is this. If they’re going to build things then build these. This is cool. Yeah, I mean, look, Barry Diller is probably not a great guy. [laughs] I mean, based on what I’ve read. But that Little Island looks beautiful.

**John:** It does. And the photos that you’ll see in the New York Times piece that we’ll link to is with it empty. But it’s actually when it’s full of people, and it’s not crowded, but when it’s full of people, people just love it. And it feels imagineered in the sense that like all the slopes are designed so that an older person could get up them. You can sort of explore. There’s little bell things that kids can play with. So everyone who was there was just really digging it. And so just well done everybody for building this thing.

**Craig:** I’m sure folks from the wide open spaces in the US like Wyoming are looking at this going, “What?” [laughs] “You spent a quarter of a billion dollars for what? 2.4 acres?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s New York for you. I love it. Love it.

**John:** What have you got?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing, you know I love an escape room, John.

**John:** Oh you do.

**Craig:** The escape rooms are open here in Calgary. And I had the pleasure of visiting twice doing two rooms at Escape Ops here in Calgary. And what I love about Escape Ops, they have four rooms. I’ve done two of them so far. There are two remaining. It is run by Dan and Emily who I don’t know if they’re husband and wife but they’re partners. And they’re also partners. And they love what they do. And they make some terrific escape rooms there. And it just occurred to me that in so many circumstances you need passion and skill. If you find people with passion and skill it is the greatest thing.

If you’ve got passion without skill it’s just sort of noise. And if you have skill without passion it’s boring. But when you have passion and skill like they do you come up with really great things because you care. Because you want them to be wonderful.

So, if you do like escape rooms and you live in here in the Greater Calgary Area go visit Escape Ops and tell them Craig sent you.

**John:** I love that we’re providing highly localized opportunities of places to visit only if you are in the places that you are.

**Craig:** Correct. Well, I mean, about the same amount of people live in New York City and Calgary I think. It’s roughly the same. [laughs]

**John:** They really are. They’re really two capitols of the world.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Cool. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Caden Brown. If you have outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter I am @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. Go to Cotton Bureau. You’ll find them, including the new 10th Anniversary t-shirt.

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 Black Widow. Craig, it’s nice to have you back.

**Craig:** Great to be back, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** And we’re back. So, Craig, this past week Scarlett Johansson or I don’t think she actually sued them this week but basically news broke that Scarlett Johansson is suing Disney over Black Widow saying that the decision to release it through streaming and theatrically cost her millions of dollars that she would have been paid in box office bonuses. This is the first of these lawsuits that I’ve seen publically, but a lot of actors and directors were complaining when Warners was doing similar things. How are you feeling about this and the situation we find ourselves in?

**Craig:** Well, we can talk about the prospects of this case and we can also just talk about the politics of it which may be more interesting. Legally the prospects seem super questionable to me. As always, I am not a lawyer. What do I know? Except that they did release it theatrically. Unless there was something in the contract that said we have to release it theatrically on this many screens and we cannot release it day-and-date in any other way, I’m not sure what she can do other than say this sucks and you guys are jerks for doing it to me.

Or, you guys suck because you haven’t compensated me the way that for instance Warner Bros. eventually compensated their major talent when they decided to put everything out on HBO Max.

So, is she going to win? At this point, like if Disney showed up and murdered your family I’m not sure you’d win either. I would not want to go up against that crew of lawyers. But this is possibly the beginning of the end of something and the first shot of a war that is about to start.

**John:** Yeah. I think that’s what makes it most interesting to me. It doesn’t honestly matter that much to me whether she wins or loses. I mean, I don’t think this lawsuit will be especially important, but I think it does signal a split between these two things. Because we have this time before which was like, oh crap, there’s a pandemic, we have to release stuff on streaming. OK, we’re going to compensate these big movie stars to do this.

In this case they didn’t compensate her for doing this, which was a choice. They could have just chosen to give her some extra money or sort of make good on that. It seems like they didn’t do that. I sort of wonder why they didn’t do that.

**Craig:** Well, they might have.

**John:** They might have.

**Craig:** They might have. It may have just not been what she wanted. Right? So then it becomes a negotiation. We don’t know. I don’t know the details behind the scenes here.

**John:** But so we should back up and say it’s not just big actors and big directors, you and I have box office bonuses built into our contracts. And so for movies that are in production right now, but also moves we’ve had before. If Aladdin had gone to streaming rather than gone to theatrical I would have lost, you know–

**Craig:** A lot.

**John:** A lot of money. Major, major money. And I would have been pissed, understandably. And I think in some ways even a little bit more pissed in – if it was just the pandemic and there really wasn’t a choice and they had to release it on streaming I sort of get it. But here they had a choice that they could have just gone full theatrical and there might have been more money to have made. We won’t know.

**Craig:** That’s the part I disagree with. I don’t think Disney is ever going to do anything that they know is going to cost them money. I think they–

**John:** But their calculation is different. Because they make money if people see it in the theater, but they also make money if people sign up for Disney+ and keep their Disney+ subscription.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And they’re trying to serve two masters there. And we as folks who get box office bonuses are only getting money if it’s successful at the box office.

**Craig:** 100%. I just think that if Disney thought that they would make more money ultimately for themselves, regardless of what they were going to dole out, by a longer and exclusive theatrical window they would have done it. It is possible that they are also pricing in the long term plan to put everything on Disney+ and just stop putting movies in theaters. I don’t know.

What I do know is that we are living in the echo time. And when Covid happened it impacted a whole ton of contracts that had no concept of what Covid was and didn’t care. So, now we all know. And contracts will look different. That’s for sure.

**John:** Oh, for sure. I mean, I guess we’re probably living in a force majeure world for a bit, where they can sort of say this is an act of god, we can’t do normal things. And now that this is more normal, we’re not as pandemic, but it’s also not – nothing is unprecedented at this point. We sort of know how to do stuff and we have a sense of what the shape of the universe is like. Yes, our contracts will be different. And I think they will be different in ways that will tend to favor the studios.

**Craig:** Yeah. Of course. [laughs]

**John:** Let me make a more obvious point. [laughs] I’m not nervous for Disney succeeding here.

**Craig:** No. They’re going to be just fine. This is really fascinating because I’m still confused. So much of this subscription based stuff is really hard to tie the income to individual works. They have their baloney theories of how they can figure that out. But Netflix won’t even tell us how many people really watch something. And when they do tell us how they define who watched something, you know, you want to shoot milk out of your nose. It’s the biggest joke in the world.

So if somebody watches something for 20 seconds they watched it? That’s crazy. So, everything is wonky. Nothing is connected to anything real. I have no – it’s just a black box. Nobody knows what’s happening inside of there. And if there were ever a time when the three guilds needed to come together and figure something out here and unify on an issue it was this. That said, they won’t. 100% they will not.

**John:** [laughs] Oh my gosh. I love how definitive you are on that.

**Craig:** 100%.

**John:** I will, god, I don’t know. Are we betting on this? I think – so here’s where I think we agree. I think you and I both agree that if the guilds don’t figure this out it is an existential threat to the nature of residuals and sort of meaningful backend compensation. And not only do the guilds understand this, but I also think the agencies understand this as well. So I think there are a lot of people who have clear vision of how important this is. And what we’re really debating is whether that clear vision will get them to actually take an action that will benefit all of them.

**Craig:** I wouldn’t count on the agencies. The agencies make all their money from probably 10% of their clients.

**John:** Like a Scarlett Johansson.

**Craig:** Correct. But in the case of Scarlett Johansson my guess is that if they were negotiating a new deal for Scarlett Johansson they would know to not build it around box office bonuses. Meaning that there’s a lot of ways to skin the cat when it’s an individual negotiation with a studio. The issue for guilds is they’re there to protect everybody, so there’s this baseline thing.

And in a way the studios love that because they don’t want individuals negotiating too much of this backend stuff. They want to be able to say, well, when it comes to residuals that’s what it is for everybody. What I think will happen is probably there will be some labor action and then the DGA will make a deal. [laughs] That’s just sort of how it goes around here.

**John:** Well so here’s the point of commonality between all these different parties is the desire to break that black box and actually have some insight into what’s actually happening there. And some of that insight is already happening because Nielsen actually kind of does know who is watching what. So I think the desire to keep all that data secret, it’s just not going to be secret for forever.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s what we really need is some sort of robust third party verification of who is watching what and how long they’re watching it for. And it’s tricky because they’ve got to figure out what watching something means. It used to be very simple. The TV was on for that thing and you watched it. And then it was gone.

**John:** Or you sold that DVD and that DVD was sold and that became residuals. And it is tougher in this age, I get it, with streaming. But we can figure this out because we figured stuff out before.

**Craig:** I mean, there’ve been things where I’ve started it watching it and stopped and then like seven months later I’m like, oh, look at that, and I finished it.

**John:** Does that count as one view or not?

**Craig:** I don’t know. I don’t know.

**John:** But we have computers who can count that stuff. And they’re really good at counting stuff.

**Craig:** The computers will save us, said the computer.

**John:** Ha-ha. So I think our summary of Scarlett Johansson lawsuit is I don’t think it will probably amount to anything, but I think it is an important step along the way of this discussion about how we move from how we were counting things to how we will count things in the future.

**Craig:** I agree. I think it will be settled, as these things almost always are, and that settlement will be yet another black box by design. But we are going to have to figure this out and one thing I think we have to be really careful about at this point is no longer fighting blood wars over dying models. We have to figure out – knowing what to fight for is just as important as a willingness to fight. And right now that’s the trick of it. I don’t envy anybody planning strategy for these next negotiations.

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

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* [Kerri Strug Shouldn’t Have Been Forced to Do That Vault](https://slate.com/culture/2021/07/kerri-strug-simone-biles-vault-atlanta-legacy-injuries.html)
* Amanda Knox’s [twitter thread](https://twitter.com/amandaknox/status/1420871392266911746?s=21) and [Medium article](https://amandamarieknox.medium.com/who-owns-my-name-93561f83e502)
* [Mandatory Vaccinations On Productions An Option Under Return-To-Work Protocols](https://deadline.com/2021/07/mandatory-covid-19-vaccinations-now-an-option-on-film-tv-productions-1234796313/)
* [Disney to Mandate COVID-19 Vaccinations for All U.S. Staffers](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/disney-requiring-all-employees-be-vaccinated-1234990995/)
* [Netflix To Require Covid Vaccinations For Actors & Other “Zone A” Personnel On Its U.S. Productions](https://deadline.com/2021/07/netflix-to-require-covid-vaccinations-for-all-actors-on-us-productions-1234801577/)
* [Little Island](https://littleisland.org/visit-us/) by [Barry Diller](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/arts/little-island-barry-diller.html)
* [Scarlett Johansson’s ‘Black Widow’ Lawsuit Is Game-Changing, But May Be Legally Weak](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/scarlett-johanssons-black-widow-lawsuit-1234990644/) by Eriq Gardner
* [Scarlett Johansson Sues Disney Over ‘Black Widow’ Streaming Release](https://www.wsj.com/articles/scarlett-johansson-sues-disney-over-black-widow-streaming-release-11627579278?mod=e2tw) on WSJ
* [Escape Ops on Calgary](https://escapeops.ca/)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Caden Brown ([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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