Scriptnotes Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Cruel fate.

**Craig:** Cruel fate.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Oh god. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yes there were.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

**Craig:** [laughs] Clearly.

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

**Craig:** Was stupid. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Which is fine.

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

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** We’ll see.

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

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

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

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

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

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

John, what is your response to this?

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

**Craig:** Bethematch.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** That’s the only difference.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah. It’s just better.

**Craig:** It’s better.

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

**Craig:** Not the pig one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Congratulations.

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

**John:** You liked it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yes.

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Megana:** Basically.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I like it.

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

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

**John:** You do.

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

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

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

**John:** That’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yes. They don’t do that.

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

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

**John:** Absolutely. Mostly.

**Craig:** Mostly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Tell me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Agreed.

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

**Craig:** OK!

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

**Craig:** Never heard of him.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** I disagree.

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

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

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

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

**John:** All right. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Andrew Ryan. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin sometimes. And I am @johnaugust.

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

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

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

Craig, Megana, thank you so much.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

[Bonus segment]

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Is it healthy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s terrifying.

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

**Craig:** None taken.

**John:** None taken.

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

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

**Craig:** No.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Well there you go.

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

**Craig:** No.

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

**John:** No idea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Megana:** Aw.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** I agree.

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

**Megana:** Thank you.

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

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

**Craig:** Good. I’ve done my job.

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

Links:

* [Rust Movie Set Shooting](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/21/us/alec-baldwin-shooting-rust-movie.html)
* [Netflix to Change How It Measures a Title’s Viewers Post-‘Squid Game’](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/netflix-change-public-viewer-reporting-1235033741/)
* [There Is No Such Thing as Bragging Too Much About a Kidney Donation](https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/bad-art-friend-kidney-crisis-donation-altruism.amp)
* [Episode 480, The Wedding Episode](https://johnaugust.com/2020/the-wedding-episode)
* [The Premise by BJ Novak](https://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/the-premise)
* [College Degrees are Overrated](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/18/opinion/college-degrees-employers.html)
* [What is the Financial Value of my Degree?](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/7583742/)
* [Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials](https://www.amazon.com/Kids-These-Days-Making-Millennials/) by Malcolm Harris (not the Kids are Alright!)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Andrew Ryan ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/522standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/you-cant-even-imagine).

**John August:** Hey, so on today’s show Craig says the F-word a couple times because he gets angry about a writer who is taking advantage of people. So that’s a warning if you’re in the car with your kids or someplace where you could just put in headphones, do that.

**Craig Mazin:** The kids need to know, too.

**John:** The kids need to be warned about Svengalis.

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 520 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show the screenplay is often described as the blueprint for a movie, but how do the artists and craftspeople who actually make movies use these blueprints. We’ll look at some of the most important people to read a script and how they do their jobs. We’ll also talk about predatory writers, getting in over your head, and what it’s like to have no visual imagination.

And in our bonus segment for premium members, fine, let’s get into that whole bad art friend situation. The thing that was all over my Twitter that Craig sent to me as an – ugh, now I had to read this.

**Craig:** I mean, kinda.

**John:** Kinda. You sort of kinda had to read it. You missed out on the episode where I think Liz Hannah was on the show and she and I talked through the Cat Person discourse. And so it’s another round of that. And Cat Person is actually referenced in it, so it’s all nesting dolls of appropriation.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s pretty screwed up. Yeah. I enjoyed reading about. And I enjoyed not being a part of it more than anything.

**John:** Yes. I really enjoyed not being involved in any of those text chains.

**Craig:** My new sort of joy is not being involved in things.

**John:** Yes. Love it. I love that for you. It’s a good look. But first some follow up. Last week we discussed the upcoming IATSE strike authorization vote. Craig, what was the result of the strike authorization vote?

**Craig:** A resounding yes. Not only did 98% of the vote come back in as a yes, which is not uncommon for these things, but the really fascinating number was that 90% of IATSE actually showed up to vote. If 90% of the Writers Guild shows up to vote that’s a pretty great number, but it represents a few thousand people. If 90% of IATSE shows up to vote we’re talking tens of thousands of people.

**John:** Yeah. Good sized towns of people.

**Craig:** Yes. So there is no question about IATSE’s willingness to go on strike. And this was not kind of even a show vote. They weren’t even doing the thing that the Writers Guild annoyingly does where it’s like you have to vote yes. They were like, no, no, no, everyone was like, please, give me the ballot. I insist on voting yes right now because there is a pent up demand for action. And it is justified.

So, what happens is they go back and they sit down with the AMPTP who at this point would be beyond foolish if they didn’t arrive at a place that thwarted a strike in my opinion.

**John:** Absolutely. Because we recorded this show on a Saturday and it comes out on a Tuesday maybe it will all be resolved by then and we’ll again be living in the past. So, for our listeners who are living in the future, hey, tell us what happened because we don’t know yet.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, my gut tells me there will not be a strike. I still keep thinking that because I feel like the impact of an IATSE strike is so dramatic. And because it would open that can of worms permanently. I just feel, I feel like the companies are going to have to give on a number of issues. If they don’t it is almost tantamount to them declaring that the era of unionization of labor in the entertainment business is over and that the Amazonian era has begun. And we don’t want that.

**John:** No, we don’t.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** In last week’s episode we wondered aloud why Netflix was choosing two minutes as the threshold for viewing a program. Craig was mocking them and asking, hey, why are you doing that. Several writers wrote in with possible answers. So, the first one really comes down to intentionality. Doug writes, “Viewing something for two minutes is long enough to say ‘that person was interested in this’ and that is a valuable metric for Netflix because the constant release of curiosity-worthy material is enough to keep people subscribing, even if they don’t finish everything they start.”

So if you clicked that and you’re watching it for two minutes you meant to click it and it wasn’t accidental. This was something that you thought was going to be interesting to you. And so that’s really kind of what they’re most concerned about. Because remember they kind of don’t care whether you watch the whole thing. They’d be delighted if you did watch the whole thing. They basically don’t want you to stop subscribing to Netflix. That’s really their goal.

**Craig:** Yeah. I get that completely. But I think Doug is stating something as fact in which I don’t really know if it is. If everybody constantly watched just two minutes of stuff on Netflix and went “garbage, moving on,” and then never found stuff that they really, really loved at some point people would turn it off. The two minutes is not a threshold – I mean, we’re acknowledging there is a threshold that implies interested in. But at that point why is it two minutes? Why isn’t it one minute? Why isn’t it 40 seconds?

It seems to me that there has to be a number that implies interested in and appreciated to some small amount. And two minutes ain’t it. At all. So I would suggest that Netflix has picked two minutes because more than anything it makes their numbers look amazing. That’s why.

**John:** That’s very, very possible. I would also be certain that if people are actually watching two minutes, if there’s that kind of churn from program to program to program to program Netflix has a whole team that’s studying that, too, to make sure that that’s not going to be a person that we’re going to lose. So, they certainly have their data scientists there. Another listener wrote in to point out that when you buy a ticket to see a movie in a theater no one kind of cares whether you actually sat through the whole movie. So it’s like buying the ticket is sort of the intentionality. That’s the money coming into the thing so that’s kind of all you care about. And so it’s not about did this person watch the whole thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s also a weird point.

**John:** It’s a weird point.

**Craig:** Because we don’t pay per view on Netflix, we pay for months. It’s really more akin to you got a MoviePass, remember those John?

**John:** Oh, I remember MoviePass. Yeah. Why didn’t that work? I was rooting for MoviePass.

**Craig:** It seemed like a great idea. The fundamentals were sound.

So if you got a MoviePass and then you hopped into a movie and then walked out after two minutes should Universal declare a victory? I don’t think so.

**John:** Well, I think Universal got paid, though. They got the money from MoviePass for it, so.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** MoviePass was not happy.

**Craig:** In general I don’t think they can suggest that this is a victory for them or a hit. I mean, the whole point is you want more, don’t you want another, you want a second one, you want a third movie. I don’t know. Anyway, at some point this is what happens. The Internet tries to gaslight you into believing that people watching something for two minutes and then turning it off is a good thing. It is not. Stop it.

**John:** It’s not an artistic triumph.

**Craig:** No. You’re writing into a podcast for writers. And you’re suggesting that we should be happy that people watched our thing for two minutes and then went, “Nope.” I don’t think so. It’s just not great. It’s not great for them either. They don’t – by the way you know they adjusted it. It used to be a much longer number. And then they adjusted it. Because now they can say four billion people watched a show.

**John:** Yeah. I think I probably referenced this obliquely in the past, saying like there’s a Broadway producer who is notorious for showing up for like ten minutes of a show and then walking out. And I probably didn’t give his name because I didn’t want to anger him, but now it’s Scott Rudin, because we can just say his name. Scott Rudin was notorious for just first-acting, second-acting things, or having people buy a ticket and just watch ten minutes of it and then walk out. And so frustrating as a person who is making theater, but that’s what you got with Scott Rudin.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s a bad person. There was a wonderful little story out last week. Elijah Wood, who is an excellent person. We ought to have him on the show. He’s a lovely guy. Have you met Elijah Wood by the way?

**John:** I’ve never met him.

**Craig:** He’s fantastic. He was saying that originally Bob and Harvey Weinstein – so Miramax had the rights to Lord of the Rings. Peter Jackson wanted to make three movies. And Harvey said he only wanted to make two. And eventually New Line got the rights. And Peter Jackson really did not like Harvey. No one did. And so there’s an orc. Somewhere in those movies there’s an orc that is modeled after Harvey. And I’m like I’ve seen those movies so many times and I’m like I’ve got to watch again just to find the Harvey orc now.

**John:** Yeah. I’m sure Elijah could point you to him, maybe.

**Craig:** I’m going to ask him to do that. That’s fair.

**John:** Wrapping up our Netflix talk here, Quinn my friend pointed me to this Twitter thread by Trung Phan who looks at how the thumbnail artwork for a show on Netflix is generated and how it is tested. And I know they were procedurally done. I knew there was some A/B Testing. But it’s actually much more complicated than you would ever think or believe. And there’s a reason why those things are designed in the rule of thirds. They know based on what you’ve done before, what you’ve looked at before, this is what’s going to appeal to you about this particular show. So even though this actress is only in like two out of ten episodes, she might be the marquee face that they’re going to show you for that program because they know that you like her face.

So it’s a fascinating sort of dystopian look at how they make their decisions.

**Craig:** Yeah. Market research is a barren wasteland where no soul can thrive. It’s effective. There’s no question about it. We’ve always known that. It’s nothing you. You see a trailer for a movie and it makes a big deal about an actor being in it and they’re in it for two seconds. This is pretty standard stuff. But it’s a bummer.

**John:** Yeah. Normal real marketing, like when you have a movie coming out, it’s not like it’s some artistic we’re making this poster for all the right reasons. It is such a workplace of committees and random opinions and that executive hates the color blue. It’s a mess that way, too.

**Craig:** It’s a mess. And they do test everything and eventually I think if you’ve been around enough testing you start to come to the inevitable conclusion that you can use the testing to justify any answer you want.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Yeah.

**Craig:** And that pretty much is what happens.

**John:** Yup. All right, so this past week I was listening to the Slate Working podcast which I highly recommend and they had a guest on, she was a costume designer named Dana Covarrubias. And she was talking about how they came up with the wardrobe for Only Murders in the Building. And Craig you don’t watch a lot of TV, so you probably have not seen Only Murders in the Building.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I think you would genuinely love it. It is a Steve Martin, Martin Short, Selena Gomez. It is like a Serial true crime thing, but also a comedy. It’s all in this upscale Upper West Side apartment building. It’s really, really well done. And the costumes are fantastic and they’re so smart and so specific. What I loved about the conversation on the podcast though is they were really talking about what is the process of getting started to think about costumes. You would think that, oh, she must talk to the director or the showrunner or the actors. And it really starts with she reads the script. And she talked about her process of sitting down, reading the script. Reading it once just for pleasure. And really just getting a sense of the tone before she then approaches like, OK, now let me think about days and nights and where is this character coming from, where they’re going to, and building out full threads on who this person really is and why they’re making the choices they are doing.

And you and I have talked so much about hair and makeup and looks and all the other things that a writer may be thinking about for characters and for their scripts. But I don’t think we’ve talked about all the other people who are getting handed that script and having to make choices based on what they’re reading there even independently of the other folks they’re talking with. So I really want to take a look at the script as a blueprint and then look at all these incredibly talented people who have to take this blueprint and figure out how to build the thing.

**Craig:** I’ve always struggled with the word blueprints because blueprints are rather bloodless and they’re incredibly thorough in that they tell you exactly what to do. This goes here. This goes here. This goes here. And it is absolutely true that every head of every department working on a television show or a movie if they’re good, and one would hope that they are, they do read to understand. They are trying to get inside of the heart of it and they’re trying to see how it functions from a character point of view. At some point they’re going to have to put other hats on.

It is remarkable to see how essential it is to everybody that works in our business creatively to also be organized. Because each department has to feel it with their soul and understand why and how they should be dressing people a certain way, putting hair on a certain way, stunts in a certain tone, but also they need to figure out how to actually pull it off with the money they have, the time they have. And people who can do both at the same time are worth their weight in gold and that’s what makes the good ones great.

**John:** Yeah. So as you approach doing your TV shows, or as you’ve been involved in movies too, it always is striking to me that in order to get these people signed on they’re generally reading the script. And so they have known who else was involved, but they have to read the script and they have to really respond to the script. And they have to say, OK, this is a project I want to work on because I think the project will be good on the whole. I think it will turn out well. I think I will be proud of the work I can do here. And I think it will present interesting challenges to me. These people may not be taking the easiest jobs, or the jobs that they’re used to, but OK this offers some cool challenges for me. Because I know sometimes the projects I want to take as a writer are also the ones that are like, wow, I’ve never gotten a chance to do this before and this is exciting to me.

And so whether it’s a costume designer who has never gotten to do this period before, or a cinematographer who has never gotten to shoot in these environments, that’s really compelling. And the first experience about what that’s going to look like, feel like, be like is going to be in that script. And that’s why it’s all so important. It’s not just these are the scenes, these are the characters, this is what’s happening. It’s what the script feels like because that’s their first vision of what the final movie hopefully is going to be.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know one of the things they’ve been saying in terms of the IATSE action right now is that for those of us who are below the line we tend to think of production as something that comes along every now and again, for people who do these kinds of jobs they’re in production all the time. They’re either in prep or they’re in production. And so you’re absolutely right, the notion of being able to show off a different muscle, a different kind of vibe, that would be incredibly attractive to them. But that means they need to understand what makes it special. So, there are situations also where just the size may be attractive to them.

But size and novelty will wear off. And also size and novelty only maybe inspires you to say yes to the gig. It’s not going to help you design it.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Ultimately you do need to get inside the tone and that means you need to also have a relationship with the one or two people that holds that knowledge inside. And you need to get in their heads and you need to share it.

**John:** Realistically on most features the person who is going to be making a lot of those decisions is going to be the director. But on something like a television pilot that showrunner/creator and the pilot director will have a lot of very direct connection about this is what the vision for how we’re going to shoot this is going to look like. This is what we’re going for. This is tonally what we’re going for. And that will radiate from all the departments. And so ideally early on in the process you’ll hire on a production designer who is responsible for like, OK, here is the very big swatches of color kind of look for things. This is the time. This is the general look. And then those decisions will then radiate through to the other costume departments and art departments and props and everybody else.

But if that vision doesn’t actually match what’s on the page in the script it’s going to be a real challenge to sort of be going back and forth between like this is what we’re seeing on the art boards versus this is what’s on the page. How do we actually marry that? If there’s a grand vision for sort of these giant 1930s cityscapes but it’s all taking place on interior sound stages that’s not going to actually work.

**Craig:** Does sound like the person who wrote the script should be involved, doesn’t it?

**John:** Doesn’t it sound like it?

**Craig:** Yeah, which is why I do find working in television now so satisfying, because that’s what I do now. And it is nice to be able to say, ah, here’s what I think. And here’s why I think it. And wonderful early discussions that bore a lot of fruit while we were in prep on The Last of Us, we’re going through the choices we could make. I mean, there have been a lot of shows that occurred after the apocalypse. So, you know, in talking with our costume designer, Cynthia Summers, about how we wanted to do this. Neil and I, we obviously had things from the game that informed us, but we also had general philosophical notions and ideas that are a bit different. It’s a very similar thing that we did with [Unintelligible] and Johan Renck and I. And it’s a wonderful thing to talk about that stuff. I love talking about that. Entirely within the framework of tone.

Costumes will blow up or preserve or reinforce tone. So will hair. All of it. It’s all essential. And the more you dig into the details the more you appreciate the people who do read the script and care about the script. And it’s the ones who don’t who can be tricky sometimes. Sometimes they’re brilliant, too, but they need more attention.

**John:** Yeah. And we should say that there’s a certain point in sort of the hierarchy on the set where like maybe it’s not essential that this person knows the overall vision for the movie or for the series because they are there to sort of get this day’s work done. And literally moving the lights and getting this lit they may not need to know the grander scheme of things.

But I also had the experience of on movies, big movies, where I really kind of felt like, oh, they only looked at the scene in a vacuum and didn’t really notice what was happening before and after and so they lit it as sort of the wrong kind of dawn. And like, oh, that actually doesn’t track with the shot that’s going to come directly beforehand. And that’s something that an editor in reading through the script would have noticed like, oh, it’s going to be really important–

**Craig:** Sorry, I have to interrupt you. An editor read through the script? [laughs] Where is this magical editor? I would like to meet this person.

**John:** So I want to have a whole discussion on postproduction because editors are notorious for not reading through scripts. And just like, oh, I found the movie as it came in. It was like documentary footage that sort of came across the transom and I decided to cut something together.

**Craig:** They do exist. I’m joking. They exist. But a lot of them really are sort of infamous for not reading the script.

**John:** But I would say that editor would notice like, oh shit, this could have been an amazing transition if you’d actually lit it the way it was sort of written on the page and you didn’t notice that. And so that can be a problem because it can become very atomic when it gets down to production where they’re just looking this scene, this scene, this scene, this scene, and not seeing the overall flow. And one of the things I so appreciate this costume designer Dana talking about her plan for things is they really are looking – costume designers are really good at this – looking for like where was this person earlier in the day. How did they get to this place? Because they are always worried about continuity and making sure that they had a scarf there. They would still have that scarf.

**Craig:** Ah, yes.

**John:** That stuff is remarkable. And they are building out these boards and notebooks that actually detail all of this.

**Craig:** I’m just laughing because Cynthia Summers is our costume designer, but on the day-to-day work on the set we have two gentlemen, the two Steves, and the two Steves are in charge of both handling the application of wardrobe to our actors on the day, but also preserving and maintaining continuity. Considering continuity and the attention to detail there is startling. And they will occasionally walk up to me and say, “Quick question for you. Seven months from now we’re going to be somewhere,” and then I’m like oh my god, oh my god you guys. But it’s essential. And it doesn’t matter what you do. If somebody is wearing the wrong shirt from one cut to the next it’s over. It’s done.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s funny actually. I looked over the shoulder. They watch the video feed. And they don’t have contacts, our little portable, they don’t care what anyone is watching at all. They’re watching moving clothes. And I said to you this shows just clothing moving around and they’re like, “Yeah.” And it’s awesome. And they’re really great at it. It’s remarkable to watch.

**John:** Now back in the day they would all be taking Polaroids. Now I’m sure they’re using their iPhones or they’re screenshotting what they’re seeing there so they can have references for this. But another reason why this is so important, like you can have a plan going in, but then a pandemic can stop production for a year and then you have to pick up scenes that you started shooting before you shut down. And they can just do it because they can. Because they’re remarkably organized and talented. It’s that creative brain which you absolutely need to do these jobs, and also this meticulous detail brain which is so essential. And I think many screenwriters don’t appreciate the importance.

**Craig:** I mean, nothing gets shot in chronological order. Inside of an episode things are being shot out of order. And then even episodes themselves may not be shot in order. We had to shoot slightly out of order episodically because of weather. Just accounting for how the weather would impact the episodes we were shooting. So, sometimes you’re shooting things and then you realize, ah, stuff happened in between. What needs to happen to the clothing, the hair, the makeup?

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** The scars? The bruises? Whatever it is. All of that math has to be done and it’s constantly being figured out and thank god these brilliant people that we have are so dedicated and committed to getting it right. And they really are. And we would be utterly lost without them.

But I will say this machine that processes details – that’s what it is, a detail machine, and it’s like details is its fuel and it’s just churning and churning. It needs detail fuel. If you don’t write the detail people are just going to fill it in for you. And this is my constant refrain. If I taught a class at the University of [Gibberish] it would just be called Details. That’s what it is. It’s how to write details. Because if you don’t then you’ve failed before you started.

**John:** Yeah. And again one of the biggest challenges of screenwriting is kind of knowing all these details and recognizing how many details you can put in before you sort of choke the life out of scenes. Where like those details get in the way and people stop reading. And that’s challenging. And that’s the craft.

**Craig:** It is. And there is a certain amount of detail that the viewer can’t take in. So there’s an amount and then there’s a kind of way to inform detail without spelling it all out. You know, if you say this room is full of blank-blank era stuff, most of which was heavily used but has been brought back to life, that guides everyone. Props. Art direction. All of it.

**John:** Just like a fight sequence does not label every punch. You’re not labeling everything on the shelf. You’re just making sure that you’re creating a space where there would be shelves full of things.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Now, before we get to editors, because we should talk a little bit about editors and scripts, the person who is staring at the script the entire time is the script supervisor who I know we’ve talked about scripties before on the show, but I do want to sort of call them out again because the same way that hair and makeup and wardrobe is keeping track of all these continuity things, the scripty is keeping track of every line that is said, every take, making sure that as you cut from angle to angle it’s actually making sense, that things aren’t drifting.

They can be an absolute godsend. So I just want to speak up for the script supervisors on set.

**Craig:** Have we talked about how crazy that job is, even that it exists. It should not be one job. I just want to run down the things the script supervisor has to do. First, they need to make sure that the actors are saying the lines as written, or that somebody signs off on a change. Second, they need to record what lines are being said on camera and what lines are being said off-camera while it’s happening. Third, they need to handle all continuity. That means what things have moved, drinks and glasses, did you pick it up with your right hand or your left hand. All of it. When did you turn? On what line did you open the door? All of it needs to be recorded. Every single take.

Then they also need to record what time the first shot of the day was. They need to record what the lens. They need to record what camera roll you’re on. They need to tell the camera assistants if we’re going up a letter in takes or if we’re staying on take six. They have to do all of that, plus they have to time the whole script out ahead of time to see what the timing would be. It’s crazy. And eye lines. And that’s the other thing. They need to know on a scene where you’re shooting 12 people sitting around a table, when you get to a particular line should they be looking to the left of the camera or the right of camera. This should be 12 different jobs and it’s a job for one person. They are essential.

**John:** And they’re heroic. And we should say when we say recording all this is happening they’re literally taking notes in pencil on a script page. And so there’s a whole coding system they use and squiggly lines for like this take, this take, this take. This is where we moved to 6A and this is 6B. They can do all this stuff. And so a script supervisor can look back at those notes and say like, OK, this is how we did this thing and the reason why you’re keeping track of lens sizes and such is so like OK we need to go back and reshoot something or fix something you know exactly how you did it.

**Craig:** Even later in the day when you’re like, OK, we’ve turned around. It was hours ago. What lens we’re we on because we have to match it on this side? It is I would say probably rare to find a script supervisor that is still doing it with pencil and paper. There are some excellent programs that people have been using for a long time. And now I think a lot of it is done on iPad. Our script supervisor works on an iPad and sometimes I just sort of peek over and watch what he’s doing and it’s crazy. I was talking to him, I’m like how does anybody survive doing this job for the first year as you’re learning? And you know he said, “You kind of just make it up.” He said early on there’s no way, there’s no way you can do it. So you’re sort of like, yeah, they were holding it in their left. And then you’re like, oh boy, I hope they were holding it in the left hand. Because it just takes time for your brain to expand, to firehose that much information constantly all the time.

But, yeah, I mean, look, there’s a reason why it’s practically in my contract that our script supervisor on Chernobyl is the same one on The Last of Us. And I intend to have him by my side always. Because he is too good. He’s just too good.

**John:** Absolutely. And of course in modern productions it is theoretically possible to sort of go back and say, OK, we can actually check the tape and see – when I say pencil notes, I’m thinking back to like Go and it’s literally shot on film. So there’s no record, there’s no way to actually look at sort of what hand someone was holding it in. So we would just have to look to our script supervisor and ask her what was it. And she knows. Because she’s always right by the camera lens, even if you’re on a dolly truck going down a street in Downtown LA. She’s there because she has to see everything with her own two eyes. So, it’s a remarkable job.

**Craig:** It’s pretty amazing.

**John:** Now in theory all of those notes go to the editors who obviously they have to take the footage and then break it into the proper bins and start assembling the movie. And in theory you’d think like, oh, they can just look at the script pages and see what the scene is supposed to be. In practice a lot of times they sort of look at all the footage and then start cutting scenes their own way.

**Craig:** Yeah. Which is understandable to an extent. You don’t necessarily want to deprive yourself of their instincts. And when they look at footage they may feel something and they may drift toward it and that makes total sense. However, I do always appreciate and ask of my editors that they do read the scene carefully before they start cutting it because there are as I like to call it clues buried all over this thing. It’s like a little clue book.

**John:** It’s almost like someone wanted you to find your way out of this [unintelligible] box.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Sometimes you’ll sit there and they’re like “I just didn’t quite know what to do in this moment.” And I’m like did you check the clue book? And then they look and they’re like, “Oh, that’s what that is.” Yes. It’s in the clue book.

The other big clue book is in fact the notes generated by the script supervisor. So a lot of times what will happen is I’ll be sitting there and I’ll go why don’t we have that shot where he turns and looks at her in the wide? And they’re like we didn’t do it. And I’m like we did. No, it’s not there. Yes it is, I know it. And then we look in the script – oh, there it is. We found it.

**John:** There it is. It’s right there. One of the things we also notice that the script supervisor is doing is marking which of the takes are, we used to say “print the takes,” because now everything is basically printed. But circling the takes is like these are the ones we think have the performance that we’re actually going after. So if you shot five takes, takes two and take five may be the ones that have the stuff that you want.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that was something we used to do when it actually cost money to print takes. So you would say, OK, well that obviously was a garbage take. But now what I’ve discovered along the way, and I’m thinking probably everybody sort of figured out early on, too, is even the takes, you sometimes have to go into that bin of the castoffs because what you needed was somebody just looking up and then looking to the left.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** Yeah. One of the best bits of directorial advice I can give anybody is wait longer than you think you have to before you say cut. Because stuff happens back there that could just be gold.

**John:** All right. So some takeaways from thinking about how other people are using the script is just to remember that I think so often as writers like, OK, I’m going to write this script and then I’ll hand it into the studio and the producer will read it and we’ll get a director on board. And then I guess the actors will learn their lines. But that’s not even the beginning of the process really.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Everyone else has to take this thing and actually make it a thing. And blueprint may be the wrong term for it, but I guess you can have a blueprint for how you’re actually going to physically build the building, but that’s not furnishing the building. That’s not doing all the other stuff that sort of makes a place you can actually live inside. And that’s what all these other amazing artisans and craftspeople are doing is really making this thing be a place you can live inside.

**Craig:** Yeah. A long time ago when I used to have a blog, do you remember back then?

**John:** I do remember that.

**Craig:** I wrote a thing called You Can’t Just Walk Into a Building. Because if you say somebody walks into a building, which I think a lot of writers do, somebody has to figure out what building. Where? What does it look like? How does it function? And if you haven’t designed it, meaning you haven’t described what the function and nature and feeling of the building is then as I said other people are going to do it for you. And so the more you can participate in the direction, and when I say direction I don’t mean film direction. I mean creative direction.

**John:** The design.

**Craig:** The overall direction of the film or television show the better off that film and television show is going to be. They need the benefit of all the things you know and you will always know more than you can fit on the page.

**John:** Now Craig you are making my segue way too easily here. Because back in Episode 519 Craig said, “I am a huge believer in the visual imagination of the space. I need to know what it looks like, how close they are together, whether the lights are on or off, if there’s a fire in the fireplace, if it’s warm or hot.” And we got a couple of responses back on this and a whole new branch of things to talk through. Megana, could you read us what Dave wrote for us?

**Megana Rao:** So Dave wrote in, “A year or so ago at age 51 I discovered I have aphantasia. This means I’m unable to visualize, or put another way I have no mind’s eye. It was a surprise to me as I have a strong sense of imagination, work in creative fields, and write screenplays for pleasure. The latter being the reason I discovered Scriptnotes. For me imagination is narrative and conceptual, but not visual. When I read a book and the character description says she was tall and had blonde hair I know what this means but don’t form a picture in my head. It’s the same when my yoga instructor asks me to imagine a balloon inflating and deflating as I breathe.

“This revelation has led me to realize many things about my life. For example I now know it takes me longer to learn new things, especially physical ones because I’m reading through a set of instructions rather than playing back a video clip or looking at pictures of the activity. And when it comes to my writing I see now that I tend to over-describe because I want to make sure people see the character or place as I see, or in fact don’t see them. It’s suggested that perhaps 3 to 5% of people are aphantasiac. So perhaps as many as 2,000 listeners to Scriptnotes could be. I wonder how this affects their personal and professional lives. For me it’s not at all.

“There are some notable examples of aphantasiacs working in Hollywood, such as Ed Catmull, formerly at Pixar, which might suggest this to be true for others. Anyhow, keep up the good work. I’m always inspired by your weekly discussions, even if I can’t picture any of the things you touch upon, which in the case of Sexy Craig might not be a bad thing.”

**Craig:** Oh, you don’t have to see anything. You just have to listen. That’s all. Dave, you just got to listen.

**John:** Let Sexy Craig wash all over you. I really thank Dave for writing in with this because I’ve seen this term a little bit popping up on Twitter and I didn’t really know what it meant. And it’s not a disorder, it’s the range of how people imagine information and how the visual system works for people. But it is really interesting because I think I just have bias to assume well everyone’s brain works the way my brain works. And my brain, I can absolutely picture things in my head. I can imagine smells and textures, and tastes. I can sort of completely put myself in a place pretty easily and I set myself there and I write what I see. And that’s writing for me. And that’s not going to be the same experience Dave is having.

**Craig:** No. And I want to call out the most important word I suppose in the quote that Dave brings up here, and that’s the word “eye.” I believe in it. It certainly works for me. It’s important part of my process. But here’s another thing I know. Dave, I cannot draw at all. I can’t illustrate. I mean, my hands work. But a cube is barely within my reach. And only because I practiced it. So I can imagine things very vividly and very accurately, but I cannot reproduce them through drawing at all. And then there are people I think who may be able to produce things by drawing perfectly but perhaps don’t see them in the mind’s eye.

So, this is not a prison sentence by any stretch as you yourself have noted. However, I will say because it is a visual medium, and we know we’re telling a visual story, you need to have some method to create specificity and completion of visual work. Whether it is happening in your mind or whether you are sketching it out in a series of storyboards, your illustrations, or whether you have a really specific connection to words and the words connect to images as you write them. Whatever it is you need something because ultimately it’s film.

**John:** Yeah. I do wonder if someone who is writing strictly a stage play, with characters on a stage talking, it would impact their process less if they didn’t have to see the whole thing, but it was literally just about the words and the talking and sort of how this all goes. But there’s also, and we can look up what the actual term is, but the same way that some people don’t have a mind’s eye, there’s people who don’t have a mind’s voice, or they don’t have a voice in their head. They don’t have the ability to imagine conversations. And that would probably be a greater hindrance to doing the kinds of things that we’re doing because so much of what we do as screenwriters is think, OK, if they say this then that’s the answer – it’s putting yourself in the middle of imaginary conversations. And that’s a sort of crucial skill. And I think it’s also a source of anxiety and sort of negative repetition.

I do find that so often I will have arguments in my head with people and it’s like well that’s just really stupid because they’re actually not here to hear the other side of this argument.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s crazy. You should stop doing that.

**John:** Because Craig you never do that. You never actually–

**Craig:** I don’t really.

**John:** Have imaginary arguments?

**Craig:** I don’t. No. You’ve said this before. In fact I believe, because I remember it making quite an impression on me, it was one of your New Year’s resolutions to stop having arguments with people who weren’t there. I mean, I’ve definitely had the thing, there’s a German word for it, where you walk away from a conversation and then you think, oh, I should have said this or this.

**John:** The staircase thing, yeah.

**Craig:** The staircase logic. But it’s rare that I will sit and have a debate with somebody who is not there because they’re not there. It seems like a total waste of good fighting.

**John:** Yeah. But again it’s a range of experiences. And so I think, you know, there’s people who are going to be, I think there’s a term hyperphantasia, people who have extremely visual internal lives and that can be great, but it can also be challenging because apparently it ties into PTSD and other things. They kind of keep re-seeing these things. And it’s not just a reported phenomenon. Like one of the things I liked in this New York Times piece that we’ll link to, they actually can do scientific studies where they say, OK, we want you to visualize a bright white triangle and while they’re doing this they’re measuring your pupil dilation and people who have a situation where they don’t have a mind’s eye, their pupils will not contract where other people’s pupils will contract. And so it really is a thing – it’s a deeper brain thing and not just how people report the experience.

**Craig:** It’s a good reminder that what we do is brain work.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And everybody’s brain is different and I don’t necessarily think, unless we’re talking about specific injury, or clear malfunction, or dysfunction, some of these things are just a question of how the imperfect system is balanced.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, you can only say that you are hyperphantasic if we have a number that is a normal amount of phantasic.

**John:** And we don’t.

**Craig:** We don’t. It’s a spectrum, like you say. There’s a range of brain function and, you know.

**John:** Here’s I think what might be useful for listeners though is if you feel – if you listen to our conversation and say like, OK, they describe as seeing yourself in a place and imagining all these things around you and that doesn’t even make sense to me. I don’t even know how a person does that. That could be a sign like, oh, maybe you actually are on this edge of this experience. Maybe it’s good to know, because if it is your situation then look for ways to address that. You may not be doing something wrong. It may just be how your brain works.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like I don’t understand why anyone believes in god. My brain doesn’t work that way. And wouldn’t it be amazing if I got to judgment day and stood before god and went, oh, whoa.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You’re real. And he said, or she said, “Yes.” And I said but I just – even now I really don’t quite believe. And then he or she said, “Yeah, that’s because you had a brain problem.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then I would say, OK, so does that get me out of burning in a lake of fire for eternity? And I suspect that’s where they would say, “No.” [laughs]

**John:** But then again the question is well then who designed your bad, broken brain? It all sort of snaps back. As you were describing that were you visualizing?

**Craig:** Of course I was.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** Of course I was. I can see everything. I could see all of it. I think I might be hyperphantasic.

**John:** I think I might be as well. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a common trait among screenwriters and writers in general.

**Craig:** Makes sense.

**John:** When I was doing the Arlo Finch books because as a screenwriter we’re only looking at what we can see and what we can hear, like texture, and taste, and smell, like those are not things that we’re actively describing in our scene description, but suddenly in a book I was doing all of those things and I did feel like my world had gotten a little bit more full. It was nice to be able to look at those senses that I normally can’t describe on the page and everything did just feel a little bit brighter for it.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Nice. Let’s get to some more listener questions. Megana, what have you got for us?

**Megana:** Great. So Stupid Luck asks, “I found myself in the most wonderful but terrifying situation. A pilot that I helped to develop and write was sold earlier this year and despite my having zero experience working on a TV show beyond assistant gigs nearly 20 years ago I have been given a higher title than I surely deserve, leapfrogging several low and midlevel positions. Am I doomed to fail? Will my complete and total ignorance of how this all works make me seem irrelevant? I’ve already been included on a ton of conference calls but besides weighing in on the development and my take on writer’s samples I pretty much stay silent. I’m trying to learn and absorb as much as I can, as quickly as I can, but the learning curve is steep. Any advice on how to approach this situation? How to balance my inexperience with the desire to contribute in a meaningful way? How to show appropriate deference to those who have been doing this a lot longer than I have while still taking my shot?”

**Craig:** Wow. Stupid Luck, you are kind of a dream. You seem to have missed the memo that in order to succeed in Hollywood you have to be a total psychopath with no shame and who has no problem talking when you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. You know, I think this is actually really good news, the fact that you’re even thinking this way is really good news. No, you’re not doomed to fail at all. Don’t be fooled by the militarization and rankifization of the television business. There are people whose value, experience level has nothing to do with their title, both for good and for bad. You are where you are, now forget about it. It doesn’t matter.

In any meeting the best idea is the best idea. And the person who is the most impressive is the person who impresses the most. So it makes total sense to listen and to learn, but you shouldn’t be afraid to weigh in. You should not worry that people are going to judge you. And if you make a mistake you make a mistake. You have a natural humility about you. As long as you don’t take things personally and you keep moving forward and you show other people respect and you don’t trample on them in an effort to get somewhere they will be OK with that. They will be perfectly fine. It’s the only way you can learn. So I think you’re doing great.

**John:** Well let’s imagine another scenario in which Stupid Luck developed and wrote this thing, it was sold, and then comes in as a staff writer on it. That also would not make sense because you are the person who co-created this project. You are naturally going to be up a few ranks there because you are going to have some decision-making capability. You helped create this world. You know things about this world that no one else does. So you’re not going to enter in at the bottom.

When I sold my first TV show I was brought in and my first title was Co-EP, but I was really the showrunner but I really didn’t know what I was doing. I had the disaster that I think you’re fearing that you may have. But it sounds like you have people around you who really do know what they’re doing and can actually support you and sort of make all the stuff happen. I wouldn’t worry so much about it.

Or my first movie, Craig you probably had a similar experience, the first time being on set for a movie, you kind of don’t know a lot.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And you’re scared like am I allowed to eat at crafts service. It’s all kind of new. But you do have a place there. You do belong there. It’s finding out how you can be useful and how to get out of the way when literally they just need to turn the set around.

**Craig:** And people actually want to help. They want to teach. Nobody walks onto a production and knows what’s going on just naturally. No one. It’s very weird. A lot of it is strange and there are things still to this day I get confused by. I’ve been doing this forever. I run my own show. And I repeatedly confuse who is in charge of beards.

**John:** Oh yes.

**Craig:** It’s hair or makeup depending whether it’s this kind of beard or that kind of beard. All the time these things happen and then you just go, OK, right, sorry, let me…

And it’s perfectly fine as long as you don’t bluster about and take it out on people when they gently correct you. And you’re going to be fine. And, by the way, don’t say Stupid Luck. I would say there is no such thing.

**John:** Good Fortune, sure. But you also worked hard to get there.

**Craig:** You worked hard. And you did something. And it is something that is now employing lots of people. So, I wouldn’t say Stupid Luck. I wouldn’t say it was inevitability either. I would say you achieved something. You should be proud of it, while staying humble, and move forward.

**John:** Agreed. Megana, can you give us another question here?

**Megana:** Casey writes in, “I’m a screenwriter based in LA who has yet to break in but I have had a pilot in development for the past couple of years. I wrote it on spec for producers and we have an older, more established writer attached to showrunner who has guided me through the development process. I wrote the pilot but we worked together to create the pitch. It’s been years now and I’m beginning to feel emotionally detached from and frustrated with the project. In working with the producers I have less and less confidence in their ability to get this thing across the finish line. And I have also come to discover that the showrunner and I have very different world views with regards to race, social justice, and gender.

“I also keep being asked to do free work on a project that hasn’t gone anywhere in two years. My question is am I shackled to this project until it’s officially dead or until it gets bought? How do I navigate this strange situation?”

**Craig:** Hmmm.

**John:** Casey, I wish I could tell you this was a strange situation. There are sort of like zombie projects that aren’t really alive and aren’t really dead that are just kind of always out there and you have to decide, you know what, I’m done. I don’t believe this thing is going to move forward. I don’t believe it’s going to move forward with these people on board.

You wrote this script, this other showrunner person helped you, or helped guide you through the pitch. Maybe contractually they’re involved. You can see. My hunch is that you have a good writing sample that you should be using to get you other jobs. But this project is dead is my guess.

**Craig:** Dead or alive, it’s your decision. That’s the good news. You’re not shackled to it. It’s yours. You own the copyright. You haven’t sold it. You’ve written it on spec. No one has bought it. So, you could just do whatever you want with it. And, you know, as far as the showrunner, the showrunner is not the showrunner because there’s no show. That’s just a person. And if you don’t like the person and you don’t feel connected with them then you make a change. Because it’s your material. They can’t go on without you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because they haven’t sold it yet. And when you say being asked to do free work, you’re not being asked to do free work. There is no work, meaning employment. You are choosing – this is what it comes down to, and this is a hard one to hear Casey, but you’re choosing to continue to work on something that you own. It is your property. The day you sell it is the day everything changes and the work is about employment and then it is a question of being taken advantage of by people who should be paying you because you’re not a copyright owner but you’re an employee. Until that day you have to act like the person you are in this situation, which is believe it or not, the boss.

**John:** Yeah. I will say that emotionally you may have moved on from this project as well. And so I want to give you permission to say like I learned some things from that and now I’m going to step aside and Craig and I both have things that we’ve wrote that’s just like I like this script, there’s things I like about this script, but it is not going to be worth my time to pay any more attention to it. It’s on the shelf now and I’m moving forward with new things. Just give yourself permission to say this is not what I’m interested in working on right now. And that’s great. Don’t feel like you have to finish everything.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just make sure that your lack of interest is not a lack of interest in people as opposed to material. If you’re still interested in the material but the people are wrong it’s time to find different people. And, of course, the other ones may say, well, if you sell it then we get a title and we get money. OK, well we’ll figure that out down the road. But in the meantime it sounds like this marriage has come to an end.

**John:** I think so. I have a thing that’s actually not a question, but I want to point to this Twitter thread by Ariel Rutherford about this white male writer with credits who puts out a call for a diverse female writer to help him on a project and then he tries to swing this kind of Svengali mentor situation where he’s like I’m creating a writer’s room and stuff. I’m not going to go in depth on the Twitter thread, but there’s a link in the show notes, so click through this link. Be warned that this kind of behavior exists out there. Especially because it turns out another writer @awkwardgirlla had the exact same situation with the exact same writer. So it’s a guy who is just doing this repeatedly.

This is just shitty behavior. And I don’t know who this writer is, but this writer should not be doing this. And it was just a new spin on sort of like a person with some credits taking advantage of writers with no credits. And so it drove me crazy. I just wanted to shine a little spotlight on it here.

**Craig:** Yeah. Anybody that suggests that you should join their mentor group you should view as a cult leader. There are no mentor groups. That’s not a thing. The mentor groups that exist are not generated by individuals like that. There may be something like the kind of thing that you and I have done where there have been organizations that have put together established writers with up and coming writers. And they have a discussion and it’s formalized and then they move on. There is not sort of you join my little mini church and then you also do all of my work for me and you clean my clothes and then eventually I have 12 babies with four of you. This is not good. You don’t want this. You don’t want to go down that road.

You don’t need it. That’s the other thing. Anybody that’s offering you that, it ain’t real. Real mentors are desperate to not mentor people. That’s the god’s honest truth. You or I, we’re not looking for extra people to do this stuff with. We have to be asked. We have to forced and shamed into it.

**John:** And so here I think is this guy’s clever trick, it’s almost like it’s a negging kind of thing he’s doing, those pickup artist books. Basically he’s saying like, “Hey, I need help. Would someone out there want to help me?” It’s almost like a white guy in a van saying hey would you help me find my lost dog. He’s asking for help and so then someone will say, “I can help you.” And he’s like, “Oh, you’re actually not good enough, but I think you could get better if you just come join my writers group.” That’s what drives me crazy. Because it’s not even the normal scam which is that like, oh, we’re going to help you polish up your script. It has that first level of I need help because I’m a white male writer who needs a diverse female voice on this thing.

**Craig:** Also, if you’re a white male writer and you’re on the Internet asking randos to help you be less white, fuck off. Go do your own work. Do your work. Research. Figure it out. Study. Interview people. Don’t make them do your work for you. Don’t ask that. What is that? That is something you pay people for. It’s called writing or producing or consulting. It’s a job. It’s not free.

Geez, fucking guy.

**John:** I should say also that he was offering pay at the start. So basically the hook was like oh I will pay you to be a consultant on this thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, but like what? When I say pay I mean like you work for Fox or Disney and you get paid, like a real salary. Not like some guy is like, “Here you go. I guarantee you $100.”

**John:** All right. Now it’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a thing I did last year which I highly recommend for people in LA. It’s called the LA County Adopt a Family for the Holidays program. It’s done through the county and you go to a really boring website, a poorly designed form, but you put in your information and they match you up with a family in LA County who receives Medicaid or basically needs some help because they would not be otherwise able to buy Christmas presents for their kids. And so you get matched up with a family. You exchange text messages to find out who they are and what their kids are like and what their situation is. You buy some presents. You wrap presents. Everyone knows I love wrapping presents.

**Craig:** Oh my god. You’re so good at it.

**John:** I love wrapping presents. And then you drop off the presents and then you go and it’s lovely and it’s nice and it’s such a good thing. A friend tipped me off to it and I’m sending out the word to other friends. It’s just a really good, smart program. So if you are a person in Los Angeles who feels like you know what I’d love to buy some Christmas presents for people who could really stand have a better holiday, really recommend the LA County Adopt a Family for the Holidays program. And we’ll put a link in the show notes to it.

**Craig:** That does sound pretty good.

**John:** It’s pretty good.

**Craig:** I can probably steal that. You know, I don’t know how to wrap gifts. Did you know that?

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** I don’t even know how to do it. Melissa does it.

**John:** I love, I genuinely love doing it. I didn’t realize people didn’t know how to do it until Rawson Thurber, who was my assistant at one point, just literally could not do it and so I would wrap all of his presents.

**Craig:** So basically I start to wrap something and then everything goes wrong. It’s sort of like me and drawing. I can wrap it in a square and then there’s the extra part sticking out and I know there’s some folding involved, but the folds don’t work right. And inevitably it ends up looking like a large Tootsie Roll inevitably. I just start twisting the ends. Megana, do you know how to wrap gifts.

**Megana:** I’m really bad at it. And it’s so embarrassing to bring something that I’ve tried to wrap in front of John because I can just feel his judgment so heavily.

**Craig:** He’s pretty judgy.

**John:** But Craig I don’t know if you know that Megana actually draws really well. She’s actually, give her a pen and some time and she can draw you up something lovely.

**Megana:** I do like to doodle.

**Craig:** I know that because Megana got me one of the nicest things ever. She made a painting of my dog.

**John:** She made a painting of my dog, too. That’s your thing.

**Megana:** It actually really wasn’t. You guys are the only two that – I’m like what do these guys care about? And the answer is consistently your dogs.

**Craig:** I have another dog now, Megana. I’m just saying.

My One Cool Thing is Megana’s ability to draw my dog.

**John:** That’s a very cool thing indeed. And that’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Layn Pieratt. Really good outro. Thank you, Layn.

If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter Craig is sometimes @clmazin. And I am always @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing. This last week’s was about naming characters and I just went through this big project where I had to name, I can’t even tell you how many characters, but so many characters and it was just fun to go back through this newsletter and look at how other people name their characters.

We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. And 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 a Bad Art Friend, or maybe two bad art friends. We’ll discuss. But only for our premium members. Thank you Craig. Thank you Megana.

**Megana:** Thanks guys.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Oh, Craig. Oh Craig. All right, so welcome all our premium members. You are true friends. You are true art friends. And we would never turn on you in our text channel, our text thread about you. Craig, can you give us the briefest recap of the situation between these two women and this writer community?

**Craig:** Yeah. So this has been zinging around and there’s a big article in the New York Times Magazine. Long and short of it is there was a woman who was more of an up and coming writer. And she decided to donate a kidney to a person that she didn’t know. A little bit like the way you just adopted a family. But this was a rather extreme thing. She was like I decided just to be a really good person. I’m going to offer my kidney to somebody in need of a kidney. And just somebody. And in fact there was somebody in need and she did in fact have the surgery. She donated her kidney. And she talked a lot about it. She talked a lot about it on a Facebook group. Facebook, of course, root of all evil.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And while she was talking about it she had an acquaintance, or she thought was a friend, was another writer who is a little bit more of an established writer who wrote a story that included something about a woman who donates a kidney to somebody. And the kidney donor was a bit irked because initially she just didn’t feel like this other woman was paying enough attention to her kidney donation.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which is where I got stuck. Cause I think it’s sort of like that’s not why you donate a kidney. Anyway, and that writer, Sonya Larson, said, “Yeah, no, no, I saw that you donated a kidney. Good for you.” And then later she released this story and Dawn Dorland, the woman who donated a kidney, was aghast and believed and accused Sonya Larson of essentially lifting her story because she included this element of a person donating a kidney. But what was really weird and where this story actually got kind of confusing and muddled is indeed Sonya Larson did lift a sentence or two from an email that Dawn Dorland had written, or a Facebook post, one of those two. I can’t remember.

So actually there was sort of like a little bit of technical plagiarism there. But not much. And this story has lit up everyone. I guess you either are Team Dawn or you’re Team Sonya, or as somebody on Facebook [unintelligible] what this story really shows more than anything is that writers are annoying. [laughs] And that is absolutely true. So, OK, John, Megana, what do we make of this?

**John:** So I’ve only read the Robert Kolker New York Times story, so my only point into it. I know there’s a discourse that goes well beyond the edged the edges of this because it’s 2021 and the discourse has to spill everywhere. And like these people themselves are probably also involved in the conversation.

God, it made me – as you start to read the story and you start to see Dawn saying like why aren’t people commending me enough for donating a kidney. That is a great character. That is a great moment.

**Craig:** Nuts.

**John:** And at the same time I think oh my god you want to use that character in a story. And then it seems like Sonya Larson did that and then also – which was probably defensible as using that idea of that character. But then to actually use those words seems so dumb. And that’s a thing I couldn’t get past.

**Craig:** Yeah. So everybody fucked up to some extent. Although my sympathies will always be with the person who does the work. And in this case the person who did the work was Sonya Larson. The fact that she was inspired by someone’s story of donating a kidney is normal. People are inspired by real life stuff all the time. Nobody owns that. If you donate a kidney to somebody you don’t own everybody’s short story from now until the end of time about somebody donating a kidney.

Yes, she clearly screwed up by cribbing that line from an email and that was wrong. Also, it didn’t really cause any damage because as far as I could tell Sonya Larson’s short story has not led to any kind of real financial success. It was just out there, but it wasn’t some huge thing. Now it’s a huge thing.

And also Sonya Larson appears to be a legitimate writer who is doing work. And so I feel like if you do the work you do the work. So she made a mistake and she has owned that mistake. The other thing that was going on in a very kind of typical Internet way there are a bunch of people who are on this Facebook page–

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** –where they see Dawn Dorland going on about her kidney donation ad nauseam and wondering why people aren’t telling her more about how wonderful she is for her donation. And they start back-channeling and gossiping about how much they hate her. And I totally understand that because I think I probably would have done the same thing. Totally. I’m like Megana I have to at this point – you seem like the nicest person in the world. Every interaction I’ve ever had with you you seem quite pure. Like you were delivered on angel wings to the world to save us all.

But, have you never just sort of seen somebody acting like this super thirsty annoying person and then kind of back-channeled some catty commentary?

**Megana:** Yeah. I mean, I so sympathize for Dawn because I think we’ve all had that experience of thinking that people are our friends, or that people are saying – you know, just that infuriating feeling of not getting the joke or not being in on the thing is so devastating. Nobody is talking about the violation of privacy here and I would never want my personal private group chats with my girlfriends to be public.

**John:** That is absolutely crucial. So we should say those became public because of discovery. Because there were lawsuits going back and forth between the two of them. And so once it got to that point I’m just like oh my god everything has gone off the rails because there are so many conversations I’ve had with people that I would not want to show up on discovery. And I’ve been through discovery. Discovery sucks. So I don’t want that done. Yes.

**Megana:** But also the context, because sometimes my friends are like really in the wrong, but when you have your friend’s back and you know. I don’t need everyone reading the New York Times how I’m trying to support my friend in that way. I don’t know, it’s just so–

**Craig:** Totally.

**Megana:** Ugh.

**Craig:** It’s a real mess. I do love just how this all started. And the way it started was that she was posting on Facebook celebrating herself and what she did. And then what’s so great is she just looked to see that some of the people she invited into her self-congratulatory look-at-what-I-did group hadn’t reacted to any of her posts. Now, at that point it’s getting stalky. What does she do? She writes an email to Sonya Larson and the email basically is why haven’t you said anything? Mother-fucker, nobody owes you a comment. We’re reading it. And what was kind of shocking was the message to her was, “I think you’re aware I donated my kidney this summer, right?” [laughs] Like what the hell is that? What kind of crazy world is that?

**John:** I want that printed on a t-shirt, please.

**Craig:** I think you’re aware that I donated my kidney this summer. Yeah? Mm-hmm. Like I would have been like, “Mm-hmm.” But Sonya Larson said, “Ah, yes, I did see on Facebook that you donated your kidney. What a tremendous thing,” which is pretty much the polite thing to say to somebody when what you really want to say is, “Yeah, what do you want? What do you want? You want a cookie?”

And then in response to that Dawn Dorland wondered if Sonya really thought it was great why did she need reminding that it happened. Which reminded me of that thing in Airplane. Hmm, he never has more than one cup of coffee at home. So stupid. Like what narcissism. Anyway, it’s kind of like I guess the person who has her kidney is like I don’t care about any of that. I’m alive. So, good on you, Dawn Dorland. But this got crazy. And, look, underneath all of it the reason I suggested it, John, is because I think there is this – as we were talking about parasocial relationships last time, this thing happening with the Internet now where people overshare their lives and then are shocked to find that other humans who hoover up information about humans for their vocation and then recreate them into art are doing so. They can’t believe it. And they feel as though they’ve been violated. And to the extent that a story like this leads some people to think that writers shouldn’t be doing things like this, other than ripping that one line off from the email which shouldn’t have happened, writers should be doing things like this.

I’m very pro-writer in this regard.

**John:** One thing I did want to actually discuss is that idea of iteration. I thought it was interesting point of the Sonya Larson side of it all is that like they were going back to earlier versions of the story. Basically she kept working on the story and revising the story. And earlier versions of the stories might have been closer to this, but when is that story finished? Because it was going to be published this one time, and then she changed it more, and it got changed again. What is the draft that is actually the problem? And at what point in the process can you really say like that was infringement or she just hadn’t done the necessary editing to not make it infringe-y. And that’s an interesting ethical question as well.

**Craig:** What do you think, Megana?

**Megana:** The thing that I was going to say is that in our Cat Person discussion we talked about how easy it would have been for the person to change key details about where this worked, just completely lifting those directly. I think in the same way here, John I think said in Episode 500 like I like to use characters from real life because it proves that those people can exist in reality and that’s a believable thing. But I think you can take the spirit of that without taking the exact details. Like what I also find really troubling is that whether or not Sonya Larson liked Dawn Dorland, like they were a part of the same community. And Dawn was very vocal about this kidney donation. So presumably everyone in Dawn’s life who reads this short story is going to know that. And I just don’t understand why you couldn’t take the extra effort to obscure some of those details. I don’t think it would have changed the feeling of the story, but it would have protected this person whether or not you like them.

**Craig:** It sounds to me like that aspect of the story was fairly minor. That the story was not about kidney donation. It included somebody who had done so. But that the value of the story was in the writing and in the execution as is so often the case. That the concept – didn’t matter what the concept was. So, yes, she could have certainly done that, but I think it’s also reasonable to expect that if Sonya Larson doesn’t know Dawn Dorland and reads somebody’s repost of that and writes a story about it that she doesn’t owe Dawn anything. So what’s the difference?

I mean, basically it sounds like Dawn thought that they were a lot closer than they were and Sonya’s point of view was, yeah, I don’t know you. You know? I don’t know you like that as the memes say.

**John:** Now, Megana, you’re actually in writers groups and Craig and I are not. So has there been a discussion in your writers group about this situation and like what is your feeling about this kind of appropriation or even just we’re writing about the same area or space? Is that a thing that comes up in your group?

**Megana:** I don’t know that I have a great response. Because it is an icky situation and I think that sometimes you see people using similar plot devices or things creep up in multiple people’s works because they’re inspired or they’ve just been talking about it in the group. So, I don’t know. It’s really tricky and I wish that I had a better way of figuring that out. But so far we haven’t really had any conversations about that.

I think we’re also aware that in the process of iterating, yeah, maybe you are using something similar to someone else’s project to figure out a solution, but maybe in your next draft that’s going to be different, so it’s not worth litigating as a group.

**Craig:** Years and years ago I had a drum kit. It wasn’t a very good drum kit but I was learning on it. It didn’t sound great. And I knew a drummer, like a proper professional drummer who came by and I showed it to him and I was like it doesn’t sound that great, but it’s good enough to learn on. And he sat down and he played some and it sounded amazing. It was like the best drum kit ever because it’s not the drum kit. And it’s not the idea. It’s not the concept. It’s not the premise. None of that is what it’s about. That stuff is just the drum kit. It’s the drumming that matters. And in this case it’s the execution that matters. It’s the writing that matters. Anybody in any writing group, everybody could get the exact same prompt and 12 of those same details and you’ll get eight different stories, and you might even get eight stories that are really similar, but only one of them is good.

**John:** Yeah. Like the four gospels in the Bible. Only one of them is good?

**Craig:** Which one is that?

**John:** I’ll tell you off-mic.

**Craig:** Oh, is it John? Because your name is John? Is it John?

**John:** That’s what it is.

**Craig:** Oh, is John the crazy one that talked about the beast and the mark of the devil?

**John:** That’s Book of Revelation. Wow. No. That’s not a gospel.

**Craig:** OK, that’s a different god.

**Megana:** Can I say one other thing about the writing group though? I’m so shocked that no one in this group was like you should definitely change that text. You can’t just lift.

**John:** For all we know someone did. We’re not seeing the whole thread. Or maybe you have gone through all of the documents. Megana has been doing nothing else for the last three weeks. Just going through all this. She found the Zodiac Killer and now she’s figuring out who was the real bad friend in the bad friend group.

People throw this at us like How Would This Be a Movie. I’m going to say that I don’t think this is a movie because so much of what it really comes down to is appropriation of words on a page and plagiarism is not great movie material. If you look at the Melissa McCarthy movie, Can You Ever Forgive Me, was fantastic, but it’s not really plagiarism. It ends up being a very physical, visual thing she’s doing. She’s faking letters. Versus this I feel is just not going to work, to me.

**Craig:** John, question for you.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** You’re aware that I donated my kidney this summer, right?

**John:** You know, I think it’s such a remarkable, selfless act. I have not been talking to any of my other friends about how much you bring that up.

**Craig:** If you really thought it was that great of an act I’m wondering why you needed reminding that it happened. Curious.

**John:** All right, well thanks. It’s been fun.

**Craig:** See you guys.

**John:** You can log off the Zoom now. Bye.

**Craig:** See you next week.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Netflix 2-minute Viewership](https://screenrant.com/netflix-2-minutes-veiwership-numbers-why/) on ScreenRant
* [Twitter Thread on Netflix Thumbnails](https://twitter.com/trungtphan/status/1445768087832182796?s=21)
* [Harvey Weinstein Orc in Lord of the Rings](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/oct/05/elijah-wood-lord-of-the-rings-orc-modeled-harvey-weinstein)
* [Dana Covarrubias explains “What the Clothes in Only Murders in the Building Say About the Show’s Characters”](https://slate.com/podcasts/working/2021/10/only-murders-building-costume-designer-dana-covarrubias-creative-process) in Slate Working Podcast
* [Aphantasia](https://aphantasia.com/what-is-aphantasia/)
* [Many People Have a Vivid Mind’s Eye While Others Have None at All](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/science/minds-eye-mental-pictures-psychology.html?smid=url-share) on the NYT
* [LA County Adopt A Family](https://dpss.lacounty.gov/en/community/volunteer.html)
* [Bad Art Friend](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/magazine/dorland-v-larson.html) by Robert Kolker
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
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Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 518 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show it’s a new round of How Would This Be a Movie where we take a look at real life stories and ask is this something we can sell to a streamer? But, in order to film these potential ideas we need to have a crew which is why we’ll look at the possibility of an IATSE strike and the issues involved. We’ll also talk about money and what you should do when you start earning it.

**Craig:** Spend it. Spend it. [laughs]

**John:** Spend it all. Spend it all.

**Craig:** As fast as you can.

**John:** Wow. We got through that segment really quickly. But we might have a few footnotes.

**Craig:** Oh, OK.

**John:** And in our bonus segment for premium members it’s officially autumn so we’ll talk about all things fall, from pumpkin spice to spooky season.

**Craig:** Pumpkin spice to spooky season. Oh boy.

**John:** Now Craig we’re recording this on Tudum and so I want to make sure that you’re having a good, joyous celebration of Tudum today.

**Craig:** Yup. [laughs]

**John:** Do you know what Tudum is?

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** So Tudum is Netflix’s hopefully annual celebration of all things Netflix. And so just like Disney has their big Disney conference and we have other fan conferences, this is just the Netflix fan conference that they’re trying to put up.

**Craig:** Why is it called Tudum?

**John:** Because when you start a Netflix show it goes “Tu-dum.”

**Craig:** Oh, I thought it went – oh, OK, yeah. So it’s not Dum-Dum. That’s Law & Order. It goes Doom, like that. Happy Tudum. Right.

**John:** Because Craig you’re making a [makes HBO noise] show.

**Craig:** I’m more of a [makes HBO noise]. Yeah, so I’m a [makes HBO noise]. I’m Happy Schwang. Why? Why do people do this? John, they’re giving these people money. The networks should be supporting–

**John:** Because fandom.

**Craig:** Oh, fandom. I mean, I love fans.

**John:** Fandom.

**Craig:** We need fans. But I want artists to have fans. I don’t want corporations to have fans.

**John:** Now, Craig, I think you should know that I’m going to be featured on Netflix this coming week. So as you’re listening to this episode I think it will have already aired. I am in the documentary Attack of the Hollywood Clichés.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Which breaks down a bunch of movie clichés, everything from she’s pretty when she takes her glasses off, the meet-cute, females running in stilettos. So, this was filmed months and months ago and it was just me filming in this one little place, this one little studio downtown. But a bunch of other actually genuinely famous people are in this thing, too. So if you would like to see me with your eyes and not just listen to me with your ears you can check that out. It debuts September 28th worldwide on Netflix.

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Do they do kind of montages of various things?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I wish that they would just do a mega-cut of all the people who have ever said, “You just don’t get it, do you?” in movies and television.

**John:** I don’t want to spoil anything, but that could actually be in this documentary.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** I don’t know what made it to the final floor. It was two hours of me filming and Megana looked through all the clips they sent through and it was exhausting to sort of go through. So I talk about specific things. I try to defend certain tropes as being like, well, that’s actually what kind of happens. I know I had a long bit about the spit take. I’m curious whether my spit take observation made it in.

**Craig:** All right. Very good.

**John:** We’ll see.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** But we’ve got some follow up. Craig, you’ve been gone for a bit, so this follow up has stacked up.

**Craig:** OK. Let’s go through it.

**John:** All right. First we’ll start with Ketchup Doritos. Bo Shim writes, “Bo would like to clarify I do not steak Craig’s Ketchup Doritos. I purchase them for the trailer. They are communal Doritos. We’re lucky I discovered them.”

**Craig:** That is definitely a recontextualization of what I believe happened. Now I encouraged her to submit this to follow up because I wanted a chance to reclarify they are communal Doritos, but I feel like in a particular day if the Dorito level goes below a certain line then, you know, the problem with communism is what happens when people cheat. And what I’m saying is Bo may be not the best communist I’ve ever met when it comes to Ketchup Doritos. That said, she does purchase them for the trailer. And I am lucky she discovered them. And we haven’t had them in a while and I think she’s just passive-aggressively denying me them because I talked about it.

**John:** Now, I want to propose a solution, because this is not just a program about problems. It’s about solutions at times.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** It’s called the Sharpie. And you write with a Sharpie on the outside of the bag Craig or Bo and those become Craig’s Doritos or Bo’s Doritos.

**Craig:** Couple issues. A, won’t stop theft. In fact, it almost encourages it. So, look, I just keep eating out of Bo’s bag. I still have plenty of Doritos and she wonders what happened. Second, I think what we should do is just put Sharpie lines on the inside of the Dorito bag and initial it this is where I got down to. And then if it goes way below that level then I know that Bo went crazy. That said, I do love her. She is great. And I only said those two things because I’m hoping to get more Ketchup Doritos. [laughs]

**John:** Our next bit of follow up is also big on Craig. Dave writes, “I’ve heard Craig disparage jigsaw puzzles a few times over the years. This week he went on at length about how much he loves Legos. Aren’t Legos basically 3D jigsaw puzzles?”

**Craig:** Boy, I sure would like to slap Dave right off the planet. No they’re not. And here’s why, Dave. If I get a jigsaw puzzle there’s exactly one arrangement that works. The rest of it is just me frustratingly trying to jam one piece into another and ruining it. Legos can lead to anything. That’s the point. Of course you can take the Lego box, build the thing that they’ve suggested you build, and that would be fun if you’d like to do it. But you can also then smash it apart and give it to your children and watch them engage in the joy of imagination.

So, Dave, how dare you?

**John:** Craig, was it called in crossword puzzles where – Sunday puzzles will often have this where it kind of breaks the rules. Is it a rebus when there’s two things in the same box?

**Craig:** Yup. That’s called a rebus. That’s a rebus.

**John:** Mike and I were working on a new jigsaw puzzle, a company called Magic Puzzles, that actually has a rebus quality to it, where like the picture you’re looking at on the box I guess is basically being formed, but there’s more edges than you think there should be edges. It’s weird. It feels like it’s breaking a fundamental tenet in an exciting way of how jigsaw puzzles should work. So I think there is a meta puzzle-solving aspect to this puzzle I’m doing right now. I don’t think you’ll care. I’m not going to win you over. I just want to acknowledge that there’s something that people clearly I think took from crossword puzzles that are being transferred back to jigsaw puzzles.

**Craig:** It’s very well possible that that could be the case. I will look at this jigsaw puzzle. I won’t spurn it. I’ll keep an open mind.

**John:** Listen to that. We may have actually changed Craig’s mind. Megana, please note the time and date.

**Craig:** No. I said I would keep an open mind. The changing has not occurred. But the door is open.

**John:** OK. Well this is recorded in podcast form, so everyone will hear that something may have changed.

**Craig:** I’m still angry at Dave. I can’t get over what he said. I can’t get over how bad his analogy is. I’m losing it. I’m losing it. I want to find you, Dave. I’m going to find you.

**John:** Honestly as you were talking about it on that episode about Lego I was going to bring it up, but it was late in the show and I just didn’t want to have that fight.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** Do you want to talk about firing writers?

**Craig:** So John in an episode where I was up here doing my thing John and Kelly Marcel discussed the undignified firing of writers, where the writer learns of their sacking from a third party or worse in the trades. Both gave good advice, but John said, and this is obviously not me talking, this is somebody writing in, “John said he couldn’t think of a way of stopping it. I’m a British lawyer so my first thought was add a clause to the contract. ‘All contractual notices whether verbal or written must be given by either party prior to third party publication for the avoidance of doubt. This includes the termination of this written agreement.’ And if you wanted to drive the point home add a financial penalty.”

John, do you think that a studio would agree to that?

**John:** A studio would never agree to this. So I want to both talk to British lawyer and say I get why that seems like a good idea. And it’s also that’s just never, ever going to happen. And later on in the show we’re going to have a discussion about like, oh, couldn’t I be paid this way rather than the other way. And it’s like I get why you think that could happen, but it’s also just never going to happen. So, it can be two things at once.

**Craig:** I think you aren’t even being definitive enough. It will never, ever, ever, ever happen. And also it doesn’t even matter if it did. Because if the studio agreed to that all they have to do is pick up the phone and call somebody at one of the trade publications, Deadline or Variety or something, and anonymously just let them know that you’ve been fired. And they’ll publish it. So it just doesn’t matter. There’s nothing that can be done to stop this other than people not being idiots or assholes, which they often are. When writers are – you know what, I’m going to stop saying fired because in screenwriting it happens so frequently. When there’s a changing of the writing guard everybody should act like gentlewomen and gentlemen and gentle people. But they don’t.

The only solution is if people just started acting nicely.

**John:** Yeah. And the other thing which British lawyer I don’t think is acknowledging is that sometimes it’s really ambiguous where stories are coming from, who is leading the charge. Because it’s not that the studio is saying that someone is fired. It’s just that they start looking for another writer and that gets out as being the person being fired. It’s murky and it’s crappy and people just need to be more upfront about what’s really going on.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Agreed. Hey, let’s go to a much simpler topic like IATSE. Craig, can you remind us what IATSE is?

**Craig:** Sure. IATSE is the umbrella union of all of the trade unions that work on screen and television crafts. So that union covers grips, electric, cinematographers, costumers, set designers. Basically everybody that you see working on a movie or a television show that isn’t driving a vehicle, acting, writing, or directing.

**John:** Yes. And as we talked about sort of the need for better assistant pay at times we’ve also discussed script coordinators and other folks who work below the line sort of with writers but not as writers are also covered by IATSE.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So those folks, too. And those are some of the worst paid people on sets or in rooms are the folks who are working there.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** They have union protection but they don’t have the kinds of union protections you’d want to have.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So IATSE is this big umbrella organization. They basically never have gone on strike, but now they’re talking – they’re asking for a strike authorization vote from members because they’ve reached a point in their negotiation where they feel like they need to consider going on strike. Because the AMPTP, the same people that the Writers Guild negotiates with, is trying to form a new contract with IATSE.

**Craig:** Correct. The AMPTP currently as far as I can tell, and the AMPTP negotiating group is led by a woman named Carol Lombardini, I think what Carol is doing is basically seeing how far they’re going to go. Because IATSE has never struck it makes sense I suppose for Carol to see if they really have the will or the way. I think that the IATSE of old that never struck in part never struck because there was a certain amount of corruption involved. I’m not alleging that firmly – please don’t sue me – but that’s been the suggestion that I’ve read. Let’s put it that way.

**John:** I would also say that in my 20 plus years I’ve never felt a groundswell of like oh we should go on strike from IATSE members I’ve spoken with.

**Craig:** I think in part because that door was always closed. So the Writers Guild talks about striking every three years essentially. We don’t strike every three years, happily. But we talk about it all the time. They don’t. A little bit like the Directors Guild. They just don’t talk about it. It’s not really a thing that’s on the table. But now suddenly it is as IATSE leadership has changed somewhat significantly over the last 10 years or so. So I think Carol is just basically seeing what’s going to happen when they have that vote. I think her presumption is that IATSE will not strike the second after that vote. If I were IATSE I would to show her that it’s absolutely real. Because the one union in our town that can absolutely cripple things instantly and devastatingly is IATSE. And yet they don’t keep going.

Now the potential IATSE strike does not cover all production, even not all production in the US. For instance the IATSE contract with HBO is not currently under negotiation. That’s a separate agreement. So some places will still have production going on if there is a strike. And obviously production that’s going on for instance like in Canada where I am will continue because that’s not IATSE. It’s a different country and it’s a different union. But I think IATSE is doing the right thing here. I think they are being incredibly aggressive and I think that they’re showing that they have the ability to do what they’re threatening to do. And I think that this isn’t like sometimes the Writers Guild has said, as you know, hey we have to vote yes just because it’s a bluff basically. I think everybody in IATSE after all these decades is pretty pissed off and with good reason. They are not treated well. They are not paid fairly. The working conditions are bad. And this has to be fixed. 100%.

**John:** Well let’s take a look at the working conditions and sort of what’s happening below the line here. We got a couple letters in but Megana if you could start us off with Cautiously Optimistic.

**Megana Rao:** Cautiously Optimistic writes, “I can’t necessarily complain about what my paycheck looks like, but my days are generally always 12 to 14 hours, or 15 to 17 counting commute. And more often than not we work Fraturdays with an early call on Monday.”

**Craig:** Let me just interrupt there in case people don’t know what Fraturdays are. There’s generally a 12-hour turnaround when we work. Which means you can’t just bring people in without 12 hours of turnaround, especially actors have these things more than anybody. So if days go long early in the week the call times to start the next day go later and later and later to account for the 12-hour time off, which means by the time we get to Friday sometimes you’re starting at 6pm, not because you’re supposed to be shooting all night but because you’ve been running late all week long, which means Friday really is a Fraturday. It’s Friday/Saturday.

**Megana:** Wow. So that means that you end your work day at like 6am on Saturday?

**Craig:** Pretty much. That’s right. By the way, or 9am on Saturday. I mean, Fraturdays are a scourge. And the worst part about a Fraturday is so you finish working on Saturday at let’s say 7am, you go home and you sleep, you wake up Saturday evening. Enjoy your Saturday evening and Sunday sort of because Monday you start at 7 or 8am.

**Megana:** Oof.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Megana:** OK, well Cautiously Optimistic continues, “And there are many others across departments working those same hours and struggling to get by with their wages. Before joining the industry I’d often heard that this is what a typical week looked like and I chose it anyway. I’m passionate about what I do, as are most people I work with. But the time off during the pandemic opened a lot of our eyes to how poor our mental health is while working and what life could be like if we had time to spend with our families and activities outside of work.

“Many are too exhausted to do anything on their off time except try to catch up on sleep. Do you see a possible future in which we can continue to do what we love without the brutal hours and conditions? Or do you think it’s just the immovable nature of the industry and studios will continue to say ‘Safety First’ without committing to any changes that actually improve health or safety for its workers? And how much weight does a showrunner have when it comes to these types of decisions before a show goes into production?”

**Craig:** Great questions.

**John:** Great questions. All right, one of the things I like about this email is Cautiously Optimistic is pointing out that the pandemic, which we all sort of went through, and the lockdown, these crews were spending time with their families and it’s like, oh wow, what it would be like to actually spend time with my family. And recognizing that there’s a world in which they’re not working 18-hour days all the time.

This framing is so important is that like it is about pay, but it’s also about working conditions. And really making sure that you are recognizing that people need to have true breaks and true time off to sort of live a normal life and actually see their families. And that’s a lot of what they’re asking for in this negotiation is, hey, if you’re going to make us work into crazy overtimes there has to be a real cost to that so that at a certain point you’re just not going to ask us to do that. You actually are going to have to wrap and go an extra day or go two extra days rather than these insane hours.

**Craig:** And there is, you know, overtime. What I think is so poignant about the requests that our crews are making is that they do get paid more for those hours past the 12 hours. And they still are saying it’s not good. It’s not good enough. I don’t think that the answer here, it doesn’t seem like what they’re saying is we don’t mind working 18 hours but you’ve just got to up that overtime pay. What they’re saying is we don’t want to do this anymore. It’s not healthy or good for anybody. And the point about commutes is really important, too.

Most crew, if we’re shooting in let’s say Downtown Los Angeles, most crew are commuting in from some distance. And there is a zone, a production zone where you’re not getting paid for that travel. I think it is 30 miles.

**John:** Yeah. There’s a 30-mile radius around sort of one intersection in Hollywood.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s where TMZ comes from. Thirty Mile Zone.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So what they’re asking for is for Hollywood to say, hey, you know what, a 12-hour workday is a lot. That’s a lot. I mean, 12 hours is more than most people work in a day. Most people work eight hours.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** We work 12 hours when we’re shooting and there are also when I say we there are also groups that have pre-calls and are post-wrap. Transpo, et cetera. Obviously that’s a different union. That’s teamsters. But my point is that I believe firmly that everything that happens after the 12th hour is trouble. It doesn’t feel good for anyone. Everyone is burnt. And it’s a sign that something has gone wrong with the planning or with the execution. And the planning and execution of things that go wrong are rarely because the crews didn’t do something right. It is almost always because the production overscheduled a day or the director is just not competent enough to get the work done during the day, or acts of god. Stuff breaks. Weather. Someone gets sick. Et cetera.

**John:** Yeah. And so a lot of these things can be addressed in preproduction and planning but decisions have to be made on the ground as well. And there are times where it’s like, you know what, we have to wrap. For safety and for the good of everyone we need to wrap. And in some ways I think Covid testing protocols and all these things have sort of forced some of these safety things a little bit higher up in the chain because there’s reasons why we just can’t actually shoot because we’ve lost this cast member. That is a thing that really happens.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Let’s also listen to what Nate had to say.

**Megana:** Nate writes, “My longest day ever on the clock is 18 hours, which if I were to ask around my peers is the lowest record I would find. I spent the summer working on a feature film that swore beforehand that our days would be kept to ten hours and in service of that expected cap we would just work through lunch. Half of that statement turned out to be much more true than the other, as we only had two days that were even close to ten hours and quite a few more where there was no break for lunch. This is but one example of how in just my eight years in this business I have seen conditions degrade, not improve.”

**Craig:** Yeah. This is not uncommon at all and Nate your longest day ever on the clock being 18 hours doesn’t beat my record. I hit 20 hours one day working for the Weinsteins on a production. And it was unconscionable. I remember very specifically saying to the crew somewhere around hour 16 if any of you feel like there’s a safety concern about the length of this day or just in general you’re burnt go home and you’re still getting paid. And you know what? No one left. And that’s the part about this that’s so heartbreaking is that crews care so much. They want to do a good job. They want to back the production and they want to deliver. And they want to deliver even though they’re not getting paid what the actors are paid or the director is paid. Their names are not being bandied around. Nobody is interviewing them when the movie comes out. Nobody uses their name in conjunction with it. They just care quietly about their jobs that in that regard it is the most noble approach to what we do. And what happens? They get taken advantage of.

And they must put their foot down. And here’s the thing. So like on our production we really tried very hard to stick to that 12-hour day. Sometimes we’re a little bit under, which is nice. You get to go home an hour early. You still get paid for your 12-hour day. Every now and then we’ve hit 13 hours, or I think once we hit 14 I think. And crews are OK with that. They know like, all right, hey every now and again something happens and we’ve got to try and get this done and we get it done. It’s similar to the lunch thing. You can ask for grace. You can say, you know what, we need five more minutes to go into lunch here just to finish this shot. If we can just finish this shot it would be great for us. Then we can go to lunch.

If you ask for grace every day it’s super annoying. If you ask for it once a week it’s OK. And that’s the problem is that studios take advantage. They just keep pushing, and pushing, and pushing, and pushing. And IATSE absolutely must do something dramatic here to wake people up. And IATSE I would argue should not be worried about oh they’re going to send all their production to the state of Georgia where there’s no union. They’re already doing that. If they could send all of it to Georgia they would. They can’t. So they sent everything everywhere. Right? And they still have to make stuff that’s union-covered and it’s time. It’s time to force the AMPTP to deal with this because in a world where we are defending the rights and concerns and inequities that people of color are dealing with, that women are dealing with, we also have to look very, very hard at the unfairnesses and inequities that we visit upon people who are middle class in our business who are dwindling, who are scraping to get by, who are “blue collar.” And in a town run by a whole bunch of liberals it really does seem like that ought to be a good place to start.

That’s where you start making things better, right now. So, hey, Carol Lombardini, AMPTP, let’s go. Step it up.

**John:** I agree. The one thing I want to make sure we’re also acknowledging is that these working conditions so important to address, but we don’t often think about them with the kind of more white collared jobs, like script coordinator and other writer assistants, people who are being paid under IATSE contracts. I’m going to point everyone to an episode of The Business with Kim Masters where she talks to a script coordinator about the hours he’s facing doing his job. And the hours and the pay are not good enough. And so as we’re looking at this contract let’s also make sure that we are addressing some of the lowest paid members like our script coordinators because this show is not sort of all built around them, but they are so vital to the process and they’re being well underpaid.

**Craig:** And generally speaking the more experienced and skilled the crew the faster the day goes.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** So if you drive away skilled people because you’re not treating them fairly or paying them well enough you’ll end up with a whole lot more people without that experience and your day goes slower.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And you lose money. Just, it’s time. My god, is it ever time. I mean, I remember the first time I was on a movie set and I looked around and I’m like this can’t be real. This can’t be the way it’s done. And is the way that it’s done. And it doesn’t have to be this way. And I want to revisit Cautiously Optimistic who asked how much weight does a showrunner have when it comes to these type of decisions. Depends on the showrunner.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I can speak for this showrunner, some. Enough that I could say I don’t want a schedule where we are routinely going over overtime. I want 12-hour days. I want the standard day.

**John:** I had no power or control over the kinds of productions I was doing as a baby TV showrunner, like a person who should not have been running a show by myself. But as a director I did have a fair amount of control. And as a director doing an indie film, this is a crew and a work setup that I could actually sort of dictate. This is how I want things to go. And I did have some of that. So I think showrunners in television and directors in features can have a big influence on how their sets work and that’s really what we’re asking.

**Craig:** That’s right. And if you look around as a showrunner and you didn’t have the power but the show is going well, except for the amount of time you’re working, then start complaining. Start complaining. It’s not fair. And we do live in a time where people can’t just bring you behind a closed door and say, “Shut up. This is Evil Co. And we’re going to do the evil thing.” Because I think everybody understands there are options for people who are being told to shut and do the evil thing. So, advocate for your crews where you can, however you can. They want to work hard. They believe in working hard. But, yes, as much as possible let’s try and stick to the good old fashioned already very long 12-hour-day.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s look at what happens next. So there’s a strike authorization vote happening for IATSE members. That will pass. It’s just a question of what percentage of members will vote for that. And then we’ll see whether IATSE needs to go on strike or if they go back to the negotiating room and they reach a deal. Whatever happens I’m excited to see that at this one moment IATSE and all the other unions are sort of together in terms of looking at this is a situation that needs to change and hopefully the Writers Guild and all the other guilds are backing IATSE. Hopefully IATSE will back us when it comes to the next time for negotiations.

**Craig:** That’s the thing. IATSE doesn’t need anybody to back them. That’s the cool part about being in IATSE. You walk and it’s over. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if the actors say oh well we would cross the picket line. Well you just enjoy your empty [unintelligible] because we’re not there. Nothing is happening if there are no cameramen, if there are no people that are doing the sets.

**John:** Craig, can this go back to shooting everything on Zoom again? It’ll be fine.

**Craig:** [laughs] Zooming. Even then because the editors are in IATSE.

**John:** Yeah, the editors, too.

**Craig:** It’s not happening. So, yeah, I think of course the unions should support IATSE, all the unions should stick together in this regard. But if there was ever a union that could just go it alone it’s IATSE.

**John:** Yeah. All right, let’s move on to our marquee topic, How Would This Be a Movie. So this is where we look at stories in the news or the thing that people have sent in and we think about how could these be processed as a movie or a TV show. Often on the show we cover scandals or major crimes, we talked about the FIFA scandal, that old person heist in England. A lot of the things that we’ve talked about have been optioned and some of them actually come out as movies.

A thing that a couple people sent in was in South Carolina there’s this Murdaugh family and there’s just all these murders, just more murders keep happening. We’re not going to talk about that today but obviously that’s the kind of thing that people would be discussing. But the four stories I want to look at today they span the globe and they’re really different opportunities for the kinds of stories – I don’t know if any of them are going to be a movie or a TV series, but I thought they had interesting things to talk about in the sense of place, a sense of story areas. So that’s why we picked these four.

So we’ll start with Knives Outback: A man is presumed murdered. But in this town of 12 everyone is a possible suspect.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** This is sent in by Yasuke, a listener. And this story was written up by Mitch Moxley who was writing on Medium, so we’ll have a link in the show notes to this article. Craig, what did you make of this situation and the events in Larrimah, Northern Territory?

**Craig:** Well it was glorious. So, Australia does afford you these things. There are these vast tracks of Australia that are kind of empty. They’re very scrubby, deserty, and here we are out in the middle of nowhere. And there are, what is it 12 people live in this town?

**John:** Yeah. Sometimes there’s 12, sometimes there’s 10. I guess maybe there were 12 and now there’s 10.

**Craig:** I think it says it had started, there was a railroad nearby. The population after the railroad shutdown went from 100, to 50, to 25, and now it’s around 13. And a murder happened. A guy goes missing.

**John:** Well, yeah, a presumed murder.

**Craig:** Presumed murder. He goes missing. His dog goes missing. And what makes it interesting is that in true Murder on the Orient Express style everyone hated him. He was a dick. He was the town jerk, which is spectacular. And he had a way of getting involved in feuds, neighbors, and all sorts of stuff. And the feuds got incredibly Australian. What do I mean by that? I mean that he would throw severed kangaroo penises into their yards. Do you know if you’re throwing a kangaroo penis you’re almost certainly in Australia I would argue. Right?

**John:** Yeah. There’s no many other choices. Unless you were going to a zoo to get a kangaroo that you can cut apart.

**Craig:** He put a kangaroo, he shoved part of a kangaroo butt through a window where there was a stove, so it would heat up and fill another house with kangaroo butt smell. So anyway the point is he’s also taking kangaroos apart. But I think that the kangaroos oftentimes are just like you can find them and repurpose them for bad neighbor purposes.

Anyway, he’s a jerk. And there are very few suspects. And it does in fact feel to me like a movie. It feels like a wonderful blend of Strictly Ballroom and And Then There Were None. You bring in the investigator from outside, and you try and solve this incredibly tiny crime. It’s like a closed room mystery, except the closed room is a town that’s very big.

**John:** The great outback.

**Craig:** Yes. That’s outside.

**John:** Yeah. So our dead guy is a terrific character. So Paddy Moriarty, the article describes him as a Larrikin.

**Craig:** Of course he’s a Larrikin.

**John:** A Larrikin. A shit-stirrer. And he’s a guy who did his morning work and then he would have basically six giant beers at the bar and then he would go home and microwave his dinner.

**Craig:** And then he would get all Larrikin-y.

**John:** Yes. He had a great dog. And so I think the dog is really an essential element. It makes it feel like, oh, there has to be a true crime focus, like he could have just wandered off but where is his dog? And he would never have left his dog. So there’s the question of what happened to this man and his dog is fascinating. The possibilities that it was fed to – there’s a crocodile. So of course there’s a crocodile.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** That did that. Or he was ground up and put into the meat pies.

**Craig:** Well, OK, so let’s just take a moment here. How great is this. His main – the object of most of his scorn was a woman named Fran, Fran Hodgetts, who ran a meat pie place and if you are a Broadway fan like myself, if you love Sondheim, then you know–

**John:** It’s Sweeney Todd.

**Craig:** It’s the plot of Sweeney Todd is that Mrs. Lovett. It’s almost the same name. That’s what I love is that it’s Mrs. Lovett and Mrs. Lovett makes meat pies. So Sweeney Todd kills people and she bakes them into meat pies. But the Australian Bureau of Investigation checked the meat in the pies and were clear to say that the meat was not identified as either human or dog mean.

**John:** Or canine.

**Craig:** But they didn’t necessarily say it wasn’t – I think they probably they were like, heh, you know, there was some kangaroo in here.

**John:** She probably should have mentioned the kangaroo of it all.

**Craig:** Should have mentioned the kangaroo.

**John:** So let’s think about this, is it a movie or is it a limited series?

**Craig:** Movie. Movie.

**John:** It’s a movie. So you’re going to go with movie. So what do you think are the beats of the story and is Paddy a character who is alive in the story? Are we flashing back to his moments of life? Tell me what your vision is for the movie.

**Craig:** If I were doing this I would probably have the report of a missing person and then the suggestion that he was murdered. I would be somebody working for the Australian authorities that would go to that town, so I’m the protagonist here. And as I keep digging I find it’s weirder and weirder. And as I do so the character of Paddy would sort of start to kind of talk to me. He would be with me. We would get a sense of just by learning him he would be by my side as a little kind of thought ghost so that we would get the experience of him and the amusement of him. And when I would find things I would be able to turn to him like, “You asshole. Why would you do that?” And then he would be like, “Oh, you know.”

But my job would be to solve the crime. And there would be a solution at the end. There would be an exciting ending. I don’t feel the need to stick to reality here. I’d want it to feel more like a traditional Agatha Christie surprise that’s the person who did it. And in doing so put Paddy to rest. And hopefully along the way feel a little bit for who he was and why he did the things he did. And perhaps, perhaps, a nice theme about loneliness and isolation and how it affects people in the world.

**John:** I can absolutely see that. And so what you’re describing feels like if it were an Agatha Christie or a Knives Out, you have a central investigator character coming there and it kind of feels like the ghost of Paddy is the – not literal ghost, but the vision of Paddy is sort of the Ana de Armas character who is along with that investigator, helping to do the investigation.

**Craig:** Like Watson to Sherlock Holmes.

**John:** Absolutely. That absolutely works. My instinct was that it was a limited series in that the great thing about episodic television is that you have the ability to keep throwing up twists. And so I’m watching Only Murders in the Building right now which does a really good job of feeling like a New Yorker short story, but also a podcast, and having fun as things keep getting revealed. And so it could be that same idea where you have an investigator come to town but it doesn’t limit the storytelling to only one character’s point of view. Because what you’re describing as a movie is we only know what the investigator knows, correct?

**Craig:** Yes, generally speaking that is correct.

**John:** And so I think there might be an opportunity to broaden out so we actually get multiple points of view and we’re not sure who to trust within this but you’re seeing more than one point of view on this whole situation.

**Craig:** That could absolutely work. You know, I’m rooting for movies these days. If I can find one of these stories that feels like it has an ending to it that you could theoretically do in two hours then I’m like pushing for the movie.

**John:** Pushing for the movie. All right. Let’s go to our next story. This is I was a Hamptons Squatter: How I lived in luxury for free. It was written by Anonymous, but Jeb submitted this because it was a New York Post story. And so this is the tale of I think a young woman who would end up like crashing at these various really expensive Hamptons houses. Very east end of Long Island. And she started out basically being a tutor to these kids, and she would live in the basement. She would get kicked out when they were actually renting out the houses. And she started to realize like oh it’s not that hard to live in one of these places. She wasn’t actually breaking down the front door or anything. She would pass herself off as somebody who should be there and sometimes she was staying at houses that had a full staff. And she was just hanging out there.

Craig, you look at this, there’s not a plot to this at all. It’s really just a situation. Does this situation spark to you as a jumping off place for a movie, a series? What does it say to you?

**Craig:** Maybe a character. I mean, there’s such a kind of tone deaf sociopathy to this kind of strange essay. The part where I really got angry was when she said that it was OK because once she kind of got there and insinuated herself into this household through lying that the staff, the maids and chefs and people, were happy because they had somebody to attend to. That’s outrageous. It’s like, I mean, yeah, if the whole point is some guy who is some hedge fund jerk is away and I can steal his stuff, OK, but now she made a point of saying how pretty she and her friends were. How they were pretty and white. And how I guess the support staff who I doubt were as pretty and white as she was felt terrific about waiting on her. It’s just outrageous. So I hated her and I hated this story. And I think it could be an interesting character that somebody could be called out about or maybe it could be like a weird scene. But it just felt gross.

**John:** So I think there’s interesting stuff here to do as a movie. It doesn’t sustain enough to be a series. But that sort of commoditizing white privilege and recognition that like, oh, it’s because I’m pretty and white that I can just pass through here. She is a sociopath, but also reminded me a bit of some of the dynamic in Zola which I loved so much, that Twitter thread, where you’re breaking the social contract of this place but maybe that’s OK because maybe it was a bullshit social contract at the start.

The movie that this reminded me most of was Wedding Crashers where you have these two characters who are showing up at other people’s weddings for their own agendas and sort of coopting them. And I think there’s a way to do that here as well where there’s a character who is coming into this space and recognizing this is all bullshit and I am just going to benefit from it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that the changing nature of culture is such that Wedding Crashers probably wouldn’t fly today. There’s just a general question of consent involved in that and it makes people uncomfortable for quite legitimate reasons.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So it’s just a different vibe. I’m kind of curious, I don’t know, Megana have you kind of detected a general reaction to this story? Is the social media sphere commenting? Or has this kind of gone unnoticed?

**Megana:** I feel like it’s gone relatively unnoticed. I haven’t seen any commentary around it. But I think I had a similar reaction that you did.

**Craig:** Yeah. Maybe it’s better that she gets unnoticed here. [laughs]

**John:** All right, let’s move on to our next story. So this Jerusalem Supernatural: Meet the Palestinian Man Hunting Ghouls, Ghosts, and Jinn. This was sent in by Jalena. It’s this article by Layla Azmi Goushey in Middle East Eye. There’s not one story here, but it’s basically about this guy who writes up stories of supernatural creatures from Muslim tradition but also general Palestinian tradition. And these are various supernatural creatures, Jinn, and ghouls, and other things that we would call spirits or ghosts. Craig, what did you think of this space as a story area?

**Craig:** Loved it. Because only really in the west we only hear about Palestinian culture as it exists in the political context of a struggle between Palestine and Israel. That’s what we hear about. That’s all we ever hear about and there’s nothing else. And what I love about this guy, Ahmad Nabil, who is promoting the preservation of Palestinian folklore and also Palestinian imagination is that what he’s putting forward is the part of Palestinian culture that is universally human. That all cultures have these stories, myths. They all overlap. They all intertwine and yet they all have their own little interesting twists. And putting that forward as something worthy is wonderful. And while there is a somewhat religious connection as is pointed out, the Jinn are mentioned in the Koran, so if you do believe in the infallibility of the word in the Koran then you believe that Jinn are real. But in that regard, what is it, 89% of Americans believe angels are real, which I should mention they are not. I just want to talk to you now directly, 89% of America. They’re not real.

But that’s the nature of believing in these things is also quite universal, unless you’re me. So I love this idea. I would hesitate to turn this into a Palestinian Ghostbusters. I don’t think that’s what it is. I think that there’s a really interesting way of approaching this like – I love the stories about children and the way that they interacted with Jinn and the idea of a child and a Jinn and a friendship that could occur could be amazing. And not to deny in the story the reality of what life in Palestine is like, but rather to use this space in the foreground to accentuate what’s happening in the background. That could be special. There could be a lovely movie here.

**John:** So there’s two filmmakers I worked with up at Sundance Labs who have made films that remind me of what’s unique and special about this. So Ana Lily Amirpour, she did A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, which is fantastic. Put it on your list if you haven’t seen it.

**Craig:** Awesome. Awesome movie.

**John:** Under the Shadow by Babak Anvari, also loved, which is about a supernatural thing happening during this bombing raid. And both are terrific. And I think a good reminder that I think these two filmmakers could make this movie because they actually had a connection to the culture and the specific environment they were writing about. So, when we say like we would love to see this movie, I would love just to watch this movie set about Jinn and Jerusalem and this stuff. You or I should not be making that.

**Craig:** Oh, I don’t know, John. Shouldn’t a Jew be making this movie? [laughs]

**John:** I think it would be best–

**Craig:** Fine.

**John:** I think it’s a great opportunity for filmmakers who have a connection to this place and this culture.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** To be doing this. Because what it does is it gives you the advantage of making a genre picture that can sort of like play to genre fans and also speak specifically to your experience.

**Craig:** And teach new things. So I think that while everybody can write everything, when there is kind of a first one in should be someone that is close to it. This feels like a movie that should be written by and made by somebody whose grandmother told them these stories. Somebody like Ahmad Nabil. He himself, I don’t think he’s a filmmaker as well, but he would be a great person to be involved. And you would want people of Palestinian heritage to do this because this is the introduction of the Palestinian Jinn to the regular, what do we call it, the regular audience, the global audience. Let’s call them the global audience.

And it doesn’t have to be in English, by the way. I think people are getting much, much better at watching movies with subtitles. Like A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, by the way, which is spectacular and in Farsi. So, yes, what we need here is a Palestinian filmmaker, Palestinian writer-director, Palestinian writer. Let’s start with a writer as we believe that is the most important part. But there is something beautiful to be done here. It doesn’t have to be about a relationship between a kid and their Jinn friend. It could be anything. But I loved the idea of the Jinn. I loved the way they looked. I loved the way they were described. And I love the fact that they are new to me. And that’s lovely.

So, yes, I think this could and should be a movie. Is it going to be made by Universal or Disney? Nah.

**John:** No. But is it made by A24 or one of those places? Absolutely.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** Or is it made by – Netflix and all of these places are trying to do local films for local audiences. That could be a great way into it. What I also want to stress is that it’s not the responsibility of this filmmaker to explain all this for a non-Palestinian audience. I think it’s that balance of you’re setting this story within this world and hopefully in telling this story we will all see the universal connections to it, but you don’t need to have the outside westerner who gets explained all this stuff to. I think we’re well beyond that.

**Craig:** You mean like a character in the movie?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh god no. No, that would be terrible.

**John:** But that will be a note that you would get. And hopefully it’s less often than you would have ten years ago.

**Craig:** But tell that note to F off. No. That’s not – no, it should be made within the culture. It should be made from inside the culture. And this is what art does is that then everybody else who is a human being with a heart in their chest can watch it and go I get this.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And that’s the fun part. That’s what makes it great.

**John:** Yeah. And I do feel like this is a movie rather than a series.

**Craig:** Oh, 100%.

**John:** Agreed. All right, our last choice here is the Tin Man and the Lion. This is a blog post by Brian Ferrari that I’m not even quite sure how I found this. It wasn’t a reader who sent this in. I just kind of loved it. So this is a story set in 1991. It’s this guy basically remembering that he got hired on to a regional tour production of The Wizard of Oz, like a thing that would play at schools and just travel around. And it was The Wizard of Oz and he got cast as – I think he was the Lion, and this other really hot guy was cast as the Tin Man. And so it was their relationship as they sort of went from city to city and it never really got anywhere. But I just loved the detail and, again, the specificity and just sort of remembering like, oh, yes, that was 1991. And this sort of weird band of actors traveling around which I think is always a great environment.

Craig, what did you make of this?

**Craig:** I mean, I absolutely would watch a six part limited about the insanity that goes on with a traveling children’s theater troupe doing The Wizard of Oz, because everybody knows The Wizard of Oz. And the weird kind of arguments and alliances and back-stabbings, and lovemaking between Tin Men and Lions and good witches and bad witches is just wonderful. Like you know Don’t Think Twice, our friend Mike Birbiglia’s film was kind of a fun introduction for citizens as it were to the world of improv and improv troupes and the way they form a family. And the road trip is sort of the highlight of it. And I could absolutely see something – you know, Mike Birbiglia can do this?

**John:** Maybe he’d want to.

**Craig:** Maybe he’d want to. Or maybe he would be like, why, what? I’m not doing that. Shut up, Craig. You know, what, Mike, Mike Birbiglia, why don’t you write in and tell us what you think.

**John:** Brian Ferrari who wrote this blog post, I don’t know if he’s a screenwriter at all, I mean, he would actually be able to write this kind of story. But even if it’s not this specific story, I feel like this idea – and I agree that a limited series could work really well. But there’s also a tradition of the Christopher Guest movies where it feels like you have this band of misfits who are trying to do this thing and getting to a place. It’s also a Little Miss Sunshine. I think there’s something here and I could imagine a version of this, really this children’s theater troupe trying to do this thing feels like a good story space.

**Craig:** I mean, it does feel funny. It just feels instantly funny to me. I would be down.

**John:** Great. So let’s review our four How Would This Be a Movies, or series, which of these are you most excited to see?

**Craig:** Jinn.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Most excited to see the Jinn movie. But I would also be down for a nice murder movie in the Outback.

**John:** Yeah. So I think the most literal adaptation that I could see actually happening is Knives Outback. I think the Jinn movie, it may not be one movie. I think we’re going to see some action in that space and I think in the next couple years we’ll see some movies that are dealing with this. But it doesn’t have to be one, because there’s not one story to adapt. It’s like something set in this space.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Cool. Great. All right, let’s move on to our last thing we wanted to talk about which is managing money. So this is all jumping off from a Liz Alper Twitter thread. So Liz has been on the show several times, talked about Pay Up Hollywood. She asked on Twitter sort of what piece of financial advice would you give to somebody who has just got their first payday. And I saw you had jumped in on this thread as well with some advice.

So let’s just quickly review some of the things, you know, we’ve had sort of five-figure advice and six-figure advice before. But what kinds of things do writers need to be thinking about when they start getting paid.

**Craig:** Great. We’ll just go through these and I guess we’ll see if we agree. So first one is once you get staffed in TV look at setting up your loan out. We talked about loan out companies before. This is usually an S-Corp. This used to be something recommended setting up at an executive story editor or co-producer level, but 45* – oh, does that mean Donald Asshole Trump? Donald Asshole tax laws now mean you’re paying taxes on money you never got like the fees that you pay to your agents. That’s, you know, basically if your accountant agrees then this is what you should be doing.

**John:** Absolutely. So we have a related question here. Brian asks, “I just got paid for this thing at Blumhouse. Couldn’t I do an LLC rather than an S-Corp, because an LLC is cheaper for me to set up?” And the answer Brian is just no. And as I sort of said at the head of the show it’s like there’s a reason why it’s an S-Corp and it’s because it’s an S-Corp. It has to do with what can pass through and what can’t pass through on an S-Corp. Structurally you need an S-Corp and it actually costs some money and it’s kind of a hassle. I had to set up both an LLC and an S-Corp because the S-Corp is for my writing income, the podcast and Writer Emergency Pack and all the software I do is the LLC because they just work–

**Craig:** Where all my money goes.

**John:** That’s where I steal all of Craig’s money. All of that has to go through an LLC because an S-Corp can’t have things like inventory. So there’s reasons why structurally it needs to be an S-Corp rather than an LLC.

**Craig:** Basically Brian the answer to the question is because the accountant said so. You know, at some point you’ve got to just trust your doctor, your accountant, etc. And they’re like, no.

**John:** Don’t do your own research. Don’t start taking horse de-wormer.

**Craig:** Don’t go to Google University.

**John:** Liz then says after you get your S-Corp get a payroll company. They will pay you as an employee and set aside the taxes you have to pay out of your quarterly end of year. And this is true, because you actually have to set aside some quarterly stuff because that’s how it works.

**Craig:** Correct. Even if you wanted to just make regular installments, estimated payments, you still are advised to get a payroll company because it essentially legitimizes your company as a company. If you aren’t doing it that way then you are opening yourself up to some unpleasant examination from our friends at the IRS.

**John:** Yeah. So the biggest advice here is save. Put money away for a rainy day, a rainy year, because we are a feast or famine business. Because you cannot necessarily predict when your next paycheck is going to come. And so unlike other folks who are being paid weekly or regularly we just get these chunks and they will disappear at some point. So she’s saying a high yield savings account. Craig, you had some different advice there.

**Craig:** Yeah. So my set advice for anyone as they start earning money at any age, doesn’t matter how old you are, 16 or 50, is that your first move should be investing. If you have money to save save it in what we call a qualified retirement plan. That’s any kind of plan like an IRA, SEP IRA, ROTH IRA, 401(k), any of those things that are for retirement. The nice thing about those is they force you save them. Meaning you could withdraw them but there would be terrible penalties. You save them and you get them back when you hit retirement age, which I think is 65. And while it’s sitting there you don’t pay tax on it. So if you put $2,000 into a qualified retirement plan you get to remove that from the income you’re paying taxes on that year. And it sits there and grows and grows and grows and grows and grows. And then eventually you get it back.

Now, when you take it out you pay taxes, but that’s OK because it’s grown without having to pay taxes in the first place. So the difference between putting in $2,000 or $1,000 in 1950 and then where it would be in 1990, think about that. That’s basically what I’m talking about. So it’s the best possible investment you can make. You can’t do better as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** Yeah. So if you are a writer, you’ll be in the Writers Guild, you’ll have a pension. That pension is not enough. That’s not how you’re really going to make it past retirement age. It’s really you putting aside money yourself is what’s going to get you there. And so you have to be thinking about that.

Just anticipating a natural follow up question, hey John and Craig, at what dollar figure do you need to get an S-Corp or should you just be paid individually? I don’t know. It changes every year. But that’s why you talk to other writers who are sort of just now doing it, but also your accountant or your lawyer, because they’re used to all of this and they will know how to handle it because essentially it’s not just the money it takes to set it up. There is some money every year you’re spending to do this. And so ask them because it does change. It’s going to be more than $100,000.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’ll be some income over $100,000. But because the laws change constantly the advantages change constantly. They’ll let you know. And, yeah, there’s an investment – by the way, the investment that you make to create your S-Corp, which is a few thousand bucks or whatever it is, also tax deductible. Isn’t that fun? There you go.

**John:** Yeah, fun how it all works out.

All right, it’s come time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is an article by Damon Krukowski. I’ll put a link in the show notes. But he’s looking at the way that streaming works on Apple and Spotify and how prone it is to gaming and manipulation. So basically if you are an artist who has a song on Spotify and it gets played X number of times you’re supposed to be making some percentage of X. And yes, sort of, but they do it based on this pro-rata number of streams rather than user-centric number of streams. So the math works out so that Craig you could set up to listen to one track 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and all of those things would count to the total number of listens that track got. Whereas if 300,000 people were listening to my track just once it wouldn’t come out the same way. So it doesn’t work basically – streaming residuals or royalties don’t work the way you kind of think they should. And it’s always good to look at what’s happening in the music industry because ultimately that’s what happens in film and television.

So just a really good look at sort of how streaming works right now and how it probably could and should change.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s incredibly complicated stuff. It’s always safe to assume when you’re talking about the music industry, the recording industry, that artists are getting screwed. Just start there. Basic given. It’s almost axiomatic. And streaming and every other method of doing this stuff will continue to screw recording artists in part because they are not employees and et voila no union. And this is where the union matters. This ties in perfectly to our discussion of IATSE and the AMPTP. So instead of having to deal with a very powerful union representing every major songwriter and a desire by union to have a tide rising and lifting all boats, they have to deal with four billion individuals who have no power separately. So this is going to continue this way.

**John:** Yeah. Interestingly though you look at both Apple and Spotify, their business model is based on sort of revealing the number of times each thing was streamed. And so that’s so different than how our streaming television is working right now, because we don’t have any insight into how many times a show on HBO Max or Netflix is currently being seen. So, similar, but not quite the same. And a big focus of discussion as we figure out the future of streaming.

**Craig:** Well that’s Netflix for you. I mean, they basically just looked at the whatever it was 70-year or 80-year tradition of TV ratings and went, nope.

**John:** Not going to do that.

**Craig:** We’re actually not going to tell you who watched it. We’re just going to make announcements. By the way, I don’t know if you noticed this, but every new Netflix show that comes out is the most watched Netflix program of all time.

**John:** Well, Craig, I think you should know that on Monday the most watched Netflix program is going to be Attack of the Hollywood Clichés.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Starring John August.

**John:** Starting at 7am. And you can see me there. And I will get paid nothing more for all your views, but that’s fine. I didn’t write it. I’m just a talking head.

**Craig:** You’re just a talking head. My One Cool Thing, so we have been talking about our crews, and of course as you are working on a show you get to know folks on your crew. We actually have a couple of overlapping teams because we have so many episodes. We have a couple of different AD teams, so the assistant directors work with our directors. But then they need breaks to prep for upcoming, so we sort of have a back and forth overlap system. And so I was getting to know our new second AD, named Ashley Bell, and she told me about her best friend Lucy Guest.

Now Lucy, Ashley said if you were driving you might crash into a pole. So I’d like you to pull over. Lucy is a super fan, John.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** She is a director. She is a writer. She is also an actor. And she participates in what I understand is a pretty sizable group of women in film and television that operates I believe out of Vancouver. And I guess a lot of them do listen to the show. And Ashley told me that Lucy – I love this – Lucy calls me her second dad.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Now, you know what? That doesn’t make me feel old at all. I actually love – I think because I was born a dad. I think by the time I was four I was basically a dad even though I didn’t have a kid. Worrying about people falling off their–

**John:** Yeah, so she’s never met you, but you’re sort of like that dad who has been in prison and you get the phone call.

**Craig:** I am. I’m her prison dad. Exactly. Yes, every now and then I call her on her birthday and, yeah, that’s about it. So, Lucy, thank you for listening. And I’m glad that I’m your second dad. And you can be my second daughter, because I already have the one. And I love that you and your compatriots are listening to our show and keep on listening. I’ve mentioned on the show many times if you listen, and you do, you know. I forget all the time that anyone listens to this. So, it’s always nice to hear that people are listening. So thank you Lucy to you and all of your friends up there. And thank you to Ashley as well for letting me know.

**John:** Hooray. And that’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** Our outro this week is delightful and it’s by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter Craig is sometimes there @clmazin, but I’m always there @johnaugust.

**Craig:** I’m in and out like a Jinn. Like a Jinn.

**John:** Appears and disappears. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. They’re also really comfortable.

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 autumn stuff. So, join us for that. Craig, thank you for a fun episode.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Hello and welcome our Scriptnotes premium members. You are here because we want to talk about fall. We want to talk about autumn. We want to talk about the autumn season and sort of the commodification, the commercialization, the celebration of fall that has become I think just a much bigger thing over the last five or ten years. Craig, you feel this, too, right?

**Craig:** Without question. It was just a season and now look at what happened?

**John:** And so we’re going to bring on our producer, Megana Rao, for this part because apparently she loves fall. Is that true? Is that accurate?

**Craig:** Of course she does.

**Megana:** Yes, I am a Fall Head.

**Craig:** A Fall Head. Now they have names.

**John:** So I remember autumn being like OK you’re back to school. And then eventually there’s Halloween, and Halloween happens like the 30th and the 31st. That’s Halloween. And now Halloween starts like September 1. The spooky season. I hear people describing spooky season like it’s the Super Bowl and we’re not allowed to say the word Super Bowl, so we just say the Big Game.

**Craig:** That’s crazy. Spooky season?

**John:** Spooky season. I’ve heard it so much. Spooky season and parasocial have become the new words added to my vocabulary.

**Craig:** Parasocial. That was the one I just heard today. Megana, what is parasocial? Because I was saying it a lot but I realize now I have no idea what I’m saying.

**Megana:** You guys both defined it two episodes. It’s when you have a relationship with someone who is like a public figure but they don’t know who you are.

**Craig:** I see. That’s parasocial – so Lucy Guest has a parasocial relationship with me.

**John:** Yes, she does.

**Megana:** Totally.

**Craig:** Great.

**Megana:** You’re her parasocial dad.

**Craig:** I’m her parasocial dad. Aw, OK.

**Megana:** But we can talk about autumn because I love spooky season. I would argue it starts mid-August.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** You realize you’re a victim of a CVS marketing plan, right? Like somebody back there was like we’ve got to call it spooky season to sell more of these pumpkin buckets.

**John:** Megana, I want to hear about what you like about it and what is it about the change into this autumn season that is good for you. What do you dig?

**Megana:** I love Halloween so much. It is my favorite holiday. It’s my favorite time of year. And so the lead up to Halloween is very exciting for me. I already have some decorations on my desk in John’s office. Yes, I’m trying to hold myself back as much as I can because John’s husband, Mike, is not a Halloween fan. But I have just cobwebs and cauldrons and pumpkins.

**Craig:** Do it.

**Megana:** Waiting at my apartment, and just like overflowing because I can’t decorate my desk yet.

**John:** So there’s two somewhat conflicting things that happen in fall though. Because there’s Halloween and spooky season, but there’s also pumpkin spice latte season. There’s a pumpkin bridge – a pumpkin spice latte really kind of goes through to Christmas.

**Megana:** Totally.

**John:** That’s really part of the holiday season. So there’s conflicting things here.

**Craig:** By the way, it’s not pumpkin spice, it’s spice that’s put into a pumpkin pie. Pumpkin has no spice. Pumpkin is the least spicy thing in the world. It’s a mush. It’s a squash. It is a flavorless squash. What we’re really saying is cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg. That’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg. And that’s–

**John:** Honestly, it’s eggnog season but eggnog is considered gross. You probably don’t like eggnog, do you?

**Craig:** Christmas is eggnog season.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** And I have a weird relationship with eggnog.

**John:** Well, I think it falls into your mayonnaise category doesn’t it really? Because it is eggs and cream.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, but it’s not an emulsion. It’s not eggs and oil. And also I think the eggnog that you get in a store, there’s no egg in it. I think they’ve gotten rid of the egg.

**John:** There is egg. True eggnog has egg in it.

**Craig:** Yeah, true eggnog. I’m talking about the stuff at Ralph’s.

**John:** The stuff you get in the carton actually has eggs in it.

**Craig:** It does?

**John:** Pasteurized, yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, OK. Well it’s not whipped into a freaking goo and it’s sweet. And it’s got a nutmeg kind of similar – it’s good for three sips and then I want to barf. But you know what? We’ll talk about that in winter. This is autumn.

**Megana:** Right. Let’s get back to fall.

**Craig:** Let’s get back to fall and the Fall Heads.

**Megana:** So I have my birthday in the fall. I’m a little Scorpio baby. And I also want to talk about Thanksgiving. And the night before–

**Craig:** Sorry, got to roll back to Scorpio baby. Because you said that like it meant something.

**John:** Yup.

**Megana:** It obviously does.

**Craig:** OK, so this is the whole millennial zodiac crap, right? Like that’s what’s happening here? Is that happening?

**Megana:** I mean, I can’t help it. I live in LA. I got my hair cut recently and the woman was like when were you born. And I was like what? And she was like you’re just very open to getting your hair cut so I need to know what sign you are. And I was like oh I’m a Scorpio.

**Craig:** You’re open to getting your hair cut? You went to a hair – the big sign is you’re there. Like I feel like if you walk into a place that cuts hair that’s a huge green light for cutting your hair.

**Megana:** She was like you’re really fearless with your hair. And I was like I am. And that is a classic Scorpio trait.

**Craig:** Classic Scorpio. Because scorpions have beautiful hair. Oh my god. Oh my god.

**John:** But let’s get back to fall. Let’s get back to autumn. And is it a change of wardrobe for you? What else is happening here? Because a thing I do appreciate about this time of year is that it gets dark much earlier and I kind of don’t like that, but I like sometimes being home and it being really dark out. Being dark for dinner is kind of exciting. What are the changes you like about fall?

**Megana:** Oh, I like the food. I love a stew. It’s not funny. Who doesn’t love a nice hearty stew? Like a lamb stew?

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s so great. I was just thinking about Jennifer Coolidge in Best in Show. “We both like soup.”

**John:** Now I want to back you up on the stew quality, because I do remember it was around September/October that the Crockpot would come out and my mom would make a big–

**Megana:** Ooh, chili.

**John:** Yeah, that too.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So these are foods that you would not eat in the summer because they’re just too damn hot to eat a stew or chili.

**Megana:** In LA? No way. No way. Yeah, you’ve got to wait until the fall.

**Craig:** Do you like to sit on a couch and put a blanket around yourself and have a warm mug of something that you put both of your hands on while you sip it carefully?

**Megana:** Mm-hmm. And I pull my sweater sleeves closer around my–

**Craig:** There we go. Yup. I want to do another podcast. Here’s my idea for a podcast.

**John:** Pitch it.

**Craig:** Megana and I just talk about stuff and we just generation X/millennial. It’s just X-v-Millennial. And we just do it. We just go through it.

**Megana:** Are you telling me you don’t like sitting on a nice cozy couch with your family around and a hot, warm cup of hot chocolate or tea or coffee, just feeling all snug in your sweater? Millennials just have it figured out and we’re not afraid to admit that we understand what the nicer parts of life are.

**Craig:** Counterpoint. It sounds hot and itchy. And because I’m generation X my children are almost adults and so they don’t want to be in a room with me. And thirdly I think you’ve just been suckered by advertising. I think–

**John:** I come back to that, too. I really wonder, what you’re doing is sort of manifest Meg Ryan.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s a Meg Ryan thing you’re trying to do. Or it’s a Nancy Meyers sort of life that you’re trying to create. And I guess it’s fine, but you didn’t invent it.

**Craig:** No, they’re trying to become the stock photo Starbucks ad.

**Megana:** I totally understand where you guys are coming from with that criticism, but let me ask you a question. Have you ever worn a cable knit sweater?

**John:** Like Chris Evans in Knives Out sweater?

**Megana:** Exactly. Like a fisherman’s sweater. And cozied up on the couch.

**Craig:** I wish Bo were here.

**Megana:** To watch a scary movie on TV.

**Craig:** I wish Bo were here so she could look at you with horror at the suggestion that I would be wearing any kind of itchy cable knit, wool, hair shirt. Just heating me up.

**Megana:** But Bo and I have recreated this Nancy Meyers image several times and it has been lovely and enjoyable every single time.

**Craig:** Absolutely. This is why I think Megana and I need to have a show together.

**John:** I definitely don’t want to yuck your yum on that. And I do get that cozy sort of like – there’s also a Scandinavian quality to – what’s it called, hygge, where you snuggle up and it’s cozy and it’s warm?

**Megana:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ugh. Geez.

**John:** I get that.

**Megana:** I also just like being scared. I get scared very easily. And I kind of enjoy it.

**John:** So Craig a thing you don’t know about Megana is she’s not lying – she’s the most easily startled person I’ve ever met. And so I’ll walk in, I went into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee, and I’ll walk back in the door and she’ll be like, “Ah!” She’ll jump.

**Megana:** I literally jump out of my seat and sometimes I see him when he comes out of the house and I still jump. I can’t help it.

**Craig:** Well, OK, to be fair in Megana’s defense she might not be particularly easily spooked, it’s just that John you do look like a ghost. [laughs] You do. You have a ghost look about you.

**Megana:** No, I mean I do it when anyone comes in. Like Mike startles me. Nima. Everybody.

**Craig:** All three people you just mentioned look vaguely ghostlike to me. They could be ghosts. They could be spirits. You know, I feel like here’s the problem. If a Jew just sort of ambles in you won’t get scared. If I just sort of shuffle on in you’ll be like, oh, there he is. You won’t be scared.

**John:** Here’s the dichotomy that I think is so fascinating, is that you both want to be snuggly/cozy, and be terrified in the season. And I think that’s a real interesting tension between the two of those. I think that’s worth talking about with a therapist.

**Craig:** Therapist?

**John:** Or Craig. Because you guys are going to have your spinoff podcast.

**Craig:** You can’t pathologize my podcast partner.

**John:** No, so I think your future podcast will be great and I really look forward to you guys scheduling it somehow and finding a time for Craig to be able to record this.

**Craig:** What’s going to be weird is when we’re doing it three times a week and then I’m like, oh, sorry, can’t make Scriptnotes this week. I’m shooting, but I did definitely – we did our third episode this week on which version of teal is the most millennial.

**John:** Thank you both very much and I’ll talk to you next week.

**Craig:** See you next week guys.

**Megana:** OK, bye guys.

Links:

* Happy [Tudum Day](https://about.netflix.com/en/news/netflix-invites-you-to-tudum-global-fan-event)!
* Watch John in [Attack of the Hollywood Cliches](https://www.netflix.com/title/81440982)
* [Episode 513: Writing for Stars with Kelly Marcel](https://johnaugust.com/2021/513-writing-for-stars)
* [IATSE Calls Strike Authorization Vote, as AMPTP Balks at Latest Contract Offer](https://variety.com/2021/film/news/iatse-strike-authorization-vote-1235069694/?fbclid=IwAR05HMNyEtBIlP9hi2JFoQIS1Z1XbBfwiO-lLohXHm7NaGFSzkkJJGtB4Xc)
* [Knives Outback: A man is presumed murdered. In this town of 12, everyone is a possible suspect.](https://medium.com/truly-adventurous/knives-outback-6b872b79f3f6) by Mitch Moxley
* [I was a Hamptons Squatter: How I Lived in Luxury for Free](https://nypost.com/2021/08/16/i-was-a-hamptons-squatter-how-i-lived-in-luxury-for-free/)
* [Jerusalem supernatural: Meet the Palestinian Man Hunting Ghouls, Ghosts and Jinn](https://www.middleeasteye.net/discover/palestine-jinn-ghoul-ghost-islam-legend-heritage) by Layla Azmi Goushey
* [A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Girl_Walks_Home_Alone_at_Night) by Ana Lily Amirpour
* [Under the Shadow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Shadow) by Babak Anvari
* [The Tin Man and the Lion](https://brianferrarinyc.com/2021/09/15/the-tin-man-and-the-lion-unanswered-prayers/) by Brian Ferrari
* [Liz Alper Twitter Thread on First Paychecks](https://twitter.com/LizAlps/status/1431298374146297860?s=20)
* [Tears in Rain: Do Androids Stream Electric Sleep?](https://dadadrummer.substack.com/p/tears-in-rain) by Damon Krukowski
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* Share your parasocial dads with [a Scriptnotes Subscription Gift](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium membership!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Eric Pearson ([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/518standard.mp3).