Scriptnotes Transcript

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

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

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

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

Craig, this is a clip show.

**Craig:** Ah.

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** No.

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

**Craig:** Great.

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

[Post Clips]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And then it’s all downhill.

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

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

**Craig:** Yay.

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

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

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

**John:** Very much.

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

**John:** Oh, so good.

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** That’s what it is.

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

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

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** It is edited, as always, by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by William Brink. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions I am on Twitter @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for the weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau, including the new 10th anniversary shirt.

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

Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I’m so relaxed.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

**John:** That’s a good point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Really?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** No.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Donuts.

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

**John:** Donuts are delicious.

**Craig:** Five is a lot.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** We’ve done it again.

**John:** Thank you, sir.

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

**John:** Bye.

Links:

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

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Who peels peaches?

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

**Craig:** Really? Megana?

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

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

**John:** It’s extra fiber.

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

**John:** Oh what is that?

**Craig:** A drupe.

**John:** Droop?

**Craig:** Drupe. Drupe.

**John:** Ah. Drupe.

**Craig:** A drupe.

**John:** Great.

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

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

**Craig:** Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Can we make designs?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah. Wow.

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

**Craig:** Love it.

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

Craig, you remember this moment?

**Craig:** Of course.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Amazing. Love it.

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

**Craig:** Correct.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yes, I remember.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Maybe? Maybe.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Oh.

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Correct.

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Great.

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** Thank you.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Segue Man.

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

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

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

**Craig:** I don’t think we have.

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

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

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

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

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

Also, the difference between camp and cheesy.

**Craig:** Oh sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Ah, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Levels over levels.

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

**John:** Oh Kevin. Kevin.

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

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

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

**Megana:** It’s writing partner.

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

**John:** My wife. Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** It’s wrong and–

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Uh-uh.

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

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

**Craig:** You have to.

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

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

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

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

**John:** Mm-hmm.

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

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

**Craig:** In Oprah we trust.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

**John:** Chun-chun.

**Craig:** Tunk-tunk.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

**John:** What have you got?

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

**John:** Oh you do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Cool. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Caden Brown. If you have outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter I am @johnaugust.

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

We have t-shirts and they’re great. Go to Cotton Bureau. You’ll find them, including the new 10th Anniversary t-shirt.

You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Black Widow. Craig, it’s nice to have you back.

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

[Bonus segment]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** They might have.

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

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

**Craig:** A lot.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** 100%.

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

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

**John:** Like a Scarlett Johansson.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* [Kerri Strug Shouldn’t Have Been Forced to Do That Vault](https://slate.com/culture/2021/07/kerri-strug-simone-biles-vault-atlanta-legacy-injuries.html)
* Amanda Knox’s [twitter thread](https://twitter.com/amandaknox/status/1420871392266911746?s=21) and [Medium article](https://amandamarieknox.medium.com/who-owns-my-name-93561f83e502)
* [Mandatory Vaccinations On Productions An Option Under Return-To-Work Protocols](https://deadline.com/2021/07/mandatory-covid-19-vaccinations-now-an-option-on-film-tv-productions-1234796313/)
* [Disney to Mandate COVID-19 Vaccinations for All U.S. Staffers](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/disney-requiring-all-employees-be-vaccinated-1234990995/)
* [Netflix To Require Covid Vaccinations For Actors & Other “Zone A” Personnel On Its U.S. Productions](https://deadline.com/2021/07/netflix-to-require-covid-vaccinations-for-all-actors-on-us-productions-1234801577/)
* [Little Island](https://littleisland.org/visit-us/) by [Barry Diller](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/arts/little-island-barry-diller.html)
* [Scarlett Johansson’s ‘Black Widow’ Lawsuit Is Game-Changing, But May Be Legally Weak](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/scarlett-johanssons-black-widow-lawsuit-1234990644/) by Eriq Gardner
* [Scarlett Johansson Sues Disney Over ‘Black Widow’ Streaming Release](https://www.wsj.com/articles/scarlett-johansson-sues-disney-over-black-widow-streaming-release-11627579278?mod=e2tw) on WSJ
* [Escape Ops on Calgary](https://escapeops.ca/)
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You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/511standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/378-the-worst-of-the-worst).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode originally aired in December 2018. In it Craig and I talk about the Worst of the Worst, which we define as that need to make things not just a little uncomfortable for your heroes, but downright awful. We talk about stakes, consequences, and transformation. Mostly, this feels like a feature idea rather than a TV idea, but with the rise of short series I think you’re going to see more and more of these decisions happening on the small screen as well.

Craig and I were not prescient. We’re just feature guys in an industry that was quickly moving towards streaming. So, enjoy this episode. If you’re a premium member stick around after the credits where I’ll be talking with producer Megana Rao about what she’s been learning listening through all the back archives and what she’s seeing out there in the real world as she’s trying to be a writer getting staffed.

Enjoy.

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 378 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re going to dash hopes, ruin friendships, and destroy things we love most.

**Craig:** Oh, thank god.

**John:** As we talk about why bad things need to happen to characters we love. Plus, we’ll be answering questions about WGA signatories and old TV scripts.

**Craig:** Well that sounds fun.

**John:** Yeah, Craig, it’s nice to have you back.

**Craig:** It’s good to be back. I’m so sorry I missed – since I’ve been working and traveling, you’re working and traveling, and then I had some needle shoved into my spine last week.

**John:** Oh, no, not good. Don’t do that.

**Craig:** It wasn’t an accident. It was on purpose. There was a medical professional doing it.

**John:** All the kids are doing it.

**Craig:** All the kids are doing it.

**John:** Yeah, just inject – first it was Juuls, and then they’re injecting things into their spines.

**Craig:** Exactly. So that was why. Initially it was supposed to happen first thing in the morning and our podcast interview with Phil and Matt was going to be in the afternoon, and then they had an adjustment. So when I got out of that thing I was about two hours away from doing the podcast and just feeling really weird and oogie. So, yeah, but I’m back. I’m back.

**John:** He’s back. He’s no longer oogie. He’s full of boogie. And you can see Craig in person on December 12th which is tomorrow as this episode comes out. We are doing our live show in Hollywood. Our guests are fantastic. Zoanne Clack of Grey’s Anatomy, Pamela Ribon of Ralph Breaks the Internet. Cherry Chevapravatdumrong of Family Guy and The Orville, plus Phil Lord and Chris Miller of Lego Movie and the new Spider Man: Into the Spider-Verse. So we are hyping this show, but for all I know we’re sold out and it’s just–

**Craig:** We should be based on that list of people. By the way, Zoanne Clack I think is a medical doctor.

**John:** She’s a medical doctor. So if Craig has an emergency, she’s the person.

**Craig:** We’ll be talking about my spine on that show. But this is an amazing lineup of people. Totally – everybody from different places – well, we do have three representatives of animation come to think of it. All right. All right. Lord and Miller, I mean, boom, Pam Ribon has got this huge movie out. Everybody is famous. And you know what? Why would anyone not want to go to this show? Plus, me and you.

**John:** Well that’s us. I mean, that’s the other celebrities in this whole thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Sometimes we like try to land a big name and then it’s like, you know what, let us be the big names sometimes.

**Craig:** We’re the big name.

**John:** Zoanne Clack, yes, she’s a medical doctor, but what I really want to talk to her about on the show is how she’s transitioned from being a doctor to writing a show about doctors. Because we get so many questions from listeners about like “I am a police detective, but I want to write detective stories.” And that’s an interesting, fascinating transition. She has done it, so she will be able to tell us what that life is like.

**Craig:** Maybe she can also chat a little bit about our episode where we went through all the mistakes that, like the fake medicine on TV. I wonder if she’s ever – well, you know what, let’s save the Zoanne questions for when we’re with Zoanne.

**John:** Absolutely. We also have another live show to announce. I’m very excited to announce that we are doing a screening of Princess Bride and an episode afterwards in which we’ll be talking about the movie we just saw. So, William Goldman passed away this past month. We are going to be doing a series of screenings for the WGA. This is going to be at the WGA Theater on January 27th. So, Craig and I will watch the movie then discuss the movie afterwards with the audience. And so this is I think going to be open up to everyone. So once there are tickets there will be a link in the show notes for that. I’m very excited to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Me too. It’s one of my favorite movies and William Goldman was a giant. So it’ll be nice. It’ll be nice to do that in his memory.

**John:** Absolutely. And so this will be kind of a trial run also because I’d like to do more of these on the whole. So if this goes well there’s some movies down the road I want to do a deep dive on. We’ll screen them and then do a deep dive. So we’ll let this be a test run.

**Craig:** Brilliant.

**John:** Brilliant. We have some follow up. First is from Partis about the Start Button. Craig, do you want to take this?

**Craig:** Sure. OK, so Pardis writes, “The problem with the system you outlined on the podcast where the WGA can be the bad guy if you ask them to, calling the studio on your behalf to enforce the terms of your writing agreement is that the studio knows the WGA is only calling because you, the writer, have asked them to. And since writers are more dispensable than directors, yes, you can get labeled as a diva or as a problem child or as more trouble than you’re worth and lose out on future writing assignments as a result. So, what’s the solution?”

Pardis says, “A system whereby the WGA is alerted to commencement on a feature automatically. And a system whereby the WGA checks on progress for all feature products automatically without asking the writer first. That way the studio can’t blame any specific writer for asking the guild to be the bad guy. There’s just automatic oversight across the board. But, how can we put this system into place if the guild isn’t already alerted to commencement automatically?

“Option number 1: Negotiate a meaningful financial penalty into the next contract for studios that fail to file their paperwork for new project with an X number of days of the agreement being signed. That money can go toward covering the guild’s increased oversight and enforcement costs.

“Option number 2: Create a small financial penalty for writers who fail to alert the WGA that they’ve started work on a new project. Option 2, because then the studio can’t get mad at writers for alerting the WGA about new projects because writers have no choice but to inform the WGA directly less the writers be penalized themselves.”

**John:** All right, so let’s take a look at Pardis’ suggestions here and sort of how Pardis is laying out the situation. So, I think what Pardis is suggesting overall have some merit to it. You want the WGA to be the bad guy. You want the WGA to step up and do this work on behalf of writers. And if it feels like the WGA is only calling the studio or only getting involved because the writer complained I can understand that hesitation.

That said, the goal is for this to feel like it is just automatic. It’s like changing the way we’re just doing this on a regular basis. And so that even without a financial penalty for failing to hit the Start Button and report a new project, that it will become a matter of course for writers to do this. And the WGA has increased already the number of enforcement people there are to do that work. And so they are going to be checking up on people anyway. And so regardless of hitting the Start Button or not hitting the Start Button, there’s a lot more outreach to say like, hey, what are you working on, how is this going, and are you being paid on time? Is anything going on? And that is one of the overall goals and functions of the WGA is to make sure that our members are being paid and are treated appropriately.

**Craig:** These ideas, all ideas really, have been discussed ad nauseam since I have been involved in WGA stuff, which is, you know, over 14 years ago or something. But I would say that Pardis you’re not the first person to suggest that we should maybe start penalizing writers. But good luck. It’s not a great idea, honestly, to essentially crack down on writers to solve the problem that is created by studios. We already have enough problems. You’re dealing with writers that are already being abused and now they have to send money to the guild because they’ve been abused? It’s not great.

Can you get a meaningful financial penalty for studios that fail to file their paperwork? No. Probably not. And again when things start is kind of fuzzy. So, the Start Button actually is the best idea I’ve seen to date. And I think it will bear fruit. So I would say, Pardis, patience.

**John:** Related aspect here is that when you are hitting a Start Button or even now if you’re not hitting the Start Button, you are supposed to upload your contracts. And so I have been uploading my contracts. Everyone is supposed to upload their contracts that show all the steps of your deal. When the WGA has this information they can be checking on it independently so they don’t need to necessarily wait for you to say that there’s a problem. They can say like, hey, according to what we have this is what’s happening on this project – is this accurate? And you need to answer that honestly. And so that is a way in which the WGA can become involved, even if you are not reaching out to them to say help me here.

**Craig:** Yeah. Hopefully this works the way we would want it to in an ideal situation where the guild is helping you without feeling like they’re bonking you on the head. And in getting in your work process. So, let’s see how it goes.

**John:** Second bit of follow up, a previous One Cool Thing was the show Please Like Me. And last night I was out and randomly bumped into Josh Thomas the creator and star of Please Like Me. And so I want to talk a little bit about sort of what to do when you meet somebody who you’ve only seen their work in person. Because it can be sometimes kind of awkward. So what I did is I said, “Oh hey, you don’t know me, but I thought your show was fantastic and you do great work.” I asked him if he moved to Los Angeles fulltime and is writing here and he is. And then I left him be and let him sort of go on and be about his night.

So maybe we’ll get him on the show at some point and he can talk about what he’s doing here. But as a person who gets approached like Josh Thomas gets approached in that situation I want to talk about sort of best practices when you’re going up to talk to someone whose work you admire, but it’s in a social situation. Because, Craig, you must encounter this, too.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, it’s not on a daily basis by any stretch of the imagination, but it does happen. And mostly people seem to do it well. You know, I haven’t had any weird encounters. Any actor that’s on television has astronomically more of these encounters than you or I. And my guess is just that numbers wise they’re going to run into some odd ducks, probably at least once a day.

**John:** Yeah. So I would just say I would encourage – if there’s a person who is doing great work and you want to say like, oh, I really like the thing you’re doing. It’s good to say that, because sometimes it’s just good to hear that you’re making stuff that the world appreciates. But I would say if you’re going to make that approach plan for an out that’s going to get you out of that conversation within 30 seconds to a minute, because they were going about their life before you interrupted them. And so you want to be able to say what you need to say and then like let them go off and do their thing. If they want to keep engaged, they can engage. But make sure you’re giving them the release to get out of the conversation.

**Craig:** And take a look at their face before you walk up to them, because listen, everybody is a person. Everybody is going through stuff. Sometimes we’re in a nice happy mood, sometimes we’re in a neutral state of mind. Sometimes we’re concerned, we’re running late, we’re sad, we’re nervous. And then we don’t want anyone talking to us. Anyone, by the way. Much less people that we don’t know. So, just take a look. I know it’s hard because – and again, this isn’t something that I think anyone has towards somebody like me – but when people see a movie star in their minds they think you know what it doesn’t matter how they’re feeling and it doesn’t matter what’s going on. This is my moment to shake Tom Cruise’s hand and I’m doing it. Because the rest of my life I shook Tom Cruise’s hand, right? I had that moment. And he’ll get over it and he will. He will. But, you know, it’s not that big – who cares? I guess that’s my whole thing is like who cares.

**John:** My ground zero for getting recognized, well of course Austin Film Festival I get recognized a lot there, which is – I sort of go there knowing that’s going to happen. The lobby of the ArcLight I get spotted a lot. And sometimes at the Grove. And there was one time I was walking through the lobby of the ArcLight and this guy goes, “Wait, you’re that writer guy. You’re good.” I’m like, OK. I guess I’m good. Thank you, random stranger. That’s nice.

**Craig:** You’re that writer guy. Well, that’s pretty much right. This is one of the nice things about living in La Cañada is that nobody cares. Nobody cares. They don’t care.

**John:** Let’s get to our marquee topic which is bad things and bad things happening to the characters that you love. This came up for me this morning because I was working through the third book of Arlo Finch and I was looking at my outline and just looking at how many bad things happen, which is just a tremendous number. I think partly because it is the third and final book, so if something could happen this is the last place where it could happen. But also the character has grown to a place where he can handle some things that he couldn’t otherwise handle. So, there’s a lot of serious stuff that happens in the third book.

But I want to talk about it because I think there’s this instinct to sort of protect our heroes, protect our characters, and it’s hard to sort of get us over the hump of like, no, no, no, you have to – not just allow bad things to happen but make bad things happen to your heroes in order to generate story. And this is really very much probably more a feature conversation than a television conversation because in ongoing series there will be conflict within an episode, but you won’t destroy everything in their life every week. But in features that’s a really important part.

**Craig:** It’s a huge part. And, yes, you’re right. In television you need to make sure that people come back the next week in roughly the same shape you found them. So there will be little mini ups and downs. But in movies we feel narratively like we have to see people torn apart. And this goes all the way back to the bible.

**John:** Oh, the bible.

**Craig:** The story of Job.

**John:** Tell me the story of Job.

**Craig:** I will. And I should mention I don’t believe in anything in the bible. However, the bible is evidence of something. And it is evidence I think of deep seeded instinctive narrative patterns in the human mind. They are expressions of these things that are in us. They are not always sensible or logical, but they are there. So, that’s how I’m going to take a look at the story of Job. It’s a very simple story. Job is a very pious guy. He believes in God. He’s just super godly. And God therefore rewards him with a fortune and health and, I don’t know, bountiful crops, or I don’t know, whatever God would give people. And God is hanging out one day with Satan, as he used to do, and Satan says, “You know, Job only loves you because you reward him.” And this is a general moral conundrum that has been dissected over time. You watch The Good Place, right?

**John:** Oh yeah. It’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Of course, so they refer to this as moral dessert. The idea that you behave well so that you get your reward from whatever metaphysical/supernatural deity you believe in. And God says, “No, no, no, no, no. Job loves me because he’s a good guy. And I’ll prove it. I will remove my protection from him and you go ahead and do whatever you want to him. And you’ll see. He’ll stand by me.” And so that’s what happens. God removes his protection and Satan begins to torment Job – torment him – torment his health, and ruin his crops, and scatter his children. It’s just awful. Like every bad thing you could do to somebody he does to Job. And Job just stands by God.

And in the end, you’re the winner Job, and God rerewards him and gives him even more crops and frankincense or whatever they had back then.

So, why am I bringing up the story of Job? Because there’s a moral inherent to it that I think is why we need, narratively, to torture our characters. And the idea is that our goodliness or our growth or whatever you want to call the evolution of our selves, the betterment of our selves, it doesn’t count to other people unless it is perceived to come at terrible cost.

Now, is that actually true? I don’t think so. I think it’s perfectly possible to become a better person without suffering. But when it comes to narrative it seems like we need it or we don’t believe the change.

**John:** Yeah. We didn’t see the work. We didn’t see the struggle. We didn’t see sort of the cost and it doesn’t feel like it was merited.

**Craig:** Exactly. So what we like to see is somebody that has experienced a trauma and they’re going to get over the trauma but only by facing it in the most hard and difficult way. They are going to repair a relationship with somebody by that person leaving them. They’re going to appreciate what they have because they lose it all. So, every character starts with this flaw and then we as the writers we torment them and force them to confront it through a series of increasingly difficult trials the way that Satan did to Job. And through that there is this falling apart. Break you down to lift you up. And we call this the low point.

The low point in a movie is the low point because the writer has tortured the hero to the point where they give up. They finally give up. That’s what you have to do is – you’ve lost your, whatever your ego is, and your hubris, and you give up and from that you will rise back. But those moments are so notable. And one of my favorite versions of that is the Team America puke scene which is just perfect. It’s perfect.

**John:** Let’s play a clip from the Team America puke scene.

[Clip plays]

So this scene classically is a character who has lost everything and then sort of loses more and in this case is literally vomiting up the last they have left. But let’s talk about some of those things that a character can lose and list off some of those classic things you’ll see characters losing here.

Some bad things might be to take away their home. So you might literally burn it down, or you might cast them out of society. You might take away their support system, so taking away their friends, their family, the institutions, the organizations that they’re a part of. You might have the rest of the world see them as the villain. And so you have a hero who is being perceived as the villain which is horrible. Incarcerate them. I have a note here sort of incarceration, also the weird case of Paul Manafort at this moment. So as we’re recording this, this is a guy who is going to probably be in jail for the rest of his life and he’s acting really strangely which leads me to believe that there’s something else he could lose, which is always fascinating to speculate on that. There’s something worse than being in prison for all this time and so he’s acting on behalf of that. So figuring out what that is.

You can kill a character. You can lop off a limb. You can force them to act against their own beliefs, so classically they have the daughter kidnapped and so therefore they have to do things that they can’t believe. You can sew tension and conflict between their allies. You can destroy the item they love most, so it’s like he finally gets that car he’s been hoping for his all his life and you destroy that thing.

So, those losses are bad things you’re doing to your character and they’re pretty crucial. If you don’t do some of those kinds of things over the course of your movie it’s probably not a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, what you’re doing is burning away what needs to be burned away. And it’s unpleasant. And we need it to be unpleasant. We need to see this character suffer. What is it, hamartia I think is the Greek word for suffering. And then catharsis is essentially vomiting. Which is one of the reasons why I like that scene so much because they just did it.

Humiliation is something that we see all the time. The writer creates circumstances in which the hero is humiliated. Where they lose all sense of self-worth and pride. We can kill or harm the people they love the most. We can make them feel terribly guilty and confront them with the consequences of what they’ve done. It’s good because it’s tortuous.

There’s that scene, people of our age always remember this moment in the second Superman movie from the late ‘70s/early ‘80s where Superman willingly gives up his power so that he can marry Lois Lane. And he gets beaten up by some guy in a bar. And it’s crushing. It’s crushing because you see someone brought low. I remember seeing that scene in the theater and feeling terrible inside. And it was the same feeling I had when I watched the animated The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe when all the evil Snow Queen and her minions shave the mane off of Aslan.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Take his hair away and reduce him to just this pathetic wretch. And, yeah, it’s – you need it. You need it or else when they come back you don’t feel anything.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk about the timing of when these bad things happen, because there’s a couple different moments over the course of a movie where you see these things happening classically. So, the first is the inciting incident or whatever you want to call that moment early in the story that sort of kicks this story into gear. And so, you know, in the first 10 to 15 minutes of a story where a change has happened. This is the village is raided and the hero’s parents are killed. This is a big change has happened that is starting this story with this character.

Often the end of act one. So you’ve arrived at a new place. We’re not in Kansas anymore. The hero’s house has burnt down. We’re entering a new world. There’s a big change and the hero has lost something. They may be excited about what they’re headed towards, but there is a loss. They’ve crossed into a place where they can’t get back to where they were before.

There’s a lot of times, moments in the second act that are going to be losses, where allies turn on them, where new obstacles arise. There’s a plan that fails, seeing things that were important to the character that we were hoping for for the character don’t come true. And then classically the biggest of these losses, which is probably the vomit scene from Team America, is the end of act two, sort of the worst of the worst, which is you’ve gotten to this point and you’ve lost everything. It should generally be the character’s lowest point, or at least the lowest point in this character and how they’ve evolved over the course of the story. That thing that looked like it was potentially in their reach has been taken away from them. And that’s classically the end of the second act.

**Craig:** It’s the end because there’s nothing left to lose. You, the writer, have beaten it all out of them. They have no pride left. They have no resources. Or whatever it is. You’ve removed the stuff that they were relying on. Their crutches are all gone.

It’s important to note that when you visit these bad things on your character you must do so sadistically. It’s not enough to just have some bad things happen. You have to do them in a way that is deeply ironic and miserable. Especially miserable. Because then oddly the more exquisite the torture the more we feel positively when they overcome it.

So, the example I always think about is Marlin at the beginning of Finding Nemo. He’s a happy fish and he’s there with his wife and their hundreds of little babies. And they’ve found a place to live. And then his wife is eaten and all of the babies are eaten except for one. And that is very bad. But then Pixar understood it’s not bad enough. They have to make that little one disabled. They have to give him a bad fin so that he will need even more protection. And then that’s not enough. He is the one that goes missing. And so you have to go get him. And that’s not enough. In the end you have to let him go into more danger to save a friend. And then that’s not enough. You have to feel like he died there. And in that moment where Marlin thinks that Nemo is dead, he flashes back to holding him as a little egg and if you’re human you cry. Because the torture has been so exquisite. And therefore the relief and joy is beautiful and our appreciation for how far Marlin has come as a character is real.

They earned it. Did I ever tell the story of Jose Fernandez, the pitcher?

**John:** No. Tell me.

**Craig:** So this sort of goes to what I think of as the essential ingredient of character torture is irony. It’s not enough to just sort of make bad things happen. You have to do it in a way that feels ironic, as if the world had conspired against them.

So, it’s a guy named Jose Fernandez. Like a lot of baseball players he came from Cuba. So he had to escape from Cuba and he escaped on a small boat with – it was one of these crowded boats full of refugees and at some point on the voyage the boat gets tossed and turned and someone says, “Someone has gone overboard,” and without even thinking Jose Fernandez just jumps into the ocean to save whoever that person is. And he does. He grabs them. He brings them back on board. He pulls them up. They live. And it turns out that the person he saved was his own mother. He didn’t even know it.

He arrives in the United States and he becomes a baseball player. Not just a baseball player. He is an amazing pitcher. He plays for the Marlins. He is fantastic. He is going to earn many, many hundreds of millions of dollars. So, just the kind of dream come true for somebody that had to escape Cuba on a small boat and rescue his mother from drowning.

Unfortunately, two years ago he died. He died in an accident. And if I told you that he died in a car accident you would think that’s bad. But he didn’t die in a car accident. He died in a boating accident.

**John:** Oh my.

**Craig:** And that is ironic in a terrible way. It implies that the universe was doing something. It had its thumbs on the scale so to speak. It is tortuous to think of. And when we write our terrible tortures for our characters I think it’s important for us to think of that. Because – and it’s a sad thing of course – but the worse it is and the more ironic it is the better the ending feels.

**John:** Yeah. Well let’s talk about sort of how those bad things come into the story. Because I can think of three main ways you see those bad things happening. The first is an external event. So that’s the earthquake. That’s the world war. In Finding Nemo that is the – is it a shark who eats the fish originally?

**Craig:** No, he gets grabbed by some fishermen who are looking to capture fish to sell, like for aquariums.

**John:** No, but at the very start of the movie where–

**Craig:** Oh yeah, it’s like a barracuda or something like that.

**John:** So that’s really an external threat because that – so barracuda is not the primary villain of the story. I don’t remember Finding Nemo that well. That barracuda itself never comes back.

**Craig:** Correct. It was just nature.

**John:** It’s nature actually. So some external force that you cannot actually defeat comes back. But sometimes it is the villain itself who is the character who arrives who is the one who is causing the suffering. So, every James Bond movie. Many fairy tales. Die Hard is an example. So, there’s a personified threat. A villain who is doing the thing that is causing the suffering. That is beginning the suffering.

But in some of my favorite movies it is the hero themselves that is doing the action that is causing the problem. So if you look at Inside Out or Ralph Breaks the Internet or Toy Story, it is the hero who is causing the problem. The hero who is ultimately responsible for the suffering that the characters are going through. And that’s often great writing. Because it gets back to the idea of like what is the character’s flaw and something about that character’s flaw is causing the suffering. And we see them having to address that flaw in order to stop the suffering.

**Craig:** No question. It’s very common with Pixar movies. In fact, I’m hard pressed to think of a Pixar movie where the bad stuff is majority villain driven other than Bug’s Life, where Kevin Spacey, a real life villain, portrayed a villainous grasshopper. But typically in Pixar films – and sort of I guess in The Incredibles, but yeah, mostly they bring it upon themselves because it is more interesting.

**John:** I mean, in The Incredibles movies there’s sort of an attenuated thing where it’s like it’s because of past actions, it’s a boomerang effect that sort of comes back in, but it’s not a thing we saw them do at the start of the movie. It’s not generally responsible for most of the suffering.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But movies are about consequences and if characters are allowed to freely make choices and then have to suffer the consequences of those choices, that is good and appropriate and compelling storytelling, especially for a feature which is something that is designed to happen just once.

So, a television show theoretically should be able to repeat itself ad nauseam. A feature is sort of a one-time journey for a character. And so that one-time journey is going to about big steps and big swings and big failures when they happen.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** So some takeaway on this idea of bad things happening to your characters. I would say really as you’re breaking a story you have to be thinking about what are the biggest worst things that could happen. And when I say the biggest worst things that are in the universe of your story. So, obviously you can’t stick a tornado in space. But within the context of your movie what are those and what are the character effects for it?

I think so often when we get notes about like well the stakes feel light here, sometimes the proposed solution is to make it be – it’s the end of the world. Like if we don’t do this then everyone else around us dies. I think that sometimes that’s mistaking the bigger scale for more personal consequences for the things that the characters are going through. So, making sure that it feels like a punishment very specifically tailored to this character that you’ve created.

**Craig:** Exactly. And you don’t have to – you don’t have to substitute volume of badness for quality of badness. In the beginning of John Wick the bad guys basically kill his dog. Which in and of itself would be like OK that’s bad, except it was the last gift he received from his deceased wife. That’s all it takes. I’m good.

And, you know, it doesn’t have to be this massive visitation of problems. Sometimes it’s just the cruelty of it really. Little bits of cruelty.

**John:** The Wizard of Oz, she’s trying to take Toto away at the start. That horrible woman is trying to bicycle away with Toto. That’s horrible. And that’s absolutely the right scale of problem for that movie so before the tornado comes that is what we’re experiencing. We can see it from Dorothy’s eyes like this is one of the worst things she can imagine ever happening.

**Craig:** A lot of times I do think about The Wizard of Oz when people start harping on stakes in meetings. Because I’m like what are the stakes exactly? What are the stakes?

**John:** There aren’t stakes in a classic way. It’s not like the Lollipop Guild was being horribly oppressed. It’s not like there was – she ended up changing the world but kind of by accident.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I guess the stakes were that she would get killed or something. I don’t know. But yeah, it doesn’t matter. Sometimes it’s really more about how closely we empathize with the character and the stakes are whatever is stakey to them. It’s about what makes them feel. And if you make me feel what they’re feeling, those are stakes. That counts.

**John:** Absolutely. In a previous discussion we talked about want and want versus need, which I think is a false dichotomy. But when characters express their wants they have a positive vision of the future. So they can imagine a future and in that future their life is better because they have this thing that they want. And that’s a positive vision. Fear is a negative vision of the future. And so they are afraid. They’ve seen the future and in the future their life is worse because this thing has happened or has been taken away from them.

That’s really what we’re talking about with these things we’re trying to – these horrors we’re trying to visit upon our characters is that those things that they feared or those things they didn’t even think they had to fear, those are happening to them now in this story and they have to figure out how to deal with it.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to some listener questions. First off is James in Napier, New Zealand. I assume it’s Napier, but maybe it’s pronounced a different way. It feels like one of those words where it could be Napier, or Napier.

**Craig:** I think it’s probably Napier.

**John:** Napier. James writes, “How in god’s name do you make sure a TV script is the right length? There’s a lot of flexibility in how feature film scripts can run. I know the one-minute per page rule is a rough guide when you’re writing. TV and radio are much more time-constrained so how do you make sure the script is exactly the right length to start with? And how do you keep it that way during production?”

Craig, you just went through TV.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re doing this right now. Don’t panic over here, James. It’s no big deal. Generally speaking, you know, we’ve got this rough 30-page/60-page guideline for half an hour or an hour. But the truth of the matter is it’s all guess work. The pages don’t really conform clearly to one-minute per page. Things are going to get cut. Some things are going to be expanded.

The good news is that we don’t really live in the world where the vast majority of television is constrained by rigid time formats. Everything is far more loosey-goosey now which is nice. If you’re writing for network television, different story. But with that point I would say, again, don’t panic. You can edit. And you can speed things up or slow them down editorially. So just generally, you know, get roughly in that zone and that’s what it will be.

And, you know, my experience at least with Chernobyl so far is that the scripts – at least for the first four episodes – are around 59 to 63 pages and they’re all timing out to be about an hour.

**John:** It does work that way. I was talking with Rob Thomas, the creator of Veronica Mars and iZombie and other shows and Rob hates the one-page-per-minute rule because he feels that sometimes networks try to value it too much. And so the way he writes it doesn’t really match up that well. He believes that you could probably actually do a word count that would more accurately reflect how long something really will take to fill.

I don’t know if that’s true, but I think it’s an interesting experiment. The truth though is that once you start making a show, so iZombie or Crazy Ex-Girlfriend or any of Derek’s Chicago shows, they know. Ultimately they get a sense of like, OK, our scripts need to be about this length because this is what the episodes cut out to be. And even then there will be episodes that are running long for a while and they have to find way to get two minutes out of it. And when we had the Game of Thrones creators on, Benioff and Weiss, they were talking about how in the first season their episodes were too short. They didn’t understand sort of how long stuff was going to play. And so they needed to add additional scenes to sort of fill them out because they just didn’t have a sense of how long an episode was going to be based on the script page.

**Craig:** Exactly. All right. Joe has a question. He writes, “I am a WGA member. I have an offer on the table from a reputable Middle Eastern production company looking to produce a more Western style show. The offer is about 15% less than WGA minimums. They won’t go any higher because they say lower budgets and the Arabic-speaking portion of the MENA territory,” Middle East, I don’t know, “simply doesn’t support it. I asked the WGA and they said flatly I cannot work for any company who is not a WGA signatory.

“I asked my reps and was told the WGA does not have jurisdiction here and becoming a signatory should not be what stands in the way of signing this deal. To be honest, the WGA response rubbed me the wrong way because it felt like they were using me to gain signatories when they didn’t have anything to lose and I did. A job.

“That said, I owe a lot to the WGA. I’m eking out a meager living as a writer and I recognize the WGA is part of that. But I don’t have so much work that I can just turn stuff down willy-nilly. So, does the WGA actually have jurisdiction here?”

John, what do you think?

**John:** I think there’s probably some situation in which you can be hired by a foreign company as a WGA member and they don’t have to pay you minimums. But this is probably not one of those situations. I know there’s international working rules, essentially one of the things the WGA needs to make sure never happens is that international companies sort of come in and sort of scoop up American writers to really write American things but try to pay them less than that. So I think that is why the WGA’s response is that.

But, Craig, you know more about the rules. Tell me.

**Craig:** Well, I have an understanding here, but it will be interesting. I would love to get the WGA’s official position on this. My understanding is that the WGA here is correct. The issue is that Joe is here and the WGA’s jurisdiction covers the United States. It is chartered by the Department of Labor. So, if you are a member of the WGA and you are writing something here in the United States it has to be for a WGA signatory. You cannot go lower than that. Period. The end. Assuming that there is an applicable collective bargaining agreement which obviously there is here.

So, no, you can’t do that. Listen, Sony, right, owns Columbia. We call them Sony now. Well obviously Sony is a Japanese company. So why wouldn’t Sony just start saying everybody who works for Columbia Pictures, we’re actually employing you under the Japanese branch of Sony, so you don’t have to do WGA. No. That doesn’t work that way. At all.

**John:** So I suspect that where we could get to with Joe is if this company was willing to fly you over to the Middle East and put you up there and you were doing your writing services there–

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** They could pay you less than that and that would not be a great situation for you. So not only are you giving up 15% of this money, which by the way 15% of scale is not a ton of money. I just feel like they could find that money for you. But, you are giving up your credit protections. You are giving up kind of all the stuff. Health and pension. You’re giving up much more than you sort of think to take that job. So that is why we have protections like this so that you cannot be undercut by a foreign thing.

So could this company form a WGA signatory? Yes they could. It would be great if they did.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t think the WGA, by the way, Joe is using you to get this company to sign up as a signatory. I don’t think they care about this company. I think they care about everybody else that’s in the WGA and the value of our minimums not being degraded. So, what I would say here is you can say to them, listen, this isn’t me asking you for anything. I’m not allowed to do this. And, by the way, company, if you come here to the United States you can’t get anybody in the WGA to do this. None of us will be able to do this. You’re going to have get a non-WGA writer.

So, you know, which generally speaking won’t probably be as good. So, that’s where they’re at, Joe.

**John:** All right. Kofi from Woodbridge, New Jersey writes, “My question pertains to the release of completed scripts after a television show has aired or a movie has been released to the public. Who decides whether or not the completed script will ever be released? I’d love to read the script for every episode of my favorite shows, but usually only the scripts for the pilot and episodes selected for awards are available. Movie scripts can be hit or miss, too. Why isn’t every script made available to be read for educational purposes?”

**Craig:** Well, there are certain circumstances where the writers actually have the publication rights over screenplays. If you have separated rights in feature films that means you have a Story By or Written By credit then I believe you have the right to publish your screenplay.

But, look, by and large they don’t do it because it takes time and it costs some amount of money and it takes some tiny bit of effort and they’re just not willing. It’s no one’s job. It’s a massive company and they can look around and who wants to be the person responsible for scanning and posting 4,000 screenplays. Nobody wants to do it. And there isn’t really a huge clamoring for it, which, you know, is a bit of a bummer. That said, there are plenty of kind of underground swap meets for these things online. I’ve seen them around.

So, yeah, it would be nice. But it comes down to sheer laziness and lack of interest, I think.

**John:** So, the situation is actually a lot different than it was 25 years ago when Craig and I were starting. I remember when I arrived at USC for film school they had a script library. You could go down and could check out two scripts from this library and they were literally printed bound scripts. Not even brads in them, but these special posts that sort of like are sturdier than brads. You could check them out and read them and take them back in. And it was a great experience for me to read all of these scripts from classic movies I loved but also things that had never been produced and it was a really good experience.

So, I think reading scripts is fantastic. But, now there’s the Internet and now there are PDFs of screenplays. And so while Kofi can’t find all the screenplays he wants to read, he can find a ton of them. I mean, even just in Weekend Read we have hundreds of scripts. Things that are going for awards, those are posted online and those things are easy to find. It’s harder to find the scripts for movies that are not sort of award contenders. But, you can kind of find them.

But Kofi’s more interesting point is he wants to read the episodic scripts. Those are harder to find. You tend to find pilots or just those marquee episodes of things. And it’s great to read the normal episodes. That’s one of those things where it actually is much easier to do if you are in this town. Because then you just have networks and assistants at places who can get you copies of scripts. They’re not really under lock and key. They don’t have a lot of value in and of themselves. You can’t do anything with the scripts and so no one is trying to sort of keep them from you. But what Craig said is like it’s no one’s job to publish them or post them. That’s why they don’t happen.

**Craig:** That’s why they don’t happen. Well, keep looking. And by the way, Kofi, spent a lot of time in the mall over there in Woodbridge myself, so just waving hi to you back there in the old country.

And we’ve got one more question here from Cory right here in LA who writes, “I’ve got an award-winning short film and I just hired a screenwriter to adapt it into a feature. Though I’ve come up with much of the story, he will be hitting the keys to bring the story and script together. I am a one-man production band with a small production company. I’d like to make sure that I am setting both he and I up for success.” That should be him and I. Setting both him and me. Yeah. Because, right. Anyway.

“I’d like to make sure that I’m setting both him and me up for success and possible WGA membership or eligible points toward. First, should or must I make my company a WGA signatory? Second, since I or rather my company is self-financing his writing of the screenplay do I need to adhere to WGA payment standards to allow him eligibility? Finally, if I’m the creator of the original work and I’ve come up and will be credited with Story By is there an opportunity for me to earn WGA points or is that just for the screenwriter?”

Oh, excellent list of membership questions there, John. What do you think?

**John:** Absolutely. So, I don’t have all the answers but I will tell you that you’re not the first person to encounter this and I think the WGA has done a much better job over the last ten years dealing with these kinds of situations. I think Howard Rodman deserves a lot of the credit for that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What you’re describing is probably a low budget independent film. And if you go to the WGA website there are resources there to talk you through what happens with low budget independent films. Classically these were done outside of WGA jurisdiction. But recognizing that some of the best work was happening there and this was obviously writer’s first work they set up these low budget agreements so that you can do this kind of stuff. That you don’t have to pay people the full amounts for writing services and other things but still allows for things like credit protections. It allows for other parts of what you get with a WGA package for these productions.

So, I suspect you will click through on the site, we’ll put a link in the show notes, and see what you need to do and how you sort of put the script into a place where it’s eligible for these low budget agreements. And I don’t think you will have to become a full signatory. I think there’s just ways you can sort of use an associate membership to get you started here. So, it’s good you’re doing it. It’s good you’re thinking about this now. But just read the stuff and then make the thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Definitely you want to take a look at that low budget independent film agreement. To become a full-fledged WGA signatory there are quite a few hoops to jump through. I mean, it’s not trial by fire or anything, but for instance you need to show that you have enough financial resources to be able to cover your residuals obligations. So in this case because it’s just you and this is just one independent film I think that’s the way to go. Take a look at it.

In terms of credit, the original work will be considered source material. It was written outside of the WGA so it will be based on a short film by blah-blah-blah. If you want proper WGA story credit, on the title page of the screenplay it would need to say Screenplay by Jim, Story by Jim and Corey. And that, of course, requires Jim to agree. The truth is the story in the original film is essentially akin to the story in a novel. The novelist doesn’t automatically get WGA credit for the movie of it. They have to actually do some work. So in this case what you would need to do to warrant Story by credit or Shared Story by credit is to work up a written story for the new movie that you’re talking about, either on your own or with the screenwriter that you’re hiring, and then that is now part of this chain of title of the work that’s leading up to this film that would be covered by the independent film low budget agreement.

Hopefully that makes sense.

**John:** I think it makes sense.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing feels like a Craig One Cool Thing, but it’s the story in the New York Times by Moises Velasquez-Manoff and it’s about how emergency rooms and other medical professionals are starting to examine ketamine as a suicide prevention or a suicide drug for dealing with people who show up suicidal and it seems like it is potentially a quick life-saving drug to be using for people with severe suicide ideation.

So, it’s a really nicely written up story about the potential of a drug which we only think of in sort of bad context possibly having some really good uses.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was a fascinating article. Totally my kind of thing. Ketamine is one of these drugs that’s been around for a long time and it’s kind of one of those – I think the World Health Organization has their list of essential medicines, like if you were building your doomsday locker of medicines you’d want ketamine in there. It is a sedative. It is kind of a tranquilizer sort of thing. It can be used anesthetically, you know.

And what they found, and I didn’t realize this, but in this article they are saying that very small doses of ketamine can almost stop suicidal ideation in its tracks. So you have somebody coming in who is in severe distress who was just taken by the cops off of the side of a bridge and brought to the emergency room and you give them this tiny injection of ketamine and suddenly they don’t have that anymore. They don’t want to jump.

And, now, that doesn’t last obviously, right? So then there’s work to be done after that. But what they’re pointing out is that suicidal ideation, kind of underlying depression, to reverse that pharmacologically with say serotonin reuptake inhibitors takes weeks. Maybe months. Same thing with talk therapy. But if you need to make sure that someone doesn’t hurt themselves over the two, three, four weeks, this may be a viable deal.

Now, part of the issue is that it can be used recreationally and if there’s a certain dosage you start to have hallucinations and, you know, psychoactive effects. So, that’s why I think in general people are a little, you know, but we have to kind of get over some of this stuff. You know?

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Doctors in the emergency rooms are pretty good at figuring out who is there because they’re actually suicidal and who is pretending to be because they feel like getting a ketamine dose.

**John:** You look at sort of this work, you look at work on LSD, you look at work on ecstasy, these are clearly drugs that should be studied for what they can do in a clinical setting and sort of what good can come out of them. But instead they sort of become demonized because of dangerous uses of them recreationally.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, we wouldn’t use them recreationally if they didn’t work on some level. So, yeah, obviously how much we use and all the rest. So, anyway, that was really promising. So you did that and I went the other direction. I went all the way over into computer world. So I’ve been playing Red Dead Redemption 2, of course, and I want to call out the people that worked on the environment because it’s so good. It’s the best environment experience I’ve ever had playing a videogame.

There was a moment where – it’s not just the detail of the appearance of things, which is quite extraordinary. But it’s the way it interacts sort of synergistically. Just sort of trotting along on my horse and I’m going through sort of a path with some trees on either side and the wind kind of blows and leaves rustle off the trees and kind of swirl in the air around me and then fall to the ground. And I’m like, what? This is getting good.

The wind people talked to the tree people. And then the tree people decided, you know what, some leaves come off when wind blows but not a lot of them, not all of them, and how do they come off? And what happens when they go? And it’s perfect. It’s really amazing how well they did with those little things. And you and I know because we work in movies and television how much work goes into making something look effortless.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** God only knows how many hours were spent trying to make the wind make the leaves go just right. It’s really well done. So, tip of the hat. My One Cool Thing this week the people that did the environment in Red Dead 2.

**John:** Very nice. Those leaf physicists, they did God’s work there.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Michael O’Konis. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today.

But short questions are great on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust.

You can find the links in the show notes for the things we talked about, so that’s at johnaugust.com. Just follow through to the links there. Or if you’re listening to this on most of the players swipe and you will see a list of links there.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. While you’re there, leave us a review. Those are lovely. We need to read some of those reviews aloud so we’ll try to remember to do that.

Transcripts go up within the week and so you can find transcripts for all the episodes back to the first episode. You can find the audio for all our episodes at Scriptnotes.net.

**John:** Craig, I will see you tomorrow for the live show.

**Craig:** See you tomorrow for the live show, John.

**John:** Bye.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right. And it is now time for our bonus segment. So bonus segments are just for you premium members who are paying us $4.99 a month. That $4.99 a month pays for a lot of things, including the salary of our producer Megana Rao who is now sitting across from me and smiling.

Megana Rao: Thank you, Premium members.

**John:** You picked this episode for our rebroadcast today. What made this stand out for you?

**Megana:** So this is a craft episode that I really like and I think it’s something that I personally struggle with is, you know, making things difficult for your characters because I think at the point that I am on a project that I’m working on it’s like, oh, I really like these characters and then making them go through conflict is something that I viscerally feel as I’m writing it. And so it’s something that I feel like I, like a lot of writers, need to push myself because that’s what makes good storytelling.

**John:** Yeah. So not only do you produce the show every week, but you actually go back and listen to earlier episodes. How much of the back catalog have you gotten through at this point?

**Megana:** I think I’ve gotten through a decent amount.

**John:** All right. A decent amount being 10%?

**Megana:** Oh, gosh, there’s a lot of episodes. No, I think over 30%.

**John:** OK, that’s really good. But of course there are premium members who have listened to every single episode and are like how could she possible produce without listening to every episode. We had Zoanne Clack on the show and she produces Grey’s Anatomy. And she was saying when they hire on a staff writer they expect them to have watched every episode of Grey’s Anatomy.

**Megana:** Well, I was really ambitious when I first started. And every time I’m like, yeah, I’m going to do it and I get through – like I’ve done the first 15 episodes of every season stack for sure.

**John:** So, what kinds of things are you learning from the show that are applying to what you’re doing now as an aspiring writer? And what stuff do you still feel like you’re still missing? What kind of advice have you not gotten on Scriptnotes that we need to make sure we start hitting?

**Megana:** So I think the craft stuff is – and as we’re working on the Scriptnotes book I’m just like, wow, what an incredible trove of information. And I should really listen to it more. But, I mean, I do read it and listen to it a lot. But I think something that I’ve been wondering and have been wanting to get your take on is when you are having a meeting in the industry what does success look like, because we work in the entertainment industry so people are very charming and great to talk to. And so it’s kind of confusing afterwards to measure how well it went or how I should be thinking about it.

**John:** Because right now you’re at a phase that I remember very distinctly when I was first starting, because you’re going to a lot of general meetings and a lot of sit-downs and hey-how-are-yous and you’re doing the water bottle tour of Los Angeles [unintelligible]. I guess actually you’re not going into people’s offices. You’re meeting for coffees? How are you doing these general meetings?

**Megana:** Some are for coffees, but I think because of the pandemic mostly Zooms.

**John:** Mostly Zooms. So a thing my first agent did which I think was a smart choice, he just sent me out on like – he just shotgunned me out into meetings. I took way too many meetings. And you just get better at taking meetings. And so it sounds like your meetings are going well, but you’re having a hard time figuring out what’s the next step, or how to go from like oh that was nice in the room but will I ever work with this person again.

**Megana:** Right. And the thing that I am sort of looking to decode is you know when you go on a date and you’re like waiting to hear what the last thing the person says, because it’s different if they’re saying, “Hey, it was really nice to meet you, or I had a really good time,” versus, “Can I get your number? I’d love to see you again.” And so what does that look like in the entertainment industry or after a general meeting?

**John:** So as you wrap up a general there will be that sense of like it was really nice to meet you, just a very classic thing, like we should look for things to do together. Great. That’s sort of the generic version. And it’s not a brush off. It’s just there’s not a specific next step they’re looking to take. If they really were intrigued by you and sort of like, “Oh, I really want to talk to you more about this specific thing,” they’ll bring up that specific thing.

**Megana:** OK.

**John:** Or if there’s something that you mentioned in the meeting and you were like, “Oh, we both really want to do something that’s based on Norse mythology.” And they’re like, “Oh, let me send you this stuff and we can keep up that conversation.” And so sometimes those will happen at the end of the general, or sort of a first meeting. Other times they won’t. You have to be comfortable with sometimes meetings are just meh.

Like when I went over to Verve. You were there for that. And I went out on a bunch of general meetings and a lot of them were just kind of, “So, we now know each other.” If something down the road comes up they actually feel like they could come out to me for a project. And a lot of what you’re doing now is sort of that.

**Megana:** So I guess also as a writer what responsibility do I have to follow up?

**John:** I think your responsibility to follow up with the good ones. The ones you actually think like oh I would like to work with this person, yeah, it’s good to reach out. And so that’s a case where it’s like, hey, can I have your email. Or you can get the email from the agents to say like, hey, I really enjoyed meeting with you about this. I wanted to talk to you about these specific things. Or this is a thing I’ve been working on that I’d love to talk with you more about.

To me, and people can disagree, I don’t think you owe a thank you note to a general meeting, or that kind of stuff. It’s just like if there was chemistry there was chemistry on both sides and it sort of is like dating. You don’t have to send a thank you for dinner at the end of it.

**Megana:** OK. That makes sense.

**John:** Now something you were talking about at lunch was when you have a meeting with somebody and they’ve read something of yours and they start giving you notes on it. And that’s a weird situation. Can you describe in a general sense what it was like?

**Megana:** I feel like in a lot of meetings there’s questions and constructive feedback or nice – I’m trying to avoid the word saying compliments – but, yeah, it’s nice that they’ll compliment my work. But then a couple of times they will have specific notes or want to do a follow up call with notes. And the notes are great, but I’m confused about whether I should act on them and what that means. Because we don’t have a clear plan forward.

**John:** And that sort of gets back into the dating. Are we actually trying to start a relationship here, or are you just sort of like giving me constructive feedback because you think it could actually think this thing and help me as a writer. And that’s a case where your reps, your agents, or your managers can sort of help suss out is this a person we really think could do this project, because if so then maybe it’s worth really investing the time with them and sort of working through that.

If not, then it’s just great to get their feedback. And if you’re getting consistent feedback about these things you could consider making those changes. But the stuff you have out there right now in the world is something that could get made but it’s really there as a writing sample for you to get hired for other jobs. So it should not be the primary focus is to be rewriting that stuff you’ve already been writing.

**Megana:** Totally.

**John:** An experience I definitely had in those early meetings is they’ll pull out a box of like these are all the things I’m working on. And have they sort of presented that list of the things that they are working on?

**Megana:** Yeah. And I’m always like – I mean, people are just so good at pitching their projects. It’s like the most fun part of the meeting to just listen to all of these great stories.

**John:** Sometimes they’re saying, “OK, we’d like to consider you for this thing,” but other times you get a sense of the kinds of things they’re looking for. Really getting the sense of like what things are going to spark for you that are really priorities for them and how you can sort of like keep that conversation going about like oh this is a thing we want to see happen together.

You’ll also be in some meetings where you’re just like this is not a fit. And the meeting should just end. Just like a bad date.

**Megana:** Yeah. Yeah. Well, thankfully they’ve all been really good so far and the people that I’ve met have been lovely.

**John:** Cool. Thank you, Megana, for producing this show every week. And thank you to our premium members for supporting the podcast.

**Megana:** Thank you guys. Thanks John.

Links:

* The Team America: World Police [puke scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKqGXeX9LhQ), with some bad language
* The opening of [Finding Nemo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG3L98NFyro)
* Aslan’s sacrifice in [The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ6VAGyhWXM)
* [Can We Stop Suicides?](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/opinion/sunday/suicide-ketamine-depression.html) by Moises Velasquez-Manoff for the New York Times
* The environment in [Red Dead Redemption 2](https://www.rockstargames.com/reddeadredemption2/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Michael O’Konis ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli). And special thanks to Megan McDonnell, the original producer of this episode!

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You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/378rebroadcaststandard.mp3).

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 509 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show how do prime the audience for what’s going to happen later? That’s right, it’s foreshadowing, [unintelligible] popular twin. We will look at examples and techniques to make foreshadowing feel clever rather than clunky.

**Craig:** We’ll also answer listener questions about Hallmark movies, friends who are bad bosses, and what to do when your movie is terrible.

**John:** Boy, not a happy topic.

**Craig:** I wouldn’t know about that.

**John:** But in our bonus segment for premium members we will discuss whatever happened to DVD commentaries and my theory is that Craig is partially to blame.

**Craig:** I’m going to hopefully upgrade that to completely to blame, but let’s see how it goes.

**John:** All right. Craig, this is one of the rare podcasts we are both out of town. So only Megana is holding down the Los Angeles fort. You are up there enjoying the Calgary Stampede, correct?

**Craig:** It’s not my cup of tea. I’m not a Stampede – from what I’ve seen it’s sort of half a stampede because of Covid and things. You can’t really get tourists in because no one is allowed to fly in unless they have a reason to be here. So I think it’s more of a Canada Folks only stampede, which is fine. There are a lot of fireworks. I do like fireworks. Not like LA fireworks that just happen constantly and for no reason. But scheduled. And professional. I don’t care about rodeo. It’s not my thing. I grew up on Staten Island. No surprise, didn’t have a lot of rodeos, so it’s not my culture.

But, you know, hopefully it’s putting some money in some folks’ pockets up here.

**John:** Yeah. I am back in New York City for the first time since the pandemic. It’s very exciting to back. We’ve just done a week-long visit of colleges with my daughter. And it’s kind of great. I mean, there’s been so many movies about kids’ college tours and stuff like that, so I’m not going to write that movie. But you can see sort of where that movie comes from because it’s just a lot of adventure. It’s been a good road trip.

**Craig:** That’s fantastic. And when you say New York City you’re on Staten Island?

**John:** I’m not on or near Staten Island. I’m on the Island of Manhattan.

**Craig:** Oh, OK.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, an innovation that probably happened before the pandemic but I had not experienced it yet was that now you can use Apple Pay on the subway and on busses which is just such a game-changer. So you don’t have to load up the stupid yellow cards anymore that never worked properly. You just tap your watch and it’s magic.

**Craig:** Yellow cards were already magic. I’m back in the tokens day.

**John:** Oh, the tokens days.

**Craig:** Or we had bus passes as students. So you’d get a bus pass and then you would show the bus pass to the bus driver. Otherwise you would have to put your coins in the weird – it was like a gumball machine in the front of the bus kind of thing. It was all bad. And now it’s good.

**John:** Yeah. Now Craig you were gone last week. Two bits of news to share with our listeners. We have new t-shirts and I’m so excited about our new t-shirts. They are our 10th anniversary t-shirts. They sort of slipped out a little bit earlier than we anticipated, but this way you can also wear them to celebrate our 10th anniversary which will be coming up next month in August.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Craig, do you recognize the reference that these t-shirts make?

**Craig:** That would require me to look at the t-shirt, wouldn’t it? [laughs] Let me go do that. I mean, I saw it briefly. I didn’t study it. I like the color and everything. So I’m going to take a look. Now I’m going to really study it.

**John:** All right. And maybe describe as this is an audio show, describe what this looks like.

**Craig:** Well, OK, maybe it’s not what you were going for, but to me it looks like the classic Zoom font from PBS.

**John:** Oh, yeah, that’s so interesting. That’s not the actual reference, but Zoom is a high quality throwback reference.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s some sort of maze.

**John:** It does look like a maze. But it actually says Scriptnotes, you see.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** So that actually is the words Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s the perspective shifty one.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Oh, I like that.

**John:** Yeah. But the other reference, because you don’t watch television you wouldn’t know that it is a reference to a small Marvel television show called Loki and it is in the style of the art from the TV show Loki.

**Craig:** No, I’d never know that. There would be no chance. I thought it was Zoom from 1976.

**John:** But it has a ’76 quality. It does feel like it is of an era. That it’s not our modern era.

**Craig:** I can’t tell you how many times – I don’t know what it is. I turned 50 and suddenly I started saying things that Bo, who is Megana’s age, so Megana and Bo are roughly the same age, that Bo just looks at me like what? Who?

**John:** What are you talking about?

**Craig:** We actually went to an escape room and in the escape room was a rotary phone and she had never used one before. That was kind of amazing. Megana, have you ever used a rotary phone?

**Megana Rao:** No. I had a fake Minnie Mouse rotary phone. It didn’t actually–

**Craig:** Spin?

**Megana:** Yeah. But it just looked like it should have when I was like five.

**Craig:** I can feel my own death. I can feel it. It’s coming. It’s chasing me down. The sort of weird crap that old people would say around me, now I say it.

**John:** Yeah. It feels like one of those, I think we’ve talked about Cook’s Illustrated and it will have a little sidebar column of like what is this gadget where they will show some gadget they found at a yard sale. What is this for? And it’s always a watermelon slicer or some kind of bizarre thing that you don’t really need but they sold at a certain point. Or a spoon for a very specific kind of dessert that no one eats anymore. It’s a hot custard spoon.

**Craig:** Oh, delicious. The whole world is like that for people in their 20s. There’s just a world of crap they just don’t know about.

**John:** Because who needs anything because you have your phone? Why do you need anything else?

**Craig:** What will be Megana’s thing? Like Megana when you’re 50, so how old are you now?

**John:** She doesn’t have to say that.

**Craig:** Oh, we’re not allowed to ask her how old she is.

**Megana:** I’m in my late 20s.

**Craig:** In your late 20s. Thank you. So throw in another 25 years. What are the things that you’re going to be remembering from your teenage years that kids will be like I’m sorry, what?

**Megana:** I mean, I guess I still had a flip phone when I was a teenager.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Flip phone. What?

**Megana:** Yeah. And I had like a Razr phone.

**Craig:** First of all, how about this? Phone? Because 25 years from now there’s not going to be one. It’s just going to be in your tooth, Megana. They’re just going to plant it in your tooth and then they’re going to go like phone?

**John:** I also feel like looking at my daughter’s age, and I’m sure your kids are the same, the idea of linear television is perplexing to them. The sense that all the channels are constantly broadcasting. Because she’s always just used to like I want to watch this show. I want to watch this show right now.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And so when there are some shows that are happening live it’s just strange for them. Like sports obviously, we understand they are happening live, but everything else is just really weird, or what networks are. That will seem really strange 25 years from now.

**Craig:** No one knows.

**Megana:** I guess I used to carry around a digital camera when I was a high schooler.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**Megana:** And I recently found it and it’s just like a bunch of pictures of Ohio teens in basements, hanging out and eating cheese puffs. I think that’s already something that your daughters don’t do.

**Craig:** No. They do not have digital cameras. They don’t do that. No.

**John:** Why would you have that?

**Craig:** That’s ridiculous.

**John:** Or an iPod that is not also a phone.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Speaking of things changing and times moving on, also this past week it was announced that we have hired new people to run the Stark Program. So this is the Peter Stark Program at USC. It is the program I graduated from. It’s a producing program that I went through, Stuart went through, Megan, Chad, Matt, Dana Fox, Rawson, lots of people who are related to the show. The really great head of the Peter Stark Program, Larry Turman, was retiring and we needed to find a new person to run the program. And so I’ve spent six months on a search committee to help find this new person. And I actually learned a tremendous amount. So I want to talk about that.

But I also want to talk about the people who they hired to take over the program are Ed Saxon who is a very famous producer with Jonathan Demme. Won an Academy Award for Silence of the Lambs. Did other amazing movies. And Nina Yang Bongiovi whose credits include Fruitvale Station and a lot of other sort of amazing movies. So these are the two people who are going to be running the program. I’m just so excited for these folks to be sort of shepherding in the next generation of producers and sort of like what producers are becoming versus what they used to be back in the old days when it was a producer making a movie and now producers make TV shows and make all sorts of other things. So it’s been exciting to think about how you set up a program for success for the next 20 years.

**Craig:** I wasn’t interviewed. I don’t know why. I think I would have made a great head of the Stark Program. First order of business, eliminate the Stark Program. Oh wait, this is why I wasn’t interviewed. Of course.

**John:** I think that’s probably why. This is who can lead this program for ten years. It’s just such a different way of thinking about things.

**Craig:** Yeah. The guild will I think have a choice like that pretty soon for its executive director. That’s the sort of thing they have to figure out. Who is going to last for a while and who is going to do a good job?

**John:** But related to your concerns, Craig, also this last week there was an article in the Wall Street Journal called Financially Hobbled for Life which was talking about just how much debt people are taking on getting these graduate film degrees, or other degrees. And how tough it’s making their lives and sort of the real question of like when are these degrees worth it and when are they not worth it. Should we encourage people to get $100,000 in debt for something that cannot or is unlikely to pay off?

**Craig:** The answer is no. That’s an actual answer. There’s a fact. There’s a fact answer to this. I don’t think we should. I don’t think there is anywhere near the kind of return on investment that you would expect for something like that. It’s not even remotely close. And that’s a shame because the idea of what schools like for instance USC or the kind of school within the school like the Stark Program can do in and of itself is a good idea. But the cost is outrageous. It is unconscionable when you consider what you’re actually receiving. It is unethical.

**John:** Well, OK, but to push back against it, like I’m listing myself and the other eight people I just mentioned are all Stark grads, all of whom I think if you were to talk to them would feel like they would not have had their careers if they hadn’t gone through Stark. So for them it was–

**Craig:** I disagree with them.

**John:** You disagree.

**Craig:** Yes. I would push back on the pushback. Of course they would, because they’re talented. And the reason I know that is because look at all the people who went through the Stark Program who didn’t go anywhere? Because the Stark Program is not the answer. The Stark Program may speed things up. You know, sometimes they say a pool doesn’t raise the price of your house. Just makes it sell faster. Maybe that’s the case. I didn’t go to the Stark Program, or any film school program whatsoever.

There are just too many people who have had brilliant, wonderful careers as producers, writers, executives, directors, and so forth that haven’t gone through the Stark Program. And there have been too many people who have gone through who haven’t had amazing careers. Also, I’ve said this a million times, I think a lot of these institutions just cheat. They choose people who are clearly destined for success and then they claim credit for the success.

**John:** Well, I think with my former assistants I’ve tried to sort of do the opposite. If I’m picking them from the Stark Program they were already kind of preselected. They were already going to be tremendously successful. So, the fact that Rawson and Dana and Megan have done so great shouldn’t be a surprise because I was picking from a very small, limited pool. But I get that, too.

**Craig:** And that’s what the Stark Program does. So it looks like at somebody like Megana and they’re like, OK, you went to Harvard and you’re really smart and you’re a great interview and you’re just basically going to do really well. We’re going to let you in and then we’re going to tell everybody, look, if you come here you can be like Megana. No, Megana was already Megana. We’re not going to talk about Megana like she’s not here the whole time. This is great.

Megana, all right, Megana you didn’t go to the Stark Program?

**Megana:** I did not.

**Craig:** Did you do any film school?

**Megana:** I didn’t go to film school.

**Craig:** Great. You know what, Megana, you’re going to be all right. [laughs] You’re going to be all right. I’m down with that. And, again, I don’t mean to imply that the Stark Program is a bad program, at all. I think it’s a terrific program. Just costs too much. Way too much. Because how much does it cost? Are you allowed to say?

**John:** I’m allowed to say, but I actually don’t know what the number is. You can look it up. It’s on the website.

**Craig:** Got it. OK.

**John:** So it’s expensive, but it’s a two-year program. And I do think there are graduate programs, especially graduate film programs, that are probably not worth the money in the sense that you are not going to be able to justify having paid that much money. The Stark Program I personally feel like can justify that for people who are attempting to enter into careers that are highly paid and will pay them back. And so if you’re coming out of the Stark Program and you’re going to become a film executive, you’re going to become an agent, you’re going to become a producer-producer, there’s a good chance that it’s going to pay off in ways that I think some of the other programs it’s harder to justify.

If you’re coming out of a graduate film program to become a cinematographer that’s going to be harder to pay off. It just is what it is.

**Craig:** Yeah. Looks like the Stark Program per year not including room and board, etc., is $53,000.

**John:** That’s a lot of money.

**Craig:** That’s a lot.

**John:** That’s a lot of money. And it raises real issues about who can afford to pay $53,000 and what does it mean for the industry if the people who are coming out with this training and the skill set have to be able to pay $53,000. So those are all valid questions.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, you know, if it costs $5,000 I think it would be amazing. You know, some of these universities – side note. I know we did our university rant last time about AP tests and all that. But I was just thinking – I don’t even think, some of them have so much money, like my alma mater, Princeton University, has such an enormous endowment I’m not even sure what they’re charging tuition for anymore anyway. I mean, they have billions, with a B.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Many, many dozens of billions. It’s too much. They have too much money.

**John:** They have beautiful campuses. We’re doing the college tour and I’ve got to tell you some beautiful campuses up there. We’ve not visited Princeton, but I hope if I do get to visit Princeton I get to see the dorm room that they set aside which has a plaque for you and Ted Cruz. Because I hear it’s great and they’ve not updated it since then.

**Craig:** It was in fact torn down. That building was legitimately torn down. That is awful.

**John:** They did an exorcism.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now if we were to do the Ted Cruz biopic, or the Craig Mazin biopic, there would be a scene of the two of you in college and your relationship then might be foreshadowing for the movie that is about to come.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Which is our segue to our main topic today which is foreshadowing. And this came up because Megana and I were looking at a woman named Gayle wrote in to ask for follow up about spoilers. And spoilers are really kind of a form of foreshadowing. So Gayle writes, “Two psychologists at the University of San Diego conducted an experiment to determine whether people like hearing spoilers. I’ll spoil it for you. We think we don’t like spoilers but we actually do. When the researchers asked people if they like spoilers they would invariably say no, but then the researchers had one test group read a story and another test group read the same story but with a spoiler first. Each group then filled out a short questionnaire to determine how much they like the story.

“Turns out the spoiler enhanced the story. The spoiler group got greater satisfaction out of their story-reading experience than the non-spoiler group. The same held true across genres.”

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** Yeah. So what a spoiler is is the most extreme version of foreshadowing. Basically foreshadowing is giving you a sense of – helping you expect what is going to happen in the movie, the kinds of things to look out for. Obviously it’s an ancient technique. But I want to talk about it in terms of movies and TV shows and sort of why we use foreshadowing, how we use foreshadowing, and how much emphasis or non-emphasis should be placed on foreshadowing for the things that we are writing.

**Craig:** It’s funny, I never think about it. I must admit. I never think about it. It’s not anything I plan. That’s probably a good method to not plan for it. But it is also one of these very slippery terms. I think if you asked 12 different people what foreshadowing is you’ll get 12 different answers.

**John:** Yeah. And we tried to pull up examples or Googled for examples of foreshadowing and some of the examples were like well that’s just wrong. That’s actually not even related to what I think of about foreshadowing. So, some examples of foreshadowing, or techniques you sort of see for foreshadowing, is the small version of a thing. So it’s that foreshock before there’s a giant earthquake. There’s a kitchen fire and then later on in the movie there’s going to be a huge bonfire. You see an argument or a moment of snippiness between two characters that becomes a huge fight later on in the movie. So give you a sense of like here’s the small version of the thing, but the big thing is coming.

You also see people ask a question early on and the answer to that question pays off much later on. So, it’s setting up a payoff. Chekhov’s Gun we talk about all the time. That sense of if you see a gun hanging on the wall in the first act it’s going to need to go off in the third act or the audience is going to be frustrated. You only put in the relevant details. If a detail is not relevant it should be removed. And the corollary, if some detail seems like it’s being placed there we’re going to notice it as an audience and therefore be looking for it. And that could be very helpful in terms of managing expectation.

**Craig:** Yeah. I was looking at some of those lists as well and it struck me that there’s a confusion out there between symbolism and foreshadowing I think. Sometimes people confuse the two. Symbolism, which like any film technique can be used to great advantage or just stink, it’s basically the connection between visual or auditory motifs and dramatic motifs. So every time you see – the famous one is in The Godfather the use of oranges, the fruit. You know, the oranges are there and then people die and then the oranges are there and people die. That’s not foreshadowing. That’s just symbolism.

**John:** No, it’s symbolism.

**Craig:** It’s just not the same thing. Oftentimes they are occurring simultaneously. Whereas foreshadowing to me in its kind of purest, best dramatic usage is some sort of image or something that someone says or something that somebody does, or even the way their hair, or their clothes, or something that is metaphorically connected to something that occurs later in a very explicit way. So, you are walking along and you step on a toy car and you break it. And then 50 minutes later you’re in a car accident. That to me, and it’s not good foreshadowing, but that to me is the kind of thing I think of when I think of foreshadowing.

**John:** Yeah. I think you’re saying the word metaphorical I think is important, because there’s some stuff which is just clearly setup. Like we’re just setting up a thing that is going to pay off later on. So in Die Hard it’s like, oh, take off your shoes and rub your feet in the car, but that’s not really foreshadowing. That is just kind of a set up.

**Craig:** That’s a set up. Yeah.

**John:** It’s purely a set up. And jokes have setups. And sometimes there will be – a version of foreshadowing where I’m setting up that I’m going to take this act into a completely different place. And so it’s not sort of the thing you’re expecting, but in general setups are not the same thing as foreshadowing.

The most probably extreme example is some Shakespeare plays start with a dumb show, which is basically a little silent morality play that is just like a heightened version of what the whole thing is that you’re going to see. That’s sort of foreshadowing that there’s going to be a death here, there’s going to be a betrayal. There’s going to be a thing that’s happening here. That’s foreshadowing. It’s really setting some boundaries around what the story is going to be like so you’re expecting the genre, the tone, what’s possible to happen in the world of your story.

**Craig:** Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit practically about we do this and how we can help writers if they want to add a little bit of this zhoosh to their scripts.

**John:** Obviously like anything you have to sort of know where you’re going. And so you’re not going to foreshadow something until you see where things are ultimately going. To me it’s a question of tone and sort of like how are you introducing your audience and your readers to this is the kind of thing that could happen in the story. And you can’t do that unless you know sort of where you ultimately want to end up. That’s why I probably don’t write those scenes that have heavy foreshadowing until I’ve actually written the scenes later on that sort of do the thing that’s going to need to get there, because otherwise you don’t want to sort of foreshadow a thing that’s actually not going to happen or at least not going to be meaningfully resonant for the audience.

**Craig:** I think that’s absolutely crucial. I think if you try to foreshadow before you get to the thing that you want to foreshadow you are in danger of, well, here’s another swipe at film school, being a film school student. You can create something that is a bit up its own tushy as we say. It’s just a little self-indulgent.

Whereas just as we often will go back and set things up, OK, well you know what I need him to not have shoes here. Why? OK, if I do something back logically I can set something up. So setting up and paying off is about addressing logic issues often. When you have a moment that you think is really meaningful and interesting you can always ask is there something that happens earlier that can foreshadow this in such a way that – and I think this is key – when people watch it, the foreshadow moment, they don’t go, “Huh, foreshadowing.” And this is where the notion of surface sense comes into play.

So in cryptic crosswords, that’s right, I’m tying it back to puzzles, in cryptic crosswords these definitions are a lot of word play. Part of the definition is a word that is defining the answer, and then the rest is word play that will get you to the answer. So a very typical cryptic crossword, I’ve pulled this one from Wikipedia I think, “Utter nothing when there’s wickedness about.” In that case the definition word is “utter” and then “nothing when there’s wickedness about,” the nothing equals O like zero, and wickedness is vice. So you put vice around O and you get voice. And that is the answer, because utter is the same as voice as in the verb.

What makes that work as a clue is the surface sense that even though it’s a weird sentence it is a sentence. And it has some sort of meaning. It’s not syntactically garbage. And so when you’re creating these foreshadow moments you want to give them, I think, you want to land in this really sweet spot where it is not nothing, meaning it’s not something where, oh, if you go back there’s this incredibly subtle thing that people can debate over on Reddit because somebody thinks maybe it means something. You want to be able to go back and go oh that is clearly foreshadowing now that I know what happened. But when I was watching it in the moment it was neither something that blew by that I didn’t notice, nor was it something that had no other purpose except retroactive purpose.

And the example that you pulled out I think is great is the one from Jurassic Park.

**John:** Absolutely. So we talk about Jurassic Park a lot on the show. And I think we talk about how well handled the exposition was. We have the little film strip that talks through – it is an information dump, but it’s such an enjoyable information dump and our characters are getting the information that we’re going to get and it all works so well. But another moment from Jurassic Park that is worth paying attention to is obviously one of the thematic ideas is that nature finds a way. Even though they’ve made all these dinosaurs be female there can be ways that they can steal be breeding and they could be having extra babies.

There’s a moment early on in the story when they’re just arriving at the park and because the park is new he’s trying to put on his seatbelt but he only has two female adapters. And so he can’t actually fasten the seatbelt. And so he ends up tying the seatbelt together and making it work. And that is a great metaphor for what is going to actually happen to the dinosaurs in the park. Even though they’re just two female ends they found a way to breed.

And so it makes surface sense because it’s like, oh, he’s improvising a way to fasten a seatbelt. He’s solving a problem at the moment. And you don’t realize it is actually creating a metaphor for what’s going to be happening later on in the story. And that is foreshadowing that there’s going to be ways for these two female parts to actually generate a whole bunch of new dinosaurs.

**Craig:** Right. And there’s even a sense that there’s a point to that moment. The point is you’ve been telling me how great this park is and how advanced the technology is, but you screwed up the seatbelts. So it seems like a sign that you guys are actually maybe a little shoddy. And that is what we think that moment is. And that’s why I love that moment. It’s not just a thing. Actually you think you know why that’s there when it’s done. And then later upon looking back you realize it was actually doing quite a bit more work at that time than you understood. And that is really clever. And that’s an example of terrific foreshadowing.

**John:** Now, I would argue that foreshadowing can be useful in our two-hour dramatic features, but foreshadowing in our series and our limited series can honestly be even much more useful. Because you are going to be able to set up anticipation of events that are going to happen quite a bit later on down the story. So at the point where like you’ve kind of even forgotten that that thing was put out there, and then when it pays off you’re like oh my god that’s right, I had forgotten that that was a thing that could exist in this world. And now look at it.

And so there are many examples of things being foreshadowed in Game of Thrones for example that paid off well. I think there’s things that were foreshadowed in terms of in your own series Chernobyl. Those payoffs don’t happen within that first episode. They ripple through later on.

**Craig:** You’re absolutely right. I think that the television medium is so much conducive to foreshadowing because you can foreshadow eight episodes later. There could be something that you go all the way back. A lot of it again starts to blend with the concept of setup versus foreshadowing. But Watchmen is just an utter feast of foreshadowing. And setups and payoffs. It’s wonderful in that regard.

Yeah. You can do so much more. You can do really weird, interesting things and you can certainly screw around with time which helps the idea of foreshadowing. And even back-shadowing. So back-shadowing is kind of interesting – there is a moment – I learned a lesson by the way. I can’t talk about The Last of Us at all because I thought I said a very mild thing to say. We’re doing ten episodes. I just thought that wasn’t really – and then it was news. So I’m not doing any news. I’m going to just say that there is a moment in an episode that kind of weirdly back-shadows to something. It is like an echo of a thing.

And it’s small. But you can do these things with television that is very freeing. And one of the reasons why I’m never writing a movie again.

**John:** Yeah. I should say that people don’t really use – I’ve never heard the term back-shadow be used in a development sense.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Back shadow or side shadow.

**Craig:** I think I may be the first person to ever say back-shadow. I just said it, yeah. Sorry.

**John:** So if you try to use back-shadow in a meeting with a development executive…

**Craig:** You’re fired.

**John:** They may walk out. Because they may recognize you heard that on Scriptnotes and it’s not a real thing. So we understand what it’s supposed to mean. There’s also a term which you can Google called side-shadowing. A literary critic, Gary Morson, created this thing. Which is setting up a detail that feels like it’s foreshadowing but deliberately is not foreshadowing something, which does feel true to life. There are things that seem, like ominous things that seem to come up and it’s like, oh, that must be setting up for some other thematic moment. And then it doesn’t because real life is full of things that seem like they have dramatic importance and ultimately don’t.

And so sometimes that can be a nice misdirection.

**Craig:** Yeah. Maybe shadow is what back-shadow is. Do we even need back on it?

**John:** Yeah, I don’t know.

**Craig:** Maybe fore was the thing that was changing the direction.

**John:** Yeah. There’s a light from behind shining forward onto the story you’re telling.

**Craig:** Shadows are things that come after something normally, like I’m here and then my shadow is behind me. And then…

**John:** I would say back-shadowing is a revelation happening in the present that recolors or recontextualizes what happened before. Does that feel like good back-shadowing?

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that that is absolutely – or sometimes I think the idea of back-shadowing is that somebody does something that is eerily familiar. Even though there would be no theoretical reason for them to do that. Or somebody says – I’m trying to think. There’s a movie where I feel like somebody says something at the end of the movie that a totally different character said in the beginning. And even though it’s a coincidence it’s very meaningful when you hear it. And you go, oh, that’s back-shadowing. I don’t know.

Maybe it’s just the end of foreshadowing. I don’t know.

**John:** Maybe it is. Maybe it’s just plot.

**Craig:** It’s the conclusion.

**John:** It’s the conclusion. I feel like perhaps setup and payoff are things we talk about in terms of plot and story versus foreshadowing is the kind of stuff that is just like theme and dramatic question. So it’s authorial intent. It is sort of why the story exists is that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But it’s not the details or the mechanics of the story. And if you think about it that way that may be a reason why you don’t have to necessarily know all your foreshadowing as you sit down to write page one because those are things you’re going to discover over the course of writing your story.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think practically speaking the two most important things to pull out of this discussion if you’re thinking about writing and using foreshadowing is that you definitely need less of this particular spice than you would think. It’s rather strong. And don’t force it in there. Wait for a moment to emerge later and then go back. Don’t start with foreshadowing. That’s bad.

**John:** That’s not going to work. All right. We have a bunch of listener questions saved up, so let’s ask Megana to read us some questions.

**Megana:** Great. Paul asks, “Do you have a home cinema set up or a cinema room? I was thinking about this as I had a home cinema set up for a long time but then ended up not having it for a while and I don’t miss it. Once the film or TV starts and I’m engrossed in the story having surround sound and all that stuff just doesn’t matter. I think the same thing applies to black and white films, too. For the first ten minutes you notice the lack of color, but after that it’s just the story that matters.”

**John:** Yeah. So we don’t have a home cinema set up. We have our library, which is our TV room, which is our only TV in the house. And it’s good. It’s fine. It sounds nice. But it’s not fancy by any stretch. It’s a couch and a TV. And I like great for that. And so I’ve never had the big home cinema set up. And kind of never wanted one.

At our old house we had this thing where we had a projector that would drop down and a screen that dropped down and we used it like three times. And we just vowed never, ever again to do that.

**Craig:** [laughs] I like that you guys vowed never, never again.

**John:** Never again. But Craig I’m curious. My perception is that your current house does not have really a home cinema, but I think your new house does.

**Craig:** Correct. Old house just has some TVs. There’s one room that has pretty good surround sound in it, so I guess that would roughly count. But, no, the new place has a proper little home cinema. And I personally suspect that I will not use it much. My wife loves it. And it’s a good social thing. So that’s probably why I won’t use it much.

**John:** For sure.

**Craig:** But people that like other people, they love it. They get to all sit together and watch stuff and have popcorn. And so I think it’s just a question of whether or not you like watching things with people or without. I’m perfectly fine, like Paul, I can watch something almost anywhere. What I need is good sound. That’s the most important thing to me.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Sound.

**John:** Sound. And, of course, to turn off motion smoothing.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** The only thing that I will try to do in any hotel room I ever enter is to turn off motion smoothing, because it is just a curse against humanity.

**Craig:** I told you I played the trailer for Chernobyl for my lawyer. I was at my lawyer’s place and he was like can I see it. I was like, yeah, I’ve got it on my computer. I’ll use your AppleTV and we can play it on your TV. And he had motion smoothing on and I almost died.

**John:** Oh no. It looks like just bad home video.

**Craig:** I wanted to actually call up HBO and be like, “Sorry, cancel it. Don’t put this out. Apparently we shot a soap opera. I was not aware.” Ugh, it’s terrible.

**John:** It’s just the worst.

**Craig:** The worst.

**John:** We’re not the first people to observe this.

**Craig:** Mm-mm.

**John:** Let’s move onto, oh, this is the big question.

**Craig:** Oh, big question.

**John:** Megana, oh my god, so Megana steel yourself, because there’s a lot to dig in here.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Look at the size of this question. Megana, get yourself some hydration. Some oxygen. Here we go.

**Megana:** All right. Andy writes, “I want to start by saying thank you, not only for making Scriptnotes but for all the work you’ve done to raise assistant’s pay and secure us better treatment, which unfortunately is not why I’m writing. I was really distressed the other day to hear you mention a ‘friend’ on the show. A friend who happens to be my boss.”

**Craig:** Uh-oh.

**Megana:** “I stopped listening immediately. Working for this person has been a nightmare and they oversee an extremely toxic work environment. I get paid next to nothing and it’s clear they don’t really see me as a human being. This job has taken me to an absolute low point. Illegality shouldn’t be the standard for calling someone out, but as far as I know nothing has been done that’s been illegal. Violations of company policy for sure, but nothing that rises quite to that level. It goes beyond just being a bad boss, but he’s also not Scott Rudin, which shouldn’t be the standard either, but it’s something I’ve been keeping in mind.

“My boss seems like a pretty popular dude and I thought I was going nuts until I reached out to the person who had my job before me who basically reassured me and said you’re not going crazy, you’re in a toxic work environment and it’s OK to want out. Yet in that same conversation I was told if you stick it out this could be a great opportunity. And it’s totally possible that both are true. Now, I do want to be very clear. None of the above is your fault.”

**Craig:** Hold on. Pause for a second. Was there ever a question that this was our fault? I’m shook. All right, continue on.

**Megana:** But he is being clear that none of it is your fault.

**Craig:** OK. Thank you. [laughs]

**Megana:** “And I’m sure you have no way of knowing how your friends treat their subordinates. I’m sure some of the world’s worst bosses are lovely over dinner. Friendly to their peers. Et cetera. But I do want to know how do you hold other screenwriters and showrunners accountable? And what would you recommend I do next?”

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** Yeah. So, Andy wrote in and I actually emailed him back and said this is a combination of two discussions we had. I don’t know if Andy is male or female. I don’t know who he is writing about specifically. And so we have many friends who work in various bits of the film and television industry. And we’ve mentioned a lot of people on the show. So I don’t know who Andy is talking about.

And it’s tough because we’ve talked so much about treating people better and being good human beings and to hear that somebody who we know is not being a good human being to his assistant is frustrating and maddening. So I just want a conversation about what do we do.

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know what we can do. I mean, well first of all Andy I don’t know who you’re talking about. And I don’t know if it’s somebody that we’re both friends with, or if it’s just somebody that I’m friends with, or somebody that John is just friends with. But I don’t know who it is. And I definitely don’t – I will say I don’t know anybody that I’m friends with who I am aware treats their employees poorly. So, if I encountered that I would absolutely talk to them and kind of figure out what’s going on, unless I felt that there would be no point in talking to them, that that was who they were. At which point I think I would just detach myself from them, because that’s not cool.

Yeah. The only way I would think to hold each other accountable is if you’re dealing with a rational person is just to have a frank heart-to-heart, without – this is the hard part – without seeming like you’re being their parents, you know. Because nobody wants somebody to suddenly scold-y dad them.

So it’s hard.

**John:** Yeah. Something I wrote to Andy is that obviously we don’t know who this person is they’re talking about, but also we don’t mention people on the show who we know to be assholes.

**Craig:** That is true.

**John:** And so there’s people who – someone could do a forensic analysis of the show and there’s a reason why certain people are not mentioned on the show because they’re assholes.

**Craig:** We have not mentioned so many people. Just because we haven’t mentioned you doesn’t mean you’re an asshole.

**John:** That’s true. That’s true. But there’s been situations where you and I have known that a person is terrible and we felt like we’ve had to sort of step around talking about them.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** That’s the reality. But those people were not also being referred to as our friends. And so the folks who we’re bringing on as guests for example, like we believe them to be actually genuinely good people to work with. And if we found out information that was not that case we would have issues.

**Craig:** And we would always try to deal with that privately. This is not the kind of show – and I’m sure somebody is going to say you guys have an obligation to say who is and who is not an asshole. No we do not. It’s important to not punish people for helping. So we do a podcast to try and help people. We don’t charge any money. I mean, there’s the premium feed if you want to get the bonus episode, like today’s bonus episode, but you can listen to this show for free and that’s the way it’s been for so long. We don’t even have ads.

So we’re trying to help people. And I think sometimes there’s this deal where people go, well, since you’re out there helping people you should also – you have an obligation to do the following things that I demand you do. The last thing I would want to be is a show where we just start running down people and accusing them of being jerks, especially when we personally haven’t dealt with them.

What we do try and do is talk to each other behind the scenes. And I will say that most jerks are notorious. I don’t think I have any private information about a jerk that nobody else has, for instance.

So, in terms of Andy what you should do next. I think that everybody is a bit different. There is bad behavior that I think is the sort that everybody who works there will agree stinks. However, it affects people in different ways. And that doesn’t make one person strong and one person weak. It just means we’re different. We have different tolerances for different kinds of stresses.

Your friend said if you stick it out this could be a great opportunity. Mm-hmm. But probably not for you. Because it’s making your miserable. I don’t think if you’re feeling miserable you’re going to get to the place where suddenly a great opportunity emerges. I think it’s impossible to rise above that misery. It seems like you should be looking somewhere else.

**John:** I agree that Andy should be looking someplace else. It may be worth talking with other people in that office and just getting a sense of whether other people are aware of sort of what’s actually happening. Because they probably are, but maybe they’re not. If you are the only kind of assistant and everyone else is sort of at a different level they may not really be aware of that. So this is not to put out the big alert, but just say like, hey, I’m not happy here and I’m going to be moving on and looking for a different job, but I want to know whether you’re seeing what I’m seeing here, because this is not cool.

Because just like Craig and I feel like we have some responsibility to sort of like if there’s somebody who we know is behaving badly who we know about to sort of talk with them about that, you may feel some responsibility to sort of just let the others around know that this is what’s happening, because they may just not see it.

I think you exit. I don’t think you exit loudly. But I think you exit with making it clear that this is not working for you and this is the reason why it’s not working for you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know what the best way is to leave something. I just don’t know. I wish I did. I always worry about people. It’s hard out there. Also, sometimes I think we somewhat cavalierly say you should get out of there and do you have another job lined up? I mean, that’s the other issue is you’ve got to pay bills.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Andy, ultimately you have to listen to your own heart here. And figure out what your tolerances are and what will make you happy. But what I don’t think you should do is gamble your present on some possible future with this particular job. That is not – I did this way too many times myself. You get to the prize at the end of the road and you go that was not worth it at all. Because I think I could have got this thing I just got without going through all that misery.

So, at the very least start looking.

**John:** Yeah. You should. Cool.

**Craig:** All right, Megana, what’s next? Geez, that was heavy. Do we something lighter?

**Megana:** Oof.

**John:** This is going to be so light.

**Craig:** Oh, I just heard an “oof.”

**Megana:** OK, so the Captain asks, “OK, I just had my first film come out in theaters. I should be ridiculously happy, right? Nope. I literally just saw it. The film is horrible. I’m embarrassed by the film. I shared credit with the director and I was given the sole story by credit as well. I sold my original screenplay to a major studio. The director rewrote it. I was not involved at all. I was banished. The entire film is completely different from what I wrote. I mean, it’s utterly unrecognizable other than the glimpses of what could have been.

“My question is this – does this hurt my career? And how badly? And what if it’s actually successful or what if it bombs? I do have another film coming out this year, so there is light at the end of the tunnel. That film is the one I can stand behind. I also just sold a pitch to Netflix. So I’ve got some things going on, but this one kills my soul because it’s my first.

“Please tell me my career is not dead before I even get started. And what do you advise moving forward?”

**John:** Oh, Captain, My Captain.

**Craig:** My Captain.

**John:** So it’s OK to be bummed and be sad and so frustrated because you had hopes and expectations of this movie because you wrote something that you felt was good and what came out is just not good. And we’ve all been there. I’ve had had those frustrations of like, oh, that was not the movie I hoped to make at all and I just don’t know how it’s going to fare in the world. But, man, you’re so lucky because you got a movie following up on that. You sold a pitch. You’re doing great. And actually having a produced credit, even if it’s not spectacular, will kind of help you is my belief. Craig, what do you think?

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I was in this position. This happened to me. So I don’t think your career is dead. I wouldn’t catastrophize, although it is certainly a painful thing. My then writing partner, Greg, and I, the first movie we ever wrote was produced and the director, you know, did not do what I would have hoped tonally, etc. And I wouldn’t say that the movie utterly unrecognizable, but it definitely – it was kind of an oh-what-could-have-been sort of thing. And it was a flop.

And does it hurt your career? Generally speaking in features no. And here’s why. Everybody kind of knows the drill. Everybody. I think they finished shooting Borderlands. So I wrote a script for Borderlands movie and Eli Roth came on to direct it and they have this amazing cast. They have Cate Blanchett. And they have Jack Black. And they have Jamie Lee Curtis. And Kevin Hart. And it’s a really great cast. But, you know, I’ve been over here doing my TV stuff and he’s been over there. I mean, I had a couple of emails with Eli, you know, but I’m pretty sure that he kind of did his own pass on the script. And then they were shooting and I wasn’t there.

So, I don’t know, you know, and that’s kind of how it is in features. We sort of just disappear and other people carry the ball. Like we come out on the field and we sort of design a play and then we leave the field and we drive home and then at the end of the game someone calls us and says here’s what happened. You know, you root for it. And you hope it turns out well. But there are times when it doesn’t and then you are embarrassed. And frustrated. But angry. And then, of course, you’re also blamed for it. So, like Twitter or whatever.

But that all fades away. What we generally get credit for in features is writing something that gets produced. The people hiring us are studios. The people who decided to produce that movie, studio. And what did they base that decision on? The script. So you did your job. If they blame it on you, they have to blame it on themselves. And they’re not going to do that. They’ll just blame it on the director. So you did your job.

Having a hit helps. Having a bomb does not kill you. Definitely you and your reps did the right thing because as you say you have another film coming out this year. That means you capitalized on some of the heat of getting that screenplay produced. And you just sold a pitch. The key is you’ve got things going on.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yes, your first – just like in sex a lot of times the first time is really bad. That’s kind of how it goes. It’s disappointing, muddled, uncomfortable, and you kind of wonder is that really all this is about. And then it’s not.

**John:** Craig, my first movie was Go and it was actually really very successful and well liked.

**Craig:** Some people have great first sex.

**John:** So I’m just saying I knocked it out of the park that first one. It didn’t actually make that much money. Craig is right. I think, you know, for a screenwriter it does not honestly hurt you that much because you got the movie made and that’s fantastic. A bad movie will hurt a director and put a director in director jail. There’s not really writer jail the same way. You’re going to be fine.

And when you go in for those general meetings at places it’s fair to say like, oh, you wrote that movie. Yeah, you know what it didn’t turn out the way I wanted it turn out and it was a little bit frustrating, but I was excited that it got made. You can say that and that’s great to say. And you’re being honest and everyone knows that stuff like that happens.

And the fact that you share, you and the director have an “and” between your names it’s clear of what the director did. The director is going to take most of the blame for that rewriting. Don’t be worried about sort of you’ll read reviews. If this movie gets bad reviews maybe your name will be mentioned as writing a terrible script. That’s frustrating but that’s just the business, too.

**Craig:** It is. And basic rule of thumb is that directors get blamed for features and writers get blamed for television. And that makes somewhat sense because directors are in charge of the features and writers are in charge of the television shows. And they focus in on that sort of thing. Don’t read the reviews. Don’t look at any of it. And I know that you are going to regret your first time out the gate not being wonderful and miraculous and beautiful. That’s OK. It just means when something good happens it’s going to feel great. When you match up with the director and it’s hand in glove and the art that emerges is what you intended or even better, that’ll feel great.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You’ve just got to prevail, Captain.

**John:** Captain, I do wonder if there was a moment thinking back was this situation foreshadowed. Because I will say that when I’ve had these movies that have gone south I can always think back to like, oh yeah, there was that meeting and that person said that thing. That giant red flag should have been there and I should have recognized like, oh, this is not going to work well.

**Craig:** Yeah. A lot of times you know. But sometimes you don’t. Sometimes it’s a big, yeah, what’s going to happen? It’s a surprise.

**John:** It’s a surprise. Megana, let’s do Doug from LA as our last question.

**Megana:** Doug from LA writes, “I’m curious about the Hallmark/Lifetime Christmas movie genre. They make a million of them because people love them. As I read a bunch of these scripts I’m finding them lacking in stakes, characters, and actual comedy. Even though they’re kind of considered rom-coms, or are they? Anyway, my question is if someone is trying to write a Hallmark style script would you follow this path that seems to work for them or try to go deeper in all of these areas while risking the notes or rejections ‘that’s not very Hallmark?’

“Are there specific holiday TV movie guidelines? I’d love to hear your thoughts?”

**John:** So Doug is asking really about they’re kind of programmers. I mean, I think the way that they used to sort of make movies of the week that would follow a really set template, there’s a Hallmark or Lifetime Christmas movie kind of template. And you’re putting your finger on it which is they do have kind of weird stakes, like very low stakes. And they’re funny-ish, but they’re not hilarious. And they’re romantic in a sense, but they’re not sort of doing full rom-com stuff.

There’s a very good Simpsons episode from I think last season where they’re shooting a Christmas movie in Springfield and it’s just a really great exploration of those tropes. Listen, I think if you were try to write one of these movies and completely blow up the genre then it would speak to sort of a misunderstanding of like what people actually really love about them which is probably some predictability and something about the form. So I don’t think you should try to write one of these movies because you don’t seem to like them.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, there is a version where the point of the movie is that it is a subversion and weird turn on the genre on its ear version of a Hallmark movie. But obviously that wouldn’t be for the Hallmark Channel. I think John is absolutely right. What we know the Hallmark Channel has figured out is what their audience likes. And we can get a little stuck in the trap of feeling like we’re separated from our audience. If you don’t know the people who are watching the Hallmark Christmas movies and you look at the Hallmark Christmas movies and all sorts of criticisms you may think that it’s worth your time to go in and fix it. Or you may just be judgmental of the people that are writing them.

But spend some time with the people who watch them. If you are making something for your friends, you’re probably not making it in such a way that would go down easily with your grandmother. And you don’t want to hurt your grandmother. You don’t want to hurt her feelings. You don’t want to disgust her or horrify her.

If you were going to make something for your grandmother, if she’s turning 90 and she wants special from you, she asks you to make a five-minute little movie for her you will make something that is comforting and wonderful for her. And that takes its own talent and skill. By the way, to write a Hallmark movie after there have been I don’t know how many Christmas movies they’ve made, but it’s actually really hard now. You know? You’ve got to come up with something new. There’s got to be some new version.

**John:** But not too new. I mean, there’s a form to it. And also I think it’s important to understand with all of these movies sometimes how they’re made dictates what actually happens in the story. Because they’re shot with incredibly specific schedules. And basically you have to hit a crazy number of pages per day, which means very few locations. Very few scenes. Longer scenes. And very simple coverage. There’s reasons why they have to be a certain way.

I think it was a previous One Cool Thing. This last year there were two gay sort of Hallmark/Lifetime Christmas movies that both sort of did the things but were also sort of like, you know, the gay versions of those things. And they were lovely. They were also examples of the form.

**Craig:** Yeah. I have a friend who writes Hallmark movies. I think quite a few of the Christmas ones. And he is gay. And they have been kind of growing up over there a little bit, which is nice.

But, yeah, I would say Doug unless you have a desire to skewer the genre and be kind of weird and cool in that regard, if you’re trying to write a hallmark style script then do it. Yeah. You follow the path and do the conventions. Try and be interesting. Just try and be better, maybe. If you think like, OK, I can stay within the conventions but maybe I can sparkle up the jokes a little bit, or sparkle up the this or that, if you think you can do better, do better. But I’ve got to tell you. You might not be able to. Because they’ve perfected that over there.

**John:** We were talking through Set it Up. Set it Up is a much better version of some of the tropes of that kind of rom-com. I guess it’s truly a rom-com, it’s not a holiday movie. But there’s a version of Set it Up which was more like a Hallmark movie or a Lifetime movie and she was able to elevate it and sort of be the more sparkly version of that. So, try to write the sparkly version of it. If it’s the same amount of dialogue to shoot they can do it. It’s just sometimes that form is really what’s dictating why the stories work the way they do.

**Craig:** Yeah. I have a feeling that the Hallmark executives have received 4,000 handwritten letters regarding the movies they make and they know what their – they know what their folks like and they know what they don’t.

**John:** Absolutely. All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is actually a genuinely cool One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** I saw this. So good.

**John:** This is so good. So I’ll link to an article by Pam Belluck writing for the New York Times, but this is a man who suffered from a stroke and lost the ability to speak and other abilities as well, but still had thinking thoughts and speech inside of him. And so usually what he was doing was using a special pointer so he could tip his head to aim at a pointer with all these letters on it and sort of spell that way. It’s incredibly slow.

What they did is they implanted wires into his brain to figure out basically he still had the instinct of speech, and so the neurons are firing into sort of make the mouth shapes and stuff. They were able to read those and do sort of AI machine learning to figure out what things are firing to try to make what shapes and actually be able to form words. And so he was actually able to generate speech or sort of written speech just based on his brain function.

And so it’s not that he’s thinking a thought and they’re creating that. It’s the intention to speak is being able to translate into actual speech which I think is amazing and really speaks to some great potential for new technologies down the road. I’m so excited about this.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is the kind of thing when you look at it you go, oh, we see what the end game is for sure. Because right now they’re using this algorithm to interpret the brain waves into the words that they think the brain waves would have formed. And in the article it says about 50% of the time when it comes to single words the algorithm gets it right. When he was given sentences on a screen to essentially repeat in his mind the algorithm did even better. Well, if it’s at 50% now it’s going to be at 100% at some point definitely. Whether that’s five years from now, or ten, we don’t know. Or, by the way, it could be one year from now. These things move quickly.

**John:** And of course it doesn’t have to be perfect to be incredibly helpful and useful. I think about the technologies we’ve used to sort of enable input and so like everything from glasses to cochlear implants to other things to help people get the information in. To be able to get the information out in a different way just feels really smart.

The same article was talking about how you still have the instinct to move your hands in certain ways. And so they sometimes can use that to actually figure out like, OK, it’s as if you’re typing but you’re not actually typing and then people can sort of mentally type to do stuff.

I was watching some of the most recent spelling bee and you know how kids will write on their hands for stuff? I noticed a lot of them were typing in the air to figure out how stuff is. I feel like we all know – so many people know how to type. I think that’s going to be another way to sort of get those letters out of people’s brains and into screens.

**Craig:** Yeah. That kind of visualization, translating. It’s a really cool thing. And to kind of unlock the experience of people so that they’re not trapped and they’re alone and simply passively observing but can interact I think is going to extend their lives. And if it doesn’t actually extend their lives it will certainly make their lives so much more enjoyable. And that’s wonderful.

So hooray for science. Science did it again. Not freaking crystals. And I would like to also point out that in the thousands of years that people have been praying to god, prayer has never done what these scientists did. Interesting. Just thought I’d throw that in there. Just a quick mention.

**John:** [laughs] Small little grenade tossed there at the end.

**Craig:** Just a tiny little grenade. Right there. Roll it on at the end.

My One Cool Thing is far less controversial than what I just said. It is a new game that I think is available on Steam and iOS and maybe on Android. I don’t know. I don’t pay attention to Android. And it’s called Chicken Police. And I have a link here to a review in the Washington Post. It is a delight. Chicken Police is a film noir story with some sort of mini puzzles throughout. But really more of a kind of whodunit that you’re following along with. And everyone is a human except for like their hands and their heads, which are animals. Some of them are chickens. Some of them are hedgehogs. Some of them are dogs. Some of them are cats. One is a deer.

And it’s fascinating. And it’s funny. It’s very clever. It’s sort of unto itself. It’s not a genre. It’s not like people are sitting around and going people should do the thing where we used to do film noirs but using animals. We should do that again. No. No one has ever done that. But now it is being done. And it’s a great way to wind down at night I find. So, highly recommend – and by the way the artwork is terrific. The voice acting is really good. They put money into this.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** So my One Cool Thing this week is Chicken Police.

**John:** And what platform are you playing it on? Because do you have your PS4 up there in Calgary?

**Craig:** Well I have the PS5 up here in Calgary.

**John:** Oh, nice.

**Craig:** Hello.

**John:** I can’t even get one in LA. But you have one up there in Canada. It all makes sense.

**Craig:** I’m adapting a videogame.

**John:** That’s true. You are adapting a giant videogame.

**Craig:** I know a guy. [laughs]

**John:** You know a guy.

**Craig:** I know a guy at PlayStation. Yeah, you know. So that helped. Definitely the PlayStation connection was the key. I played a couple of cool games so far. Maybe I’ll save those for next One Cool Things.

**John:** Excellent. Well that is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced, as always, by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Michael Karman. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter I am @johnaugust. Craig is not really on Twitter. But he sometimes will post a funny gif to things.

We have t-shirts and they’re lovely. You can find them at Cotton Bureau, including the brand new Scriptnotes 10th anniversary t-shirt.

We have some plans for our 10th anniversary that Craig doesn’t even know about yet. So, I’m going to tell him off-mic, but stick around because cool things are coming.

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.

You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the ones we’re about to record on DVD commentaries. Craig, Megana, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

**Megana:** Thank you guys.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** So, Craig, do you remember DVD commentaries?

**Craig:** I sure do.

**John:** What DVD commentaries have you recorded? Where can we hear you do a DVD commentary?

**Craig:** I recorded DVD commentaries for Scary Movie 3 and for Scary Movie 4. I assume for Superhero. I don’t think I did any for Identity Thief. And I don’t think I did anything for like the movies before. So I’ve just done a few of them.

**John:** I’ve done a few as well. So I did the first Charlie’s Angels. I did the second Charlie’s Angels which is where I first met the Wibberleys who were the cowriters of that film. I did one for The Nines, which was my own movie, so that would make sense for me to record it. So I did one with Ryan Reynolds and I did one with Melissa McCarthy.

They were a thing. They were a thing that would be added onto the actual physical DVDs when physical DVDs were something that people bought and collected. And I just don’t hear about them anymore and I don’t think people are recording them the same way. Partly because DVDs just don’t sell the same way. And I don’t think there’s a pent up demand to have that extra thing on the disc to make the disc be more valuable than just the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. And also they just kind of stank I found. I know that some people really enjoyed listening to them, but I don’t. I just want to watch the movie. I don’t want to hear somebody explain it while I’m watching it.

**John:** I don’t think I’ve ever actually watched a full DVD commentary. That’s actually part of the problem is that, you know, I don’t think it’s actually the right combination of form and function. If I want to hear a conversation about the movie I just want to hear the conversation and I don’t want it to be interspersed with the film underneath it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Nor do I want the person who is making the commentary forced to comment on what is onscreen. Because what ends up happening with DVD commentaries is like, OK, yeah, so this was an interesting day. Blah-blah. It’s like you’re constantly restarting a conversation. And you never really get anywhere. I don’t really know what the point is with those things.

**John:** Yeah. And they weren’t super expensive, but they were expensive enough that they really – it did count. And they had to decide like, OK, when are we going to get studio time to do this because most DVD commentaries were in the era before everyone had a microphone and we could just do this podcast. And I think honestly Craig you ruined them. I think you proved that we did not need them because it’s actually much more helpful than a year after the product came out to hear the commentary is to have commentary immediately after the episode aired, which is what you did with Chernobyl.

**Craig:** And to divorce that commentary from visuals. And just have a conversation with somebody so that the conversation could unfold naturally and allow – I think an inquisitor is really important. Having somebody ask questions as opposed to leaving somebody there alone to go, “Oh, yeah, OK, so this is blah-blah-blah.” You know? No. Let’s have a conversation. Much more interesting.

**John:** Yes. So you did the same with Damon Lindelof for Watchmen. And they became successful and highly listened to podcasts which makes a lot of sense. And I think because you’re splitting them from the linearity of the movie or the episode, like you’re not having to track this minute versus that minute, you could talk in an overall sense of like you’ve just watched the episode so now let’s have a discussion the same way that Talking Dead, that show that follows The Walking Dead, can have a discussion of like what happened in the episode rather than sort of minute-by-minute.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that was maybe the only thing that I actually did that was different was that it was me. It wasn’t people who were watching the show and then having a fan discussion after. There were a few such podcasts for Chernobyl, but I think it was the first one where the person who created the show sat there and kind of did this with an interviewer after each episode. And it was initially, the theory was just that there were things I wanted people to know that were not going to be in the show.

And the nice part about a podcast is, you know, so you didn’t pay for it. It’s not like you bought a DVD and then, oh, including exciting features. You’re like, well, that’s part of the reason I bought this was for the exciting feature. And then I listened to the feature and the podcast stank. It was free so if you didn’t like it you could just turn it off and not listen to it. And you could listen to it in your car. You didn’t have to be at home watching it on TV.

It was more fun doing the Watchmen one because I could be the inquisitor and I could be the fan and ask Damon all the questions that I really, really wanted to know. And put him on the seat. That was fun.

**John:** There’s also a different relationship to authority because anything that got put on that DVD would have to have sort of all the legal clearances and all that stuff. Versus anyone can record a podcast. And while I’m sure there were discussion with HBO about stuff on that podcast, there was more freedom than there would have been if you had recorded a commentary to go on the actual disc.

**Craig:** There was as far as I can tell total freedom. I don’t think we got any messages back. It was interesting. The first time I mentioned it to HBO, I don’t know if I’ve said this on the show before, they were interested, but they were tentative. Like it’s a large company and we don’t do new things quickly. We think about new things. We talk about new things. We have meetings about new things. And so they said we want to get on the phone to discuss this with you and there was a phone call with like 30 people on it from HBO.

And they were all kind of trying to wrap their heads around it. I was like guys let me just cut to the chase. It’s super easy. It costs almost nothing. And it’s going to be me and a guy talking for an hour on audio. And then you can listen to it. And if you hate it, just don’t put it out there. But if you like it, we will. That’s all you need to know. Don’t panic and don’t overthink it. It’s very simple.

And that is one of the beauties of the podcast format. Very simple.

**John:** Yeah. Now I think the other advantage to a podcast format is it’s not bound to time. It doesn’t have to come out the same time as the product came out. So Phil Hay, his One Cool Thing was An Invitation to The Invitation which was a podcast about The Invitation which he was not participating in but it was about the thing he had made. And could focus on that. Or listen to like Office Ladies which is two stars of The Office talking about going through given episodes of The Office ten years later. And it’s a way to sort of go back and celebrate ad thing that doesn’t have to be married to the physical disc or this new printing of The Office DVDs. It can just exist out there in the world by itself. And it can have folks who were involved in the original thing, like Office Ladies, or like Phil’s it doesn’t have to have the imprimatur of the actual artist there.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** It’s actually a good use of film criticism degrees, to talk through what this thing meant when it came out and what the resonance is for it now.

**Craig:** And for the podcasts where you are dealing with the author of the show, one thing that’s nice is that it’s rather a throwback to the old days when you would have Dick Cavett sit with somebody and have a real discussion for an hour that was intelligent and thoughtful and was not bound by a need to titillate or amuse or excite, but really was just, look, we’re going to talk. And if you find this interesting you’ll listen.

But the object of the podcast – for instance for the Chernobyl podcast the real object was to be transparent about an adaptation of history. Not to sell tickets. Or to drive viewership. Because I presumed that nobody would find a podcast first and then an HBO television show second. It would be the other way around. So it really was motivated by a pro-social instinct to put something good out there that would be helpful. And that’s something that DVD commentaries, you just can tell that somebody was forced into a room by gunpoint to do this. [laughs] Nobody wants to be there.

That’s why my favorite ones are Ben Affleck talking about Armageddon, which is amazing. And Arnold Schwarzenegger talking about Conan the Barbarian which is also spectacular. Because one of them is drunk and cranky. And the other one is super into himself but in a childlike way. It’s really great. I love those two. The rest stink.

**John:** So I’m thinking about my two examples with the second Charlie’s Angels. So I recorded the DVD commentary with the Wibberleys about Charlie’s Angels 2 and we had actually sort of hashed out does that story point make any sense at all. Where did that come from? We just don’t even know. And we could have that conversation but we were also having to keep up with the movie itself a little bit. So we were always feeling like, oh, we can’t dig too deep into it because the movie keeps rolling forward.

**Craig:** Exactly. It keeps rolling.

**John:** And then a week or two ago I did an episode of this Spy Master’s podcast where we talked about the second Charlie’s Angels. I thought we were going to talk about the first Charlie’s Angels, which I love and the second Charlie’s Angels which I don’t love as much. But I also feel like I can be kind of honest on this because it’s like, you know, listen, there are some things that just don’t work about this and I have frustrations. And I could have those – I can have a conversation that would never make it onto the DVD copy because it doesn’t promote the movie. It doesn’t speak to the movie’s artistic success, but was just honest about sort of like this is what the intention was, this is what the reality was. And have those come out.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Craig, so even though you destroyed DVD commentaries, I think in some ways–

**Craig:** Feels good.

**John:** In the destruction you liberated the form for the next.

**Craig:** I am the breaker of chains.

**John:** You are the breaker of chains. Don’t stop breaking those chains. And enjoy the Calgary Stampede.

**Craig:** Thanks John. I’ll see you next week.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Calgary Stampede](https://www.calgarystampede.com/stampede)
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* [USC’s Peter Stark Producing Program Taps Ed Saxon & Nina Yang Bongiovi For New Leadership Roles](https://deadline.com/2021/07/peter-stark-producing-program-ed-saxon-nina-yang-bongiovi-new-roles-1234794091/)
* [Story Spoilers Don’t Spoil Stories](http://bear.warrington.ufl.edu/brenner/mar7588/Papers/leavitt-Psychological%20Science-2011.pdf)
* [Spoiler alert: spoilers make you enjoy stories more](https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/spoiler-alert-spoilers-make-you-enjoy-stories-more)
* [Jurassic Park Foreshadow Scene](https://medium.com/cinenation-show/a-perfect-case-of-foreshadowing-jurassic-park-the-seat-belt-scene-12ab3be19236)
* [Tapping Into the Brain to Help a Paralyzed Man Speak](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/health/speech-brain-implant-computer.html?referringSource=articleShare) for the NYT by Pam Belluck
* [Chicken Police Game](https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/05/21/chicken-police-paint-it-red-game-review/)
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