Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/creating-a-tv-comedy).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today on the show we have some clips with some bad words in them, so if you don’t want your kids to hear those words maybe listen to this one on headphones.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 508 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig and I could not get our schedules to sync up this week, but lucky for all of us we have a remarkable replacement in the form of Jen Statsky. She’s a writer-producer whose credits include Broad City, Parks and Rec, The Good Place, and my previous One Cool Thing Hacks, a series which she co-created. Welcome Jen.

**Jen Statsky:** Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

**John:** I’m so excited to have you here. So we’ve not really met in person I don’t think, maybe at a WGA thing?

**Jen:** Maybe at a WGA thing. But I think this might be our first in-person meeting.

**John:** It very well could be. So on Twitter I congratulated you on your show, but I think we probably retweeted the same things in the past, but that’s about as much as we’ve done together.

**Jen:** Yes.

**John:** Well today on the show I want to talk about how you got started and particularly how you got started in comedy because that’s a thing I know nothing about. And then I really want to dig into the form of single camera comedy, because Hacks is just great and Hacks and Broad City are both single camera comedies, but they’re very different. And I want to talk about writing those, writing towards act breaks, writing without act breaks.

**Jen:** Sure.

**John:** And we have the pages in front of us, so we have some scenes. So I really want to get very specific if we can.

**Jen:** I love it. Let’s get into it.

**John:** And you know who else has questions? Our listeners. I put out a call to the premium subscribers and they sent in 130 questions about comedy that Megana has sorted through. So, we will not 130.

**Jen:** Let’s do them. Let’s hit them all.

**John:** All of them. We’re going to knock them all out.

**Jen:** 130 questions.

**John:** And in our bonus segment for premium members I want to talk through the cat person discourse, so cat person which is that short story that everyone is talking about years ago, well now there’s an update to that, so I want to get your take on that.

**Jen:** It’s so funny that we are once again reliving cat person on Twitter. It’s all come full circle from 2017.

**John:** Yeah. I feel like there’s people who were in a coma all this time and they wake up and we’re still talking about cat person.

**Jen:** On one end of a global pandemic there’s cat person discourse, and on the other end of the global pandemic there’s cat person discourse.

**John:** It gets into those questions about like who owns a story. And we’re all sort of drawing from real life, especially writers. And I’ve run into situations where an event will happen and it’s like, oh, do I get that event, or do you get that event?

**Jen:** Exactly. I know. It’s a super nuanced conversation about art and who owns certain life things that have happened to people. So it is a really interesting conversation.

**John:** Cool. Two little bits of news and follow up to start with. First off, the WGA put out this pilot deal guide, which was kind of cool. So coming out of the agency agreement we now get all the contracts, and so we can see everybody’s contract and we can see how much people are getting paid for their deals, not just as writers but also as producers, and how much they’re getting paid to write pilots. And so they have all this information. The guild looked through 700 pilot deals from 2020 and 2021 to see what the averages were.

Jen, were there any surprises in here for you?

**Jen:** No, no real surprises. I mean, I think it’s so helpful to have this information out there. I’m just so delighted that the guild did this because you know so much of what happens is people get kept in the dark about what other people are getting paid. And in doing that it allows studios and networks to have all the power, because we’re not talking. We don’t know what our counterparts are making. And so just to have this information out there is I think wonderful.

I remember when the guild was asking for people’s contracts I had a couple of friends reach out and be like, hey, is it OK to send them this. And it’s like yeah it’s to help us, it’s not for nefarious purposes that the Writers Guild wants to look at your contracts. It’s all in the name of the information being out there and just being super helpful and give writers a stronger place to be in for negotiations.

**John:** Yeah. So if you have an agent or manager or lawyer getting your deal, great, they should have some of this information. They should have a sense of what this is. But this is a chance for a writer to say like, OK, this is above the median, this is below the median. If it’s below the median, why is it below the median? There could be a good reason. I mean, half of writers are going to get paid more. So, there could be a reason why you’re below median. But it’s helpful to understand. And if there’s a reason that you can solve about this, great.

**Jen:** Totally. Were there any surprises to you in looking at it?

**John:** I was happy to see that there were changes from 2019. So that a pilot script went up $17,500. That’s great.

**Jen:** That’s great.

**John:** And so that’s progress people are making. And the split between one hours and half hours is also good. So you deal for Hacks, was it a streamer at that point? Was it clear that it was always going to be something that was made without commercials and made for not a cable?

**Jen:** Yeah. It was always – the idea was always to go to the cable streaming places. Like we didn’t really ever entertain pitching this to networks. I and Mike Schur under overall deals at Universal Television, so it started out – we pitched to Universal and then kind of going from there we plotted out where we were going to take the show. But, yeah, in the very early iterations as Paul – my co-creators Paul Downs and Lucia Aniello and I were talking about this idea. We just always knew it had to be for streaming or cable. It’s just baked into the idea.

**John:** Great. So we’ll put a link in the show notes to this, but it talks through sort of what broadcast network and streamer deals are like and you can see where things are at right now. And the good news is that it’ll keep going forward. So each year they’ll be able to put up an update to see what progress is being made, or if stuff is retrenching at all.

A bit of follow up here. Two episodes ago we talked about getting fired. Phil in LA wrote in. Megana could you tell us what Phil said?

**Megana Rao:** Yeah. So Phil wrote in and said, “I listened to Episode 506 where you discussed how to handle being fired. While bad communication isn’t limited to screenwriting, it doesn’t need to be the practice. In Episode 399, Notes on Notes, instead of accepting the status quo on notes you and Craig created a program to help producers learn to give better notes and fix communication issues. The same could be done on this issue as well. And industry build on relationships and communication needs a bedrock of respect. And important moments like firing need to have established norms.”

**John:** Yeah. My daughter just applied for her first job. She’s a high schooler. And so she applied for her first job and she keeps asking like when do you think they’re going to tell me if I got the job or didn’t get the job. And I’m like they’re never going to tell you.

**Jen:** Oh, you’ll never know. I’m still waiting to find out if I got a job at Jimmy Kimmel from a packet I submitted in 2008. So, you just never know.

**John:** Well you’re in a position now to hire people, or to fire people if you need to. So, what are some things that you’re thinking about in terms of communication outward with people that are either under your employ or want to be under your employ?

**Jen:** It’s a good question. I mean, I think when it comes to hiring, and especially firing, there are just difficult conversations that you have to have. And with the privilege of getting to be a showrunner, getting to be a show creator, getting to be the boss you are also taking on the responsibility of having difficult conversations. And so I think you can’t shy away from that. I think you have to say, OK, if this person is being let go we’re not just going to do it in an unethical way where we don’t treat them like a human being. We’re going to have a conversation.

And so it’s about being a human being and just treating that person like a human being and saying, OK, this is going to be a difficult conversation and it’s probably not what I want to do with my day to day, but I at least owe this to someone to talk to them about it.

**John:** Well from a writer perspective the golden rule really applies. You know what it would feel like to be ghosted or to be fired in a bad way. We can understand what that’s like. And so even though we may not be trained as managers, which is a whole separate issue, we do have a sense of what it feels like to be the writer who is not getting the full information. And so just being honest with the person and just being thoughtful and human with the person seems to be great progress.

**Jen:** I listened to you guys talk about it and as someone who works primarily in TV, not in features, I knew this as a fact but it is so fascinating that in features it does seem like you have to get so much more used to being fired than in television. Like in television, you know, maybe you work on a show for a season and they don’t ask you back, but even that doesn’t totally feel like firing. It feels like in features it’s a much more common occurrence that people have not figured out how to handle well still.

**John:** Talk to me about not being asked back. Because that is a different thing than being fired. And it doesn’t have the same negative connotation as being dropped off of something.

**Jen:** No, not at all. You know, I have friends who have run rooms and they’ve not asked people back the next season and it’s never necessarily because, oh, that person was bad and didn’t work. Sometimes you’re just like oh you know what going forward we found that the tone of the show is way more dramatic than we thought and so we’re going to try to hire some people with more experience in drama for example. And so that really just becomes looking at every single, the makeup of your writer’s room, who do you need, what are you feeling you need more of, what direction is the story headed, and who can help you serve that?

So a lot of times I think if someone doesn’t get asked back, like yeah sure there are situations where it was just a bad fit and that person didn’t gel with the room, but it doesn’t – like you said, it doesn’t have the same stigma. It’s not quite the same as being fired and told like, OK, you’re not doing this job again on Monday basically.

**John:** It also strikes me that with so many shows being done in mini rooms are being entirely written before anything is being shot, there’s not that same expectation that you’re going to be coming back season after season on a show. Because those people will not be available necessarily. So you’re just kind of assembling a team for one heist.

**Jen:** Exactly.

**John:** And then you go off again.

**Jen:** Exactly. Like there’s so many shows now, so many opportunities. So you can’t really expect – like we have some wonderful writers who wrote on season one of Hacks, but they might get their own. They’re doing their own stuff. They might get a pilot. They might not be available for that reason. Yeah, it’s very much so one heist at a time, one season at a time.

**John:** Let’s talk about the staffing up on a show. So, this is a good transition between your role as a showrunner now versus when you were first starting up. You mentioned that you had submitted a packet to Jimmy Kimmel. What were your first jobs in the industry? What were your first attempts at writing in the industry? Because you were an intern also, correct?

**Jen:** Yeah. So long before I worked I was a kid who just was like obsessed with television. Reruns of the Mary Tyler Moore Show on Nick at Nite was like that’s what raised me. Because my parents kind of kicked the can down the road on that one. And so I was obsessed with television from a very young age. I didn’t really know that it was a job someone could do until maybe towards the end of high school. And then I realized like, OK, it seems like NYU has a very good film and TV program. I’m going to apply there. And I got in. And I studied film and TV there.

I went through the film and TV program which is actually more for directors, but pretty quickly learned that I did not like directing and only wanted to be a writer. And so at NYU the thing that was an incredible privilege of being at NYU was that you’re in the city during the school year so you can apply for these internships that people at other colleges can really only do during their summer breaks. So my senior year I interned at Late Night with Conan O’Brien and Saturday Night Live. Kind of found myself in this insane situation where I was going to 30 Rock six out of seven days a week as a 21-year-old because I was able to do, yeah, three days at Conan, three days at SNL, which was an incredible learning experience.

It was actually 2007, so it was an incredible learning experience which was then cut short because of the writers’ strike. So I got to also see how all of that stuff was going down.

**John:** Tell me like it was an incredible learning experience because they had set it up to be, or because you were doing something that you actually – were you being entrepreneurial about your learning there?

**Jen:** Kind of a combination. They definitely were very kind people who I think wanted interns to learn from being there. But I lucked into a very specific role at Saturday Night Live which was I was a photography intern, which made no sense because I have absolutely no photography skills whatsoever. But that’s just the department I ended up in. And in being a photography intern you are tasked with going down – at least this was how it was in 2007, I don’t know if it still is now – but we were tasked with going down on the floor and taking photographs of the dress rehearsal, like on the Friday, the day before the show on Saturday. And so I had like this firsthand front row view of the sketches being worked out, the actors running through them, the writers whose sketches it were being on the floor, figuring stuff out, what works, what didn’t.

And that was just so incredibly fascinating. So it was kind of a combo. Any time you’re in an environment like that hopefully your eyes are wide open. You’re listening and you’re just trying to take in as much as you can to learn. And then I also kind of lucked out with the position I got.

**John:** That’s great. So you were there to see the tension of sort of like these are the sketches we think are going to work. These are the tweaks we’re making. Just all of the stuff that gets cut.

**Jen:** Exactly.

**John:** And you’re seeing the writers trying to save their things along the way.

**Jen:** Exactly. And just seeing firsthand what a high pressure environment it is. I mean, it’s been well documented, but that show it’s like really crazy that you are under that kind of time limit. And there’s a gun to your head and it’s like, OK, the show happens Saturday, figure it out. You’ve got to write 12 sketches or whatever it is. And they need to be done by Saturday by 11:30 and it’s Tuesday or whatever. And so that was also just kind of a good intro into realizing like, oh yeah, a lot of these TV writing jobs are super high pressure and can be really intense.

**John:** Were those writers on the show talking with you? I mean, I guess you were the photography intern at SNL, so you weren’t probably interfacing so directly with them. But something like Conan O’Brien did you have a role of actually working with them?

**Jen:** Yeah. SNL was like you said I was more in the photo department for that. But I remember at Conan there’s a long term Conan writer, I think he might be at Colbert now, this guy Brian Stack who is just the funniest, loveliest man and he would always come into the bullpen where the interns were and talk to us and say like how are you guys doing, and any questions we had we were able to ask. So like, yeah, you did mingle with the writers there a lot, which was amazing, because you’re getting to see the people doing what you hopefully – what you want to be doing. And so that was a great experience, too.

**John:** So you come out of these internships and NYU with a degree, but also hopefully some writing samples? What were you trying to do next after this experience?

**Jen:** I knew that I wanted to work in comedy. But I wasn’t quite sure what lane I wanted to pursue. And by that I mean I was taking classes at UCB. I was taking improv classes. I was taking sketch writing classes. I had some half-hour samples that I had written at NYU. But I was also doing standup. And that’s kind of an interesting thing about comedy is that there’s so many – if you are like I want to write movies, you’re like I’m writing movies. But if you’re more broadly like I know I’m interested in comedy and I want to work in comedy there are a bunch of different kind of paths you can dabble with.

And so I was doing a bunch of that and pretty quickly like the things that I was having no fun doing I realized like, OK, that’s not for me. I’m not meant to be a standup. That’s not going to happen. And so the way it happened that I got my first actual job in the industry is that when the writers’ strike happened and so SNL and Conan kind of shut down and didn’t really need interns for a bit there was a satirical newspaper called The Onion which I’m sure people are super familiar with.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Jen:** Which was like a huge touchpoint for me comedically. Like one of my first big comedic influence was The Onion. I just loved it. And I spent my last semester at NYU interning there because they at the time were doing web videos based on Onion headlines and articles. And so I worked there at The Onion and then as I graduated I just got a job in a coffee shop because had rent to pay and wasn’t sure the exact path I was going to take to make it in comedy.

But my two bosses there at the time, Will Graham and Julie Smith, they were tasked with running shows – The Onion did a show for Comedy Central and then they did a show for IFC. And these shows were happening at the exact same time, which was pretty crazy. And so they offered me a job of being their assistant and I took it. And so that was my first kind of real TV production experience.

**John:** These internships were clearly so important for you because you met the people who both inspired you but also gave you a job. So what advice do you have in sort of pursuing one of those internships and how do you land one and how do you make the most of it if you’re in one of those spots?

**Jen:** I think that’s a great question. You really just can’t underestimate what it means to be a kind, good person who seems happy to be there, which sounds like the most simple advice in the world, but I think sometimes people forget it. I think like treat those opportunities like they’re really great opportunities and work hard. And I think you will reap the benefits of it. It’s also a tricky thing because even in the ten or so, 13 years since I was doing that we’re having more conversations about what is free labor, are these internships totally ethical? So I also understand that you might find yourself in a situation where you’re like am I being taken advantage of.

But hopefully in a situation like mine was where I was being compensated in the form of school credit and I was treated with respect. I was able to I think work really hard and be available and engaged with the people I was working for and serve their needs and learn from them. And I think it led them to be like, OK, maybe she’s someone we should bring on in a more fulltime capacity.

**John:** What was the first thing you were hired to write, that you were paid to write for film or TV?

**Jen:** So the first thing I was paid to write freelance was actually Onion headlines. While being an assistant there I wanted to also be writing and so I asked if I could submit headline. And Megan Ganz actually who is a very talented writer who co-created Mythic Quest on Apple, she was an editor at The Onion at the time. And so I submitted to her and she gave me such helpful notes on why this headline works, why that one didn’t, and all this. And she kind of guided me through that.

**John:** Talk to me about an Onion headline. Because I have a sense of what it is, but it’s hard to break down specifically what it is. But is it really the order of words?

**Jen:** That can be one part of it, right? Like, oh, this needs to be more succinct. There’s too many words here. You can cut these ones out. Other times it would be like just the general premise of the idea. It’s like I kind of get the observation you’re going for here but it’s not clicking for me. Things like that. And then I eventually got hired as a freelance Onion headline writer. And so that was every week you submit Onion headlines and they send back, OK, here’s the 40 we picked and your initial would be next to yours if yours made it in. And then you don’t even know if they’re going to use them, but those are at least these the ones they’ve culled down they’ve picked that they’ve liked.

And then if they did eventually use them I think you got a $25 check in the mail. So that was my first freelance job, which again I loved because I just loved The Onion so much and I felt so grateful to be getting to write for it.

And then my first fulltime staff job was writing monologue jokes at Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

**John:** So that was a job you probably went through a packet process?

**Jen:** Yes. That was a packet process. I was lucky enough to get a manager through a UCB class I took. The teacher very nicely said, “Oh I think my friend who is a manager would like your stuff, can I pass it along to her?” And he did. And to this day she’s still my manager. So through that I started submitting packets to late night shows. And, yeah, did a bunch of those that I am pretty sure I didn’t get the job for because I never worked at those shows.

**John:** In all those cases you’re submitting – you or your manager are putting this in and you just never hear back? For all you know they’re just going into a void?

**Jen:** Oh, you never, ever hear. Basically like, OK, SNL is looking for sketch packets. Conan is looking for monologue joke packets. And so you just do it and you send it out into the world and, yeah, you typically don’t hear.

I remember the monologue one for Fallon, it was like a weeklong, almost challenge or something. You would every night get sent premises and then you would have to send in your jokes either later that night or by the next morning. And you did that for like four days.

**John:** And you’re not getting paid for that.

**Jen:** No, you’re getting absolutely no money for that.

**John:** That’s why the WGA sort of stepped in there and said like, OK, you have to limit that.

**Jen:** Exactly. Yeah. I mean, it’s a good question. I’ve been out of the late night game for so long now. What is the situation with packets now?

**John:** So, here’s what happened. Both on the east, but also some on the west, we were getting these complaints about, OK, this has just become abusive. They’re asking for just tremendous amounts of just free labor to do these things. And even if that stuff is not making it into show, it’s just abusive.

**Jen:** It’s not cool.

**John:** It’s not cool at all. And so there are limits to sort of how much they can ask. And trying to get some standardization of like what packets really mean, so that you can theoretically submit a packet to more than one place, so it’s not all specific work to this. And if there’s real research involved at some point they have to pay you for like those later rounds, because some of these shows were having round after round after round you have to go through.

**Jen:** So crazy. Yeah. So unnecessary to make people jump through those hoops.

**John:** And it was clear when you talked to some of the people who were hiring it’s like they were just doing it because they were doing it. And it wasn’t actually helpful in their process.

**Jen:** Yes. That’s one of those things. And I do feel like in the late night world this happens even more than in half hour of like ways of doing things just get calcified and people go, “But it’s just because it’s the way it’s done. That’s how we do it.” Even on SNL they still stay up all night writing when I don’t know that that necessarily needs to be the process. It’s so good that the guild got involved to challenge these ideas of like, yeah, just because it’s the way it’s always been done doesn’t mean it’s actually cool to be doing to people.

**John:** Yeah. So it sounds like you knew in the general sense you wanted to write comedy, but you decided I’m going to try all the things and then decide from those things which things are not my things. So standup was not your thing.

**Jen:** Standup was not my thing. I am really not a performer. It is not where I shine.

**John:** So UCB was learning sketch writing.

**Jen:** Yes, UCB was sketch writing, which I liked OK, but I still wasn’t great at. And so what happened actually was around this time, I guess this was probably now 2010, before Twitter became a hell scape it was a place where people were just writing stupid jokes. And in a really cool way it kind of democratized comedy writing a little bit because anyone could just write a funny joke. And if it was funny enough a ton of people would see it and get retweeted. And a lot of people made their careers by doing that, which was cool.

And so I joined Twitter in like 2010 and started just kind of writing little one-liner jokes, which like I said there were things I wasn’t great at. I wasn’t great at standup. I wasn’t great at sketch. But I found that one-liner jokes I had a lot of fun writing those. And so I always tell people when they’re starting out in comedy like kind of follow the fun. The thing you’re having the most fun doing is probably the thing you’re best at.

So I just was doing that on Twitter and what’s funny is I had submitted – like I said I had submitted to Fallon many times. I had done that week-long challenge of sending jokes in every night, not getting any sleep, and never hearing back. But what happened was is A.D. Miles, the head writer at that time, learned of me through Twitter and then just sent me a direct message being like, “Hey, do you want to submit a packet for Fallon?” Which I was like, yes, of course, even though what I could have said is, “Yeah, I’ve done it hundreds of times. Just hire me off one of those.”

But they were actually looking for sketch writers at the time, so I had to a sketch packet. Got hired off of that. And then though quickly again since sketch is not really my strong suit I started also – even though it’s divided into up into sketch and monologue writers at that show, or at least it was when I was there, anyone is allowed to submit monologue jokes. You can just send them in.

So I started doing that and getting a decent amount on. And then it kind of became apparent, oh, this is more your skill set. We’re going to move you over to here. And then I became a permanent monologue joke writer for the rest of my time there.

**John:** What I hear you saying is that you didn’t go in saying this is exactly the kind of writer I am. You actually sort of discovered and you just tried a bunch of things. And then winnowed out the things that didn’t work. And so if people are listening to this at home who say, oh, I want to write comedy, maybe take a broad approach to what kind of comedy you’re writing and see where your natural strengths are.

**Jen:** Exactly.

**John:** Rather than assuming I’m the person who is going to write this exact show.

**Jen:** Exactly. I think that when I started, you know, growing up, even though I loved – like Mary Tyler Moore was, again, a huge influence, I also loved SNL. And I think a big part of me was like oh I’m going to be a sketch writer for Saturday Night Live. That’s what I want to do. And I think if I had just tried to like force myself into that it would have been a much tougher path because, again, I don’t think my natural skill set, I don’t think sketch writing is something that I’m great at. And so by trying a bunch of different things and allowing myself to go, right, I’m having the most fun doing this thing, let me follow that, I think that’s the thing I’m best at, it allowed me to find what my path was.

And so, yeah, I think anyone starting out, especially in comedy when there are so many different ways to approach it, I think give yourself the freedom to try a bunch of stuff, and be bad at some of it. And just because you’re bad at one part of comedy writing doesn’t mean you’re bad at the other parts. You know?

**John:** Now, what’s the segue from Fallon to writing for shows, writing for Broad City, writing for Parks and Rec? What was the step in there?

**Jen:** So I was at Fallon for about 2.5 years, which I always say felt like 20.5. Not because of the people there. They’re lovely. But because monologue joke writing is so grueling. You basically – I think every morning by 11:30 in the morning I would have to have like five pages of monologue jokes written, something like that. And let me be clear. Most of them bad. They’re not good. It’s not a good five pages. But still you’re expected to produce this volume of stuff. And it’s all based on the news. And it really – I think the people who can do it forever, like I truly tip my cap to them, because it’s really challenging and it’s really hard. And especially as the world seems to be getting darker and darker it’s hard to write topical jokes based on the news. That really, really weighed on me after a while and I was gone in 2013.

So I really appreciated the job there because – I say it was comedy writing boot camp because I just had to produce so much material every single day. But pretty like towards the end of my time there, like the last year, I realized I think I want to tell longer stories. I want to explore writing for characters and characters that have arcs and just get into that. So I knew that half hour was the place I wanted to be.

And so I made the decision to just leave. I didn’t have my next job lined up, which I remember at the time people were like why are you doing this. But sometimes I think you just have to force yourself to make the move. So I left Fallon. My then boyfriend at the time, now husband, we moved across the country. Came to LA. I wrote a spec of, wow, this is going to date me. I wrote a spec Happy Endings. Do you remember that how?

**John:** It’s a good show.

**Jen:** Yeah, I loved Happy Endings. Very funny show. So I wrote a spec for that and that was my sample, because I think even back then half hour people were looking more for specs than original pilots. And, yeah, I got hired. My first half hour job was actually the show Hello Ladies, on HBO, which was co-created by Stephen Merchant and Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky. So that was my first half hour experience.

But that was a pretty short – it was like an eight-episode HBO show. One of those shows where you kind of are going to write everything in preproduction and then they’re going to go off and make it. And so towards the end of my time in that writer’s room I also came to know Mike Schur via Twitter. And he I guess, yeah, liked jokes I had written there. And then I think he read my spec, but I honestly think he also hired me based off of Twitter and just meeting me and being like, all right, she’s not a total crazy person.

**John:** So that was for Parks and Rec?

**Jen:** That was for Parks and Rec.

**John:** And again these are very joke dense shows. These are things where there’s expectation that there’s going to be a joke every 10, 15 seconds.

**Jen:** Yes. Totally. Yes.

**John:** So from there then back to New York for Broad City?

**Jen:** Yes. I did my first season of Broad City in between the last two seasons of Parks and Rec. It kind of worked out beautifully where I think the day we ended season six of Parks I got on a plane and went to New York and started the Broad City season two writer’s room. And I did that for a couple months. And then came back.

And then going forward Parks and Rec ended. I went on to a show, Lady Dynamite on Netflix. I did that in the interim. And then once The Good Place started I was always kind of – I was never again fulltime in the room in Broad City. I was always just writing a script from LA while they were in New York and giving notes on episodes and punch ups and stuff like that.

So I was very lucky in that I was able to be on The Good Place fulltime, but also be working on Broad City as well.

**John:** Great. So you’ve mentioned all the people who seemed to be involved with Hacks. So talk to me about where did the idea for Hacks come about and how did the three of you, but also Mike Schur and everyone else come together on this property?

**Jen:** So Paul W. Downs, and Lucia Aniello, and I, we met doing comedy in New York. Lucia and I were the only two women in this sketch group that was kind of like an offshoot. It was all people who had met at UCB. And then slowly but surely the sketch group stopped emailing us to come to the meetings and we both realized, OK, I think we’ve been let go from this sketch group. Cool.

But, we instantly connected and shared a sense of humor. And I loved her and I was desperate to make her my friend. And then she was dating Paul and was also comedic partners doing sketches with Paul. And same thing. We hit it off. And I was lucky to just kind of be in their orbit for a while. If they had sketches and stuff I would pitch jokes and they went and they made their movie Rough Night. And I was on set as a punch up writer for that.

And so we just always loved writing together and knew that we wanted to make something together one day. So what happened was Paul was doing a Netflix Characters special, which I don’t know if you guys have seen, but it was basically just a bunch of sketches he was shooting. I came along just to pitch jokes for them. And we went to Maine. We were going to a monster truck rally. So the idea for Hacks was born out of a monster truck rally.

Paul has a character called Jasper Cooch, whose catchphrase is Big Trucks. And he was being allowed to just host the monster truck rally in Portland, Maine. They gave him the mic even though – like he could have absolutely said there’s a bomb in here and caused and incredible panic. But they trusted him. And so on this road trip we met up in Boston and then we drove to Portland, Maine for this monster truck rally.

And I don’t know how we got on the topic, but we started talking about comedians, particularly female comedians, and women in the arts in general and how maybe they hadn’t gotten their due the way their male counterparts had. And how it’s just such a harder path for women, like how they had to keep their heads down and pound the pavement and put up with so much bullshit frankly while, yeah, for other comedians who were maybe straight white men, they didn’t have as hard of a path.

And so we just kind of started talking about characters like that. And wanting to tell a woman like that story. And that was sort of the birthplace of Hacks.

**John:** All right. So for listeners who haven’t seen the show yet, let me give you the briefest logline so you get some sense of what we’re going to be talking about today. Hacks is a limited series, well now it’s going into its second season, so it’s a series about a legendary Vegas comedienne who hires on a disgraced, young Hollywood writer to freshen up her act. And their relationship is alternately contentious, very contentious, and maternal. And it feels like it’s mostly a two-hander.

**Jen:** Yes.

**John:** And yet other characters have some storytelling power. So Paul W. Downs plays an agent who can drive scenes by himself. Marcus who is her COO can also drive scenes by himself. How early in the process did you know who the characters were and sort of what the shape of the show was going to be?

**Jen:** Well, I think you’re right that it is a two-hander. That’s very much so like in the DNA of the show. That’s kind of what it was born out of. It was this idea of, OK, what if it’s this woman who has been through so much and has so much trauma from what she’s done, but also amassed this empire, making so much money doing it. And then what if there was a younger woman who didn’t fully appreciate what this woman has been through and has also maybe like so many women like this, the younger writer has the story about her wrong. Because so often we get women like this, we get their story wrong. And something gets pushed in the media and people just blindly go along with it. And only in the last few years when we look at when like Britney Spears or Paris Hilton have we started to reevaluate these stories we’ve believed about women in the public eye.

And so that was kind of the genesis of, OK, they’ll be forced to work together and they will butt heads, but actually they both really need each other. And at the heart of it it’ll be a love story. It’ll be about these two women falling in love with each other through their friendship, through their working relationship, and how does that change them and what new places does it bring them to.

But then you also are correct to bring up Marcus and Paul’s character and Kaitlin Olson who plays Jean Smart’s daughter so wonderfully. We knew we wanted to fill out Deborah’s ecosystem, right? We’re very interested in the idea of people like Deborah who are empires. Like I said they have a very carefully curated ecosystem around them. They have enough money and enough power that they get to choose all the people in their world, and there’s a lot of people in their world whose job it is to only fulfill their needs and think about them. And so someone like Marcus, played by the wonderful Carl Clemons-Hopkins, we wanted to explore the idea of well what does it mean that Marcus has devoted his entire adult life to working for Deborah and building something up for her. And also taking from her this kind of workaholic attitude and how does he reckon with but is that fulfilling him, is that fulfilling his soul.

**John:** And it’s not into late in the series that we learn that he’s actually a fan. That he got the job because he was a super fan.

**Jen:** Exactly. And we just I think never wanted any one character to feel purely like an accessory, which is a challenge to do that because even though it’s streaming you only have so much time. You only can afford to shoot so many pages in a day. So it’s definitely a balancing act of trying to give – when it’s a two-hander but also kind of also an ensemble, giving the other players in the ensemble rich storylines that feel and grounded and interesting.

So, I hope that we achieved that because that definitely was our goal going into it.

**John:** Let’s take a listen to a scene. This is a scene from the pilot in which Deborah Vance is meeting with the owner of the casino who is trying to tell her that basically she’s going to lose her theater and this job that she has is going to be ending. Let’s take a listen to it, then I want to get to what’s actually on the page.

[Clip plays]

**Marty:** You know how I’m redoing the casino’s east tower?

**Deborah:** Oh yeah.

**Marty:** So the contractor double orders everything. And what the hell am I supposed to do with two tons of fertilizer?

**Deborah:** Dumb it on Steve Wynn’s doorstep.

**Marty:** Bingo.

**Deborah:** Marty, you set me up.

**Marty:** Deb, 2,500 shows. Now, I think it’s a Vegas record.

**Deborah:** It is.

**Marty:** Well cheers.

**Deborah:** Cheers.

**Marty:** And they’re naming a street after you.

**Deborah:** I know. Deborah Vance Drive. It’ll probably be a dead end with an abortion clinic on it.

**Marty:** [laughs] Now that the big show is all planned, maybe it’s a good time to talk about the future. You know you’ll always be a part of the Palmetto’s history. But maybe it would be good if you did a few less shows a year.

**Deborah:** Good for who?

**Marty:** Yeah. I need some marquee dates for new acts. Like Pentatonix.

**Deborah:** What the hell is that?

**Marty:** They’re a beatbox forward acapella group. They do medleys. They won the Sing Off.

**Deborah:** Who gives a shit?

**Marty:** I have two buckets to fill. Families and idiots in their 20s. The families want to see singing and dancing and the college kids want to spend a grand to watch a guy in a helmet hit play on an iPod.

**Deborah:** You’re forgetting about your third bucket. People from Florida. They love me. And my numbers are strong.

**Marty:** You’ll still be doing shows, just not Friday and Saturday.

**Deborah:** Oh, just the most important nights. Un-fucking-believable.

**Marty:** Deb. Why do you even want to do 100+ shows a year? It’s not like you’re having fun. I mean, you’re on cruise control up there.

**Deborah:** I fucking wish – wish I was on cruise control. I’ve been defense my entire career thanks to assholes like you.

**Marty:** Deborah, calm down. Please.

**Deborah:** Oh, what do you care, you own the place. The service sucks. Where’s my fucking doggie bag? I’ll take his, too. And the fork! There was a cockroach in my salad.

**Marty:** Shit. Comp everybody.

**Waiter:** OK.

[Clip ends]

**John:** Great. Let’s take a look at the words that are actually on the page. So this is starting on page 5. This is scene 114 of the script. There’s a lot of changes at the head of the scene. So the script starts with another conversation about being wealthy. It’s about a yacht and an infrared sauna. At what point did that change?

**Jen:** So what you see here on the page we did shoot. We came into it writing the scene like first thinking OK we need to set up what is the dynamic between Marty and Deborah. And the idea being, OK, well one they connect over rich people shit. So they’re talking about their yacht and infrared sauna and that. And then also as – spoiler – but I don’t think we have to worry about that, as the series progresses you see that they have romantic history these two characters. And so there’s also a line here where Deborah says, “Oh yeah.” He says, “Remember my first 70-footer,” talking about his yacht, “Remember that one?” She says, “Oh yeah, we had some fun on that.” And it’s kind of a coy moment where they’re alluding to their sexual history.

But as we got into the edit room it just felt like this is such a lesson in storytelling you learn time and time and time again. Get to the action, get to the crisis. Also, I think once we saw obviously Jean Smart phenomenal. Chris McDonald is incredible, too. Their characters feel so lived in from the moment they appear on screen. We realized like, oh, we overwrote. We didn’t need to write stuff to establish their dynamic.

**John:** You gave them a big onramp that they did not need.

**Jen:** Exactly. Exactly. Trust your actors. Capable actors can communicate that even without words. It’s how they’re interacting with each other. It’s how they’re laughing at each other. It’s how they’re truly sitting across the table from each other. So what happened was is that in the edit we just realized oh their dynamic is clear. This is overwritten probably. Let’s just get right to the heart of the scene which is Deborah finding out your dates are getting taken away from you.

**John:** Great. So the lines we hear in the show, are those just looped lines that you threw in? Did you shoot alternates on the day?

**Jen:** We shot alts on the day. Because it comes in about the Steve Wynn stuff. One of the benefits to having Paul, Lucia, and I are always on set. I mean, Lucia and Paul direct, so they’re of course there. But the three of us are able to pretty easily rewrite on the fly. If we feel something isn’t working there’s three brains. We can huddle up, come up with something. And so that Steve Wynn kind of leading into it that just came from us at village being like all right let’s try this. And credit to Jean and Chris, too, because they’re so nimble and quick that they can have something thrown at them like that and knock it out of the park.

**John:** Great. On page 7 I want to call out some things you do here. So there’s a great moment early on page 7. So she tells a joke, Deborah Vance Drive, and then she writes it down in her notebook, which is just such a great little detail. Is that something you’ve actually seen in real life, or just something you created for this character?

**Jen:** Yeah. It’s something that I think comes from all of our lives. Like I have on my phone Notes app of just like if a joke or if I see something going into it and writing it. And I know on Broad City they had – I think it was a doc of convos we could have. Things we could just talk about. Things that would be funny to see Abby and Ilana talk about and we’d just go into the Google Doc. So that’s something that feels very true to – I mean, I don’t know if it’s all writers. Maybe it’s more specific to comedians, but just constantly observing things and not wanting to forget them so you write them down in your notebook or on your phone.

**John:** So this lunch is set up on the pretense of just like oh let’s get together, but of course he actually has news to deliver and it’s going to lead up to this argument here. A thing you do on page 7 which works really well is Marty’s dialogue is interrupted by a scene description line that is just actually Deborah’s action here. So Mary says, “Now that the big show is all planned maybe it’s a good time to talk about the future.” Deborah puts down on her drink. “What’s this?” in quotes. He presses on.

And so the “what’s this?” is a reaction that she can give. It’s a line that she can say just with her face.

**Jen:** Yes.

**John:** It’s such a great use of breaking up the dialogue here so that we can actually see what the shift is that happened here.

**Jen:** Yeah. It’s a great way I think to show that Deborah is incredibly perceptive and very smart when it comes to business. And so when someone is gently trying to guide the conversation and maybe sneak something by her it’s like, no, no, no, you’re not getting anything by Deborah Vance. Just come out with it, man. And I think Chris does a great job then of like shifting uncomfortably in the seat because he’s a little bit scared of Deborah Vance. So yeah.

**John:** Without that line in there the delivery of his whole thing wouldn’t work. You’re going to need to have some kind of break in there so to call it out in the text is great. You also on page 7 have “Beat” just as its own line as a sentence. And listening back to it she doesn’t actually take that beat, but it’s a nice – Beat is just used as a placeholder like there’s a shift, there’s a moment, there’s a little air here.

**Jen:** A little air to show that Deborah – and again it’s not really in the version that ended up in the final cut, but yeah to show that Deborah is trying to process this tornado that’s been thrown at her of like what are you talking about, I’m losing these dates. These are the most important thing in the world to me.

**John:** Moving on to the next page, here’s an example of I bet you shot all this and people don’t realize that in the edit you have magic scissors and you can cut anything out. So what was actually probably shot was she says, “My numbers are solid and presales from the holiday are on par with last year.” That shows that she’s savvy and that she’s on it. But you probably recognized you did not need the line, so you just cut back to him and her line disappears.

**Jen:** Exactly. Exactly. It was really like – and I had been in the edit a lot on Parks and Rec and The Good Place, always for our episodes. Mike was super like, yeah, get in the edit and do stuff. But this was, running my own show, I was the most in the edit I’d ever been before. And I was just like oh yeah you can truly do anything in the edit room. So, yeah, we shot those lines and then, again, at this point the conversation is getting heated and they’re kind of speaking on top of each other. And so we just wanted to amp up the pace and the frantic energy of it, so it just made sense to lose those lines.

**John:** Now, the decision of when she actually loses her cool, and even when she loses her cool it’s kind of a performative losing her cool. She recognizes she’s doing this in front of a crowd and that she has power because she’s doing this in the crowd. You’re going, “This hits Deborah, then she explodes.” That’s done as scene description but then there’s a parenthetical, hitting the table, getting loud, really emphasizing that this is going to color her vocal performance in this next piece.

**Jen:** Yeah. We knew that this was the moment where we wanted her to lose it because someone like Deborah Vance being told you’re on cruise control, even though it is somewhat maybe true with regard to the quality of her material or how much she’s updated it, she is a woman who like we talked about has had to fight and claw for her position. And so the idea of someone telling her, especially a man telling her, you’re on cruise control is so opposite to what she believes about herself to be true, which is that she is a shark. She just keeps moving. She’s never on cruise control. She’s always fighting, and fighting, and fighting. And so hearing this makes her really lose her top. And yeah.

**John:** So this is a dramatic moment but you’re still in a comedy, and so that’s why you have the runner of the doggie bag coming back. And so can you talk about the shape of this scene and sort of how much did this change in the writing from its initial conception. Was this the scene you kind of always envisioned it to be, or how much did it change as you approached it?

**Jen:** This one I would say of all the scenes in the pilot this one changed quite a bit. We definitely reworked this one more than we reworked some others because it’s such a pivotal scene. It’s the inciting incident for this change Deborah is going through.

**John:** The series would not happen if this scene didn’t happen.

**Jen:** Exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, it was a lot of rewriting in terms of like we talked about at the beginning, OK, how much of their dynamic do you need to set up, do you understand who Marty is. I think we got a note at one point that like someone didn’t understand his role, that he owned the casino. So I think that’s where some of the Steve Wynn stuff came in from.

So we rewrote it a decent amount. And I think the beat where she grabs the fork and stabs his steak and throws it, like that came later. She always was going to freak out, but I don’t remember that – that was a later pitch. And, again, you’re also rewriting on the day. And I got to give a shout out to Jean Smart. That “I found a cockroach in my salad” line, that was improvised. She just yelled that as she walked out and we thought it was hilarious and we kept it in.

So this scene went through a lot of rewriting. It was always, OK, he’s telling her he’s cutting back her dates. That was always what was happening. So that never changed. But a lot of the pieces around that inciting incident did change.

**John:** Now the pilot is working on basically parallel tracks. So we’re seeing what’s happening in Deborah’s life, and what’s happening in Ava’s life. And as she’s going to Las Vegas to meet with Deborah about potentially writing for her. They finally meet at the end of the show at it does not go well. It’s a long scene, so we’re going to play just a smaller clip from it, but let’s take a listen to the actual interaction between Ava and Deborah.

[Clip plays]

**Deborah:** So why are you here?

**Ava:** Oh, well, obviously it would be a huge honor to work with someone like you, who has been working so successfully for so long. I mean, you’re a legend.

**Deborah:** Wow. A legend. So you’re a fan?

**Ava:** I mean, of course. Would I be here if I wasn’t?

**Deborah:** What’s your favorite joke of mine?

**Ava:** Man. You know. That’s so hard.

**Deborah:** Well it shouldn’t be. I’ve written over 30,000. Just pick one.

**Ava:** Uh…you know what? I would have to say that your TV show is my personal favorite thing that you’ve ever done.

**Deborah:** You mean my sitcom from 1973? You’ve seen it?

**Ava:** Oh yeah. I mean, yeah, I’ve seen clips.

**Deborah:** Clips? Wonderful.

**Ava:** Um, yeah. Well, you know, a lot of the actors on the show that I most recently worked on were standups.

**Deborah:** You know, I’m going to stop you right there. I don’t work with writers.

**Ava:** You don’t?

**Deborah:** No. Jimmy sent you against my wishes.

**Ava:** I’m going to kill him.

**Deborah:** No, I’m going to kill him.

**Ava:** Great. Well, this sucks.

**Deborah:** Yeah. Sucks. Well at least you didn’t waste too much time researching me.

**Ava:** I’m sorry. Did I do something to offend you?

**Deborah:** Other than walk those chimney sweep boots on my silk rug? Um, no.

**Ava:** Sorry, I didn’t realize it was a shoes off situation.

**Deborah:** Well it’s shoe-dependent. Thank you for your time.

[Clip ends]

**John:** Great. So they’re finally meeting. In the actual episode they start to meet and then of course DJ the daughter interrupts and so you see all of that drama happen and then they finally get to their discussion. This scene was clearly always going to be part of this first episode, because we have to get these two women together in the room. How early on did you know who Ava was in the show? Like who her character was?

**Jen:** I think pretty early on we knew, too. But that one was certainly more – we learned it more and more as we cast. You know, we had this incredible thing where Jean signed on to do the show and you’re like holy shit we’ve got Jean Smart, and then you’re like holy shit we’ve got Jean Smart. Who is going to be play opposite her that’s like 25 and can go toe-to-toe? Oh no.

So the casting process for Ava was really, really long and intense. We saw I think maybe over 400 women for it. Watched that many tapes. And it was always this thing of what Jean has, what Jean is so incredible at is she can in equal parts do comedy and drama. She’s so skilled in both. And so we knew we were looking for someone who also could do that. Someone who could tell jokes and realistically seem like a comedy writer, so someone who is in their bones funny and you believe that, but also can play the more dramatic parts of this show. And so they had to have some real acting ability.

**John:** So what were you looking at for this? Did you write up sample scenes? Or were they scenes from this pilot?

**Jen:** They were scenes from the pilot. So everyone auditioned with the initial Ava and Jimmy scene in his office where he’s telling her he can’t help her get her job and she’s kind of laying out her situation. So they auditioned with that and then they also auditioned with the Deborah/Ava meeting scene.

**John:** OK. So a version of what we just heard?

**Jen:** A version of what we just heard, yeah.

**John:** And that didn’t burn a hole in your brains? Because I’ve always been reluctant to do that because I don’t want to hear that same scene a thousand times and then actually have to deal with it on the day.

**Jen:** Totally. Mike Schur is a big fan of doing fake audition sides because that’s I think part of it. He does not want to hear the same scene over and over and over. And it definitely at a certain point did burn a hole in our brains. I remember just being like I can’t hear this Ava/Jimmy scene one more time. It’s not working.

So, but what was interesting is that there were a lot of really wonderful, talented women who read the part, but for whatever reason a lot of the times we heard the scene Ava just came off as pretty whiny and it was not what we wanted it to be. And then when Hannah Einbinder, who plays Ava, auditioned it just felt different with her reading it. She was like projecting the strength and confidence of a 25-year-old who thinks they know everything, but also there was some very obvious vulnerability right below the surface that felt like she was also accessing, which made Ava not feel whiny and made her just feel like a very interesting character to us.

And so I think what was helpful was even though we had to hear these scenes over and over and over and go through the process of like oh no this isn’t working, junk all the thing in our darkest moments, once we heard it with Hannah and certainly when we heard it in the screen test with Jean and Hannah reading it it was like oh this works. This absolutely works. Which I don’t think I would have felt that if they were dummy sides that weren’t actually from the pilot.

**John:** We had that experience on Go. As we were seeing a zillion actors for Go, and I started to question like did I even write something that is even castable. And then suddenly you get the actors like, oh, that’s Sarah Polley. I get it. It all works.

**Jen:** Exactly.

**John:** And I wasn’t imagining that there was a person who could fill that.

**Jen:** There’s a certain chemistry that happens between the writing and the actor. And when it’s the right actor you’re going to feel it in your gut in ways that you’re not if it’s maybe not the right person reading it.

**John:** So Hannah Einbinder has the vocal fry of a 25-year-old. Did you hear that voice as you were writing this? And also her tendency to kind of stop in the middle of thought. You write with a lot of ellipses in her dialogue. Was that always part of the voice for it?

**Jen:** Yeah, I think we knew that Ava felt more like kind of a drier sensibility, so that was very baked into the character. I think there are a lot of ellipses, but then I also think that Hannah’s natural – she’s also a very talented standup and if you see her perform she has a very interesting, unique cadence, which is much slower than probably your average 25-year-old up on stage. And so it kind of like naturally lined up that way. But, yeah, that was always kind of – she was written on the page the way we imagined it.

**John:** Looking at the words on the page, on page 29 there’s some cuts here and I’m just curious when the cuts came or if they all came in the editing room. So Jimmy actually sent you against my wishes/I’m going to kill him/no, I’m going to kill him, but feel free to kick the corpse. It’s a joke. Did you try it and it didn’t stick?

**Jen:** So this scene, it’s I think a 7.5 page scene or something. It’s incredibly long. And so we always knew – we knew two things. We knew, well, this show lives or dies by the chemistry between these two characters. So, hopefully the chemistry you’re interested in watching them for 7.5 pages. And if you’re not we’re in trouble anyway. But then we also knew when we get in the edit we’re going to need to trim this down, but let’s just shoot it as is and then see where we’re at.

And so, yeah, that was this “I’m going to kill him but feel free to kick the corpse” line, it totally worked. Jean delivered it perfectly. It just felt like the scene was running a little long.

**John:** It’s a little bit of a detour also. It’s pulling attention to somebody–

**Jen:** Exactly.

**John:** Off the focus here. What happens in the rest of the scene is like we finally get to see Ava kind of monologue and actually have her voice and express her power which is ultimately what impresses Deborah. It’s so fun to actually see somebody sort of cut loose eventually, because we’ve seen Deborah be able to go off, but to actually see – it’s a strange place for an audience to be kind of rooting for both sides of the equation. Because it’s really a true two-hander we’re sort of seeing both sides of the story. And to see them go after each other was just sort of delicious. Just a nice job here at the end of this.

**Jen:** Oh, thank you. Yeah, I mean that was always by design that that was how the scene was going to end. That Ava would let loose and in letting loose and kind of they would start roasting each other the way comedians do and that is their love language. Jokes are their love language. And Deborah would be impressed by Ava’s ability that way. And, yeah, I think it’s written that way and then Jean and Hannah just perform it so wonderfully together. They have such amazing chemistry that we were very happy with how it turned out.

**John:** We have a ton of listener questions, so maybe we can do some speed rounding through some listener questions.

**Jen:** Love it.

**John:** Megana Rao, if you could get us started.

**Megana:** Awesome. Joel asks, “Standup comics seem to get far more freedom to go more controversial while TV writers have to be far more careful with jokes and topics. First, do you think that perception is accurate? And if so how do you find that balance?”

**Jen:** Interesting.

**John:** So standup versus sitcom writers.

**Jen:** I think that, sure, there’s probably a little more leeway given to standups because you are just one person getting on stage one night. You might say something controversial but on the flip side when it’s in a TV show it has to go through so many layers of approval before it actually makes it to air. So I think in the case of jokes that are seen as offensive sometimes I certainly think this when I see it, I’m like how did the – so the initial writer, then the showrunner, then the entire writer’s room, then the studio, then the network, like no one gave a note on this? There are lots of rounds that that could have happened.

I think if it is true that standups are allowed more leeway that way it’s probably because it’s just one person getting up on stage saying something one random night and it’s not going through so many levels of approval. But I have to say as a TV writer it’s not something I think about. I never think like, oh, I wish I could say this controversial thing but I got to get up at the Improv to do it. I don’t really think about, oh, can I get away with saying this or not.

**John:** The incentives are also different for the standup comic. And one of the episodes sort of goes into her trying new material and the standup guy who she confronts. And the incentives are trying to get the laugh, to keep the audience laughing is so different than in a sitcom situation. When it’s just you up on that stage you’re going to say whatever you can do. You just keep saying–

**Jen:** That’s a good point. It’s almost like it’s survival. You just need them to laugh, so you’re probably – who knows what you might say to get that to happen. Whereas, yeah, TV you’re crafting characters and you need to make sure that if someone is saying something controversial it better not be punching down or something that makes this person seem like a horrible person if that’s not the intention.

**John:** Because you don’t have to go home with that standup at the end of the night, but with a sitcom character you want to come back the next week and see that character again.

**Jen:** Exactly. Totally.

**Megana:** Awesome. Nora asks, “So many of my favorite comedies get better the longer they go on. And audiences tend to say stick with it, it gets really good. Why do you think many comedies are growers and not showers?”

**Jen:** I think that is really true. I think it’s – well I think it’s for two reasons. One is, and Mike Schur, again, my mentor and the man I credit with teaching me how to make television, is fond of saying I wish I could just throw out the first episodes of a show when you make it. Because the first eight episodes is kind of this sludge pile of figuring out–

**John:** Parks and Rec, those first episodes are rough.

**Jen:** Yeah. And I think Mike – he would be happy to admit that they were figuring it out. Especially in an ensemble comedy. You are figuring out how are all these characters funny. How are they funny with each other? How does that actor mesh with that actor? And so you are really figuring it out. And so I think when comedies start out maybe not as strong as they get as they progress, it is because the writers, the actors, the crew, everyone is figuring it out a little bit. Comedy, I think there’s chemistry to it. It’s intangible. And you’re trying to capture lightning in a bottle in a lot of ways. And so it takes a little bit of trial and error until you really get there.

And then I think the other reason that comedies feel they get better as they go on is like great jokes come from character. You know, yes, there are some lines on sitcoms where if you just saw them written on someone’s Instagram page you’d be like that’s a funny one-liner. But for the most part jokes are funny because they’re specific to character. Like a Ron Swanson joke can’t be put in the mouth of Leslie Knope or Andy Dwyer because they all have very different character games and world views. And it’s why you love them, because they’re specifically drawn characters.

And so I think when you watch a pilot you don’t know these characters. You don’t know their game. You’re learning them. And it’s the writer’s job to introduce you to them and that takes some time. And so I think as a show goes on you learn these characters, you love these characters, you know their games, so you say like, oh yeah, of course Monica has 11 categories for towels. That’s so her. But you don’t know these characters as well when you’re first watching a show. So I think the longer you spend with them the more you understand them and the more the things they say and do are funny to you.

**John:** You just used a term which I don’t use at all in features. Character game. So what is game?

**Jen:** So character game in comedy is basically like – and this is something that I don’t know in the streaming world if it’s as relevant, but character game is like what is their specific trait that they exhibit over and over again in behavior that is how they are funny. So for example Leslie Knope’s game, and you could say she has multiple games, but one game is she is type A crazy optimistic to a fault. She is like the craziest, hardest worker you’ve ever met in your life. And she does everything in her life 150%. And that is both endearing but also sometimes exhausting to her friends and coworkers. And so that’s the character game.

In the most simplest of terms, like sometimes the character’s game is they’re the dumb one. And that is what gets hit over and over again in their jokes and dialogue and what they do. And so it’s a term that gets used a lot in comedy and I think maybe as comedies become a little more – or at least some of them become a little more grounded, a little more real, maybe we say that less and less because the characters – at least when we were making Hacks like we want the characters to feel like real people, real grounded people.

We don’t all have character games in life. Some of us do. But it’s something that maybe we talk about a little bit less. But certainly in a more traditional comedy network sense you do talk about character game a lot.

**John:** So on the Scriptnotes podcast Craig’s umbrage is his character game?

**Jen:** Exactly. Exactly.

**John:** He goes off and my desire to keep things moving along to segue, like this next question.

**Megana:** Leah asks, “In a previous episode Jac Schaeffer mentioned that she received good advice about staffing people in the room. Pick writers who offer something different from what she already had. Is there a type of comedy that is your strongest? And if so, what types of writers do you look for? For example, physical humor? Adept one lines? Etc.”

**Jen:** That’s a good question. That is really good advice for staffing a room. I think to look for people who fill in the gaps for you, who are stronger in things that you are maybe weaker in. Listen, I’m really good at formatting a script. I’m really good on the keyboard. That’s definitely number one maybe. I guess, let’s see, comedy wise probably I feel stronger in terms of jokes and one liners, like just sort of naturally where I come from from the monologue writing world. I think that maybe in jokes more than I think in story.

Story is something that, you know, I think the longer you work in narrative TV you get better at it, but that certainly wasn’t my strong suit when I started out. And so for example I think I’m always, like when staffing Hacks, looking for people who are really great with story. Really great with coming up with story. Coming up with twists and stuff like that. So, yeah, that certainly is good advice. That if you are staffing you want to find people who do things that you don’t maybe do as well.

**John:** This is an obvious point, but something just occurring to me now. A difference with Hacks is you have two central characters, two women who are telling jokes and are aware that they’re telling jokes because it is their business to tell jokes all the time. So there’s two characters who are aware that they’re funny, which is really unusual actually.

**Jen:** Yeah. Exactly. Most times in comedy people are funny but they don’t know they’re making jokes. And in this show, yeah, they know they’re funny. Making jokes is their business. It’s also been an interesting thing because I think when you write about comedians or comedy writers the bar gets set pretty high I think about how funny they need to be in their every interaction. And it’s funny because as a comedy writer, like I personally – the comedy writers who are constantly making jokes in every day conversation are the worst ones to be around. They’re pretty rough.

I, you know, I’m like – I am a comedy writer, but I’ve had so many people, like my hairdresser one time who shares some clients, some friends with me, and he said, “You know, everyone says Jen is so funny, but I don’t see that side of you.” And I was like, OK, cool. I think comedy writers, you think oh this person is playing a comedy writer they better be cracking wise every line. And that’s just truthfully not – it doesn’t feel like a realistic portrayal of a comedy writer to me anyway.

**John:** Yeah. Our next question was from Jay who asks…?

**Megana:** “What’s the correlation between being funny in person and being funny on the page? How does one get better at one or the other?”

**Jen:** Well, I mean, my hairdresser would like me more if I could learn.

**John:** It’s been my experience, too, is that like there’s people who are really, really funny, but they cannot write it down. They don’t have the ability to write in anyone else’s voice. Actually just something falls apart when they actually try to put it down on paper.

**Jen:** it’s really two different skills. And I think there are some people who are so wildly funny in person and also incredibly funny writers. That certainly exists. Someone like my co-creator Paul Downs is an incredible performer, so he’s so funny in that way, but then also a very talented writer. So it’s not like it doesn’t exist. But I think it’s hard. I think there’s no way to learn to be funny. You know, you either have it or you don’t.

So, what was the second part of the question?

**John:** How does one get better at one or the other? So like obviously people can – you went through UCB and so you learned how sketches works and you also learned some performance stuff, but it wasn’t your natural thing. And there’s going to be an upper ceiling to how good you are going to be as a performer, right?

**Jen:** Yeah. I think so. I think I could have taken a million more classes and they happily would have cashed my checks to do it, but I don’t think I ever – it is not in my wheelhouse to be a dynamic, incredible performer. It just isn’t. And that’s OK.

**John:** And we all know some really tremendous comedic actors who could not be any funnier, but they just cannot write. It’s just not natural to them.

**Jen:** Exactly. It is two very different skill sets. And sometimes you’ll find someone who has both, but it doesn’t always line up. And comedy writing is an interesting, especially TV comedy writing, is an interesting hybrid. Because when you are writing on a TV comedy you’re spending all your time in the writer’s room. And the writer’s room is just sitting around a table, breaking story together, pitching ideas, and then going through a script and pitching jokes for that script. I was shocked to find out my first narrative half hour job how little time you spend in front of a computer. When it’s your draft, you’re out on script, you’re writing the episode, but that’s pretty much it.

And so writer’s rooms are a very social place. You have to be comfortable sitting with five, six, seven, eight – back in Parks I think we had like 16 writers. A room of 15 other people and you have to get comfortable pitching your jokes out loud in front of all of them. And that was a real – again, for someone who isn’t a natural performer, and I’m not like an extrovert, that was a real challenge is to get comfortable learning like, OK, I need to just kind of be performing to pitch this joke for this character. So it is two different skill sets. But when you do work in TV comedy in writer’s rooms both come into play.

**John:** Yeah. On the feature side, if you’re pitching a comedy there’s not an expectation that you yourself are going to be hilariously funny in that pitch, but they need to believe that you actually know what funny is. And so if you’re a humorless person going into that you’re not going to get the job. That’s just how it works.

**Jen:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s tough. What else we got?

**Megana:** OK, a different Jay asks, “How many story arcs ahead do you and the staff have a feel for from the start?”

**Jen:** 1,012. No. There’s no set number to be honest. I think basically from the start what you’re more looking at is kind of, especially in a serialized streaming comedy, you’re looking at your tent poles for the season. You’re saying, OK, tent pole one, they meet, they clash. Then mid-season she’s going to quit, but she’s going to go on this bonding trip and learn more about her, which opens her eyes to new experiences and brings them closer. OK, another tent pole, her old LA life calls her back and she gets an opportunity that way.

You’re laying out the very big story points that you want to hit over the course of the season. And then you’re kind of filling in in between that all the little stories. And that is how it works like on our show, Hacks, which is a little more serialized. On more network TV shows, or even Broad City, those shows they were able to withstand a little more one-off episodes I think. So, I remember Parks and Rec like the beginning of every season we would have a writer’s retreat and part of your assignment for your writer’s retreat was to come up with ten episodes and you would just go to the retreat and then you pitch your ten episode ideas to Mike and we would write them all down on index cards and by the end of this retreat we would have this huge board of all the index cards of just crazy one-off episode ideas. Because a 22-episode network sitcom you have a little more leeway.

One that I pitched I remember was like Donna sends a tweet that she thinks is from her personal account but is actually the Parks Department account and it spirals. And that was just a one-off episode that we did that wasn’t tied to a larger arc. But because there are 22 episodes you had the time and space to do that.

And same on Broad City. Broad City we had much more ability to do kind of like one-off episodes that weren’t tied to a larger arc, even though we did on both Parks and Broad City you’re still telling longer arcs, but for something now like Hacks which is only 10 episodes, there’s less of a need to go, OK, we need to generate 500 episode ideas. It’s much more about these tent poles like I said of knowing where you want your character’s story to start, what’s happening in the middle, what’s happening in the end. And then filling in in between.

**John:** Well in the case Hacks in this first season you established stakes for both of the characters right at the very start. And so we know as an audience that by the end of this series we should have an answer to these fundamental questions about what’s going to happen to these two women.

**Jen:** Exactly.

**John:** Which would not really make sense for something like Parks and Rec. That really wouldn’t make sense because the idea of characters leaving, it just wouldn’t track.

**Jen:** Yeah. And we did some stuff, like Leslie is getting recalled at the beginning of the season, what’s going to happen with that? So we certainly did that. But it was less central to the way the show was built.

**John:** Let’s try one more question from a listener.

**Megana:** Jerry asks, “I’ve heard Breaking Bad and Succession both described as comedies. Atlanta has had at least two horror episodes. And Insecure has had episodes that have brought me to the edge of tears. What are the biggest changes you’ve noticed in the form as of late and what do you see coming over the horizon?”

**Jen:** That’s a great question. And I agree with all those assessments of those shows. Those shows have made me laugh and cry similarly, too. I think it’s really honestly exciting to me. It feels like there’s no longer these strict parameters of like it’s a comedy so it needs to sound and look like this, and it needs to be this one way, and the tone always has to be comedic.

Something with Hacks we talked about all the time is like we wanted it to feel really grounded and we wanted it to feel like real life. And real life is equal parts drama and comedy and you’re switching in between the two tones in a matter of instance sometimes. And so what I think is so exciting about all those shows, you know, the question mentioned is like those shows all play with tone in such a cool way. They can be like, yeah, Insecure can be so funny, but then it also has these real grounded heartfelt moments that do make you cry.

And to me that’s so exciting. Like I want my art that I consume to reflect the real world I live in. And it feels like these half hour shows, or all these shows, not just half hour, are getting closer to reflecting the way the real world is in that it plays with tone and it isn’t just one thing.

So I love that shows are now able to do all these different things and it doesn’t feel like there’s hard and fast rules about what they can do. And as far as what’s on the horizon, I hope that trend just continues because I think it’s really exciting. And I think what’s in, I mean, maybe I don’t know if this is on the horizon, because I don’t know what the future of network comedy is, but maybe because these shows are so successful and people love them like maybe network comedies will also get to be a little more fluid with tone and a network comedy doesn’t have to like you know be just one thing. I think that was something Mike did with The Good Place in such a great way. That is not your typical network sitcom and he was given the chance to make it. And I think people were really excited by that.

So hopefully just kind of playing with tone and the rules and letting things be more fluid is something that will spread to not just streaming or cable but also network.

**John:** A thing I noticed about Hacks and Succession both is that they’re not very classically comedies, and yet the dialogue and how the characters are sort of presented are presented with a sort of comedic voice to them. Comedic things can happen in their universe and it makes sense for them do it. And characters talk in a way that I don’t want to say they feel like they’re written by comedy writers, but it feels like they’re writing at a pitch that can feel funny.

As opposed to something that’s done as a straight drama which just would never happen. And so you can basically take the same outline for a Succession episode and write it as just a true drama and write it as this. And the same things could happen in the scenes but it’s really just how characters are expressing themselves mostly that makes it feel like kind of a comedy.

**Jen:** Which is what I love about that show so much. It’s not just a straight drama. I love the comedic moments. And the specific character, again character games, that they kind of play with. I think that’s what makes that show so rich and run to watch.

**John:** All right. It’s come time for our One Cool Things. I have two short One Cool Things there this week. First is an essay by Zachary Zane that ran in the New York Times a couple weeks ago called You Are Bi Enough. And it’s just a nice way of looking, as we head out of Pride month, bisexuals always kind of feel like should I even be at this party. There’s that sense of like do I even belong here. Am I sort of stealing someone else’s valor for being in the room for this conversation?

And he does a really good job sort of laying out what to do if you’re a bi person who is in a mixed gender relationship and stuff like that. It’s just a really smart essay on approaching that.

Second is much more important for me personally which is that one of the things that has been hardest about the pandemic is it’s been impossible for me to get Caffeine Free Coke Zero, which is my go-to drink.

**Jen:** That is a tough one to find. I’m a Coke Zero drinker too and I never see Caffeine Free Coke Zero.

**John:** It’s really tough. So all the canned beverages took a real hit during the pandemic because there was not enough aluminum to sort of make all of our favorite sodas. But the niche drinks, like the Caffeine Free Coke Zero just became impossible to fill. So my two placeholders have been the Caffeine Free Diet Coke, which is OK. If you can find it, that’s great. And so Megana was able to find it this week. God bless you, Megana. But the other go-to for me has been I have a SodaStream and we always just use it for fizzy water. But they actually sell the syrups to put into it.

And so I was able to track down Caffeine Free Diet Cola syrup for the SodaStream. And if you use just under one ounce in a bottle it is a pretty good approximation of what Coke Zero should be like, what Caffeine Free Coke Zero should be like. So if you’re really jonesing for it – it’s not even really economically advantageous, because I worked it out and it’s $1.50 per liter which is not great.

**Jen:** Not great, no.

**John:** It’s not great. But I mean when you absolutely need it it’s there.

**Jen:** I love that you’re over here doing chemistry, too. You’re in your lab mixing.

**John:** One after another, I’m tweaking the formula to get it just right. And so I would say just under one ounce is what you need to make a perfect caffeine free diet cola.

Jen, what do you have for a One Cool Thing?

**Jen:** My One Cool Thing is my favorite show that I watched over the pandemic, and honestly one of my favorite shows I’ve watched, which is a British show called I Hate Suzie. I don’t know if you guys have seen it.

**John:** I have not. Megana is nodding that she has.

**Megana:** Yeah, I love it.

**Jen:** It is co-created by Billie Piper who stars in it as well. And Lucy Prebble who is a phenomenal writer/playwright. She also writes on Succession actually. But this show is just so, so good. Billie Piper plays this actress who is like somewhat famous. She was like a pop star and now is on a zombie sci-fi show which is like seen OK. And then she’s up for this big career opportunity which is Disney is maybe going to hire her to play an “aging princess.” And so she’s very excited about that.

And right as this opportunity is about to happen her phone gets hacked and compromising photos of her leak. Her with someone who is not her husband. And it is just an eight-episode series. They’re all available on HBO Max. And it’s kind of this exploration of what it means to be a woman in the public eye. What it means to be – just modern womanhood in general. And the performances are just so wonderful. Billie Piper is amazing. It’s one of my favorite performances in a comedy of all time I think.

The woman who plays her manager and best friend, Leila Farzad, I hope I’m pronouncing that right, she’s wonderful. It’s a wonderful show that I feel like not enough people I’ve seen talking about. So, I’m doing the work.

**John:** We’ll start talking about it more.

**Jen:** I love it. Great.

**John:** Great. We’ll do it. 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 Peter Hoopes. 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. You’re on Twitter?

**Jen:** Yes, I am on Twitter. I’m @jenstatsky.

**John:** And we have t-shirts. They are great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find 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 one we’re about to record on Cat Person and the discourse around Cat Person.

Jen Statsky, this was amazing. Thank you so much for coming in.

**Jen:** Thank you so much for having me. This was a real career highlight as a longtime listener.

**John:** Aw, thanks.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right, Jen Statsky. What was your experience with Cat Person before this? So you were aware of the original short story?

**Jen:** Yes, I was aware. I remember reading it back in 2017 and I remember being very struck by it because it came out during the #MeToo movement when I certainly as a woman and I think a lot of women I knew and globally were like reevaluating their relationships with men and interactions with men and just what kind of it meant to be a woman out in the world. And certainly a woman with a sexual life. And so I was very – I thought the story was – I remember reading it and liking it. And then was also was so – I was like, wow, this is like the first viral short story. I couldn’t believe how much Twitter was discussing it and talking about it. So, yes, I was very aware of Cat Person.

**John:** I remember when it broke as well. It was a New Yorker short story by Kristen Roupenian and it just spread everywhere. I think because it was a short story it wasn’t a huge commitment. It wasn’t like a book where you had to read the whole thing. You could sit down and read the thing and like, oh, that was really good. And what struck me as I first read it and it was a lot of part of the discourse originally was it felt like it maybe kind of wasn’t fiction. It felt like it was actually just an essay. It felt like it was a first person thing that she was writing about her own experience. And she said like, no, I’m not, it’s fiction.

The term auto-fiction came up there. The sense of like it felt like autobiography but it was actually fully fiction.

**Jen:** Yeah. And I mean I think partly is because it’s so well-written, or so confidently written that people found it hard to believe it wasn’t someone’s actual experience.

**John:** Yes. And that’s where we get to this week. So, this past week Alexis Nowicki, another author, wrote in Slate saying like, OK, well this is actually based on my own experience, even though she’d never actually met Kristen, the original author. And so we’ll put a link to both things in the show notes. This summary of what Alexis is writing is that she read this short story and everyone was texting her saying like, “This is about you, right? This is about you and that guy?”

And she’s like, yeah, but I never met this woman. I don’t understand how this could be the situation. And she eventually reached out to Kristen Roupenian who said like, yes, I knew that same guy. And while I’m not the person, you sort of are the person who is the other character in the story.

**Jen:** Yes. That must have been such a crazy – I found the essay by, it’s Alexis–

**John:** Nowicki.

**Jen:** Nowicki. I loved the essay. I thought it was really, really well-written and interesting. And she describes coming out of a movie and having like dozens of texts being like, “Is this about you?” People sending her the story. And that must have been such a bizarre, strange experience for a person to go through. And yet it goes into a really nuanced, interesting conversation about art and who owns the details of one’s life. Is it ever OK to just point blank take facts from someone else’s life and use them as fiction? It’s really interesting.

**John:** Well so often on the podcast we do a segment for How Would This Be a Movie and Craig is always arguing you don’t need people’s life rights because facts are facts. And the facts that Roupenian was using here are kind of facts. It was basically she didn’t know this person. She looked up and she had heard about this earlier relationship this guy had had and sort of imagined what this woman was like. And Googled and found real information about where she went to school and where she used to work and was just imagining what this life was. And imagined pretty correctly sort of how a lot of this stuff worked.

But it’s the issue of like nothing was illegal here, but where the ethical boundary is between sort of pulling that stuff in.

**Jen:** Yeah. I mean, I guess what was interesting to me and this Kristen when she did, if you read the essay, you’ll see she apologizes for this eventually. She says I’m sorry I should have taken some of the details and changed them so that it wouldn’t be so directly linked to you, which I do – as a writer myself I can’t picture, yes, it’s of course you don’t need someone’s life rights necessarily. You’re always pulling from different people’s lives and experiences. But I can’t really picture writing something and using such specific details that could easily be traced to a person and not just taking the extra step of changing them slightly so that person wouldn’t think it’s about them.

**John:** Yeah. People were pointing out that it’s always dangerous to be around writers because you never know if you’re going to be sucked into this, but in this case it’s dangerous to be around people who could be around writers.

**Jen:** Yeah. Right. There’s always a writer within a few degrees of connection to you and that’s really dangerous.

**John:** So a thing that I’ve always been aware of as I’ve been around writers is like events will happen, or somebody will say something or things come up. You were saying this before about Deborah writing a joke down in her book. Like as a funny thing happens, who owns that funny thing that happens? Who owns that moment?

**Jen:** I have friends who are standups who talk about this specific issue because they’ll go on tour together. And then when you’re on tour you’re living together. You’re going out to eat. You’re on the bus. And something crazy will happen and then it’s a race to who can craft the joke about it first. Who gets to tell it on stage first? It is a really interesting thing when creative people are together. Who has ownership over it? There’s not really a hard and fast rule about it.

**John:** I also – Dana Schwartz makes this point on Twitter that whenever there’s two people it always feels like you have to declare two sides. And it’s this or it’s that. And you can’t actually say that’s an interesting conversation about this thing. She was in the right, she was in the wrong. She’s trying to claim credit for something that she didn’t actually write. And it makes it more complicated than that. I’m not on either team here. I don’t think they should have teams. I don’t think we’re playing a game.

**Jen:** Right. Twitter always rushes to be judge, jury, and executioner, right? So someone always, yes, exactly, like Dana is saying has to be in the right and someone has to be in the wrong. And what I thought was so interesting about Alexis’s essay is that she wasn’t casting herself as the victim and Kristen as the villain primarily. I thought the essay was so well done because it’s a really nuanced, holistic look of like this very strange thing happened to me. I feel angry about it in this way, but I also see that this person has a particular experience of their own.

So I found it interesting that people didn’t take the hint from the essay which is like I’m not trying to cast, oh, this action was evil and this person should be condemned. I’m just working my way through this specific personal experience that happened and kind of exploring this conversation about art and the ethics of art.

So, yeah, that was interesting. Twitter is not great for nuance.

**John:** What’s also strange about this situation is that the third person in this relationship, so Charles who is the basis of the character, is apparently dead, which is dismissed in a single line and not explained.

**Jen:** I know. My jaw dropped when I got to that part of the essay. And then I don’t know if you saw this, but a lot of people – and again we have no idea – but a lot of people on Twitter took the extra step to say, oh, he killed himself. He must have killed himself because of the negative portrayal in this work of “fiction.”

**John:** I don’t think we know that.

**Jen:** We don’t know that at all. That’s just complete conjecture from people on Twitter, which again like rushing to try to put everyone into the category of villain and good person. It’s just so fascinating. But we have no idea how this man passed away. It’s very sad. It’s a very sad part of the essay and that both of these woman are left I think grieving this person is just like a sad bookend to it.

**John:** And there is theoretically a movie version of this, so the tie in to this is so Nicholas Braun of Succession is apparently supposed to be playing this character.

**Jen:** Right.

**John:** And so it just becomes complicated as reality and fiction and meta fiction overlap.

**Jen:** I don’t know what stage – do you know if they’re–

**John:** I don’t know where they are.

**Jen:** I wonder if the current writer is scrambling now to include this newest twist into the Cat Person saga.

**John:** The next Zola saga.

**Jen:** Yeah.

**John:** Thanks Jen.

**Jen:** Thanks.

Links:

* [WGA Pilot Guide](https://www.wga.org/members/employment-resources/writers-deal-hub/pilot-deal-guide)
* [Hacks on HBO](https://www.hbomax.com/series/urn:hbo:series:GYIBToQrPdotpNQEAAAEa) check out the pilot script [here](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Hacks-Script-It-Starts-On-The-Page.pdf).
* [Jen Statsky](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4278387/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/jenstatsky?lang=en)
* [You Are Bi Enough](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/opinion/bisexuals-coming-out-anna-paquin.html?referringSource=articleShare) by Zachary Zane for NYT
* [Caffeine Free Diet Cola syrup by SodaStream](https://sodastream.com/products/diet-caffeine-free-cola-4-pack)
* [I Hate Suzie](https://www.hbomax.com/series/urn:hbo:series:GX6MziQh41pYSwwEAAAK4) on HBO Max
* [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 Peter Hoopes ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/508standard.mp3).

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

**John August:** Hey, this is John. There’s a few bad words in this episode just in case your kids are in earshot and you don’t want them to hear mild swearing. This is the warning.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 506 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig is buried under an avalanche of preproduction on his new show. Luckily we have an amazing replacement. Please welcome back returning guest host Liz Hannah.

**Liz Hannah:** Hey.

**John:** Liz!

**Liz:** What’s up?

**John:** Hey, how are you?

**Liz:** I’m good. How are you?

**John:** Now, I called you last minute. Thank you so much for filling in on this. But then I just realized this morning you were in prep on something yourself, aren’t you?

**Liz:** Yeah. I guess this just makes me way better at juggling things than Craig, so we’ll just add that to the list. [laughs] No.

**John:** More evidence of your superiority here.

**Liz:** Obviously. But I’m in early prep. I feel like he’s diving in. We don’t start hard prep until next week. So I’m just in the getting used to my new place [unintelligible].

**John:** Now do you have any fungus-based zombies in your show?

**Liz:** I mean, I don’t really want to give it away, but hopefully. I don’t know. We’ll see.

**John:** Hopefully.

**Liz:** Yeah. We don’t have the finale written yet so you never know.

**John:** And season two is blue sky. You could do anything.

**Liz:** Exactly. I mean, why not.

**John:** Put a room together and figure it out. Now, today on the show we’re going to answer a ton of listener questions that have been backed up for a while. We’ll talk about what to do when you’re fired, or sometimes what’s harder is actually what to do when have some good news in your life, so we’ll talk about those. Plus I want to do some follow up on spoilers, living wages, multiple timelines, and Liz if you’ll stick around in our bonus segment I’d love to talk about pets because you are a dog owner if I recall correctly.

**Liz:** I am. I’m a dog and a cat owner actually.

**John:** Oh, fantastic. So you can give us both sides of that debate. I’m a dog owner but I also have experience with the pocket pets, the short-lived gerbils and hamsters.

**Liz:** Oh wow.

**John:** So we’ll talk about pet ownership as a screenwriter.

**Liz:** Love it.

**John:** All right. Let’s get right into it. If you are listening to this podcast on Tuesday, the day this comes out, June 29th, I’m going to be hosting a symposium on vaccine storylines in scripted entertainment. So we’ll have a link in the show notes to that, but it should be really great. It’s me and Vince Gilligan, the Kings, Latoya Morgan, Beth Schacter, Mike Schur, David Shore, the Spellmans, both Malcom and Nichelle are all here to talk about how we work vaccines into the storylines for the TV programs that we’re doing. So if you’re curious about how that would work please join us. That is at I think 5pm Pacific Time if you’re listening to this on Tuesday morning when this episode comes out. So please join us there.

Second, Liz, have you been following any of this stuff about the IATSE negotiations and what’s happening with IATSE. Because you’re in prep so this could actually effect you.

**Liz:** I have. I have been following it pretty closely.

**John:** So let’s remember that we often talk on the show about the Writers Guild which is the guild that represents all the writers. There’s a Directors Guild, a Screen Actors Guild. IATSE is sort of a super union that represents almost everybody below the line on a movie. So these are everything from grips and gaffers, but also script supervisors and script coordinators.

**Liz:** Writer’s assistants.

**John:** Writer’s assistants in rooms. So this is a big negotiation happening right now.

**Liz:** It is. And I believe the support staff of the room, meaning the writer’s assistants and coordinators joined I think recently. They’re the most recent additions in the last couple of years. So I think this is their first major negotiation. You know, they are probably the group that gets taken the most for granted in any group in making a television show, at least in my experience.

And it’s really unfortunate to see them under-valued when I think anybody here who has been in a room or has show-run knows that you kind of live and die by your support staff. And I really hope that they are able to get their wages up, which they are asking for. I think the average wage right now is barely livable if not livable, because we also have to keep in mind these are not normally 52-week jobs. These rooms are 20-week to 30 weeks maybe. And often they’re even smaller in the smaller run of rooms. So they need to be paid a livable wage and they need to be appreciated by obviously the room and the showrunners and the EPs, but on up to the studios and networks. They make the shows that you make possible.

So I really hope that they are getting the support they need and are getting movement in those negotiations.

**John:** Yeah. So often as we talk about #PayUpHollywood and the crisis of low wages across the board, it’s nice to always be thinking about, oh, if there were only a union that were protecting these people. And so assistants at agencies have no unions. They don’t have that support. These are people who do have that union support in theory but if their wages are not actually livable it’s not worth a whole ton. So we’ve got to get these people up below these barely survivable wages in many cases, particularly because they’re working piecemeal. They’re working from one show, to another show, to another show.

So, it’s both the responsibility of the union negotiators to make sure that these lowest paid people are getting paid a livable wage, but also on studios and showrunners and everyone else’s behalf to make sure that the people who are in their rooms are actually getting paid enough that it’s viable. Because this is often the pathway into other jobs in the industry.

**Liz:** Absolutely. It’s often the pathway into writing for television, because you have such exposure to the room, to the showrunners. And it’s not only – it is absolutely what you said. It’s jumping from show to show. Often I’ve found it’s following one showrunner, which can be at times really consistent. It can be completely inconsistent depending on what the showrunner does. You know, if they do limiteds that means maybe once a year, once every two years, three years there’s a room.

So, you know, I think there needs to be loyalty to the staff in as much as there’s loyalty the other way. And there needs to be support. And it really is something that I think I’ve seen a lot of conversation about and I’m sure you have too. These are not entry level jobs, which seems like what everybody assumes is this is an entry level job into the room. Being a writer’s assistant, being a script coordinator in no way is an entry level position. Like those are jobs that, sure, it could be your first time as a writer’s assistant, but there’s a lot of pressure in being a writer’s assistant. There’s a lot of pressure in being a script coordinator. As a script coordinator you are the gatekeeper of what is the product that goes to the studio, the network, the talent, the entire crew. If there are things wrong there that you didn’t catch that’s a real problem.

And there’s a lot of training in that. And there’s a lot of nuance in it. And so it’s not like somebody can just walk out and do it.

**John:** Yeah. Liz, just because people may not be familiar with it, can you talk a little bit about what a script coordinator would do on a show like yours? So this is a limited that you’re shooting. So what was the script coordinator’s responsibility as you’re putting together this show?

**Liz:** So we have kind of like a unique situation because we had our room during the pandemic. So we actually opened up – so we were on a Zoom room and we opened up our room to all the support staff, meaning everybody was auditing. Typically in a room you wouldn’t always have your script coordinator in your room. I think oftentimes the script coordinator is not in the room. It really depends.

But we did and we had our script coordinator there as well as our writer’s assistant and all of the showrunner’s assistants in the rooms that we were going. But to answer your question a script coordinator is in charge of all of the drafts, all of the files, coordinating every draft. Making sure that everything from character names to scene locations to scene numbers to clearances for character names, all the way down to you have one line over on an act and I know that you hate that showrunner so how can I help you bring that page up so that it’s actually 56 pages instead of 57. As I said, there’s a real camaraderie I think between the best of relationships between script coordinators and showrunners. You get to know each other’s tendencies and wants.

So it is a very sort of symbiotic relationship at times. And also as a benefit of that as the script coordinator you see every draft, from like the vomit draft to the shooting draft to the rewrites in post to everything. You see everything.

**John:** So it’s a very technical job, but there’s some creative element to it because you have to be able to anticipate what the showrunner actually wants. And you’re that last set of eyes and fingers on the keyboard for that script before it goes into the machinery of production. So it’s the last chance for the script to be perfect before it gets into the beast of production. And then once you’re in the beast of production you may be responsible for some of the updated pages and distributions that need to go out after that point.

**Liz:** Absolutely. And I have to say my script coordinator that I’m working with right now is incredible to the point where she’ll recognize when I’ve overused a word too many times and is like did you want to do this. And like, no, I didn’t. I was quite tired. Thank you so much. And, again, it’s a close relationship because particularly as a showrunner at a certain point your room wraps. And as we are right now in Covid you don’t get to have your writers on set. And so it’s really just you. And so it’s very much you and the script coordinator are kind of drilling in and making sure that it’s good as it can be.

**John:** Now that you’re in prep is the script coordinator still on the job?

**Liz:** Yeah. I still have an episode to write so yes, yes she is.

**John:** All right. Some more follow up. We always love to do our How Would This Be a Movie segment, and one of my favorite ones was at the Austin Film Festival back in Episode 222. And one of the stories was Zola. Do you remember Zola who was the stripper/sex worker who had a series of tweets that were just phenomenal and that came out the week that we recorded that show?

The Zola movie comes out this week. And I’m so excited to see it. It’s only in theaters, but I love when one of these How Would This Be a Movie is actually a movie-movie. So I’m looking forward to checking that out.

**Liz:** I’ve actually been really fortunate enough to see Zola.

**John:** All right. Tell us.

**Liz:** Get ready. It is awesome. It is so different than I think, I don’t know, than I was anticipating. I don’t know what I was anticipating. But it’s an experience. And as much as – I think Janicza Bravo directed it. Jeremey O. Harris I believe co-wrote it. And as much as – I think it’s like capturing kind of the thrill of reading that thread in a way. So it’s sort of edited that way. There’s an energy to it. There’s an excitement to it. You know, there’s a lot of ways they deal with texting which I’m dealing with currently on the show that I’m about to go into production on, but I think we’ve all been dealing with over the past ten years is like how do you show texting on television or in features and have it not just be reading on screen. You know, how do you not now do it sort of in the way that Euphoria does it? And I think they did a really amazing job. Joi McMillon edited it, who she’s an unbelievable editor.

So I think everybody is really going to be kind of blown away by this. That’s my prediction.

**John:** Great. Well I’m eager to go in cold and not have too much anticipation, because definitely whenever we do one of those segments I’m building my version of the movie in my head but I’m really curious to see what version they built. So I’m excited for that.

More follow up. We’ve been talking a lot about spoilers on the show recently. We had several listeners write in to tell us just how wrong we were about spoilers and that obviously we didn’t know anything about writing because we would understand how important it is to have surprise there at the end. And how when you tell a joke you don’t tell the punchline first.

And I’m curious to hear your thoughts on spoilers. And we’ll divide it into two sort of categories of spoilers. There’s spoilers for things like TV shows that are out on the air right now, so a spoiler for Loki, and sort of how you’re feeling about spoilers on Loki for a who that’s week to week. People may not have seen that episode. Versus The Sixth Sense or Citizen Kane or Fight Club. Older movies that everyone could have seen but doesn’t choose to see. What is your feeling of spoilers?

**Liz:** I mean, I guess breaking them into the new version of television movies, I think Loki and all of the Marvel shows have been dropping on weekdays so it’s either Wednesday night or Thursday night. And there’s a lot of people who can’t watch these till the weekend. So I feel like there should be some type of understanding that we don’t talk about the spoilers on Twitter until Monday morning or something. At the same time I just avoid Twitter. If I see somebody say something about Loki I just don’t read it. We don’t have watercoolers anymore. And we’re all still at home for the most part. So I feel like we have to understand that people want to engage and that’s what’s exciting about pop culture, right, is that we’re all engaging in it and that we’re all excited about it.

So, I don’t know, do I get pissy when I see a spoiler that was an accident? Yeah. But also I don’t know that it’s going to fully ruin the experience for me. You know, I want to watch the whole thing. I’m not sure that just because I found out something that maybe is a small spoiler or something is going to totally ruin it.

**John:** Yeah. Your point about Twitter and the watercooler I think is a good one, because if you didn’t want to hear the chitchat maybe don’t hang around the watercooler at the office. I mean, it’s natural for people to want to have those conversations.

Now let’s think about movie spoilers and the sense of like there’s a movie with a big twist in it and you don’t know what the twist is and is somebody ruining the movie for you, someone spoiling the movie by revealing the twist. And that’s where I get a little bit more my fists on my hips here.

**Liz:** Me too.

**John:** It’s not OK to – at a certain point you can’t put police tape around all of popular culture. And you need to be able to talk about the things that are in those movies. And if you’re listening to a film and television podcast like this one I think it’s pretty reasonable that we’re going to talk about those things because they are important things that happened in the course of the story. And that we can appreciate movies for more than just the plot twists that happened in them.

**Liz:** For sure. I also think there’s got to be some type of expiration date on when a spoiler is a spoiler anymore. Like I just recorded a podcast about a West Wing episode and I was like is this a spoiler. Has somebody never seen this? I guess – spoiler alert – they’re suddenly going to find out that Bartlett had MS. You know what I mean?

Also, I think this is a different conversation but to touch on it lightly. We’re all so sensitive right now and everybody is just ready to get in a fight and pick everybody apart for the smallest thing that, you know, something like that feels like everybody is going to gang up. But, you know, like I went and saw Fast 9 last night. I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know what was happening. There’s a couple things in there that I was pleasantly surprised and not spoiled by. If I’d been spoiled by them would it have changed my expectations or enjoyment of the movie? I don’t think so. I think it was fun.

**John:** Yeah. And also I think part of the reason why we go and see Fast 9 right away, or we watch the Game of Thrones finale in the taxi on the way back from the airport is because we want to be able to participate in the culture right when it happens and we know that there’s a limited window for that. So it’s not just that we have it unspoiled for ourselves, but so we can actually talk about the thing when it happens. So that’s part of the excitement of experiencing a thing when you can right when it comes out. That’s part of the joy of it, the shared experience.

**Liz:** Exactly. Exactly. Now, I will say if somebody has said I haven’t seen this don’t spoil it for me and then you spoil it for them, don’t do that. That’s not nice. That’s not a nice thing to do.

**John:** Well maybe there should be different rules for like if you and I are in a private conversation then I think to ask about like do you want me to spoil this thing, or have you seen, is absolutely totally fair and valid. Because that’s a one-on-one conversation or a small group conversation. But in popular culture you can’t sort of fragilize everyone just because they may not have seen this one thing.

**Liz:** Couldn’t agree more.

**John:** Cool. All right. Let’s get to our marquee topic here. I want to talk about good news. And I have a clip here to set this up. This is a clip from the 1994 movie Sleep with Me. And this movie if you’ve not seen it you may have seen this clip of Quentin Tarantino having a long rant about how gay Top Gun is. So he has a sort of famous monologue about how gay Top Gun is. But this is also from that same scene you recognize that this party is happening because this guy has just sold a spec script. So let’s take a listen to this clip from Sleep with Me.

[Clip plays]
**Male Voice:** [unintelligible] really hot property. So did you always know that the big guy here was going to make it so big?

**Female Voice:** Of course. It was just a matter of time before Hollywood realized [unintelligible] was the way to go.

**Male Voice:** I’m in the [unintelligible] training program.

**Female Voice:** I heard he got like half a mill. For first spec script? Not bad.

**Female Voice:** Is it Dwayne or Wayne?

[Clip ends]

**John:** All right, so Liz that is about the sale of a spec script and a party being thrown because this guy has just sold a spec script. Did you have a moment where your career changed a lot where you just got a piece of really big, good news?

**Liz:** Yeah. For sure.

**John:** Tell me about that.

**Liz:** When I sold The Post it was a spec. It was a pretty similar experience. It was a spec. I had never sold anything before by myself. And I got a call at midnight that Amy Pascal was going to buy it and she wanted to make it. It was absolutely within sort of 45 seconds of that my life completely turned upside down. And sort of became a domino effect of where I am now. And I’ve had amazing opportunities because I sold that spec.

**John:** Great. So we have a listener question here that I think ties in really well. Megana, if you could ask this listener question.

**Megana Rao:** Abby asks, “This has been a tough year for everyone. I got through relatively unscathed but I dealt with my share of anxiety and depression and to top it all off got dumped by my partner of over two years. Things seemed to be finally turning a corner this month. I just got some potentially exciting news. There’s a production company interested in one of my scripts and I just signed at a small agency. I should be feeling amazing, right? Instead I feel lonelier than ever. This is something I would have celebrated with my boyfriend. My family and close friends don’t work in the industry so it’s hard to explain what this means to them, especially since there’s nothing concrete to celebrate.

“And I feel conflicted about sharing with my friends in the industry, especially those who have been struggling professionally. It feels selfish to expect them to be happy for me. And is any of this even worth celebrating? Is this what the life of a screenwriter is like? Hustling, pitching, facing rejection, and then on the off chance something does work out waiting for years before you can actually share the accomplishment? How do you guys deal with good news?”

**John:** All right, so Liz, how do you deal with good news? And how did you deal with the good news of The Post? Just getting called that Amy Pascal wants to buy your movie and make your movie, what did you do next? What was that next week like?

**Liz:** My now husband, then boyfriend, was actually on location at the time. So I was kind of hiding in my house by myself. I definitely share Abby’s feelings at the same time I’m an incredibly superstitious person. So like I don’t share anything until it’s signed on the dotted line and there’s no way that it can ever be taken back, just because I think particularly in this industry you never know. Things can always go away. Or things can always take a turn.

So I don’t really share anything until I’m very convinced. So it wasn’t until much later, or it was like a week later that the announcement was going out that Amy had bought it that I started telling people. But the crazier one, which happened a few months later, was when Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep signed on, which happened in this 48-hour period. And I had told no one except my husband. And my mom found out on Twitter, because I didn’t know the announcement was going out. That one I’m still reaping the pain of that I did not let my mom know.

But I guess in response to Abby’s question of what do you do, yeah, I mean sometimes it can be really hard, but you have to reward yourself. And I think you real friends are able to see past whatever is going on in their lives, whatever struggle they’re having that’s personal to them, to celebrate you. You know, your success does not mean a lack of their success. Actually your success has nothing to do with them. And so I think when you have friendships that are deep and meaningful people should celebrate each other. And so I think you should be able to share and you should be able to feel proud of yourself.

And then the other thing I would say which is advice I tell everybody which is when you sell something or you get a great job or things like that buy yourself something. It doesn’t have to be like extravagant. It doesn’t have to be one of a kind. But buy yourself something you want that’s not dinner or something like that. That is something tangible that you can hang onto that you can look back on and remember I remember when I bought this for myself at this moment when it was so wonderful and so amazing and I accomplished this.

Because there are always going to be ups and downs. There are always going to be moments where potentially on this project you’re like, ugh, this is terrible and I’m so frustrated. You always want to be able to look back and be like I remember that moment when it was wonderful and how that felt and I want to get back to that.

**John:** Yeah. Something I see in Abby’s email here is that she’s worried about feeling too good about herself, or being over-excited. And it gets reasonable to sort of tap the brakes a little bit about some of the overenthusiasm.

**Liz:** Sure.

**John:** We see people who like go crazy and go nuts and they throw the party, like we just listened to in the clip, where they’re celebrating this giant win and they sort of seem like assholes. And you don’t want to be that person. And you don’t want to set yourself up for disappointment and failure. But I think there’s other extremes to underplay it to the degree which like oh I don’t deserve this, I’m worthless, they’re going to find out, they’re going to see that I’m a fraud. The imposter syndrome kicks in really hard because they’ve had this little bit of success.

And it’s finding that middle ground there can be tough. One of the things I always recommend is just remember to Abby you got there because you wrote something really good, so keep writing. Keep writing and keep up on that level. And recognize that like you’ve achieved a thing and you get to do a whole bunch of new work now because you have this agency, so now you get to go out and have these meetings.

Some of those meetings will be great. Some of those meetings will be terrible. But that’s part of the process as well. So don’t be too afraid to be happy in this moment, but also don’t be too afraid about what comes next.

**Liz:** I think that’s great. I would add I think like don’t be looking for perfection. Don’t think you’re going to go out on your first meeting be like this is it, I’ve met my collaborators for the next 20 years. I think just look at the experiences as a whole. You know, I think have sort of a holistic view about it. And don’t put so much pressure on every meeting, every moment, every conversation. Because here is a certain amount of enjoying it that you have to have. Like this is a job. This is work. We’re so fortunate to have this. But you have to have a little bit of enjoyment in it and a little bit of happiness in it. And a little bit of like this is crazy, I’m here because I sold something I wrote. Have that fun.

**John:** Absolutely. Now the second half of this email is talking about how she has friends who are struggling, or friends who are similarly placed but haven’t actually gotten that agent, or having gotten those meetings, and haven’t gotten that stuff happening. I remember that, too. And so I remember when I first got hired to write stuff and I had other screenwriter friends who were not having the same success I was it was weird, but I always remind myself that I can’t control how other people feel. All I can control is sort of what I’m doing. And so I can still be really positive for them while also doing the work that I’m doing. It’s tough.

Did you have other peers who suddenly you’re working with Spielberg and they’re still in the grind?

**Liz:** Sure. Of course. And I think you’re absolutely right. You know, you can’t control how anybody feels. At the same time I think it goes back to what you were saying before, John, which is there’s a very fine line of being proud of yourself and wanting to have that sort of pride with your friends and rubbing it in somebody’s face. And bragging about it. And I think there’s a very sensitive way to tell your friends that this happened. And I guarantee they’ll be excited for you. And if somebody isn’t excited for you then I think that’s a showing of true colors.

**John:** Yeah. Hey Megana why don’t you hop back on here. Because I’m also thinking Megan McDonnell, your predecessor here, who is also a friend of yours has obviously had a really good run and a really good year. And I’m guessing that she probably went through some of these same things and you were the friend who wasn’t quite there yet. What are you thinking about when you read Abby’s question?

**Megana:** Well, first of all, Megan is a brilliant sci-fi genius writer and so hardworking, so it’s just an absolute joy to watch her career. But to me one of the most appealing parts of this industry is the promise of making cool things with your friends or supporting your friends making cool things. And I think about those sociology network diagrams about how behaviors, habits, and emotions spread thorough those little nodes. Sorry, that’s such a scientific way of thinking about friendship and teamwork. But to me it’s like trust that positivity begets positivity. And so if it’s not happening for you, or for me right now, but it’s happening for my friends, that feels like a signal that things are trending well. Your team is doing well so be excited about that.

You know, I think any time you think of something as a zero sum game it gets you in trouble.

**Liz:** Absolutely.

**John:** That sounds great. And what you talk about in terms of like if one person is successful I think it’s giving you a template for a thing you can do. When I graduated from the Stark program at USC people would say like oh you must have had these amazing alumni who could do all these things and were so helpful, but by far the greatest resource I had coming out of Stark was that I had 24 classmates who were all striving really hard in the industry and we could help each other. And so never discount that lateral networking. That people who are the same level as you are such a great resource because they have information and they are doing the thing that you are trying to do. And you are each other’s best resource.

**Liz:** For sure. I also think that it’s really important, this is not on the question, but it’s just something I think in terms of the success that we’re talking about is have happiness outside of your job. Make sure that you have wins and celebrations and moments that are about your life, not just work, because particularly in this industry there are ups and downs and we’re going to get to the next question which is going to be a down. And I think you have to be able to find joy in your life that does not revolve around whether you sold a script or not.

And when you have that joy selling a script is so much more enjoyable because your whole life is not based on it and your whole happiness is not based on it.

**John:** Yeah. If your identity is so tied up in your being a screenwriter who just sold a script, well that is going to fade and it’s not going to last. So you have to have things that are bringing you consistent joy that is not about your career.

**Liz:** Mm-hmm.

**Megana:** Can I ask you guys a follow up question?

**John:** Please.

**Megana:** Just off of that. Because I think a part of what resonated here and seeing my friends is that there’s something like noble in being an aspiring screenwriter and hustling. And I think that that becomes the sort of identity in and of itself. So was there a moment when you guys had to deal with the identity shift of being like I’m no longer hustling, I’ve kind of tasted the success and I can own this title now?

**John:** Yeah. That’s a really good way to put it. Because I always talk about how there’s not really an experience of breaking in. it’s basically there’s not a wall around it. It’s like you’re working as fast and as hard as you can to keep stuff going. And you’re spinning so many plates. I did definitely notice that at a certain point when I stopped – just economically when I stopped having to worry about sort of like paying rent consistently, that was a real change. And I did feel just an ease and comfort that was not there before.

That’s not really tied into any sort of commercial success. Even after Go came out and was doing well and was acclaimed, that wasn’t the moment where I felt like, oh, I’m in, I’m set. How about you, Liz?

**Liz:** I agree with you, John. I think when I was able to pay rent that felt like a marked shift for me in terms of success. You know, I felt stable in a way which I’d never felt before. But I think going to your question, I still have imposter syndrome. I don’t know that you ever, at least I don’t have that moment where I feel like oh I’ve made it, nobody is going to find out. I think there’s still moments of that.

You know, maybe not every day anymore. But at least once a week that I’m like well it was a good run and I’m excited to have done what I’ve done. And I do think that also keeps me a little bit hungry and some of that energy that I did use to feel when I was scrappy and trying to sell a spec, I constantly feel like I want to prove myself. Not because somebody is disproving me, but because I feel like I want to earn it.

**John:** I’ve definitely recognized a moment where people move past their imposter syndrome and they settle into kind of complacency. And that’s no one’s friend. And I think we can all think of some writers who have become complacent and they just sort of do the thing that they do and aren’t pushing themselves. And that can be an issue, too. But I don’t think Abby needs to worry about that yet. I think she needs to just be landing that first job and getting the next job after that and making stuff. And the thing that’s probably going to improve most for her is once she sees her words on the page becoming scenes on a big screen she’ll recognize that like oh I really can do this thing and I can keep doing this thing.

**Liz:** Absolutely.

**John:** All right, let’s get to the opposite side of this, so from the good news to the bad news. We have two back to back questions. Megana, if you can help us out here.

**Megana:** All right. Kitty in London says, “Scriptnotes is my first port of call for industry advice. So when I got fired recently, or rather replaced to use industry parlance, I turn to you. But having rummaged through your entire catalog I can’t find the episode What To Do When You’re Shit-Canned. Please tell me it exists. If not, please make it exist.”

**John:** We will make it exist today. All right. And how about Erin in LA here.

**Megana:** All right. So Erin says, “I was recently working on a project for over two years with a studio and director. Then instead of telling me straight up and letting me go with a handshake and a thank you I was told to sit tight and wait to hear from them about triggering my next step. Only to then be ghosted for months. After waiting patiently and anxiously for as long as I could I finally asked my agents what the hell was going on and then found out the studio had recently hired a new writer to replace me. But never actually told me or my reps I was off the project.

“It was and still is a pretty embarrassing experience and I’ve never heard from any of the involved execs, producers, or director since again after two-plus years of working together. So obviously I think this is the wrong way to let a writer go from a project. But what is the right way? And why doesn’t anyone seem to do it? When we’re dumped in a crappy and classless way should we push back and stand up for ourselves, or does being a pro writer mean just accepting being ghosted, disrespected, or finding out we’ve been replaced on Deadline as a part of the business we’ve chosen?”

**John:** Ugh. I had such flashbacks in the second email.

**Liz:** I’m having like PTSD right now.

**John:** Yeah. So I have found out relatively recently that I’ve been replaced by a Deadline article. And it’s absolutely the worst feeling. And the reason why it happens is because producers are chicken shits and they don’t want to have a scary conversation, so they don’t call you, and they just find a replacement writer and hire that person without having a conversation with you first. It is absolutely terrible and it happens all the time.

**Liz:** It’s awful.

**John:** Liz, you’ve had something similar?

**Liz:** Oh yeah. I’ve been replaced on a number of projects before and I think – look, it’s never fun. It is a part of this business which we can talk about and unpack later. But definitely best of times is when the exec or the producer or whomever calls you and is like, you know, and your steps are done. It’s not like you’re in the middle of something. But if your steps are done and they call and they’re like, “You know, I think we want to bring somebody in to do X, Y, and Z.” And that sucks but at least they’re being honest with you.

You know, I’ve found out through arbitrations that I’ve been replaced. I’ve found out through production. I’ve found out through word around town. I think there’s a lot of different ways to find out about it. It’s really shitty and it’s exactly what you said. It’s execs or producers or whomever doesn’t want to make that phone call being chicken shit. And it’s never fun. And it’s not how it should be.

**John:** Yeah. I’m thinking back to a really terrible experience I had was on Dark Shadows. And so I was really happy with the script and everything looked like it was going fantastically well. And then I was in Des Moines for a college thing and I get this call from Dick Zanuck who was the producer for Dark Shadows. And he said, “John I’ve got terrible news for you. You’re being replaced on the movie. And I’m so sorry. I feel terrible about it. But this is what’s happening and this is why.” And he talked me through it for like five minutes. And I was so angry and I was so incredibly appreciate to Dick Zanuck for having the guts to make that call. And I told him right then on the call like thank you so much for making this call because otherwise I would have heard about it from somebody else. Or I would have read about it in Deadline. It was the right thing to do because he was a classy producer from the right era who knew how to do it. And so few producers these days are doing that.

And I don’t have great advice for how to get producers to do that because I don’t have good experience. I try to keep up conversation about like hey what’s going on on this project, but they do sort of ghost you and they say, “Oh, we’re still figuring it out,” and it happens. It’s shameful.

**Liz:** It’s shameful. It’s really shitty. It shows you I think ultimately how appreciated writers are in the film industry overall. I’m saying this not to get into the film industry, being a writer is wonderful. Being able to write movies is fantastic. But it’s pretty common knowledge and I think pretty well understood that if you’re the first writer on a feature it is very unlikely that you will be the last writer on the feature.

**John:** If they’ve hired you on to do a project, so it wasn’t your original thing but they hired you on, yeah, there comes a moment where they feel like, oh, maybe we need a new set of eyes, a new something. And it’s often–

**Liz:** Even if you are the original writer. You know, if it’s a studio in particular it’s very unlikely that you will be the last writer on the project. It’s just for whatever reason it is how the industry believes that movies should be made. You know, I think it’s pretty disrespectful to writers to not give them the same respect as any other collaborator on the project, namely producers or directors who their opinion is appreciated from day one till the end, and heard, and valued, particularly if you are the generator of the project, or the person that was hired for the project. There’s a reason they hired you for that project.

So, yeah, I’m with John. I don’t have a lot of advice on how to get over it except that it sucks. And, you know, have a drink. Or do whatever it is that you do to wallow and then get up and write again tomorrow. Because you have to.

**John:** All right. I do have some practical advice here I think.

**Liz:** Oh good.

**John:** So obviously feel your feelings. It’s fine to feel your feelings. Find somebody you can vent to. But then also take a couple steps here. First off, make sure you’re clear on what your drafts are and these are the official drafts. And set them aside because if you go to an arbitration at some point it will be important to be able to show I wrote these things along the way. And if there are emails that sort of tie into stuff that you didn’t actually implement but you had actually discussed, those can be important as well.

Then figure out – if you know who the writer is who is going to be coming onboard I reach out to that writer. And if I’m the person who is coming on to rewrite somebody I generally will reach out to the previous writer just to know this is where the bodies were buried. This is sort of what’s going on. And make it clear that you’re not mad at that writer for coming onboard. You’re mad at the situation. But you want that writer to succeed because that’s going to be the best possible movie that’s actually going to get made. So as hard as it can be to see your kid being raised by somebody else, you want your kid to thrive. And that can kid being your movie will only thrive if that writer is able to succeed. And so if I can help that writer get that movie to a place where it’s actually going to work I will do so.

And so I will try to reach out to that person. It’s not hard to find their email. It’s an awkward email to write, but all the conversations I’ve had who have come in after me, or if I’ve come in after them, have been great. And it just makes the process better and smoother. So if you can make contact with that writer do so because obviously they’re going to have to carry the ball for a while.

**Liz:** I think that’s great. I would also say this goes on the other way which is, you know, as you said if you are the writer who is coming on, which I’ve done, you’ve done John, it is your responsibility in my opinion to reach out to the previous writer and to reach out to the original writer. Because, yeah, it’s not your fault. You’re not in trouble. You’re not the problem. But, you can be the asshole who doesn’t reach out and have that conversation. And say like, hey man, I’m really sorry. This is a shitty situation. What can I do to help? Where are you at? What were you trying to do that maybe wasn’t getting across? What’s the conflict, if there is one?

I think that there’s a lot of value in that, particularly since a lot of the people who are being replaced are first time writers, are green writers. And you only learn when the writer who comes on to replace you reaches out. And has a conversation and says, “OK here’s what I’m going to do. Let me explain it to you why. And what do you think?”

So I think – and by the way, there are times when I’ve reached out and the original writer wasn’t super interested in talking, which is also totally fine. It sucks. It’s not a fun thing to be a part of. But if you are the writer who is replacing somebody I really think it is your responsibility to reach out and have a conversation.

**John:** Yeah. The times when I haven’t done that has been because it’s a weekly and I’m here in the middle of production to build a set of cabinets right there.

**Liz:** Absolutely.

**John:** And that’s not that situation. But if I’m going to be doing some major work I will do it. And also if I’m going to be coming in and doing some kind of surgical work but I’m not rewriting the whole script I will try to write in that other writer’s voice just so it reads like one continuous document.

**Liz:** Absolutely.

**John:** And we know how to do it. We’re professionals. So the underlining message of like it sucks when you’re fired, yes, it sucks. Just try not to carry that bitterness with you. And try not to carry that bitterness with you into other rooms, because you’re going to be going in on meetings on other projects and you could say that I had a great time working on this, someone else is writing this right now, or I really hope it goes into production. Don’t dwell on sort of how angry you were to be fired because that’s not a good look for anybody. It’s not going to get you your next job.

**Liz:** It’s not. And it’s also nobody is going to appreciate it in that room. So, I think, as you said, John, find the person you can vent with. Unfortunately I think every screenwriter has dealt with this, so every professional feature screenwriter has dealt with this.

The first time it happened to me I had a friend of mine reach out and was actually sitting with me while the conversation was happening on the phone. Reached out to me the next day and took me out for drinks and, you know, kind of like walked me through what had happened to him and listened and there’s not a lot to say. It sucks. But the letting go is a really important part of it.

And I also think the getting back to work is important, because if you just sit and you’re bitter, or you just sit and you wallow, or even you get to the point where you watch the movie and you’re like that’s not what I wrote and this is terrible, none of that is helpful in the ultimate goal which is having a long-lasting career.

**John:** 100%. All right, maybe we can squeeze two questions in here. Megana, do you want to start us off?

**Megana:** Great. KD Scruggs writes, “I need to differentiate two timelines a la Sliding Doors in my short script. I currently have a physical descriptor, for example red earrings, pony tail in parenthesis after a character’s first scene mention and every line of dialogue, but it’s super clunky. Thoughts?”

**John:** Oof, that sounds super clunky.

**Liz:** Yeah.

**John:** So when you have two timelines you’re going to want to do something, hopefully in the movie it becomes really clear we’re in one timeline or another timeline. You need to do something in your script to say OK these scenes are this way and those scenes are the other way. As we look at Greta Gerwig’s script for Little Women she ended up putting everything in red for the scenes that were in the past. That’s the only time I’ve seen a two-color script, but she really needed it for what she was doing. Other writers I’ve seen put scenes in italics, or in the slug line they’re say bracket past for when we’re in the other timeline.

Just you’ve got to make it read like a movie and don’t kill us on every line for these back and forths. Any thoughts, Liz?

**Liz:** Yeah. I’m actually dealing with it right now. I have three different timelines that I’m dealing with. So, you know, it’s a little different I guess because it’s not Sliding Doors, but in terms of past and present we just put it in the slug line. It’s, you know, INT. HOUSE. NIGHT (PAST). Is it like the most clever thing to do? No. But people aren’t confused.

We can throw a chyron in the script and you just say, you know, which you don’t have to put in production. But it is just helpful for people when they’re reading. They’re like, oh, this is 2014, this is 2012, whatever it is. And since we’re doing three we do have one section is italicized. I think the italicized is really helpful. It can be – you can also breeze through it at times.

Since this is a short script I actually think the coloring of the script is not a bad idea. You know, it’s clean, concise. And because it’s not past and present that might be the easiest way to do it. But I wouldn’t do the descriptors because I think that’s just going to be brutal.

**John:** It’s going to be too rough to read. All right, what else we got?

**Megana:** All right. Ryan in LA asks, “I have a writer’s group that I’ve been a part of for a few years now and over that time we’ve become really close. I value their notes immensely and I know my writing would not be where it is without them. I recently got staffed on a show and have some paid gigs coming my way. It’s exciting, but I’m the first of my group to reach this point. Is it weird for me to continue to get notes from my notes for projects that I’m being paid to write on and ask them for notes for free?”

**John:** Wow. I’ve never been in a writer’s group like this. Liz, have you?

**Liz:** No, I haven’t.

**John:** So we’re at a bit of a disadvantage here. I would say this reminds me of the sort of good news question. You have friends who are not as successful and you’re sort of coming back to them with this. But you’re still working on scripts. You’re still working on projects and they’re working on projects. I would bring it up and ask them like hey do you feel weird, this is a thing I’m being paid to write, but I would love to keep working with you as a group to do this stuff. And if they say yes then great.

You’re getting something out of them, but they’re also getting something out of you because you have experience working for money on these projects. And so I bet they want to keep you involved in that group.

But Megana you’re in a writer’s group so you tell us. Tell us what you think.

**Megana:** Yeah. I think going back to the same thing. It’s like teamwork and it’s being excited for your friend when they’re doing something and hoping that you get better as they improve in their craft as well. But I have a question, so when you guys are writing a draft or a script like who is reading your drafts before you’re submitting it?

**Liz:** For me it really depends. In TV just the room is reading it. And then we go through notes that way. And then my non-writing producers will read before it goes to the studio. In features I have like three people that I send not like my vomit draft but my first personal draft. Two of them are writers, sorry it’s four people. So two of them are writers and two of them are not writers. But that’s also been developed over the course of the last, you know, almost decade and we kind of all share with each other.

So I guess it’s kind of a writer’s group, but it’s very specific and it’s not as big.

**John:** And with my scripts obviously it’s you because you’re reading the very first things, Megana. And then Chad who is a former assistant from a zillion years ago and a good friend. And a couple other people who I will turn to for their thoughts early on. But, no, I’ve never had that sort of writer’s group where we’re constantly responsible for delivering stuff and meeting and discussing that stuff. And I’ve always envied that but it’s just never been something that’s part of my life.

So I’ll be curious whether as you and Megan and other friends of yours who are in that group become successful how that morphs and changes.

I do think also of Dana Fox and her whole group of amazing writers, you know, Diablo Cody, and Lorene and company, Liz Meriwether, and they’re sort of that same way. They’re a writer’s group but they’re also bestie friends who are reading each other’s stuff and it’s been incredibly helpful for them. So there’s precedent for it.

**Liz:** Absolutely.

**John:** Megana, thank you for these questions.

**Megana:** Thank you guys.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Liz, you start us off.

**Liz:** OK, my One Cool Thing is a book. So I recently drove across the country because my dog is five pounds too heavy to be on a plane. So, literally drove across the country. So my sweet baby trash dog could be in the car with us, being on the east coast for production. On that I heard this really interesting interview and subsequently have been reading the book. It’s called Battle for the Soul: Inside Democrats’ Campaign to Defeat Trump by Edward-Isaac Dovere. It’s super fascinating. It starts in 2016. Goes through the entire campaign on the Democrats’ side up until the 2020 election.

There’s really intimate details in there from sort of how Kamala and Biden fought at the first debate to how she was chosen as the VP candidate. It’s a really intimate and detailed book that is really interesting. And so for people who are fans of campaign books I couldn’t recommend that better.

**John:** That sounds great. It sounds like a terrific book that I cannot read right now because I cannot actually follow any political news whatsoever. My brain just broke and I cannot reengage with it.

**Liz:** Can I give you another recommendation then that has nothing to do with it?

**John:** Absolutely. We’ll take it.

**Liz:** Yearbook by Seth Rogan. I’m not sure if anybody has done it yet.

**John:** I’ve heard great things. Yes.

**Liz:** Oh my gosh. First of all, I’m sure reading the book is amazing. Listening to the book, we listened to it on the drive, is incredible. Seth reads it himself and then there’s a bunch of guest stars that come in. Lots of people who play themselves. Sasha Baron Cohen. George Lucas plays himself at some point. It’s really funny. It’s really insightful. There’s a ton of heart. I am not being facetious when I say that it truly got us through 12 hours of driving through dust and farm land and fast food.

So thank you Seth for that. I really appreciate it and I think everybody should check it out.

**John:** Excellent. That definitely is on my to read list. And probably actually my to listen list because that sounds great.

My One Cool Thing is a series of videos by Ryan George called Pitch Meetings and basically the premise is that it is the screenwriter going in to pitch a movie that is an existing, so like Army of the Dead. And so Ryan George plays both the screenwriter pitching it and the executive listening to the pitch. And so it’s the feeling of the pitch, but all of the absurdities of the movie sort of come out in the pitching process. So let’s take a listen to the pitch for Army of the Dead.

**Male Voice:** And it basically walls up the city to contain the spread.

**Male Voice:** Smart. And they declare it’s no longer part of America.

**Male Voice:** Well why was that necessary?

**Male Voice:** Unclear. So eventually the government decides to nuke the city to kill all the zombies.

**Male Voice:** OK.

**Male Voice:** But this casino owner, Tenaka, has $200 million in a vault under his casino. So he approaches this former mercenary, Scott Ward.

**Male Voice:** Oh, and he tells him to assemble a team?

**Male Voice:** He does. So Scott needs some teammates. He needs a safe-cracker obviously.

**Male Voice:** I thought it was Tenaka’s vault. Can’t he give them the code?

**Male Voice:** No.

**Male Voice:** OK.

**Male Voice:** And they also need a helicopter pilot.

**Male Voice:** Oh, they can fly in. That’ll be helpful.

**Male Voice:** No, see the government doesn’t actually allow people to fly into Vegas. It’s restricted air space. But they can fly out.

**Male Voice:** Yes, sir. I don’t care.

**Male Voice:** So Tenaka also adds his own head of security, Martin, to the team. And this guy is real suspicious.

**Male Voice:** Oh, sounds suspicious.

**Male Voice:** He is. So they head to Vegas and Scott’s estranged daughter, Kate, forces herself into the movie because she has a friend that’s inside the city.

**Liz:** Love it.

**John:** Love it. And so I bring this up because it’s easy to sort of make fun of movies and I don’t want to particularly poke at Army of the Dead. But even like the best movies have these like real implausibilities that if you were to try to pitch them would sound absurd. So I just thought that was a really performed and written piece of video on how weird pitches are.

**Liz:** Pitches are so weird, dude. They’re the weirdest.

**John:** Pitches are weird. And so, here, let’s do a quick two minutes on pitching. I always describe pitches as like I just saw the best movie and I want to convince you to see this movie. And so what’s weird is that it’s not really the plot of the movie. It’s the description of the experience of having just watched the movie to me.

**Liz:** Totally. And I think it’s also a bit about you. Like how you tell it is how you’re going to write it. So, I just did this pitch this last week and I’m doing more this week for this feature and like you know the feature itself is not necessarily funny, but like I want it to have humor in it, so I’m funny in the pitch, which feels a little off-kilter. It’s so performative. Everybody is uncomfortable.

The one thing I will say is that I don’t think I’m ever going back to pitching in person again. I’m all in on pitching on Zoom or Teams or whatever the hell that we’re supposed to do. It’s so much easier. You don’t have to do the small chat and awkwardness and memorizing lines like you’re an actor. It’s great. But that’s kind of the only good thing that has happened.

**John:** Yeah. I have a pitch this week and I, like you, I’m pretty good at pitching on Zoom, but for this one I also have a video clip I need to show.

**Liz:** Oh wow.

**John:** And going from slides to video clip is really a beast. And the amount of time that me and Megana have spent trying to optimize video performance has been a lot.

**Liz:** Break a leg.

**John:** The technical challenges. But when do we have to become TV producers, by the way? Like suddenly we’re responsible for all this technology stack in order to pitch our shows. That’s also crazy.

**Liz:** It’s pretty crazy. To the fact that I, you know, I can use my computer and I can type on it and I can do sort of the things I’m supposed to do on it. The second I’m asked to like put a slide show up or share my screen suddenly I go into a panic like I have a dream that I’m naked in my high school. Because the worst thing possible is I share my screen and something horrible is on there that I don’t want anybody to see.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Liz:** Or like an instant message pops up or something like that. So, it’s truly – I just feel like my anxiety is already high during a pitch. It’s like at an absolute high thinking that I’m going to have to share my screen. So I just stick to reading off of pages and hopefully people have an imagination.

**John:** That’s always a good choice. I will say the one thing I have learned is that I tend to read off of the screen, but I move my pitch to the very top of the screen.

**Liz:** Totally.

**John:** Near the camera so I’m keeping eye contact a little closer there.

**Liz:** 100%. I also just cover everybody’s faces with it. So I don’t even look at anybody on there because I’m just looking at the camera ultimately. You know? But it’s also–

**John:** That’s what you want.

**Liz:** It’s that. And it’s also like I’m not then thinking about their reactions to things, you know. I’m not distracted by, oh, are they buying it or are they not buying it. It gets me a little bit more into the rhythm of my talking and then my producing partner is able to like actually gauge their faces and tell me after like oh they were really into it, or oh I don’t know, things like that.

**John:** Yeah. Another good thing about pitching on Zoom is that Megana can sit in on pitches now, because she would not normally be able to – like she wouldn’t go to Disney with me to sit in on a pitch, or other studio executive assistants can listen in. And it’s great because they get some experience there but they have their cameras off and it’s fine.

**Liz:** Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, that was what was great about having the room on Zoom honestly was all of our support staff was able to be there and participate and really have the experience of being in a room that typically you don’t have when you’re in a brick and mortar.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our amazing outro this week is by Zach Lo. 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 like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter I am @johnaugust. Liz, you are?

**Liz:** @itslizhannah.

**John:** @itslizhannah. We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting where we link to things about writing.

You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on our pets. Liz Hannah, thank you, thank you, thank you so, so much for filling in at the last minute as co-host. You are remarkable. So thank you very much for doing this.

**Liz:** Thank you, John August. I hope that Craig unburies himself from an avalanche soon.

**John:** We’ll all hope.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** And we’re back. All right, you traveled across the country with your dog because your dog was too big to fly on a plane. So you obviously have a pet and you love a pet.

**Liz:** I do.

**John:** Was this your first dog? Have you always been a dog person? What is your relationship with animals in your life?

**Liz:** This is not my first dog. I’ve always been an animal person. I grew up with dogs and cats. I adopted – my first dog I adopted as an adult I adopted when I was 25. And he was three-legged and four-months-old and allegedly a purebred lab. And then he turned out to be a Great Dane. And so I had to move out of my studio apartment because he was 95 pounds at like a year old.

**John:** Wow.

**Liz:** And so he passed away two years ago and I spent – my husband and had like – my husband went right back into production pretty quickly and I was in a new house we moved into. And I slept one night there without a dog for the first time and I was absolutely not, we’re getting an animal. I just spent seven hours looking at our security camera.

And then we met this little trash dog. And so this is who we have now. And literally she’s five pounds over the limit. She’s 35 pounds. She’s five pounds over the limit to fly. It’s just ridiculous.

**John:** My first dog who was my own dog was my dog Jake who was a pug. And I’d wanted a pug for forever and I would say – on this show we’ve been talking about good news, bad news, when you feel like you had some success. I really felt like I had some success when I was able to get an apartment where I could have a dog. That was really to me like OK I’ve made it because I have a place where I can have my own dog who I can take care of. And that was my little boy for so many years. He was just an absolutely amazing little pug.

So before that we’d had some family dogs. Most of them died when I was really little. And then I had gerbils and hamsters who don’t live very long. They just don’t. And sometimes they let you hold them in their hands, but they’re not great pets. I’m sorry for people who are like big hamster/gerbil people. But like once you’ve had a dog it’s just really hard to really go back to a hamster or such.

**Liz:** It’s hard to ever go back. It’s hard also I think like we have a cat also who is 12 who I adopted like six months before I adopted the Great Dane, Boo, and just keep in mind I lived in a studio apartment with both of these animals for like eight months. So I definitely did not heed the warning of like this is where you get success is when you can have an apartment that can take pets. I just got pets. And it was crazy.

But Lucy is still kicking, our cat, and she is basically feral. Like hates everybody except my husband. And weirdly now the new dog, loves the new dog. Obsessed with Jonesy. Just wants to be around her. Our other dog, Boo, hated him. Never wanted to be around him. But, yeah, I think it’s like once you – it’s also really interesting because Boo was kind of a loner. He definitely loved me and wanted to be around me, but as long as he could sort of see me from his bed he was interested. Jonesy has to be touching me, like at all times.

If I’m around she’s just like I want to be on you or next to you or sleeping right beside you. It’s a very interesting – I just don’t think I could ever go to like a gerbil. There’s like an intimacy and an affection with a dog that there isn’t with other animals. And they sit at your feet while you write. I mean, it’s great.

**John:** Yeah, which is so lovely. They’re there with you, but quiet, which is terrific. I think a dog also provides structure, particularly for feature writers which you and I mostly have been. You’re mostly doing TV stuff. But providing some structure in terms of like you need to be up by a certain point so you can feed the dog and walk the dog. And the dog needs two walks and two meals a deal. It’s some good structure because otherwise my whole day could be just a blur of nothing.

And so when I was a bachelor screenwriter that was really important to have some sense of structure there and my dog provided it for me.

**Liz:** Absolutely. And you also can build in breaks of like, oh, I’m stuck on something, I just kind of don’t want to sit here and stare at my computer. OK, I’ll just go walk the dog for 20 minutes. And I also think there is a – and I’m sure this becomes exponentially more real with children – but there is a bit of life is more important than X, Y, and Z when you have something that you have to literally keep alive. And whose entire – with dogs, you know, their entire purpose is to make you happy and for you to love them and all of these things.

It kind of puts things a little bit in perspective when you’re like oh man this draft is due tomorrow and my life is going to be over if I don’t turn it in perfectly. And then you have to keep this sweet little thing alive.

**John:** And the dog doesn’t care.

**Liz:** No. They don’t.

**John:** So we got the great news of this episode of like, you know, oh you sold a script. The dog is happy, but the dog is always happy. Or you got fired and the dog is like the dog still loves you just the same. The dog has no idea that it’s happening whatsoever.

And it’s good to have – we talked about having some source of joy in your life that is not career-dependent and that can often be a dog, or a cat to some degree, but dogs are the ones providing a little bit more structure there.

**Liz:** Yeah. I’m all in. I’m staring at my sweet little trash dog right now who is passed out from the humidity. So she’s on her nap time.

**John:** And where did you find trash dog? Was it through a rescue agency?

**Liz:** So trash dog’s name is Jones, but we call her trash dog because that is literally what her DNA said she was. We got her, so I had adopted Boo, our former dog, from this place called Dogs Without Borders, which is amazing and based in LA. They were working with a family who brings strays from Iran, specifically Tehran, to Los Angeles. And puts them with families. I had reached out to them and just said like, hey, you know, we’re not ready yet but just in case let me know if you think any dogs come up that we would be right for. And two days later they sent me a picture of Jonesy and we went and met her and we adopted her instantly.

We wanted a small, hypoallergenic, really dumb, lazy dog, and we got a medium-sized shedding machine that is extremely smart and very energetic. But she’s very loving.

**John:** Yeah. My advice if people are looking for a dog is just to put out in the world that you’re looking for a dog and someone will have the dog for you. And so, yes, you can go to all of the rescue agencies and that’s phenomenal. But some of my best experiences have been sort of hey we’re in the market for a dog so if you know of a great dog let us know. Because people will know.

So in the case of Lambert who is our amazing dog right now we were just getting back from Paris and so I put that out into the world and a friend said, oh yeah, we’re actually watching my mom’s dog right now who is phenomenal, but we cannot keep him. And maybe you could come visit. And love at first sight.

**Liz:** Lambert and his human eyes. He’s got real human eyes.

**John:** Such good human eyes.

**Liz:** So real. It’s like E.T. eyes. They’re so real. Yeah, I agree. I think you can also put it up on social media, like hey guys thinking of getting a dog. There’s so many dogs that are looking for homes. And I know a lot of people did the pandemic puppies and things like that. Please don’t give them back. I know that you were home and you could take care of a dog when you were home all the time. Guess what? That’s a living, breathing thing that loves you. Please don’t give it back.

**John:** Oh yeah. Don’t do it. Liz, it is so lovely to catch up with you. It’s been a long year, but we’re coming out of it. And we’re making stuff.

**Liz:** We are. We’re coming out of it. We’re making stuff. I can’t believe we’re halfway through 2021 already. It’s pretty bananas. So, yeah.

**John:** And whenever you drive back with the dog I want to see you here in Los Angeles.

**Liz:** Absolutely. Yes sir.

**John:** Cool.

Links:

* Join John at 5pm, Tuesday the June 29th, for the Ad Council summit about [vaccine storylines in scripted entertainment](https://adcouncilevents.splashthat.com)
* [IATSE Negotiations](https://deadline.com/2021/06/hollywood-union-labor-talks-break-off-resume-july-6-1234774095/)
* [Zola Movie](https://a24films.com/films/zola)
* [Sleep with Me Film](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111218/)
* [Army of the Dead Pitch Meeting](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC1LiBBkDdo&t=22s)
* [Battle for the Soul](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/607647/battle-for-the-soul-by-edward-isaac-dovere/) by Edward-Isaac Dovere
* [Yearbook](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/yearbook-seth-rogen/1138692367) by Seth Rogan
* [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
* [Liz Hannah](https://twitter.com/itslizhannah) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Zach Lo ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/506standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/making-tv-like-features-but-better).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s show has two bad words in it, so just a warning. It’s probably PG-13, but you know, just in case.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 505 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we talk about why and how feature writers like Craig are turning their back on the big screen movies that made their careers and are instead making television programs for small screens in support of giant streamers.

**Craig:** So dramatic.

**John:** So we’re not placing the blame entirely on Craig, we’ll be interrogating two other villains. Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi are the writing team behind such big screen movies as Crazy Beautiful, Ride Along, Ride Along 2, Clash of the Titans, The Invitation, and Destroyer. But now they’ve made The Mysterious Benedict Society for Disney+, which debuts on June 25. Welcome Matt and Phil.

**Craig:** Welcome guys.

**Phil Hay:** Hello, thank you.

**Matt Manfredi:** Hey guys.

**Phil:** Thank you for having us and casting us as villains.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, he’s just doing that so that I don’t have to bear the entire burden. It sounds like all three of us are going to be up against the wall here while John peppers us with his rhetoric bullets.

**Phil:** It does seem like this might get really dramatic.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s going to get confrontational. This is going to be a hard hour.

**John:** It’s going to be a hard hour. But we’re going to make progress as we go through it. We’re going to really learn some lessons, some tears will be shed, and we will get through to the other side. I do want to talk about features versus television, but also you guys are writing partners and we have a bunch of questions saved up from our listeners about writing partner situations, so I hope that you can offer some good advice on that.

How long have you guys been writing together as a team?

**Phil:** We have been writing together for a seemingly endless amount of time.

**Matt:** It just keeps going.

**Phil:** And I hope it’s endless.

**John:** You’re the husband who has no idea how long he’s been married.

**Phil:** No, we’ve been writing professionally together for 26 years, Matt. Is that right?

**Matt:** Yeah. Is that titanium? The anniversary? What do I get you?

**Craig:** Oh my god. I think it’s gold. Or is 50 gold? 25 is meat. It’s meat.

**John:** You get some meat.

**Craig:** A nice roast beef.

**Phil:** I think 28 is the prelap anniversary.

**Craig:** Oh nice.

**Matt:** Wow. See what he did?

**Craig:** You know I’m coming up in 13 days from this recording will be my 25th wedding anniversary.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Matt:** Congratulations.

**Phil:** Congratulations.

**John:** Nicely done. Really, congratulations Melissa.

**Craig:** Way to go, Melissa. Like what a remarkably patient person. You know what? She’s doing fine. Let’s not turn her into some sort of martyr. She’s doing fine.

**Phil:** Feels like John’s mission today is to create a lot of dichotomies and a lot of—

**Craig:** Tear people down.

**Phil:** Uh-huh.

**John:** Also to say for our bonus segment for premium members I want to talk about shooting during a pandemic, because you shot this show entirely during the pandemic, so I want to hear what you learned from that and what you will carry forward into future productions.

But first let’s talk about that land that you used to be in, features. I sent through this article by Daniel Victor about MoviePass which has been a frequent subject of scorn on this podcast. Craig, what’s your take on MoviePass and what are we now learning about MoviePass?

**Craig:** Well we learned is that sometimes the obvious is in fact the obvious. So early on in MoviePass’s lifetime you and I both expressed confusion, bordering on anger, on how this plan could possibly work. It just didn’t make sense on its face. So eventually they fell apart and we thought well there you go, we were right. You just can’t make money doing something where you spend more than you make. But it turns out that in fact MoviePass, once they realized that they were about to head into a freefall, instead of just giving up they decided to try and save themselves by sneakily limiting the amount of movies their most frequent users could see.

So it’s a bit like an all-you-can-eat buffet that suddenly starts like, whoops, our door doesn’t work, you can’t come in. It’s like that. So they had—

**Matt:** Before you get more bacon, you’re going to need to change your password.

**Craig:** Correct. So they would do things like if you were seeing too many movies they would force you into a password reset and then that password reset just wouldn’t work. They would say, oh, there’s fraud here, but there wasn’t. They just made it up. And then they wouldn’t respond to requests. And essentially so there’s a phrase in programming called Sending you to Coventry. It’s from the war. So in WWII, sending someone to Coventry, they would do it with a spy. If they figured out that somebody was sending messages to the Germans, rather than confront them, they thought it would be better to just have them continue to send messages but reroute them to nowhere. So that person kept going, so they could keep reading the intelligence they were sending.

And that’s kind of what MoviePass did. They just sent people to nowhere. And now in addition to being out of business, they are also under investigation by the federal government. Good.

**John:** Yeah. It’s so hard to fine a business that’s out of business, but I guess it’s sort of important to sort of take care of it for the next time through, to call this out. But this answers some of my questions about what they thought they were doing versus how they actually worked, because it reminded me of this strategy called Blitzscaling. So remember Amazon, like Amazon sort of shouldn’t have worked, but eventually they got so big that they sort of had to work. They actually achieved this kind of scale.

And I think MoviePass thought they would achieve a kind of scale that they could actually negotiate prices with these theaters and it would all work. It just didn’t work and so they were just left floundering trying not to burn through all their money.

**Phil:** Well it’s also like the concept of the loss leader, which we all learned a long time ago, but at some point it’s worth it to spend a lot of money to gain customers period. But at some point you have to convert that into something. And also it feels like a too good to be true situation.

**Matt:** Also, if you have a loss leader you need to have another product.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** That cheap rotisserie chicken in the front of the grocery store, that’s so you’ll buy other things in the store.

**Craig:** The hamburger is $0.99 so that you buy a soda, which is all profit, but I guess my question for you guys is why did any of these people who ran this thing think for any moment that it could work? What possible future contains success for this plan?

**John:** Well, think about Netflix. So remember Netflix when it was still a DVD business.

**Craig:** Let’s talk about that.

**John:** So they had problems where they had some people who would get those two DVDs and they would go through it so quickly that Netflix was losing money on some customers. But it wasn’t most of their customers. And I think that’s really the fatal flaw here is that they really misassumed how often people would use MoviePass. They thought people would use it and not really get the full value out of it, but instead millennials sort of saw this as a lifestyle subsidy and would use it up and they would just use it constantly.

**Craig:** So the very thing they were advertising they were hoping their ads wouldn’t work and that people wouldn’t do it. It’s so weird. Anyway, they were nuts and they’re out of business and under investigation. Yay.

**Phil:** And it worked too well, because I think what they were counting on makes sense, because they thought people were going to do what I do which is see something interesting that they want to subscribe to and then forget about it. And then harvest any number of months or maybe even years of a small fee that you forget about.

**Matt:** Yeah.

**Phil:** And people just liked using it too much, because it’s great to go to the movies for almost no money.

**Craig:** For free.

**Phil:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Crazy.

**John:** So, Matt, do you have any subscriptions to things that you are not using? Things you have just forgotten to cancel?

**Matt:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Phil.

**Matt:** Yeah. And I get updates every month, but the problem is if someone else in my family has subscribed to that I have to figure out which computer I can get on to unsubscribe. Like my daughter is into swimming, but the pandemic kind of took that away for a bit. And so we have this swim times app for various meets. And I don’t know when she’s going to swim again. But we get a monthly update for that.

There’s all kinds of things. It’s very hard to unsubscribe.

**John:** Now if you want to subscribe to Scriptnotes, it’s Scriptnotes.net and it’s $4.99 a month.

**Phil:** Very transparent. That’s a very ethical and transparent process.

**Craig:** That was just sweaty.

**Matt:** God that was efficient.

**Craig:** That was thirsty.

**John:** All right, let’s try a less thirsty transition here. I want to start talking about television and I thought was set up I was watching an episode of a show this last week that made me think of it. And so in this episode it’s set in the ‘70s and one of the characters is an aspiring writer. And he has this revelation that he should probably stop writing books and should start writing for television because that’s where all the best storytelling is happening. So let’s take a listen to a clip.

[Clip plays]

**Male Voice:** I’ve seen it. I have glimpsed through the veil of time.

**Craig:** What the fuck are you talking about? I didn’t understand a goddamn – did you understand any of that? Either of you?

**Male Voice:** Your passion is admirable, but worlds coming to life on television? None of the good stuff is on TV.

**Craig:** TV is shit. It’s for morons.

[Clip ends]

**Craig:** That’s solid acting.

**John:** That’s an episode of Mythic Quest, an episode called Backstory written by Craig Mazin and starring Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say “starring.”

**John:** Costarring Craig Mazin. With all the best lines written for Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** The true star of that episode is Josh Brener.

**Phil:** Craig Mazin, OBE.

**Craig:** OBE. Josh Brener delivering those lines there as a young C.W. Longbottom, the character played by F. Murray Abraham. Boy, that Josh Brener, by the way, can I just say, wow. Brilliant. Just a great actor.

**John:** He’s great. I remember him as Big Head and really having almost no character to play.

**Craig:** Everybody knows him as Big Head and I’m just announcing to Hollywood like seriously pay attention. He’s just phenomenal.

**John:** All right. Don’t try to distract us from the real topic here. Craig, your character has a [unintelligible] about how stupid television really is.

**Craig:** Which in the early ‘70s was a fact. I mean, I remember in elementary school there was a push for us in arts and crafts class to create little posters with crayon and such tracking the hours of television we watched purposely to reduce it because television would “rot your brain.”

**John:** Yeah. And you were not a television writer at the start of this podcast. So 10 years ago you were not a television writer. And now you are mostly a television writer. So I want to track that change and sort of how your opinions have changed, but really involve our two guests here this week because you guys are not television writers and now you find yourselves running this TV show for a streamer.

So, what changed? What made you decide to go from making features to making this as a series? Phil?

**Phil:** Well, I think in this case it was just very specifically the book and the situation and feeling like this was a feel and a vibe and a tone that felt really important that we wanted to do. To be clear, speaking for myself, really always have considered myself a movie person. And I think in life I am a movie person. And I’m really committed to that form of art. And I think what’s interesting is you know making a television show that has eight episodes is, you know, there’s congruent things to making a movie to making that style of television show. I’ve never made a television show that had 24 episodes in a season or anything like that.

So along that spectrum there’s a lot of different approaches. And I think specifically this was just a book that we loved and a kind of thematic landscape that we wanted to do. And it was too big to be a movie. I think there was a way to think about it as a movie, but it was always framed to us as a potential television show. And so I think we inherently walked in assuming that.

**John:** So Matt, Phil says you walked in assuming that. So this was not a property that you came to them with. Basically they said we think this is a TV show and what is your guys’ first approach to this property as feature writers. Like how did you approach adapting The Mysterious Benedict Society which is a middle grade fiction book series into a series? What was your first way in?

**Matt:** It was brought to us by Karen Kehela Sherwood and Jamie Tarses as a television show. It had been set up already and they came to us to see if we wanted to do it. I think the way we approached it was not – we wrote the pilot first. We looked for, having read the book and seen that it kind of basically mapped out for a season of television, we didn’t break the entire season. We thought what’s a good end point for a pilot? What will kind of propel us forward and give the audience an understanding of what the rest of the series would be?

And so it’s somewhat clear in terms of the structure of the book where you might the first one or two episodes, because our series ends up kind of having two pilots based on where the location goes.

We wrote the pilot first and then they commissioned the second episode before they green lit the series. So then we got the writer’s room together. Hired showrunning partners, Darren Swimmer and Todd Slavkin and got the room together and broke the rest from there.

**Phil:** Yeah. And I think it was helpful for us to be able to do it in little bits, because to do the pilot like, OK, we can figure out what the pilot is from this book. And I have in my copy of the novel little yellow Post-Its sticking out still that are like 101 ends here, 102 ends here maybe, and 103 somewhere here. And then to be able to do the second episode, and then we only have six left. And then as Matt said we get our partners together and they’re just very talented and adept at structuring a season. And so then we could together look at it and be like, OK, here’s how we’re going to get to the end and break down the structure.

Because I think Matt and I generally when we write are really intuitive about structure. And so this required a little bit more kind of a grind at structure than we’re used to doing with the films that we write. Because I think especially with the independent films that we do we kind of our in our little zone where we just feel it and having those 26 years of experience helps you do that. But it was interesting to enter TV where it did feel like we needed to hammer that structure a little bit more tactile-y.

**Matt:** We ended up thinking about it a little bit in terms of three act structure. Like the overarching thing because the villain kind of has a master plot, and so the kind of last two episodes with the kind of initiation/foiling of this plot, you know, you quickly see well the first two we’re going to establish, the last two we’re going to get into the climax. And we have just a big second act.

So it was helpful on a macro level to step back and think about it that way. And then get into the fine structure over every episode.

**Phil:** We were confidently calling it a two-part finale the entire time before we had any idea why it had to be a two. We were like well then you have the two-part finale.

**Craig:** That’s not a thing. It’s just two episodes.

**Phil:** And they were like, uh-huh, OK.

**Craig:** It’s the two last episodes. That’s what it’s called.

**Phil:** Bedrock principles. We have written the first two episodes and then of course there’s there two-part finale.

**Craig:** The two-part finale.

**John:** Why did they come to you for this property rather than someone who had done TV before?

**Phil:** I think that there was something about, I mean, Karen and Jamie definitely felt very strongly – they had read and seen stuff we had done. And again it’s not, you know, as you guys know, we and you guys do all different types of things. So there isn’t a “oh that’s just what they do.” And the tone of this story couldn’t be more different than Destroyer or The Invitation which are the last two things that we have done.

But they had had just kind of a spark that said we just feel it’s you and we feel like there’s a sense of optimism that we share that the show shares. And there’s a sense of humor and you guys again would know this. The ability – the show is in many ways a comedy – and the ability to do comedy that’s not R-rated comedy is its own thing. You know, and it’s its own – absurdism is a great doorway into doing comedy that doesn’t have to be R-rated comedy.

And that’s what these books are sort of and there’s a sense of that. And so I think it was maybe almost more about the personal feeling than like looking at things in our past and saying oh it’s kind of like that so it would make sense.

**John:** But you’d also made things. You were producers as well as being feature writers. And so Craig it reminds me of our conversations we’ve had on this podcast for forever about sort of the writer-plus. And in features you started to see some writers who were not just writers, but were also the people who could get stuff made. And it feels like Phil and Matt, but also you are sort of finding that, but really finding it more in television. Is that fair?

**Craig:** More than fair. Because what happens in television is you finally get acknowledged for doing all that stuff. In features as a screenwriter you have to – if you’re that writer-plus you have to behave as a producer, as a filmmaker, you have to be involved in all levels of decision-making and no one can know. No one can know.

**Phil:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Because the director is made of the most fragile material and I guess would collapse to the mere suggestion that the person who wrote everything down might have some thoughts. So, not bitter. In features we work in the shadows when we’re doing this. And in television we are not in the shadows at all.

I pride myself on working with the directors that I make television with. Doesn’t matter about rank or title or credit or who is technically in charge of blah-blah-blah. I want to work in partnership with them. That means we should both be happy. When it’s time to move on we should both be happy with the costumes, the locations, the sets builds. Everything. So I work with directors the way I wish most of the directors I’ve worked with worked with me.

But instead in features they don’t even want you there. Because apparently they’re too delicate and it would hurt. And that it turns out is psychologically damaging. It’s not that working in television makes me feel great. It’s that the pain of hiding – I don’t know how many times I’ve said this. When I hear male feature screenwriters being like why are women complaining so much, I’m like how do you not get it? How do you not get what it means to be the smartest person in the room and you’re not allowed to show it and you have to make other people feel good about themselves in order for you to be heard? How do you not get it? That is what it is working as a feature writer.

**Matt:** And the goal is to be involved, as a feature writer. The goal is to be involved throughout the entire process because you know the stories better than anybody else. And it’s not like you’re sitting there defending it like a goalie or something, like an antagonistic presence. You’re there to kind of yes-and but also think about this in terms of the story. But I think you’re always very much aware that you’re serving at the pleasure of the king or queen.

Whereas in television you are expected to be there and everything kind of flows through you. But like you said, Craig, it doesn’t have to be a dictatorial style of–

**Craig:** I mean, especially for you guys since I don’t know if Karyn shot all of it, or some of it, but when Phil’s wife is working on it I would imagine that you would want to be as collaborative as possible, the way that you guys are in your features. I mean, tell me if I’m wrong, but I suspect the way that you would work with her on a show like that would be exactly the same.

**Matt:** It is, yeah, because our process is so interesting because even though technically when Karyn is shooting an episode of our show we’re the final word on the thing, whereas when we’re shooting one of our movies Karyn is the final word on everything. Because our process is so specific and healthy there’s no difference. Because when we’re making a movie with Karyn it’s going to be, it’s just very clear, she’s going to decide. But it’s a very healthy exchange so that we always feel entirely heard and the same way I think in this experience – you know, this is the only time we’ve done it this way, but there’s just a natural triad that just makes sense.

And I think kind of going back to what you were saying Craig, it’s true, the pain part of doing – because we’ve been lucky. And part of the reason we so aggressively wanted to do our independent movies together is that we could just be free to produce. To write the script and never worry about any other exigencies coming up with the script or other writers. Anything like that. It was just period going to be ours, no doubt.

And then to be free to actually produce the movie and learn how to produce. And that production knowledge then translates really well to television. But the pain of that studio thing, where we were in the same thing, Craig, sometimes. I used to joke it’s like being an Air Force colonel on an aircraft carrier. It’s like you kind of vaguely seem like you have authority, but you have no one in your department. You know what I mean? You’re kind of just an odd character. Always on the side. You know, that’s less fun than being able to just fully engage and not have to be kind of a ghost, which often.

And, again, we had so many times where we were extremely integral to the studio movies we were making, but it was a bit like, oh that’s right, you guys are kind of doing all this stuff.

**John:** I remember having to sort of invite myself into edit rooms. Just really getting in there to fix things because they weren’t used to me being around and didn’t sort of know what to do with me on a feature. And a project I’m working on right now which is somewhere between a made for a streamer and a feature, it’s weird trying to figure out sort of what everybody thinks my place is. And sort of to assume that I have the most authority in there as possible.

**Craig:** And you start to think, oh man, I’m the dog that caught the car here. Because I’m writing most of the episodes of this season by myself, and then Neil Druckmann, we co-wrote a couple. He’s writing another one. So there’s a lot of writing. Then there’s all this other creative stuff that I love, like I mentioned, costumes and production design. And then there’s like talking to agents, trying to get deals done with actors. Discussing publicity. And going through marketing plans. And all of that at times–

**John:** Do you like any of that?

**Matt:** I love the publicity and marketing.

**Craig:** Publicity and marketing, obviously, [unintelligible]. Like I had a meeting today that I actually kind of loved about clearances and what we can show and what we can’t show. But there are times where I think like oh my god there is – being in charge as it turns out is a whole lot of work. So I would say that one of things, if you’re going to make that transition from features to showrunning is you have to know yourself well enough to understand that you can or cannot multitask at a very high level. Because you’re going to need to.

**Phil:** And it’s also great, and in our case we’re so lucky that we found partners that could really willingly and with a great deal of kind of grace under pressure really help handle and manage all of that television production. And really allow us to lean into our strengths in terms of the creative vision of the show. That partnership with Todd and Darren was very critical, because it really liberated us in many ways.

**John:** Now two episodes ago we had Jac Schaeffer on talking about her experiences with WandaVision and she said one of her favorite moments bar none was getting together a writer’s room and actually having writers working on this show which was brand new for her because she was a feature writer. This was her first time working with a TV writing staff.

This is also new for you guys because you have overseen productions before but you never had a writing staff. How is that process for you? How did you go about finding writers and working with writers? What was it like to be a feature writer suddenly overseeing other writers?

**Phil:** It was really interesting because I’d had this very vague vision of what – you hear people talk about writer’s rooms all the time. I mean, knowing so many TV writers. And in many ways it was a lot like I imagined it, and in many ways it wasn’t.

We had a total of five writers besides ourselves, including Todd and Darren, and then three other really great writers. And it was really an interesting thing of just seeing how much the – like realizing that the goal there is to hopefully inspire other people. You know, same way with a screenplay. You’re hoping to inspire a director, then you’re hoping to inspire actors. You’re hoping to inspire financiers. So almost took that approach to the writer’s room. And this show is very, very specific, and very strange, and to kind of help mark the boundaries of what the show is and what the vibe was. And that we realized kind of part of our role was to try to just throw a lot of things out there that would help to inspire other people to slowly get more like, oh, I get it. This is what the show is and this is what the show isn’t.

It was really interesting and really actually a lot of fun, because it was, as you said, we’d never been in that situation before where we had all these people to help.

**Matt:** It was interesting though because things just start to move and it’s a different way of thinking about story and writing. Just the process of it was so different to me, because a lot of times I just need to go off and think for a second. I need to go walk from my office to the car and then the problem would be solved. And this time just like you’ve got this group of people throwing out ideas and it’s fun. And it’s kind of exhilarating and it was a new and kind of interesting thing I thought.

**Phil:** And people do it differently as we were informed. And we learned early like you can do it in so many different ways. In this case we were in there a lot. And I know a lot of other people maybe you come at the beginning of the day and the end of the day. And there’s all this other stuff to do. But we tended to want to be back in there as much as we could. So, I think it can evolve in terms of–

**John:** What were your documents along the way? So as it moved you guys had done a pilot and a backup script. But were there outlines for other documents? What would come out of the room and what were the states of episodes before they were full scripts?

**Matt:** We had a lot of time before production. It didn’t overlap. And so we kind of broke the whole season very roughly and then we kind of finely break 103 on and then at some point if we were doing 105 we’d assign 103 and that writer would do – we did story areas for two or three episodes and then we got those taken off the menu which was so nice.

**John:** How long is a story area document?

**Matt:** Story area document. We would start pitching those just orally to the studio rather than have a round of notes on another document.

**Phil:** I think those were like three pages when we.

**Matt:** Yeah.

**Craig:** For the folks listening at home, when we call episodes 102, 103, 104, the way we number television episodes is the first number is the season number and then the second number is the episode number. So, episode 315 if the 15th episode of the third season. Now you know.

**Phil:** There you go. Thank you, Craig.

**Matt:** I mean, the story area documents, I don’t find them particularly useful. You’re just kind of stating what the episode will be about in a page or three. As a tool to help you write the script I didn’t find those very helpful. Mainly outlines. So 12-page outline for each of the episodes. And we’d look at it for a while and send the writer back to do some revisions and then we’d obviously send to the studio and then they’d go off to write.

**John:** So all episodes were written before production started, correct?

**Phil:** Yeah. I think almost. We might have been writing a little bit of the finale, the second part of the two-part finale.

**Craig:** Two-part finale.

**John:** But did your room still exist by the time?

**Matt:** Part two of the two-part finale was written during production.

**Phil:** Now the room had broken actually right before the Covid shutdown of mid-March. And we had actually really finished. We were maybe going to be in the room another week for kind of odds and ends. But we had sort of perfectly timed to be able to finish. So the room was broken but there was still a lot of writing to do.

**John:** Let’s talk about what writing you guys needed to do on people’s scripts that were not – someone else had written the script but you needed to go through and do some work on that. How did you approach that and did you have conversations with the writers? Did you give writers notes first and then go through and touch it yourselves? It would feel weird to me to not actually be fixing the problems in front of me.

**Phil:** Yeah, it’s a strange but very customary thing that we hadn’t encountered because we hadn’t done TV. But I think in the end if you’re going to be the last word on the script, which was our job to be, then what you’re hoping and what we got, which was fantastic, is writers who get you really close to what is going to cohere and what is going to really sing as the very specific and voice of the show, which is its own thing.

So I think customarily, yeah, you’re really in this situation where you’re hoping to, like I said before, hoping to inspire people to kind of, A, both be able to kind of deliver something close to what you would have done, but, B, surprise you with something that you wouldn’t have considered and there’s plenty of examples of that in the show. You’re trying to manage, you know, I think it’s no news to anyone in television that that’s kind of the job of the people who are the final word on the script. You’re going to have to work on it and really pull it all together. But your hope is that, yes, the writer is going to get another bite at the apple. That’s also how things get better rolling forward.

That process of giving notes to people, having them work on it, talking it through, that’s all part of the grist for the mill.

**Matt:** It’s all with the understanding of like there’s no hard feelings. It’s not a judgment of what you’ve done. It comes to a point where you can’t read our minds in terms of like how we would phrase a certain thing. So there are certain things that we’re just going to do. It’s supposed to flow through us and eventually it does. But like Phil said the hope is that everyone has been prepped well enough through the room and through your notes on the various other documents that they go off and surprise you with something awesome. And that happened a ton.

**Phil:** Yeah. And the goal is that you have every writer feel very invested in their episode, because there is a linkage between whatever brings their special thing and whatever brings the show’s special thing. It’s in there that it can be found.

**John:** Now Megana we have an email from somebody who wrote in with sort of the opposite experience here, so I wonder if you could share that with us and we could talk through what’s happening on this show and what could be improved.

**Megana Rao:** Erased wrote in saying, “I’m working on a TV show from a big name creator. For the episode I wrote the showrunner did small tweaks right before the episode shot. They replaced my name on the title page and turned in the script with their name on it. I learned of this when the script coordinator distributed a draft. I decided not to confront them, but instead to point out the ‘oversight.’ Paperwork had to be reissued and the show creator seemed upset that I was now a credited writer. It seemed to ruin their branded vision of the second season being written by only them and the showrunner.

“The creator took over the writer’s room Twitter account and when we premiered went on a huge PR parade that pushed the narrative that the season was only written by two writers. In the end I got the credit I needed to get into the guild. And when the episode airs it will say my name. But I hate that this creator has gone to such extreme measures to push a narrative that excluded my contributions.”

**Craig:** Yikes.

**Phil:** That stinks. Straight up.

**Matt:** That’s not the way we do business at Hay-Manfredi.

**Phil:** Nor anybody that I think we know. I mean, I think, I don’t know, I think a couple things. If you wanted it to be written by only two people then the answer would be to only have two people writing it. That’s a denial of the reality of the show. But the other thing is not knowing what this is, just I think my general take on these things is similar to being a director in features. If you’re a creator or a showrunner in television, everyone is already going to assume you did everything. They already are going to give you all the credit that you can possibly handle. So the idea of trying to erase someone else can only come from ego, to me.

**John:** Ego and insecurity.

**Phil:** And insecurity. And also the fact that it has a very tangible financial impact on somebody who is by definition making less money than you are, to take away that credit. So, I don’t know, again, we kind of knew this instinctively and talked to many of our friends and again when we partnered with Todd and Darren they’re extremely ethical, very professional, moral guys. And it was just clear when you talk to other professionals that you just don’t do that. It’s tacky.

You know, and I know many people do, but in my opinion it just does not come from a positive place.

**Matt:** It’s like swinging a 3-0 with a big lead.

**Craig:** Yeah, the unwritten rules of baseball, and they’re the unwritten rules of television. And we all know who does it. I mean, people talk about it. And I can think of one guy in particular that people mention all the time who is a serial violator of this unwritten rule.

The instinct behind it I assume is, hey, I wrote on this and maybe the showrunner thinks that he or she did most of the rewriting. Because a lot of times rewriters in their own minds expand their contribution.

**Phil:** Anyone who has done an arbitration can definitely see that.

**Craig:** God knows if you’ve read enough arbitration statements you marvel at it all. But even so, even if you rewrite every word there is a contract and the contract – not legal, but ethically – that you just let it go, because you’re the executive producer, you’re the creator, in some cases you’re the director, and so really what is the fear? That one day that episode is going to win an Emmy and some other person will get up there to take that Emmy even though they didn’t write a lot of the stuff that’s in it? Who cares?

You know what? You’ve just got to be bigger than that. You have to be bigger. It’s part of being professional. And especially now – look, I don’t have a writer’s room, so this is easy for me to say, OK. I get that. I’m writing checks I don’t have to cash. But, now when people are trying to hire folks who generally weren’t hired frequently before, so basically everybody that’s not a white guy, it seems more and more important to keep making sure that you’re pulling them up and you’re keeping the integrity of the ladder in place so they can move up. And the integrity of the ladder comes down to credits. It is money for people who need it.

And you know who definitely doesn’t need the money? The showrunner. Every single time. So, this is déclassé, it shouldn’t be done. You’ve got to be bigger than that. And I’m extending an olive branch to the big name creator and saying I understand the impulse. I do. I get it. And I do believe that there are cases where you have to sit there, perhaps, in the Emmy audience and grit your teeth as somebody that you had to spend a weekend rewriting completely gets up there and thanks everybody for your work. I get that.

But hey, you know what, guess what? Welcome to being a writer in features again. It’s kind of that’s the way it goes.

**Phil:** It all comes back to that.

**Matt:** The way we did it was, and Todd and Darren, this was their method, which was you hire you room and you’re very clear about what’s going to happen. With us, the number of episodes worked out that we said, OK, each of you is going to get an episode. We don’t know which one it will be, but you know.

And if we had had one more writer it would be like each of you is going to get an episode and two of you are going to share an episode. We are not going to take credit on any of those episodes and your name will be on it. Your name will be on an episode. We’re going to get enough credit.

**Craig:** Right.

**Matt:** You know? Like our name appears last and at the beginning and the end of every episode and sometimes it appears like three times. People know what we did.

**Phil:** That’s enough.

**Matt:** And we’re comfortable with acknowledging the work of others.

**Phil:** And as you said, Craig, too, like I mean you also realize that one of the mysterious of screenwriting in television writing world is it’s not – unless it’s something like when we have done our movies where no one else has been part of that writing process period, if there’s multiple people there’s going to be multiple perspectives on what reality is and who did what and who remembers doing something that the other person actually did. And the only way out of those weeds is to just say everyone is responsible for their own perspective on what happened. But what I can do is be ethical and generous.

**Craig:** Generous.

**Phil:** And positive.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Phil:** That’s what I can do. And then everyone else’s stuff is up to them.

**Craig:** We talked about publicity and marketing and all the rest of it. When the publicity thing happens it is fascinating to watch how it all functions. So, in movies you just don’t exist when it comes time for publicity, and if you do it’s just so that someone can say that you did a poor job. And then regardless the director gets this possessive, you know, so-and-so’s movie. And you’re like, what the?

And then in television it’s the other way around. And it’s equally as unfair. I cannot tell you how many times I would read that I was the director of Chernobyl. I was not. I didn’t direct a frame of it. Johan Renck did. All of it. But in television they just gravitate towards the showrunner and assign the showrunner full responsibility for everything. Which means for the love of god if you have a writing room you can share a little bit. You’re not going to go hungry for attention. Good lord. The opposite.

**Matt:** Yeah.

**John:** Now, Megana, we have a bunch of questions saved up for people writing in about writing partner questions and issues. I’m wondering since we have Phil and Matt here if you can ask some questions about writing partner stuff.

**Craig:** I think we might – and maybe we should do a speed round, because we have a bunch of them and I kind of want to get all of these answered.

**Matt:** Let’s do it.

**Phil:** We need to definitively answer all of these questions right now.

**Craig:** Go.

**Matt:** No.

**Megana:** So first up Tom from LA writes in, “I’m in a bit of a bind. Simply put, I want to break up with my writing partner. But I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. We’ve been writing together for a while now and over that time have become really good friends, with my wife and her especially growing close. With writing though I dread every time we sit down to write. At risk of sounding conceited, I feel like the gap between our abilities has grown throughout our relationship, to the point that I don’t trust her edits when she rewrites me anymore. Writing alone is hard enough, but this is exhausting.

“We recently turned in a project to financiers and are beginning to meet with production companies and actors about a script we finished in 2020. The conversation of what do we start next has come up and I honestly don’t know what to say. At heart I’m conflict-averse and can see myself unhappily staying in this relationship for a long time just so I don’t have to hurt anyone. What advice do you have for ending a writing partner relationship? How can I go about it in a way that won’t endanger the projects we’ve already written? Or our friendship?”

**Craig:** [laughs] This is where we reveal that Phil asked us to read this question so that he could say, “Well Matt it’s funny that they asked this because…”

**Phil:** Sometimes in the presence of friends it’s easier to get to the…

**Craig:** Witness me.

**Matt:** The answer has to be, you know, you’ve got to rip off the Band-Aid. And this isn’t meant to be condescending, but I was talking with one of my kids the other day and I was like don’t make yourself miserable just to avoid a difficult conversation. It will only get worse. And I think there’s a really graceful way, you know, I think creatively we’re heading in different directions. And that’s not a slight on what you’re doing, but I think we’ve kind of grown apart a little bit as writers and I think we should be free to explore other stuff.

**Craig:** I went through this. I had a writing partner. Fantastic guy named Greg. We wrote a couple of movies together that got produced. And we were a bona fide writing team with a writing team quote and we shared agents. And over time what happened was I started to realize that I was probably supposed to be writing alone. Sometimes the best way to put it, Tom, is it’s not that I don’t want to write with you anymore, it’s that I don’t want to write with anyone anymore. I just want to write with me. Because it is possible that you are a solo act, which is perfectly fine. It happens.

It isn’t a judgment. It isn’t a condemnation. Now, when you are concerned about hurting her feelings what I can tell you is you will hurt her feelings. Sorry, it’s going to happen. And what you don’t want to do as Matt says is just sacrifice your own emotional integrity and joy and pleasure in what is already as you say alone hard enough just because you don’t want to hurt her feelings. Her feelings are going to be hurt, but then she’ll get over it because you’re not being cruel. You’re not being selfish. You’re just being honest about who you are and how you’ve changed.

**Matt:** As my therapist once said about a difficult thing, it’s going to be bad, but it will be finite.

**Craig:** Yes. Tincture of time is what Dennis Palumbo would say to me all the time. Tincture of time. It is amazing how time really does heal everything. It’s insane.

**John:** All right, Megana, next question.

**Megana:** Frustrated and Furious asks, “A friend and I wrote a script together. We agreed it was good and that we needed to get it out there as widely as possible. But all of the reaching out was done by me, exploiting only my contacts and relationships and burning my favors, and none of it was being done by him. I reached out to over 75 friends and contacts. He reached out to two. I tried addressing it with him directly and let him know it was leading to frustration and resentment on my part because he said he would send the script to his contacts and then he wouldn’t.

“We had been knee-deep in planning our next project and I just stopped engaging because I felt as if I was being used for my contacts and my willingness to put myself out there. Now, it’s unlikely I will ever write a script on my own as good as the one we wrote together, so here’s my question. Should I put this issue aside to continue writing scripts with him since the scripts I write with him will be better than those I write on my own? Or should I torpedo our relationship because my cowriter is a weasel and someone who is using me and my contacts for his own personal gain without exposing himself to failure the way I am?”

**Craig:** Whoa. Whoa. Good golly.

**Phil:** Wow. Well I think we all recognize that the key sentence in that is “I don’t believe I will write a script better on my own.”

**Craig:** What else is there to know?

**Phil:** So the question then becomes can you reframe the relationship and what the demands business-wise are in a way that allows you to do your best work? Because there’s plenty of partners out there. Like Matt, there’s a lot of different ways to be partners. Matt and I are the sort of two of the same guy version, where we both are kind of good at the same things and we both try to improve at the same things and all that.

But there’s plenty of partners who one person is an absolutely cannot speak in a meeting. They are just terribly socially awkward and the other one is the face person. But that other person who can’t talk in a meeting or can’t pitch is a brilliant writer and they have an exchange that feels completely equitable and fair to them.

So, everyone doesn’t have to offer the same stuff, but if it’s creating resentment to the level of [weaselry] then you have to address that in one way or the other, but I guess I’m giving you the permission to say that unless this person is kind of doing it in a way that’s errors of commission versus omission, just like this person maybe is not good at reaching out to people, then if you can make an accommodation because the work is better and you like that part of the partnership then it’s possible.

**Craig:** I don’t understand this complaint. I’ve got to be honest with you. Frustrated and Furious, if this works, you send out a script to a whole bunch of people, if it works then you’ll get an agent and then your agent does this for the rest of your career and it’s no longer an issue. This is more of like if the two of you were starting an agency together I would get it, but you are putting this massive stress on how many friends and contacts you sent things out to and that those contacts are valuable. No they’re not. No they’re not. Your script is valuable. Period. The end.

**Matt:** I’m with Craig. If you have one contact, I’m a true believer in good work will out itself.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Matt:** So screenwriting is not about contacts it’s about the writing. And if you’re producing good writing with this person, and like Phil said if you can put your frustration aside, do not worry about the contacts.

**Craig:** No.

**Matt:** Because you’re going to write something and it’s going to take one contact and you’ll be on your way.

**Craig:** I’m frustrated and furious.

**John:** Yeah. I honestly felt like maybe we actually did get the other side of this writing partnership sending us an email as well saying like this guy only is trying to hustle, but he’s actually a terrible writer.

**Matt:** Exactly.

**John:** It’s all hustle.

**Craig:** Then we yell at that guy.

**Phil:** I mean, just to refine a tiny bit, it is a little bit about contacts. Let’s not be, you know what I mean?

**Craig:** A little bit. But it’s such a weird like you won’t email your mother whose daughter went to school with Tom Cruise’s friend. Like who cares?

**Matt:** Yes. And it’s about maintaining relationships and things like that. But I don’t value Phil for his contacts.

**Craig:** Oh well. Well there you and I have to differ. Because that’s the only thing about him I find interesting.

**Phil:** Craig is constantly having me make calls to minor league baseball players for him.

**Craig:** But only to Karyn. Like I’m constantly asking can you ask Karyn?

**Phil:** Exactly. And like you have her phone number. Just call her.

**Craig:** Because John won’t do it.

**John:** I will say in every relationship though there’s the one person who like calls the strangers. Like I’m the person who is going to call that stranger to get this thing to happen. That’s just how we sort of divide stuff up like that.

**Craig:** Oh, you mean like for you and me? Oh definitely. I’m useless.

**Phil:** There’s different roles that can be valuable.

**Matt:** But John is frustrated.

**Craig:** Of course. John carries me around like a dead Siamese twin. That’s a Tim O’Donnell line I stole. I’m just sort of hanging off of him, like I died years ago from sleep apnea but he can’t cut me loose because we share a liver and that’s the way it goes.

**John:** Let’s take a listen to a question from somebody who is at the start of a partnership. Megana what you got?

**Megana:** Margaret asks, “I’m considering pursuing a one-off partnership with a co-writer on a feature film script but I have questions relating to the other party’s representation. While I don’t have representation, the other party is represented by a manager in an unofficial manner. His deal, which is not in writing, is that he submits ideas and scripts to the manager who will then consider packaging it with the performers that he represents.”

**Craig:** Oh my god. He’ll consider it.

**Megana:** “Also, the talent would probably be considered C or D-list celebrities. Yes, I acknowledge that I’m no-list. No one with whom I want our new project tied. I think that this project that can potentially do better in terms of attracting talent. Overall the manager seems more like a booking agent then a rep for writers. My question is what are the legal complications of having one party in a partnership represented by a manager while the other party is not represented? Will the situation force the project to be handled through that manager? And could that manager act as a spoil sport that kills a deal that develops outside of his pipeline?

“In other words, just how messy could this get?”

**Phil:** I think that it could get very messy. But I think the answer is very clean and I’d be surprised if any of my friends disagreed, which is–

**Craig:** Margaret should do it. [laughs] She should jump in.

**Matt:** Go for it. Go for it.

**Phil:** It is that you’ve already correctly perceived the situation. You seem very clear-eyed about it. You know that this manager is not a good one and is not going to help. And will only in fact hurt. And I actually think the chances that this manager will not hurt are very slim. And so I think it’s in my – if this were me, I would either avoid the situation entirely, or I would make it very clear that this project cannot be represented by that person.

Now that person may still win their way into it, or create a static. And the last thing you need is static. And you really don’t need someone packaging a script with less than the very, very best. So, I guess my questions is if it is not something you absolutely have to pursue, which it kind of doesn’t sound like it from your framing, it’s best just to leave it be.

**Matt:** Unless the partner severs ties with the manager.

**John:** Yeah, that writer should not be with that manager.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So get rid of that manager. But if that writer is not willing to get rid of that manager you should not be writing a project with them because they have bad judgment.

**Craig:** Total consensus.

**John:** As a general case though I’m curious about your thoughts when – this is something I’ve encountered once or twice – when I have an agent but I’m working with somebody who has a different agent or not an agent at any point, it does get kind of weird when one of the partnership and the other side doesn’t. Because it just becomes weird. Like are they representing both of you? Are they representing your side most? It is strange.

**Phil:** Yeah.

**John:** You guys have the same agents I assume? You and Matt have the same agents?

**Matt:** Oh yeah.

**Phil:** We’ve always had the same agents. But it’s interesting. We have – Karyn, her agent is at a different agency. Now over the years they’ve all learned to work extremely closely with one another, so it’s sort of like they all represent the three of us. But that is tough. Especially if you’re in the more starting out and you may not have representation and the other person does. There’s a power imbalance. That sense, from either side.

Or if you’re a writer that’s partnering with someone who has a massive quote and your quote is not massive. Who gets paid what? That’s really complicated stuff to deal with. And I think as in the theme that I think as always is even though it’s painful the only answer is to communicate extremely openly about it from moment one. And to try to get those expectations understood, not in an unspoken way, but in a spoken way.

**John:** That is a great segue to our last question. Megana, do you want to ask Kevin’s question here?

**Megana:** Great. So Kevin says, “I write with a partner on some projects and I’m wondering if we need a simple contract for those projects showing that we are co-writers. Someone expressed a hypothetical to me. What if my partner and I started developing an idea but the relationship has a falling out? What if my partner takes that idea and writes a script? I could be left without a path for compensation. How have you guys handled co-written projects?”

**John:** I would point people to some sort of screenwriter agreement before you get started. Basically something that lays out – we’ll put a link in the show notes to an example of it. But something that lays out like this is the project we’re trying to do together. This is how we’re going to split things if stuff is to be split. This is how we’re going to be credited with our ampersand and whose name goes first. The more you can do that stuff ahead of time in those initial discussions the better you’re going to be down the road.

**Matt:** I totally agree.

**John:** It’s the prenuptial agreement.

**Craig:** Prenup. Prenup.

**Phil:** And I think that I guess the good news and bad news of this is that if you have something that is written together – I guess this is talking maybe in the early, early stages that veers, but if you have something you’ve written together and you split up both people are holding a kill switch.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Phil:** Neither one of you can make it live on its own, but either one can kill it. Because nobody wants trouble. And the kind of trouble that is where someone in the partnership that wrote it is fighting the thing will guarantee nothing will happen.

**Craig:** Yeah, Kevin, when you’re dealing with the my partner and I are developing an idea, just write things down at the end of the meeting, or write them during the meeting. Take notes. Put them in outline form. Everything that’s written down in fixed form is copyrightable, assuming that it’s more than just what if babies had wings. But if you guys are going down, laying out a plot, and characters, just write it down. And now you’ve got something—

**Phil:** And email a summary of what you did that day to the person under the headline What We Did Today On This Project. That will do it.

**Matt:** I think those agreements are so helpful, especially when you’re starting out and you meet people and you don’t really know them that well and you get excited and you start to collaborate on something. Phil and I had like a very small project very early on that got held up by someone kind of trying to glom onto it. And the stakes ultimately were super low, but to us at the time they were super high.

**Phil:** Very wounding. The idea that this person could kind of kill a thing that we did because of conversations we’d had. You know, so.

**Matt:** And one of those agreements, even if it feels stupid to kind of over-codify something, I’m all for it.

**John:** Well you guys talked about putting the boundaries around what is the show, what is not the show. You’re putting boundaries around like, OK, this is the thing we’re working on together. So we can have discussions about other stuff, but this is the thing that our partnership is actually pursuing at this moment, and that feels so especially important right at the beginning of a relationship.

**Phil:** Definitely. Especially when you’re in a position in the business where you’re less established or you’re starting, or you’re kind of hustling and creating stuff. Like you feel much more vulnerable, for good reason, and thus all the more reason to hopefully take a couple of those worries off the table for yourself so you can focus.

**John:** Megana, thank you for these questions.

**Craig:** Thanks Megana.

**Megana:** Thank you. I love that this segment has just felt like general good dad advice.

**Craig:** Aw, well, you are dealing with four of them.

**Phil:** That’s our [unintelligible]. Thank you Megana.

**Craig:** That’s who we are. You know when you get four white men together you know what it’s called? A podcast. [laughs]

**Megana:** Thanks guys.

**Craig:** Thanks Megana.

**Phil:** Thank you.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is called 50 Years of Text Games. It’s a sub-stack by Aaron Reed. And it’s really great. Sort of week by week he’s going through and looking at the text games of the last 50 years obvious, from Zork, to Hunt the Wumpus, Super Star Trek, and also the play by mail games, like the ones that pre-dated even sort of computers or BBSs.

It’s really fascinating and some stuff I knew, some stuff I didn’t know. But it was just great. And it’s not just interactive fiction but also kind of all the other strategy games that came up along the way. So it’s a sub-stack. It’s easy to subscribe to it if you’re curious. There’s some free issues you can look at, too, to see whether it’s something you’d like to read. So 50 Years of Text Games by Aaron Reed.

**Craig:** God, I love those. All the Infocom Games. So frustrating. So wonderful. My One Cool Thing is Miso Black Cod. You guys have had Miso Black Cod at a restaurant before. So delicious.

**John:** Delicious.

**Phil:** Oh, c’mon, delicious.

**Craig:** Sort of made famous by Chef Nobu. And I made it this past weekend and it turns out it’s incredibly easy to do. And kind of fool-proof. It’s pretty remarkable. The key for you at home who are like, oh my god, I can’t do it. Yes you absolutely can. The most important thing is to know what fish to get. It’s not actually cod. I think this is where everybody goes wrong. Black cod is just a nickname for a different fish called Sable fish.

What you want is a sable fish filet. And then the coating is just white miso. There’s like a specific miso called [Saikyo] miso which you’re probably not going to find here in the US or here in Canada, as where I am. You can get close to it by taking white miso or otherwise known as sweet miso which is not sweet, and then add a little sugar and add some mirin which is a kind of rice wine which is a different kind of rice wine. You mix it all together, coat it on the sable fish, broil it for 10 minutes. And oh my god it works.

**John:** Does it flake just like at Nobu?

**Matt:** Delicious. So good.

**Craig:** It works. It is so easy, it’s crazy. So, especially if you have kids who are like oh my god fish, no, it’s delicious and doable.

**John:** Craig and Matt and Phil, do you like monkfish?

**Matt:** I like monkfish.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not my favorite, but I don’t kick it out of bed.

**Phil:** I don’t think I ever eat it except for the liver to be perfectly honest.

**John:** Oh really? Monkfish I find it to be delicious fish. Really strange, fleshy. And so this black cod is reminding me sort of how I like some monkfish.

**Craig:** Well monkfish has a name problem. It’s got “onk.”

**John:** It does.

**Craig:** Which you’re like, uh, is it from a monkey?

**John:** But also you can look at the actual fish, it looks like an eel.

**Phil:** You sense it trolling the bottom of whatever water.

**Matt:** Craig, it does come from a monkey.

**Craig:** From a monkey. It’s monkey fish.

**John:** Matt, what have you got for us for One Cool Thing?

**Matt:** My One Cool Thing, during this pandemic I didn’t think I was going to get into puzzles and sourdough, but I did. And my One Cool Thing is Liberty Puzzles. They’re these–

**John:** They’re so good.

**Matt:** Oh my god, they’re so good. They’re these wooden puzzles. They’re a little expensive, or they can be, but they have these shapes, like each puzzle has shapes kind of that make sense with the subject matter. So like you’re doing this ocean scene and there’s a fisherman and there’s a boat.

**Craig:** Oh these are jigsaw puzzles.

**Matt:** It’s a jigsaw puzzle.

**John:** I was going to say, Craig hates jigsaw puzzles.

**Phil:** He doesn’t recognize jigsaw puzzles.

**Craig:** Yeah. I call them broken pictures.

**John:** Matt, you and I are right here. Aline Brosh McKenna is listening to this and fully agrees.

**Craig:** I know, but in my mind you are. I just turned you off in my head.

**Matt:** What happens is—

**Phil:** Pack your things and go home.

**Matt:** They’re so beautifully cut that as soon as you put one of the shapes in like a man, he just melts into the puzzle and goes away. And it’s this beautiful visual metaphor for a lot of things. And it feels somewhat emotional to do these puzzles.

**Craig:** I wish you could see my face.

**Matt:** I don’t care. Go eat your cod. Go eat your cod.

**Craig:** Broken pictures.

**John:** Let’s also celebrate because these are laser cut you open the box and it smells like a campfire which is fantastic.

**Matt:** Oh, it’s great.

**John:** It’s fantastic. It’s great. And you’ll look at these pieces like this could not possibly connect to any other piece and then it does. And it’s just amazing.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** They’re also made in Boulder, Colorado, my hometown.

**Phil:** The tactile element of a jigsaw puzzle is wonderful, Craig, and that’s what it’s about. It’s the small victory.

**Craig:** It’s just repair. It’s a repair job.

**Matt:** What if I slather some mirin and miso on it?

**Craig:** Well, I mean, if I can eat it then it’s food, it has value.

**Matt:** And will you perk up?

**Craig:** Well it’s not a puzzle. I mean, at least we can agree on that. It’s just food at that point. I can’t tell you, I was so excited, Matt, and then it all went to hell.

**Matt:** Aw.

**Craig:** Goddamn.

**Phil:** Matt, if you hope to go through life never disappointing Craig, I’ve got news for you.

**Craig:** So far so good.

**Phil:** So don’t worry about it.

**Craig:** So far so good. But if you say jigsaw puzzle I’m going to hit the roof.

**Phil:** I have a One Cool Thing and I struggled because I believe every time I’ve ever been lucky enough to be on this show my One Cool Thing has had something to do with baseball. So I challenged myself to not do something about baseball this time. But I can gladly offer bonus baseball content if you want to.

And in fact I will, I’ll sneak it in really quickly. A woman named Justine Seigal who is on Twitter who runs an organization called Baseball for All which is dedicated to fostering girls and women playing baseball and staying in baseball at a very high level. It’s incredible.

**Craig:** Excellent. I love that.

**Phil:** Look it up.

**Matt:** Does she make jigsaw puzzles?

**Craig:** Why would she? She sounds awesome. [laughs] She doesn’t have time for that.

**Phil:** So my One Cool Thing is something happened that’s really remarkable, it’s a podcast. And there’s a guy named Jim Penola who did a podcast about our movie The Invitation called An Invitation to the Invitation. And I feel so honored and shocked by the existence of this thing, because it is a tremendously accomplished and in-depth kind of breakdown. And I mention it specifically here because he talks about the script a lot. It’s mainly sort of about the script and how it translates to the screen. And it’s also about how the movie speaks to him personally in terms of his life.

So, it’s just a really beautiful work of art on its own. And really well made. The music is beautiful. So, if you have any remote interest in this movie that we made, Jim has taken the analysis of it to a – it’s like one of those BFI movie guides that I love so much. So that is a really cool thing to me personally.

**Matt:** I agree.

**Phil:** And hopefully to others.

**Matt:** I agree. It’s cool.

**John:** Excellent.

**Craig:** Can’t make fun of it. I’ve got to respect it.

**Phil:** Sorry Craig.

**Matt:** How would you like to come on a podcast and be relentlessly abused?

**Craig:** I don’t think relentless. I think the abuse has been sort of–

**Matt:** Just a focused.

**Craig:** I would say you’ve been intermittently abused, which is fair.

**Phil:** Now, the one true cool thing that I can imagine is to someday get Matt to play Dungeons & Dragons with us.

**John:** That would be amazing.

**Phil:** That would be the coolest of things.

**John:** Now, Matt, to be fair a lot of Craig’s mockery of you happened before we started recording. So it’s not really on the podcast.

**Phil:** That’s right.

**John:** Phil and Matt, thank you so much for being on the show with us this week.

**Craig:** Thanks guys.

**Phil:** Such a pleasure.

**John:** Your new series debuts?

**Phil:** June 25th.

**John:** June 25th on Disney+. All over the world.

**Craig:** Mysterious Benedict Society.

**Phil:** Mysterious Benedict Society based on the novel by Trenton Lee Stewart. And we’re really proud of it and hope you check it out.

**John:** Cool. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Ryan Riley and it is so cute.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** 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 like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter I’m @johnaugust. Phil Hay, are you on Twitter?

**Phil:** I am. @phillycarly.

**John:** And Matt Manfredi are you on Twitter?

**Matt:** I am. I’m @mattrm.

**John:** You may want to tweet at them to tell them how much you’re enjoying Mysterious Benedict Society or The Invitation.

We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and 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 the bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on shooting during a pandemic. Matt and Phil and Craig and Megana, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Yay.

**Matt:** I’ve got to say one thing and Craig is going to make fun of me.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** Go.

**Matt:** My twitter handle I got wrong because I don’t ever look at it. It’s @mattrmanfredi. I’m so sorry.

**Craig:** Oh my god. You missed more than half of it. Wow.

**John:** Also you should follow Matt on Instagram because he takes photos of interesting trees.

**Phil:** Yeah, that’s growing in popularity wildly.

**Craig:** That I feel like was the most damning thing anyone said about you today.

**Matt:** Well the trees actually are beautiful.

**John:** Sometimes they’re also fire hydrants. So.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right. So you were all set to film the Mysterious Benedict Society. You were just weeks away from production and then a pandemic happened. So you ended up having to not shoot your show and then go back to start shooting it at the height of the pandemic. Talk to us about that decision.

**Phil:** Well, yeah, we were all ready to go. We were deep in preproduction. I think we were maybe 10 days from the start of shooting when that kind of week happened in mid-March where kind of Rudy Gobert had Covid and Hanks and everything started shutting down. And it was as everyone remembers such a chaotic time. And our first concern, we kind of knew, we saw the writing on the wall pretty quickly and our first concern was to get everybody home. We had a director from England. We had people from all over. The production was in Vancouver.

And then once that happened and we officially pushed we were like everybody else just waiting. And while we were waiting were kind of in all these conversations about developing protocols. What that would even look like, this unprecedented way of being and shooting. And our line producer, Grace Gilroy, who is sort of–

**Craig:** I love Grace.

**Phil:** You know Grace.

**Craig:** She’s the best.

**Phil:** If you meet Grace Gilroy, she’s the greatest.

**Matt:** She’s the reason we got this shot.

**Craig:** Just a little side note, Grace was the line producer on the Scary Movies that I did in Vancouver as well. And line producers will sometimes show up on set towards the end of the day if you’re going way over and they’re there to be like you’ve got to finish. And she would wear this very long coat. She’s a short woman. And she would wear this big, long winter coat that would go to the floor. And she walked very smoothly, so she floated. She would float into the stage and everybody was like oh boy we’re in trouble.

**Phil:** Exactly. We must wrap it up immediately.

**Craig:** She’s wonderful.

**Phil:** So she was kind of very instrumental in creating those protocols with the BC government. We knew one thing that we were going to have the most stringent protocols and if anyone could pull it off it would be our production. And so we started talking about during the summer sort of getting prepared to try to get people back up there and get going in September.

Remarkably, I mean, there were some very specific things that had to be different. Like normally of course we would have been up there for the pilot physically. Because of the 14 day quarantine coming into Canada, once you’re there you’re not flying back and forth. So we had to figure out what was going to be the best use of time. Our normal thing would be fly up there, fly back. It’s Vancouver. You can fly back three times a week if you need to. That wasn’t going to happen.

So, the biggest tangible for Matt and I was once production started we were on a monitor at our individual homes on Clearview Flex which is one of the several apps that allows you to do this, watching the feed from the monitors all day long. And we created some ideas of how to communicate with the directors. We would do a WhatsApp with the director, director’s assistant, script supervisor to do notes.

And in a strange way it allowed us to be on set for every take of every set up in this entire eight-episode run.

**Matt:** It worked really well. And for the first season of a show it was pretty invaluable to be present for kind of all of it.

**Phil:** Though we couldn’t be physically present, we were able to be mentally present for all of it.

**Matt:** Yeah. And what you don’t get in that is to kind of be with the actors, to be with them off set. Part of the job if everything is going well is just to let people know how well they’re doing. They don’t often get to hear it. And so to not be able to be there for both technical things and creative things, but also morale, it’s difficult. But this was kind of the best possible solution. And we did 95% of post remotely. Color. Sound. All of the editing.

**Phil:** And you kind of learn which parts of it kind of work pretty seamlessly and which parts of it are difficult. I mean, there was something amazing about being able to be watching the monitor between set ups, being in a production meeting for the next episode on Zoom, getting emails about costumes and locations and etc. and being able to handle all that at once in a way that, you know, when I’m physically on a set, which is a place I truly love to be, one of my favorite places in the world, I’m not one of those people that can pull out the laptop and work on something else, or do a little rewrite on the next script coming in. I just can’t. I just have to be and be there.

And so this let me kind of do all that. And as Matt said the intangibles are what we missed, too. And for the actors, shooting in a pandemic, I know for our show everyone was so committed to each other’s safety that the actors were not – they’re not out having fun on the weekends. It’s a very lonely thing to be an actor and be without your family, alone in another city period. But for Tony, Tony Hale who is the star of the show, he’s just living a monk-like existence. Working, coming back, working, coming back.

So we started figuring out, oh, we really need to schedule things with him. So we would have Zoom drinks regularly. We’d have a check-in to make sure right before shooting to go through the script page by page and walk through every single line with him and make sure everything was cool. So, those intangibles are what you miss and is a lot of the fun of making movies and television. But in the editing room, for example, I thought it was very—

**Matt:** I loved it.

**Phil:** Seamless and smooth to be on a Zoom editing session. Whereas Karyn for example is like, “Oh, the second I can get back physically in the editing room I want to be. I don’t like the virtual thing.” So everyone has a different vibe with it.

**John:** So what things will you try to take from this – was forced upon you the first season, would you try to take with you into a second season if there is a second season for your show?

**Phil:** Personally, I would say definitely we will spend time on the set for sure. Because I did miss that. I did miss the physically being there. But the lessons, number one I think a lesson a lot of people are taking is shorter days are good. We were kind of forced into shorter days because of the pandemic and also because we have a lot of kids in the cast. But I found it to be very clarifying. I’ve always believed that and Karyn on our movies is adamant about working humane days. It’s just a bedrock.

You can do it. And you can get it done. And I now see shows by necessity operating in this way and I think I’d like it to be a thing that the industry carries forward. That 10-hour days is not a bad thing. If you do it right and you approach it aggressively in what you get done in that time that that would be something I’d love to see carry forward.

**Matt:** It was kind of funny, before we got shut down and it was unsure, I was going to bed and I was like what about last looks. There’s no way we’re not shutting down. I mean, there’s certain practices that I think in terms of like masks and face shields that are just going to be carried forward, so it’s just not a given that everyone on set is going to get the flu.

But I would say some of the remote stuff for post, at least to my mind, saved us a lot of time and allowed us to multitask in a way that I found incredibly valuable. So if some of that stayed I wouldn’t be so sad.

**Phil:** Yeah. And you see the different ways. Like remote mixing to me wasn’t great. And when we were able for the last couple to go back and mix on a stage as we were supposed to—

**Matt:** How it sounds on headphones can be inaccurate.

**John:** So, Craig, you hearing this, does it give you any thoughts about what you want to do for your show? Because they were able to do their Canadian show without ever being there, and you’re there right now. What’s the mix for you?

**Craig:** Well I’m a little bit more like Karyn, I think. I’m very much – I like being in the space. I like being connected as best I can. For Chernobyl I did do quite a bit of remote editing only because for budget purposes all of our post was in London and there was only so much time I could spend there. It seemed like if I could edit remotely and stay with the family then that probably made sense.

But right now we are going through – we’re in late Covid, it’s not early Covid. So there are a ton of practices that are generally accepted and being used. We wear masks. I get tested three times a week. We all do. Every morning I have to go through the Kabuki of telling an app on my phone that I’m not sick and then they scan a code.

And this is what we do. And for good reason. However, while things were very, very bad here in Calgary just a month ago, they’ve improved dramatically since the vaccination rate up here is excellent. So, it is my great hope that as we proceed through production things are going to ease up and in fact because our production is so lengthy I suspect that at some point it will be almost like it used to be. That’s kind of where it’s going and that’s what I hope we are able to get to.

So, you know, we follow the rules. They are a little frustrating at times but they’re there for good reason. And the last thing we want to have is for someone – forget shutting down or any of that. I just don’t want anyone to get sick. I don’t want anybody to – and certainly I don’t want anybody to get dangerously ill – but I don’t even want anybody to get slightly ill. So, hopefully it goes smoothly.

**Matt:** And I think as we hopefully get back to normal I think the remote viewing is going to be a continued conversation with the DGA because it was something that had to be negotiated for the feed to leave set.

**Phil:** And the key is who that feed can go to, right? So in our case the feed could explicitly not go to the studio or network. So that actually is a bit freeing in some ways. Because if no one is on set–

**John:** Well, talk to me about that because you can always look at what the cameras are seeing you had a sense of what was being filmed at all times. So you didn’t have to watch dailies because you actually just watched it for real.

**Matt:** Right. And I think it’s so much more valuable than watching dailies, you know, because you can correct. If you have a location for one day and you watch the dailies the next day and you didn’t get it, the way it worked out especially with Covid, like we couldn’t go back.

**Phil:** And again not everyone is like this, but for me personally unless there’s some incredibly compelling reason I can’t, I am on set for every single take that is shot of that movie. Because to me – and I’m not doing other stuff.

**John:** You can’t split your time when you’re on set. It’s really hard to work on other stuff.

**Phil:** Totally. And it’s experiential. It’s not just watching and listening. It’s feeling it. And so I rarely have to watch dailies because I’ve already absorbed it in a very deep way. And so in a strange way so for a movie you can – for me at least you can always do that. The TV show, what’s so interesting is in a normal situation – I mean, every TV show is different – but a lot of times it would be like had the Covid never happened I would imagine Matt and I would have flown up to Vancouver. We would have been on set for the first two episodes. Then we would have flown back and then someone else, in television a lot of times the writer of the episode will go up there and be the voice of the writers for that episode. All those different customs.

**John:** A supervising director who sort of overseas how it works.

**Phil:** Totally. And for me it’s hard for me to envision that, because I want to see everything. It’s hard for me to be like I wonder what’s going on up there. So, if I can’t physically live there for five months then it is really helpful to have that feed and to be able to be like feeling the being there. Now there’s things that happened with our supervising director that can’t happen from the feed. But it’s interesting. In a weird way it’s a way to stay completely and immediately connected when the timeframe is too long for you to be able to just be there.

**Matt:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, so good to talk with you. Matt, so good to talk with you. And Phil.

**Phil:** That was great.

**Craig:** See you guys. Thanks guys.

**Matt:** Thanks guys.

**Phil:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [MoviePass](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/business/moviepass-settlement-ftc.html) for the NYT by Daniel Victor
* Blitzcalling: [Kevin Roose for NY Times on “The Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy”](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/technology/farewell-millennial-lifestyle-subsidy.html?referringSource=articleShare)
* [The Mysterious Benedict Society](https://www.disneyplus.com/series/the-mysterious-benedict-society/5HfolGRtUHpv)
* [Mythic Quest](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8879940/), check out [Backstory! Season 2, Episode 6](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14596556/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_5) for a special guest star!
* [Why Netflix Cancels Shows](https://www.ign.com/articles/heres-why-netflix-cancels-shows-so-quickly-now)
* [WGA Writer’s Collaboration Agreement](https://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/contracts/other-contracts/collaboration.pdf)
* [50 Years of Text Games](https://if50.substack.com/archive?sort=new)
* [Miso Black Cod](https://www.thekitchn.com/recipe-nobu-miso-marinated-black-cod-117238)
* [Liberty Puzzles](https://www.libertypuzzles.com/)
* [Justine Seigal and Baseball for All](https://baseballforall.com/our-founder-justine-siegal/)
* [An Invitation to the Invitation](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/an-invitation-to-the-invitation/id1533306426)
* [Phil Hay](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0006534/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/phillycarly?lang=en)
* [Matt Manfredi](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0542062/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/mattrmanfredi?lang=en)
* [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
* [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 Ryan Riley ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/505standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey this is John. Head’s up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 503 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig is traveling, so today I’m hosting solo. But I’m hardly alone. Later in the show I’ll be talking with WandaVision creator Jac Schaeffer about her amazing series, and writer-director Lance Oppenheim about his acclaimed documentary, Some Kind of Heaven. A question I asked them both is what do you do when you don’t control the characters you’re given. Jac and Lance had very smart ways of thinking about that challenge.

But to kick things off I want to welcome back the writer-producer behind such iconic films as The Wedding Date, How To Be Single, Couples Retreat, and Isn’t it Romantic. She’s also the co-writer of the new film, Cruella. Welcome back returning champion, Dana Fox.

Dana Fox: Woo-hoo. I need my playout music.

John: Yeah. You’ve got to – you walk down, you take your seat, you pick up your mic and you wave to the crowd.

Dana: Ah, big time waving.

John: Dana, I can’t believe I’ve not seen you in person for more than a year. This is not good.

Dana: I miss your face so, so much. Sometimes I just Google you just to see you, because I miss you.

John: During this whole crazy time you decamped to Virginia, right? You’ve been in Virginia for most of this pandemic.

Dana: That is correct. We were in LA for the beginning sort of horrible sudden three children on Zoom school scenario where we were all jammed in like sardines and it was pretty intense. And we decided to come to Virginia because more space, just grass, just outdoor space. And we just told our kids to go outside and never come back. You’re wild animals now. Goodbye. And they became like feral. They stopped showering. There’s zero hair-brushing happening here at this house, including for me.

But we all just needed a little bit more space from each other. We love each other so much, but we needed a little space. Three kids under eight was intense.

John: That’s a lot. So, you were still able to manage your career though. So an interesting thing about this year is that it has sort of shown that people can be in places that are not Hollywood and still get stuff done. You had a whole second season of your show Home Before Dark. That all happened during the pandemic and you did it all from Virginia, correct?

Dana: Yeah. I mean, Home Before Dark season two, which comes out June 11, was literally almost entirely completed from a creepy room in a house in Virginia with just me being sweaty, with a lot of monitors. A lot of Apple products. A lot of whiteboards. So much laundry. So many piles of laundry all around me at all times.

But what I learned was that I’m actually weirdly possibly more efficient this way. I know it’s going to be controversial to say, but the Evercast system which allowed me to sort of watch what was going on on-set I know can be a little bit of a tricky thing for some people, but I tried to make sure that I was calling in more like compliments and cheers than anything else. And the only time I ever really called in notes was just if I had a good idea about something. I was like, oh, that made me think of a different line. Try this, because I didn’t want to use it like a creepy big brother who called in to complain from 100,000 miles away.

But it was incredibly effective because I could watch set. I could write scripts on one monitor while I was keeping one eyeball on set. I could pop into a Zoom to talk to the editors. All of a sudden I’m looking at one episode in one Zoom room and then I’m hopping into another room, watching another cut in a different room with a different editor. And like weirdly I ended up being a ton more productive.

I was also really lucky because I had this incredible woman, Margie Love, who helps me with everything. And she was like – not CJ Craig, but who on the West Wing is the one who orders everybody around and tells them what to do? The chief of staff. She’s like my chief of staff.

John: The Allison Janney character?

Dana: I don’t know who it is. I’ve seen West Wing 75,000 times and I love it so much and god forbid you held a gun to my head and told me to say what everyone’s jobs were. But truly it was like amazing because she was just sort of a chief of staff. She would sort of order me around and be like you’re going in this room next, you’re going in that room next. You’ve got 45 minutes. You’ve got to look at this script. You’ve got to do your changes on this script. So that was sort of what kept the whole train on the track. And it was weirdly I think I got a lot more done which is terrible because it becomes very man behind the curtain-y.

Like I think we all realized a lot of the like getting in your car and driving for two hours to Santa Monica to do color timing is maybe never going to happen again for me. Because I was able to do it from home. They sent me a fancy iPad. I looked at the color timing live. I could say, hey, can you brighten up that window, or hey, I feel like she’s sort of like this, and can you treat that. And, boom, he’s tweaking it and I’m looking at it from my creepy room in Virginia.

John: So Dana what I’m taking from this description is that there’s no reason for Craig to be in Calgary for all these months coming up here. And that he basically just ran away to escape me and the Scriptnotes recording process?

Dana: Literally 100%. That actually is why I was called to do Scriptnotes today. This is so awkward. Craig wanted me to come to tell you that it’s because of you that he’s gone.

John: Yeah. So, with Craig gone, this is normally the part of the show that we would talk through the news. And so maybe you could fill in for Craig on this part. Because I’m sort of struggling here without him.

Dana: I can’t possibly do as well as Craig, but please, try me.

John: So I want to roll out a new segment, it’s really a beta test of a new segment called Did You See in Deadline Where…? So these are all actual Deadline headlines. And so we should make it clear that ten years ago this would have been Did You See in Variety Where, but really Deadline has supplanted that as the thing people talk about when they go into one of those meetings. Like did you see in Deadline where.

So these are all actual Deadline headlines. And I just want to get your feedback on this headline, which may be complete news to you because maybe you aren’t following the trades the way you were before.

Dana: Hit me.

John: Are you ready?

Dana: Yeah, big time.

John: Dana, did you see in Deadline where Timothée Chalamet is set to play Willy Wonka in a new origin tale from Warner Bros?

Dana: Yes, I did. And that was one of the moments where I just Googled your face to think about you because I remember you did that movie. And I love me a Timothée Chalamet. I think he’s actually kind of fantastic for this part. And I was like, all right, I see where you’re coming from. I wonder what they’re going to do with it. What were you thinking? That’s kind of intense. You must have had some emotions.

John: I did. I mean, the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory made like a billion dollars and it was an origin story, so I guess there’s still new territory to explore. But Dana as the writer of Cruella I want to say you’re no stranger to origin stories, but at least Cruella only killed dogs. I mean, here you’ve got Willy Wonka going after Augustus Gloop. You’ve got some Violet Beauregard. You have Veruca Salt. You’ve got the unambitiously named Mike TV. This is like The Joker with chocolate.

Dana: Do you think we’re going to meet those people, or do you think we’re going to be like hanging out with him when he’s in his house before he gets the chocolate factory?

John: I suspect it’s before all of those people exist because they would be too young if it’s Timothée Chalamet. But it’s a good question. It could be the origin story of the Oompa Loompas, which is potentially problematic so you’ve got to find a way through the Oompa Loompa and their sort of indentured servitude to Willy Wonka. Yeah, there’s a lot.

Dana: We were always thinking of ways to sort of tease these future things when we were talking about Cruella and sort of saying well how much do we want to do nods and winks to the sort of canon. So I feel like you can do the math on Timothée Chalamet’s age and I think maybe you could watch Augustus Gloop’s parents make love and know that Augustus Gloop is coming? No pun intended. He’s like coming into the world.

You can always do the math and say well what would be the cool precursor to the thing and the thing. And so I mean I feel like I’m in for that movie. I’m intrigued by it. Who is directing it? Do we know who is directing it?

John: It is I think the guy who did Paddington if I recall correctly, who is great.

Dana: People are like obsessed with Paddington 2. Is Paddington 2 guy the same as Paddington 1 guy?

John: I think it’s the same person. I’ve never seen Paddington 1. I’ve only seen Paddington 2 and it is indeed delightful.

Now, going back to Cruella though, you know, one of the things I found so frustrating about the discourse on Cruella is this question of who is this movie for.

Dana: Oh, god, my favorite.

John: Yeah. And with this movie I guess you can ask that question. Who is the audience? If you want to see a twink navigate a chocolate river you’re probably not going to the multiplex.

Dana: [laughs]

John: I mean, that’s niche content Dana. No judgments. But you’re going to want to VPN for that.

Dana: That’s amazing. I really, really didn’t think about it that way, but now I will never, ever be able to think of it any other way. That’s really special and important.

Yeah, I feel like the question of who is it for is the number one thing I have been asked in the last three years of my career. And I keep just being like, I don’t know, I just kind of like it. I think it’s pretty great.

John: I think it’s pretty great.

Dana: You know, that’s the kind of thing that people ask when they’re scared that they don’t know exactly how much money something is going to make. And I just kind of feel like it’s fun to try to straddle the different worlds and try to say I think young kids want things to reach up to. And I think adults want to feel like kids again. So, don’t ask me that question anymore people. I’m not interested.

John: Speaking of adults feeling like kids, another casting news, did you see in Deadline where Kevin Spacey Will Return To Film In Franco Nero’s The Man Who Drew God. Spacey will play a police officer investigating a man wrongly accused of sexually abusing children. Spacey said he’s been researching the role–

Dana: No.

John: –for decades.

Dana: No. Are you kidding?

John: No, it’s a real movie.

Dana: That’s not what the part is about?

John: That’s what the part is about.

Dana: That’s not the part.

John: That is the part.

Dana: No, John.

John: Yes. He’s a police officer investigating a man wrongly accused of sexually abusing children. That’s the confusing part.

Dana: Oh my god, John.

John: I mean, Spacey, he’s so excited to be in a film that asks the question what if a guy didn’t do what I’m accused of doing.

Dana: I have to take a minute. I actually have to maybe potentially get down on the ground. I tend to sort of go low when I feel dizzy. Are you kidding? I literally thought you were 1,000% joking.

John: No, it’s not a joke. There’s a joke around it, but that’s the actual premise of the movie.

Dana: Oh my god. [Unintelligible]. I saw the headline and I intentionally didn’t click on it because I was like I’m not OK with it. I’m not ready. It’s too soon. Possibly it will always be too soon for me. I can’t do it. Unfortunately I can no longer watch Woody Allen movies. I love a Woody Allen movie. I used to have a secret thing where in the very beginning before I felt like it was like fully confirmed I was like I’ll only watch them on planes where nobody notices I’m watching. Like I’d like get on a plane and I’d immediately look for Annie Hall and then just sort of embarrassingly check both directions and then hit play, and then just watch it on planes where I feel like it was like, look, what happens at 40,000 feet stays at 40,000 feet.

And even that I can’t do anymore.

John: There was a time which I was a vegetarian, but I would eat chicken if it was the in-flight option.

Dana: Totally. Totally.

John: That’s you with Woody Allen.

Dana: And for me Kevin Spacey is chicken, which is that I no longer eat chicken even when it’s a secret, or when nobody is going to know about it. I just can’t do it. Can’t do it.

John: Dana, what are we going to do if this movie is good? That’s my biggest worry is Spacey is actually a good actor. And so this movie could be good and then what do we do?

Dana: I couldn’t agree with you more. But I think it’s like it doesn’t matter if it’s good. I think you just can’t see it. I think people just have to say we’re just not giving – to me it’s sort of like a serial killer writing a book and making money off of it. It’s like no. You don’t get to do that. Not my money. I’m not giving you my money.

And I think he’s a great actor, but you know, I was going to make a horrible joke that I’m not going to make about murderers being like painters. Like so and so is a good painter, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t care if the movie is good.

John: I know who the so-and-so was, and you know what, it’s right for you not to have made that.

Dana: Exactly. Thank you. Not funny. Never funny.

John: Speaking of restraint, did you see in Deadline where John Cena Apologizes — In Mandarin — To China Over Calling Taiwan A Country?

Dana: [laughs]

John: I get it. He’s got F9 to promote and China is a huge market, but still I have not seen a public figure so fully prostrate themselves to a foreign power since Craig apologized to Liverpool for misattributing You’ll Never Walk Alone.

Dana: Oh my god.

John: That’s a niche joke. That’s for the fans, I’m putting that in there.

Dana: That’s literally for my husband. I’m like you’re welcome, Quinn Emmett. Please enjoy.

I have to say I know I’m supposed to be talking about the headline, but I don’t know anything about it, so I am going to say I didn’t realize you were so amazing at segues. Have you always been this amazing at super natural segues in between stuff?

John: It’s a found skill, a found art. I’m one of those mutants in X-Men who like very late in life it manifests. Oh my gosh, he can do this really unimportant thing. But I became Segue Man only because of Scriptnotes.

Dana: You’re incredible at it. It’s sort of like how Craig discovered he’s an amazing actor. Did you guys both discover that because of Scriptnotes? It’s beautiful.

John: I don’t know. I think he did a lot more voice work sort of because of Scriptnotes, so who is to say. I don’t have a good segue for this next joke though. Dana did you see in Deadline where Amazon is buying MGM for $8.5 billion?

Dana: Oh my god. They have all the money.

John: Amazon vows to keep releasing movies theatrically with the new James Bond movie due out October 8, or October 7 if you check out in the next 30 minutes.

Dana: [laughs]

John: You can throw some batteries in the cart and push it over the limit.

Dana: It’s kind of amazing. But I have to say I know I’m supposed to be cynical, and I know I’m supposed be like ugh they’re destroying the world, but I just love sunscreen and I love being able to just order as much of it as I want anytime I want and five seconds later it’s at my house. So I was like psyched about the MGM thing. I like MGM’s catalog and I like sunscreen. So I was like it’s kind of a beautiful marriage for me.

John: Yeah, I mean, a lot of people are freaking out but I don’t think there’s really anything to worry about Amazon entering the movie business because look what they did for books.

Dana: Correct. Can you explain – I got the joke, but I’m moving on from it. Again, I like to order off of Amazon, I’m so sorry. But can you explain to me why people are freaking out about it? Because I didn’t totally understand why everyone was so up in arms. I was sort of like, yeah, there’s going to be a place where you can watch the movies that you couldn’t watch before this, now this other place. It’s all on your thing.

John: I think it’s just the problem of all of the consolidation in the industry. I think it’s people trying to take a do-over for Disney and Fox, which should probably never have happened. And so I think it’s just people recognizing like, oh my god, there’s going to be three buyers and you’re going to go to just the same three places the whole time.

Dana: Right. Right.

John: I think it’s just awareness of how much the industry is coalescing around these giant players.

Dana: I hear that. But I feel like if any of these places had been making these like profoundly amazing artistic films and then had been gobbled up by it I’d be like, oh trag. But, I mean, they’re kind of commercial movies. Here, go buy your batteries and watch your movie.

John: They got their Creeds. That’s sort of it.

Dana: I like that Creed. I’m not going to lie to you. That was a nice Creed. Love that Creed.

John: Finally, Dana, did you see in Deadline where in the new movie Army of the Dead Tig Notaro shot all of her scenes alone? So it was all reshoots and she’s in a bunch of scenes with actors but, nope, she was just in a green screen. It was just all Tig Notaro alone.

It reminds me that Craig was originally supposed to be in those scenes but he got too busy making his new show.

Dana: That’s amazing. That does not surprise me. And I’ll say it’s because I finished a TV show in complete Covid protocols and I was kind of amazed at – you know, in the beginning when we shut down in the middle of an episode I thought, oh, there’s going to be this fun bingo game, drinking game, that everyone is going to get to play after the end of the pandemic where you’re going to be watching your favorite TV show and then you have to drink when you see the character age by like a year in the middle of a scene.

And I thought it was going to be really complicated and everything was going to look crazy. And it’s like I watched the show and you absolutely can’t tell. We have huge crowd scenes that we just did totally safely with tiling and all sorts of stuff. We had to do a bunch of stuff like what you’re talking about. Just kind of shooting people alone so that they could be in scenes with people that they couldn’t breathe around. And so it kind of doesn’t surprise me.

And again I don’t think it’s something that we want to do in the future because I think that actors really feed off each other’s energy and I think it’s a little bit oddball to be up against a green screen for like an entire conversation. But like, OK, I’m buying it.

John: Yeah. The real question is Dana why isn’t Tig Notaro in your show? She could be in your show. What do you have against Tig Notaro that she’s not in your show?

Dana: Well now we know that there’s no reason Tig Notaro can’t be in every show. So it’s like, yeah, there’s going to be a real reckoning with that. I like Tig Notaro a lot. I think she’s great.

John: I think she’s that little bit of pepper you need to sort of spice things up. She’s great.

Dana: I think that’s right. And I think maybe–

John: She’s like deadpan pepper.

Dana: Maybe just send me the footage and I’ll see if I can work it in from the other thing.

John: Done. 100%.

Dana: Some of the green screen stuff. Let’s just stick it in my thing with a different background.

John: Dana Fox, thank you so much for helping me out with the headlines. I’m going to be back talking with you–

Dana: Oh, I love you.

John: –in our bonus segment about naps. And everyone check out the second season of your mystery-thriller series Home Before Dark. It appears June 11 on AppleTV+. Yay.

Dana: Yay. Oh, you’re the greatest John. Thank you.

John: Stick around because after the break I’ll be cheating with Jac Schaeffer about WandaVision and navigating the Marvel universe.

[WandaVision clip plays]

So Darcy may not know what’s happening, but luckily we have someone who does know. Jac Schaeffer is a writer-director whose credits include Time, The Hustle, and the story for the upcoming Marvel Studios’ Black Widow film. She also created and executive produced the hit series WandaVision. Welcome Jac.

Jac Schaeffer: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

John: Now, I emailed you probably after episode two to say how amazingly well-done I thought your show was and just how much I was enjoying it week-to-week. And I’d been curious about your show really early on because as listeners will know we lost our former producer, Megan McDonnell, to your show. She was hired away from Scriptnotes to work on your WandaVision show. And I was just so excited that it turned out so amazingly well.

Jac: Yes. I’m so delighted that I got to poach her directly from you. She is extraordinary. I love her madly. And that was her episode that you were just playing. One of two that she contributed to and many other things on the series.

Yeah, I could spend this whole segment just talking about Megan McDonnell if you wanted to do that. She is very smart.

John: Well maybe we can do that off-mic. But Megan is also an absolute steel trap because she told us nothing about your show or what was happening in it. And even as it was airing she was like I can’t say anything. She revealed nothing.

So now that the show is out and done I really want to talk about the process of putting together WandaVision and we’re not spoiling Marvel secrets. I’m just really curious how it all came to be. Because I don’t have a good sense of was Marvel pitching you? Were you pitching Marvel? What were those early conversations when it came time to think about doing WandaVision?

Jac: Sure. You know, it’s unusual at Marvel. It’s unlike anything else that I’ve experienced in the industry. They have their own system and it has been very successful for them.

They typically develop their concepts in house. And the only other actually place that it’s a little bit similar to is Disney Animation, where there is a lot of dedicated in-house development time. And so when you come in to pitch on something usually they have materials for you and they sort of know essentially what the gig is going to be. And then you’re meant to come in and bring your voice and perspective to the project.

So for WandaVision it was Kevin’s idea. He wanted to blend – to put Wanda and Vision’s characters together with the history of sitcoms and sort of use that to examine her very robust and tragic backstory of loss and grief. And they had a lot of sort of – they had some little ideas. They had this idea of like a milkman who was really scary. And so they had some granular stuff. And then they had big picture stuff of is it a dome, and is it the world, and who is helping, and what’s going on. And so I adjusted all of that material and then came back to them with a pitch that sort of gave shape to all of these pieces.

John: So it feels very much like a feature, you’re also a feature writer, so it feels like situations where there’s a book to adapt, and so obviously you have everything that’s in the book and then they may be bringing you in. And then you say like, OK, here’s how I’m going to do this. This thing you’re pitching towards me, here’s how I’m pitching it back to you. This is what I think it feels like. This is how I think it might work. Is that fair?

Jac: It’s sort of like that. I mean, I haven’t adapted a book, but I’ve sort of gone down the road. And I have felt that for me it’s a different approach. Because I find books are so immersive, especially when they’re very POV driven, if they’re very first person. And so you feel kind of surrounded by a world and a voice and a tone and a character. And this is different than that because it’s so sprawling. Because what you’re pitching on is like a kernel and a tone. Because they often assign genre to their – so the most reductive thing is like, OK, we’re doing a western, we’re doing a heist. So you’re sort of buying in on what, like you know Black Widow obviously is sort of spy genre, in the Bourne world.

John: As opposed to Ant Man which is like a heist comedy.

Jac: Yeah, heist comedy. Exactly. Exactly. With a novel I feel like there’s a little bit more containment. And yes you can depart from the book, but you’re always kind of housed in whatever that original container is. Whereas on this there’s like no container. It’s just an enormous table full of materials. And some of them – it’s sort of like I would imagine, I don’t know anything about cars, but cars before they were computers. If you took apart a car and there were all of these pieces spread out over a table. One is a huge engine and one is a tiny little whatever piece. I’m going to say wingnut, even though it’s probably not that. And this metaphor has gone off the rails.

But do you know what I mean? There’s so many parts to it that – on this one in particular I had to find the sort of spine and through line of it.

John: That’s what I really want to talk about is how did you find the spine and through line, which I guess quite early on you had to figure out sort of a tone and an approach. Because one of the things I loved so much about WandaVision is you watch that first episode and second episode and you’re like I’m not even quite sure what show this is. I’m not sure what the tone is. It’s just so wild and weird and unusual.

So what was the containment device for it? You say that it’s not a heist movie, it’s not a western. What did you feel this was? This surrealist existential drama? What limits did you put on yourself?

Jac: It’s funny. When I was thinking about having this conversation with you today and I was thinking about Craig actually and how amazed I am that he wrote The Hangover sequels and then also Chernobyl, and I always really admire people who can do it all, and can dance all the different – they can do all the different dances at the ballroom competition.

But for me, I just like them all in the same spot. That is really exciting to me. The challenge of can you do the kitchen sink with the one project.

You know, my first way in, I sort of had two points of entry on this. One was I mapped – I broke the episodes according to the stages of grief. It was a very reductive framing device that just helped guide me. And it ended up – we ended up straying from it a little bit, and then kind of returning to it. And now if you look at the show it’s very evident. She is in denial for the first three episodes.

And she’s angry and kicks Monica out. And then she’s bargaining outside, the sequence that we called the hex flex, when she steps out of the hex. You know, and the whole thing was meant to culminate with acceptance. That she has to accept the truth of her circumstance. So that was like one of the ways that I approached the pitch and kind of gave shape to it.

And then the other thing was that I knew that there was a huge risk that it would just feel like parody and just feel like a gimmick. And there was such a risk that we wouldn’t care about these characters. And I just knew instinctively that if we told the linear story of Wanda goes to get Vision’s body, is denied, and freaks out and creates a dome that there’s no tension in that.

John: Yeah.

Jac: So, it was my instinct and I think it was also kind of implied in their early documents of starting inside of the world and then trying to sort of unpack that mystery. But I think their instinct was to kind of parse it early, like in the first episode reveal. And I wanted to hang onto it. And I wanted to try and create an actual sitcom. So that was the driving force is like how long can we keep the cat in the bag and create maximum tension and intrigue and interest.

John: Well tension and intrigue and interest, you’re really talking about expectation. You’re talking about where the audience is at. What does the audience this is going to happen next? How can you reward that and how can you challenge that and sort of move past it? So those first two episodes, the first episode is so very classic black and white and really arch performances and so we’re expecting is this show, and then as we move to the second episode we see the time has jumped forward. It felt like you were from a very early stage anticipating what the discourse would be like week to week and where the audience was going to be at and what the audience was expecting to happen next. Is that fair?

Jac: It is fair. It is fair. We weren’t entirely certain that it would be week to week. When we were making it it was up in the air whether or not it would be a dump and be binge-able, or if it would be week to week. And it was always my hope it would be week to week. And I was so pleased that that’s how it landed.

But, yeah, I mean, it is bizarre writing in this world because you’re not writing alone. You’re writing with the legacy of everything that came before. People say lovely things about the show and I’m delighted that it has resonated, but I also – you know, I didn’t think it would play for people who didn’t understand the Marvel universe. I didn’t think it would play outside of the states. I was like if you’re not steeped in American sitcoms this is going to be Greek to you. And of course I completely under – and it’s actually even in the story she learns English. The character Wanda learns. So I don’t know why I was so sort of shortsighted about it.

But I mean so much of the eeriness and the uncanniness is about going into it knowing that these are superheroes. And that’s part of what’s so kind of delicious about it. So, yeah, I was absolutely playing to the expectations of Marvel fans. But then, you know, I wanted people who weren’t fans to be pulled in as well.

John: Now, one of the challenges of writing these characters though is that you don’t really fully control these characters. These characters existed before you. And they will exist after you. And so you have them for this period of time. It’s like you have them for college and you can do whatever they want to do in college, but they’re going to enter college and they’re going to leave college and you only have them for that time.

What were some of the challenges of taking Wanda and Vision and all the other supporting characters you brought in from the Marvel universe and using them to your best effect, but also knowing that they would have to go on and do other things? Like how early in the conversations with Marvel did that come up as an issue?

Jac: The continuing on you mean?

John: Yeah.

Jac: Well, you know, it’s really not as much of a burden as it sort of seems on the outside. First of all, it was a real surprise to me to discover how much I enjoyed picking up other people’s story threads, especially when they’re peripheral. There’s something about the characters with less screen time that really fascinate me, because you end up being able to make a meal out of these tiny moments. And actors are amazing and they make all these little choices that you sort of pass through but then upon inspection – you know, Randall Parks’ whole thing from what I understand that the moment in Ant Man between him and Paul Rudd where Jimmy makes the mistake that he thinks that Paul Rudd’s character is asking him to go to dinner. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this moment. But it’s this really charming and totally disarming moment of miscommunication between two men who aren’t friends, but it reveals that Jimmy’s character is actually seeking connection.

And it was like so pleasurable to run with that. And also his sort of little interest in magic in the Ant Man movie to then sort of take that. So all that textural stuff is very, very fun.

And then of course with Paul and Lizzie like they’re performers who really operate with an enormous amount of integrity. So they had so much to contribute and there was so much already there.

In terms of where they’re going, I mean it’s an ongoing conversation throughout making your thing, because while you’re making your thing they have an idea about what the next thing is, but it’s not rolling yet. And then once it starts rolling there are conversations. I never really felt – the only place where it sort of made me feel a little bit hemmed in is the tags. The tags are always really challenging because typically they’re iterated and iterated and iterated through the process and then really they’re decided upon so late in the game.

And that’s the handoff.

John: It’s not really wrapping up your story.

Jac: Correct.

John: It’s setting up the next one which you had nothing to do with.

Jac: Correct. Yeah. And I love the tags. I always find them to be so fun. And I’ve written a bunch that I fell in love with that then were cut because it didn’t align with the next thing, or the actor was unavailable. So that’s sort of where you handoff the baton. That’s the only place where it gets a little bit sticky. But really I have felt very fortunate that in the larger scope of whatever project I’m on you’re allowed to do what you need to do to make it the best that it can be.

John: So let’s talk about the characters you’re using, like Randall Parks’ character. How early on did you know that he was going to be a force? Was that already part of the Marvel pitch to you? And same with Darcy or other people who sort of exist in the Marvel universe. Did you need them or did they say like, oh, here’s available people we’d love you to use?

Jac: Yes, so they had a list of possibilities. And it’s funny now. I can barely remember who else was on them. Usually it’s a long-ish list. Randall and Kat Dennings were on there. And high up. And I was like absolutely. That is just an immediate yes to those two performers and to those two characters. And same with Agatha Harkness was on there as a maybe, I don’t know, maybe she’s in the mix somewhere. So those were the ones that I pulled out.

You know, we went down a road with a couple other characters that didn’t end up working out very early, because it’s also like you’re gambling on actor availability, which in the MCU usually that’s not a huge problem because they’re interested in continuing their participation. But it is a little bit tricky. And then sometimes characters get pulled into another property and that on a very small scale happened with us. On Black Widow that was a little bit more blue sky on that.

I was the first writer in on that. In conjunction with my producer on that we sort of set the table on who those characters were going to be. So, the short answer to your question is they have some ideas. It’s sort of like it’s a menu and then you can select and run at it and then if it doesn’t work often it can be modular and you can slide somebody else in.

John: Well let’s talk back to the process for WandaVision. What were the first documents you ended up writing for this project? Do you do an outline for the whole series? Did you do a pilot? What were you writing first?

Jac: Let’s see. That’s a good question. I mean, Marvel has a very extensive pitch process. So I had really detailed pitch documents. Because you pitch multiple times. So I had my pitch document which broke the whole series. And then I got notes on that which just sort of shored it up. Gave it a little bit of shape.

So the next step was putting the writer’s room together. And so when we were hiring writers they would come in and I would pitch the series.

John: So at this point you had not written a script, but you were hiring writers based on the approval of this pitch document and saying like, OK, we’re going to try to make this thing.

Jac: Correct. And it was in broad strokes. I can’t remember. Monica being kicked out. That was always there. The first three episodes, obscuring the truth, and kind of having red herrings. That was all – so I think that that kind of basic shape was there and that was part of what I was pitching to the writers. You should ask Megan. It’s all gone.

And then one of the things that you have to do is like you have to pitch over and over again because you have to pitch to the actors and then when you’re hiring the directors you have to pitch to them. So we ended up having it all on a wall. We had this really fabulous writer’s room with an enormous amount of art which was one of the things I did before the writers came in is I put all the art on the wall because it’s such a visual story and because we were telling such a multi-layered story.

So we had the wall broken by episode and then we had the art, like the posters from those classic shows above each episode. So it was this kind of wall that was a pitch document.

And then once the writers came on that’s when we started producing documents for the studio to receive notes on. And those were kind of series overviews. And then eventually once their episodes were assigned they were writing outlines that were part of the series overview. So we went really, really, really deep before anybody started writing a script.

John: So there were no lines of dialogue written until everything had sort of been signed off on, right?

Jac: Well, I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s actually true. You know, the pilot opens with the like “my wife and her flying saucers,” like that kind of stuff was in – those type of cute moments and big moments like “he was killed by Ultron, wasn’t he,” that stuff was in the outline documents.

John: OK. So you had those little moments. And it sounds like the James Cameron scriptment kind of things.

Jac: Correct. Yeah.

John: You have dialogue where you absolutely need the dialogue to sort of show how stuff works, but the scene work is not in those. It’s really showing—

Jac: Yeah, the scene breakdowns. Yeah, I guess scriptment. I mean, the way that I did it, which I don’t know if it’s any kind of formal system, was slug lines and what we planned to do. It wasn’t in Final Draft. It was in a Word document. But we broke out the scenes for everything and what would happen. Yeah, bits of dialogue here and there.

John: Now, finally you feel like, OK, we have a shape for this whole thing. We are signing off scripts. Is this your first time running a room? This is your first time working with other writers? What was that process like for you?

Jac: It was. It was my first time running a room. And it was the very best experience of my career. And I loved hiring these phenomenal people and I loved working with them. And I will keep it in my heart until the day I die. It was so wonderful and so special.

And it was a tricky thing because I needed to hire talented, inspiring, somewhat seasoned people, because I hadn’t done it before. But I also needed to hire people who weren’t going to have a problem with that. And weren’t – I didn’t have time for anyone to have a problem with my authority. I’ve heard on your podcast before that you and Craig talk about kids and having kids and the impact of family on your career. My children were two and four when I got this job. And I live on the west side and Marvel is in Burbank. So I had an hour plus commute every day.

So I was working on an extremely tight schedule. So I needed people who were just going to be in and be excited and optimistic and up for the whole thing. And so that’s who I hired. And I wanted people that I would learn from. And I wanted people who would keep the engine going if I ran out of gas. And that’s what I got. I mean, this team never quit.

And they had so much love for it. And I also chose them based on the kind of people that they are, but also because of their influences. I hired this group that just like they know film and TV in all the ways that you need them to, but the love that they have for it, and the deep cuts that were brought to the table in the room when we were breaking the show, and because it’s such a bananas show I needed those people with those super bizarro frames of reference.

John: I actually was writing down your quote, “I didn’t have time for anyone to question my authority,” because that is just such a great encapsulation of the real challenge of trying to do this job. My first experience running a TV show was this disaster called DC. It was me and Dick Wolf. And my authority was constantly being questioned at all moments. It became impossible for me to do this show because not just the question of authority for the network or the studio or Dick Wolf, but also you’re too young to be doing this. You shouldn’t be doing this.

So to hear you say that is such a smart way to approach how you’re making the decisions.

I want to know how you actually picked those writers. Were you looking for recommendations first and then reading them to make sure they were really good? Were you looking at the words first and then meeting with writers? How did you pick who would be the people in the room?

Jac: So my producer, who is my Marvel executive, Mary Livanos, who is wonderful – Marvel is really great because these executives are always doing the next move way before it’s time for the next move. Because of the way they operate, you know, they plant a flag. This is when this thing is coming out. So they just run at it and it’s kind of amazing whether or not it’s ready to go.

So I think she was reading scripts before I was hired. And also I met with some people who had been up for my job as well, because there were great people in that pool. So she was passing me scripts, things that were her favorite. I told her what my priorities were in the read which were I wanted people with original voices. It was less important to me that the specs stick the landing of whatever the show was trying to do. I just wanted ideas to leap off the page. Or I wanted comedy to leap off the page.

I just wanted it to be memorable. Because those were the brains that I needed in the room. I needed people who were going to constantly be questioning the tradition of storytelling. Megan’s spec was so good. It was such a fully realized mythology. And it was so achingly melancholy. And it had such an original voice to it.

Cam Squires’ spec was such a swing. And I remember when he came in to meet my first question was where does this series go. What even is your plan for this story? Because I can’t see it and that’s not a ding. That’s not a fault. It’s just you bit off so much in the pilot. Tell me what your plans are. And of course he had a plan and it was fascinating to hear what that was.

And I knew I needed people who could do mythology and world-building and genre and procedural. And I knew I needed people who could do sitcoms and comedy. I ended up leaning away from a lot of the straight sitcom writers, because our show was so ambitious. So I did hire sitcom writers. So Mackenzie Dohr wrote on the Mindy Project but she also wrote on Lock and Key. So she’s no stranger to fantasy and genre.

So that’s what I was looking for on the page. That was truthfully 30%. Maybe 30% of what was important to me. It was really so much more about the personality. Coming up in the industry I’ve had my share of bad experiences and being in rooms where I felt small. Whether or not I allowed myself to feel small, or I was actively made to feel small. But I was adamant that the room culture be positive and respectful and joyful. And that everyone would feel heard and valued.

So I hired people who that’s how they operate at. I hired Chuck Hayward because I invited him over to my house. I was like, OK, crack the code. Tell me how I run a room. And he painted a picture of what his dream room would look like and I was like, OK, great, because you’re hired because I need you to bring that energy into the room. I actually hadn’t even read his script. [laughs] And luckily it was great and he’s wonderful and very talented. But it was so much about a friend of mine, Micah Fitzerman-Blue who is wonderful and so talented himself, he was like you know you can write. So what you need is the people to help you break this. And you need people who will inspire you.

And my friend Chris Addison who is an incredible – he directed The Hustle and he won Emmys for Veep and is fantastic, he was like look at your room like a toolbox. You don’t need – every chair isn’t supposed to be a writer who is better than you. Every chair needs to bring something different to the table. So that was very much part of my approach.

I’ve been talking forever John because I love talking about building a room. It’s so fun. And I, yeah–

John: Well it sounds like you’re going to have a chance to do this again because just this last week it was announced you made a deal with Marvel and 20th Television to create some new shows. This is very exciting. Congratulations.

Jac: Yes. Thank you. Thank you. I’m very excited about it and I feel incredibly grateful and honored.

John: So what do you see as priorities? Would you want to do traditional broadcast? Do you want to do more streaming? What do you think is really interesting in television for the next couple years?

Jac: I mean, for me I love this limited series space. I mean, that’s not to say that things can’t have another iteration, but I was so surprised at how much freedom I felt in making WandaVision. That every episode was a chance to redefine the actual show itself. In the years leading up to getting WandaVision, you know, it wasn’t my intention to go into television. That wasn’t the trajectory. But I had been watching these shows that were just blowing my mind with – especially with bottle episodes. The bottle episode of Girls, the Panic in Central Park, I was so dazzled by that episode. And it was the first time that I really sort of looked squarely at the bottle episode and what it could be.

Because prior to that in network television it had always seemed like filler or I remember my parents watching an episode – there was an episode of The Cosby Show. I think it was John Ritter who was on and his wife Amy Yazbek, is that right?

John: That sounds right.

Jac: I don’t know if I’m remembering this correctly at all, but they were having a baby and the enormous amount of show real estate was dedicated to their storyline. And I remember my dad saying, “Oh, they’re lining up a spinoff,” which didn’t turn out to be the thing. But I remember feeling like departures from the norm in network television was like filler or a detour or con. And now, you know, another one that I just couldn’t believe was Escape at Dannemora, the penultimate episode, that was very much an inspiration for the penultimate episode of WandaVision in that it’s a rewind. And you don’t know where you are when you start the episode.

That feeling of disorientation, rather than it being filler, rather than it being just like, oh, watch this instead, that you have to lean forward. I mean, that is what I am clawing after at every turn.

John: That’s how you know you’ve engaged your audience is they are desperate to figure out what’s going on. And they’re with you to solve the mystery. That’s it.

Jac: That’s totally it. That’s the juice.

John: Jac Schaeffer, congratulations again. I’m so excited to see what you’re going to make next. Do you know what that is? Is there anything you can announce yet that you’re going to be making next?

Jac: There are no announcements.

John: Nothing will be announced today on Scriptnotes. But thank you very much for coming on the show. And thank you for hiring Megan McDonnell and giving her that platform, even though we were sad to lose her. Thank you for taking a chance on her because she is a superstar.

Jac: She is. I mean, I’m the one who benefited from that. Let’s be honest. She’s the best. Thank you. Thanks so much.

John: Thank you, Jac.

Stick around because after the break I’ll be chatting with Lance Oppenheim about the writing that goes into documentaries.

[Clip plays from Some Kind of Heaven]

In that clip we hear from Dennis, one of the people in the documentary Some Kind of Heaven. The film follows four seniors living in The Villages retirement community and explores how they cope with later adult life. The film premiered at Sundance in 2020 and is now available on Hulu. And we have with us Lance Oppenheim, the film’s writer and director. Welcome Lance.

Lance Oppenheim: Hello. Thank you for having me, John. Big fan. It’s funny. The writer – I don’t consider myself the writer of a documentary, but I guess all documentaries are written somehow.

John: I want to talk about that. Because sometimes you see writing credits on documentaries and sometimes you don’t. But there’s clearly a lot of character work, a lot of story work that’s happening here. So I want to talk about how you do that in a documentary sense.

But I also want to make sure that people who are listening to this understand that your movie is actually really funny and visual and surprising. And it’s sad at moments, but also that clip might make it seem like it’s all dark and grim, and it has this really kind of weird spirit to it. So I want to make sure people don’t get the wrong idea about your movie.

How early on in the process of coming up with this movie did you know what it was going to feel like?

Lance: Oh man. I think it took a long time to know what the movie was going to be about and how it was going to do that. But I think the feeling of it actually came pretty early to me. And that came from spending a lot of time in the world. The Villages, as most people know of it from how much of a political spectacle it became this past year during the election cycle. It’s a very conservative stronghold of America.

But I think that the thing that appealed to me, I’m a Floridian. I grew up knowing about the place was that it really was kind of like The Truman Show in real life. It’s designed to simulate the 1950s, the 1960s. Kind of like an America that never really existed, but an America that I grew up with in movies, like in Blue Velvet or in Safe or in Edward Scissorhands. And Nicholas Ray’s Bigger than Life. The suburbia of those movies is the same suburbia of Ronald Reagan’s Morning in America and it’s the same suburbia that is literally brought to life in the Villages.

So I knew that I couldn’t just make a standard cinema verité style documentary that the aesthetics of it were handheld. I wanted to find a way to bring the audience into the world and make it as immersive and make it feel as [transportive] as if you were really there, as if you had stepped afoot in the community.

John: So those choices were about the kinds of shots you’re doing. Just literally the production design, sort of what you’re showing on screen. But you also need to show characters on screen and that’s really what I wanted to dig into. Because that boundary between what is writing and what is directing and what is being a documentary filmmaker and what is sort of shaping narrative.

How did you find these people? Because I keep wanting to call them characters and they’re not characters. They actually are people. But they felt very carefully selected and edited. And over the course of your times meeting with them you are putting them in situations that can help tell your story.

So, let’s start at the beginning. How did you find these people and when did you know these were the people you wanted to follow for your film?

Lance: Well, I think over the process of making the film, it was about four trips over almost 18 months of time spent on and off in the community and filming with a lot of different folks. It only really became apparent I think at the end of our second strip who our ensemble really was. We were following a lot of people. But I think going back to the root of the question of just documentary, fiction, how we watch documentaries, how we watch fiction films. I mean, I think it’s interesting.

A lot of people in documentary – the documentary orthodoxy likes to talk about this word “manipulation” and I think it’s a word that should exist. But I think, you know, I may be stating the obvious but everything in documentaries is manipulated. The moment you put a camera and train it on anybody. And anybody that is living a life and breathing and existing, something happens. Depending on how much time you spend in a place, how comfortable, and how much that bedrock of trust exists between you, the filmmaker, and the subject that’s on camera, there may be some kind of alchemy that gets you closer to real life. But it’s a tremendous hurdle.

And even the way most documentaries no matter how observational they may seem are put together in the edit. It’s a lot of times following the tenets of a thing we call story, which is inherently I think the tenets, the touchstones of how we think about story go back to the things that you talk about so well on the podcast which is narrativizing and the way we even narrativize our lives goes back to that same thing.

So I think a lot of movies, even the film that we made, contain these manipulations. And I think for me the world, the setting of the Villages, felt perfect to drop a camera and to kind of experiment with a more heightened, more stylized way of telling real stories. I guess my process kind of involves a lot of me getting to know people, spending a lot of time with them, and then essentially riffing off of reality. Putting them in situations, as you’re saying. It’s not even a matter of me putting them in situations they wouldn’t normally be in. It’s bringing those situations to life and shooting them in a way that may feel and evoke how a narrative film looks and breathes.

John: Let’s talk about one of the characters in this. So in the initial clip here we meet Dennis. And so the first shot that we’re seeing of him is he’s in his van and he’s going through his daily life and he’s talking to us about the kind of woman he wants to meet. And it’s a character who he can seem like a grifter, he can seem like a hustler. And yet he is kind of a classic protagonist, like a shaggy dog protagonist of a story.

So, when you first meet this person as a filmmaker are you thinking through sort of like where you want to see his arc going? Or are you just observing? Because that’s really the question. So often as a writer we kind of know what track we need that character to go, and so we’re tailoring that character from the start because we need that character to achieve these things.

You as a documentary filmmaker have limited means of actually deciding how this character ends up. So when you’re first meeting Dennis do you have a plan for him?

Lance: I’d say no. I think what compels me to the process of making docs, and also the process of making a doc in this way which is maybe a little bit more unorthodox to how docs are normally made, you know, the process in the beginning is similar. It’s observing someone. I’m meeting them. They’re meeting me. We’re getting to know each other really well. We have a few drinks. We have dinner. We have more drinks. We do that process, that cycle kind of repeats several times over, as many times as possible until we feel comfortable and we are friends with each other.

And once we got to the place where we were in this movie, you know, the film is shot entirely on a tripod, right. A lot of the intention was to make our frames as composed, feel as composed, as manicured as the Villages, as the setting dictates, as the landscaping is. It’s this very meticulously crafted suburban bliss that’s there. And I wanted the camera to feel that.

But in doing that and shooting the movie entirely on tripod it really did not allow for us to be flies on the wall. For one I’m much younger than every subject in the film, including Dennis. The process of shooting it on tripod in a way immediately established this distance and the challenge with the movie was to eliminate that distance and get as close as we possibly could. In a weird way something happened where midway through our shooting, you know, there were times where this process did not feel like it was working and it felt like it was corrupting too much of reality and it felt too artificial, even though we were putting things on screen that normally do happen in their lives.

And there were a lot of times where we were just observing and kind of putting the camera in a place where we would just let it run for a long time until something would happen in the frame. But what happened over time was that in kind of embracing the artifice we got to something more real. You know, the process of shooting on a tripod made me be a lot more honest about what I was shooting, why I was shooting it, and how I was going to shoot it for the subjects of the film. So in a way our process, our relationship, didn’t just evolve – it wasn’t like a mosquito biting someone and sucking up their blood and then painting a portrait with their blood in the edit or something.

This was something far more collaborative. I’m using such a violent example for how I imagine documentaries are normally made. But I think it’s like somewhat true. You get closer, the material you end up making out of somebody’s life, and it’s a very [vampiristic] relationship. So I wanted to do something different. This whole process of shooting on tripod kind of allowed and enabled this sort of collaboration and trust and honesty. I had to be very honest about the places and situations I wanted to shoot. And I had to be just as honest about how I thought it was going to work in the edit.

So in a way these were real people but they were playing a version of themselves that was entirely real and all the things that are happening in the movie are real. The way we’re shooting them, the framework we’re shooting them in, and sometimes even the way a situation is blocked, that is very much planned. And I think that’s the kind of joy of it all is that you’re riffing off of reality. It’s like jazz and you’re trying to shoot actively unfolding things in as stylized and interesting of a framework as possible.

So to answer your question I prefer not to know where a person’s journey goes. I have hopes, I have dreams, I have wishes for where they move, and how they move through a world, but I’m never telling them what to do or how to do something. It’s really more they make a choice to do something and for me the reason I chose these folks was, one, I was interested in some ways of making a movie about relationships, so there was that subtext to each of their stories. But, two, they were actively having things happening to them when I met them.

Barbara, the widow in the film, was trying to get back out in the world again. That was something very active. There’s conflict there. Dennis is someone who is trying to find a woman to move in with. And he needs to find a home essentially. His journey is about companionship and comfort and freedom. And these things that he talks about very articulately and beautifully. And the last subjects of the film are Reggie and Anne, a married couple, who are very different from one another and are about to just experience how different they really are and how there’s so much distance in that relationship. And how she has to deal with the fact that her husband may not just be recreationally dabbling in psychedelic drugs. He actually may be losing his mind.

And to me each of those stories, it took a lot of time to find each of them and befriend them and then get to a place where they were comfortable with me putting their lives onscreen. I’m not interested in taking it I guess to that degree. What’s more interesting and more challenging to me is taking real life and creatively lensing and creatively treating it. And that’s what I think my favorite documentaries do that. And it’s a shame that not all documentaries do.

John: Well, let’s talk about trying to frame it and you’re literally framing it with your camera, but you’re also deciding what parts of their lives are going to be useful for your film to be showing. So you said that initially there were other people you were following and they did not make it into the edit, or you stopped filming them because they were not helping you tell your story. So you said there were a total of four visits, between those visits what was the process for you in terms of like this is what the movie wants to be, this is the story that it looks like we can tell here? And was there writing involved in that? Were there conversations?

Or was it just looking at what you’d already shot in the edit bay? How did you figure out what the movie wanted to be? Because that’s a question that screenwriters are facing all the time. They have all these scenes, they have this stuff, but they may not necessarily know what the movie is from the moments that they’ve found.

Lance: You know, the process of making this – for so long I had no clue what it was. And I knew that we visually found a way to lens the place in a way that felt very expressive and not just representational and that I think was exciting to me and exciting to my cinematographer who I really consider a coauthor of the film. But it was only until I brought on an editor named Daniel Garber who I consider – screenwriting in documentaries, what that really is is the editors of the films.

Daniel is someone who is really well versed in both documentary and narrative films. He edited a film called Cam a few years ago. And I owe a great deal to him. We edited the film together, but he was the person who was making sense out of the lasagna, the cold noodles of footage that was just sitting on a hard drive or sitting in a refrigerator basically forever. And I had no idea how to make sense of any of it, or how all these people, places, and things added up. And he was the person that showed me what the film needed to be.

I think the thing that was guiding him in making those choices and guiding me, after seeing material structured in a particular kind of way it guided the rest of the way we were filming. Daniel came on I think at the end of our second trip and was struggling to figure out what it was.

There was one story that we actually released as a separate short documentary that the New York Times put out. I think it was about two months ago. About one of the stories that I thought the movie was about. I thought the movie was about this little girl who was living actually outside of the Villages and the development was trying to buy her land and turn this home that has been in her family for generations into prefab cookie cutter retirement home essentially, a house in this retirement community.

And there was another thread that I really liked about the ecological devastation this place causes. Sinkholes that were forming in the bottom of the ground. I mean, just like totally unbelievable things that we just kept shooting because that place is just unbelievably insane.

I’m trying to remember how we decided it didn’t work, but I think one of the things for sure that I think I was interested in and existentially so felt when I first got there. I had just gotten out of a long relationship. I felt pretty upset about that. And I was wandering around trying to figure out how these people who are navigating their seventh or eighth decade on this planet are still together. And what romance looks like there. And do we repeat the same things – if you’re returning to a place that reminds you of your youth do you make the same mistakes that you made as a young person?

John: So what you’re describing sort of sound like central dramatic questions. And so it sounds like you didn’t know going into it – you knew what the movie might kind of feel like. You knew what was interesting about it. But you didn’t have a central dramatic question until you really winnowed it down to like these are the people we’re going to follow and these are the questions the movie is going to try to answer, which is kind of what happens – it’s not about the place. It’s about what happens when you’re at this point in your later adulthood.

Lance: Right. Precisely. I think for a long time I was interested in making something that I thought at first was going to be about the place. And I realized over time that this movie, that stories aren’t settings. That this movie didn’t want to be about the setting. It wanted to be about people going through real problems against the backdrop of this unreal place. That seemed more interesting to me and that also – when I first started making the film, before I even rolled a frame on anything, before my crew came, I lived in the community for about a month and a half. These two retired rodeo clowns I found off of Airbnb, I rented a room in their house.

And I think a lot of those central dramatic questions came from seeing how they lived their lives and who their friends were and what they were doing. One of them had leukemia and the reason they were putting their Airbnb room up was to pay for the medical bills. So immediately I was like this is so fucking dark, but also they are still clowning. There was something – the tension between those two things, something that is more tragic through the funniness of it, and more funny through its tragedy. That was really nice and interesting to me and I knew I wanted to bottle that up somehow.

John: Well let’s get a sense of who you are in this picture. Because how old were you when you started this movie?

Lance: I was 22 when I first got there.

John: So you were literally just out of film school when this is happening. You’re straight out of undergrad and you’re trying to do this thing which has got to be both inspiring and also annoying to many of our listeners who are like how can this young kid do all these things. And my guess just from interactions we’ve had is you are not shy about approaching and asking people for this. You hustle. And it’s a thing I admire just in my interactions with you so far is you seem to recognize what you need and how to very graciously approach people about getting that thing that you need. And that feels like that’s Hollywood you get your subjects for your movie. But also how you sort of get the movie out there in the world.

Lance: Yeah. I’m an annoying person. You know, I think even the process of getting this film made, it was not – as I’m sure you would imagine it was not easy. It was I think throughout the process a lot of people were constantly, even in trying just to get the money to keep going back, you know, people could see through what I was doing. They could see through that I didn’t have it figured out yet. That I didn’t have a narrative that seemed like it would satisfy all of their funding needs, especially in documentaries which is a world – financing in documentaries I think goes back to a lot of other questions about issues and advocacy and stuff like that that is important but not – that was not this film.

So, it took time and it took a lot of bullshitting I think to really figure that out. I mean, the film that I thought we were making, the film that is this short film called The Paradise Next Door, that was essentially my pitch was that here’s a movie, you have a younger person, and you have these older folks, and it’s a movie about these two people and when those worlds collide, which was complete bullshit because it never collided. So, you know, after we were able to successfully bamboozle some people, graciously this company called the Los Angeles Media Fund, they were still down for the ride even as I started realizing that that narrative wasn’t the thing that we needed to be shooting.

What we needed to be shooting was something much more intimate and interior and subjective about these people and about this existential feeling of being in a place where you’re supposed to be having the best time of your life and time is running out and tht stress of not feeling that and also when this thing you’ve invested in, this dream – what happens when it becomes a nightmare? And that’s something that I think anybody can relate to, especially anybody who grows old, which is everybody on the planet I guess.

John: Now what I hear you describing though, it sounds like you weren’t asking for permission, and you weren’t waiting to figure out all the things, you just kind of started doing it and you sort of built the road underneath you as you were going. And that applies for a documentary feature, but also applies to a lot of writing. I do feel a frustration that sometimes the questions we get in on the podcast are about like am I allowed to do this thing, is this possible, is this a good idea, and the advice I want to shout so often just like well just try the thing and see if it’s a good idea. And if it’s not a good idea you haven’t lost that much.

And it sounds like as you started to make this movie you didn’t have – you kind of weren’t risking a ton. I mean, you might be wasting your time, but it wasn’t expensive to do the initial things you were trying to do. You could just go off and do it and eventually you had some footage you could show and you could bring in another person and another person. You got to Darren Aronofsky. You could sort of keep the ball rolling by just bringing in new people who could see what you’d already done. Is that fair?

Lance: Yeah. I think that is. I mean, you know, the movie – I started working on the film like kind of [co-curricularly]. It started off as my thesis film in school and that was how I initially was able to go down there. But even when we got the financing, the process didn’t change much. In terms of shooting it still was just me, my cinematographer, and I’ve been working with him since I was like 17. My sister who has a fulltime job, not in movies, but I convinced her to come and help us figure it out. And one of my college friends who coproduced the film. And then I had the sound guys.

So it was like a crew of five basically across the journey. And then obviously on the post side and everything else things started to get a little bigger and just a lot more people to answer to. And wanted to make sure that even though it wasn’t a ton of money to make, they wanted to make sure their money wasn’t being wasted. That’s fair. I feel like all first time feature filmmakers have to go through that process of just getting people to trust you in that way.

But it’s a process of trying things and taking risks and swinging big. And when you are there, when you’re up at the plate you’ve got to swing as big as you can possibly can and be as ambitious as you can. And I think going back to the thing you just said before, like don’t worry about being annoying. No one is going to find you on the Internet and pluck your script or you movie or your short out of obscurity. The only way they’re going to find it is if you sort of get it in their face.

And I remember reading this story about like Gus Van Sant. I think he called, I don’t know if it was William S. Burroughs, so forgive me if I’m screwing up the story, but I remember he found someone he admired very deeply, his name in the phonebook, and he just gave him a call. And they became friends and then he ended up adapting his story into a movie. So I’ve always just been inspired by that and took that to heart.

John: We just spoke with Jac Schaeffer who ran WandaVision and her Scriptnotes connection was that she ended up hiring former Scriptnotes producer Megan McDonnell as a staff writer there. You also have a Scriptnotes connection. Do you want to tell us what that is?

Lance: I would love to. I grew up with Stuart Friedel. His father was and has been my dentist for my entire life. Stuart was the first dude that I ever knew that was working in movies. He worked for Alexander Payne and exposed me to his films. And exposed me to your films, John. Told me what the podcast was. I didn’t know what the podcast was at all at that point in time, but I had seen so many of your movies. I’d seen The Nines. I’d seen Corpse Bride. I’d seen Big Fish. So I was like oh shit I should listen to that.

And I am devoted listener. Especially as someone who is trying to make stuff that is documentary and nonfiction based but also as I’ve tried to learn and remediate myself on how to write a screenplay which is an art, a dark art that is not easy. So I’m very grateful – I feel like your podcast keeps me going, and I’m sure keeps a lot of people going when they’re trying to figure out how the fuck to do it.

John: You also have Stuart’s vocal cadences, which I find so fascinating, because I wouldn’t guess that there was a South Florida accent, but you and Stuart sound so much alike. It’s jarring.

Lance: Oh, that’s funny. Huh. We’re just two Jewish South Floridian guys I guess.

John: Maybe it’s all that Friedel dentistry on your mouth that has shaped it into a specific way. So, you made this movie, but you’re still very, very young. So, what are you doing next and are you trying to stay in the documentary lane? Are you trying to do narrative features? What’s next for you?

Lance: I don’t know. I don’t feel very young. I feel, if anything I feel weird in a way. This was the thing that I basically went as far in as I possibly could on. And there was a kind of tremendous period of just like, wow, what do I do next. And this feeling of sadness of finishing something I cared so deeply about. And the people in the film, the subjects in the film, I speak with them still once a week. We’re still very close. And I’m always like, god, I wish I could go back and keep making something there.

But I’m working on a bunch of stuff. I am interested in continuing to make docs, but I also am very interested in narrative films and seeing if I can find ways to bridge that gap. So I’m working on another film right now that’s a small narrative film that’s based on a short story that I really liked. And then I’m adapting one of the short documentaries I made a few years ago and I’m writing that right now. And Darren Aronofsky is producing that. So we’ll see. I just want to make movies and I find it so interesting how I think especially in the narrative world it’s like so much time – hurry up and wait. You work and work and work and then if you get to that place where you can set something up it just takes a million years to get it made.

So I feel like I’ll probably just keep making documentaries because at least I have more agency and ownership of the process of just going and shooting stuff. Even if it’s the wrong stuff to shoot, it still feels good to be shooting something rather than talking about it I guess.

John: We’re always big advocates on this podcast of just making the thing. And so I believe you will continue to just make the thing and you will have the frustrations of development hell and all of that stuff, but as long as you can always make some things for yourself you’ll be set.

Lance Oppenheim we can check out your movie on Hulu right now. So everyone on Hulu can see it. I’m sure internationally you can find it through all the other streaming and download places. Congratulations on your movie. And it’s great talking with you.

Lance: Thank you so much, John.

John: Stick around because after the break we’ll be talking about writing while at your day job.

OK, this is the part of the show where we normally answer some listener questions. Megana, do you have a good question for us?

Megana Rao: I do. Cautious from San Gabriel Valley would like to know “Can a company gain partial ownership of something I wrote while at work? I got a day job where I basically babysit a building and my supervisor doesn’t care if I write for the majority of my shift. I was worried when I found out through an episode of Silicon Valley that a company can sue you for ownership of your project if you worked on it on company equipment, i.e. a computer. I thought I was fine because I’m a third party contract worker and continue to write at work, but recently due to my coworker’s constant cellphone and YouTube use my company sent out a scary memo regarding computer usage.

“Though the memo may not hold up in court, I’m uncertain how to proceed working on projects at work. I don’t care if I’m fired or transferred to a different post. I just don’t someone else to already have a bite out of my apple. I’m leaning towards continuing to use company computers to write scripts and only saving in the cloud because if I do sell a script I’d have a whole production company backing in the unlikely event of a lawsuit. As for other writing projects that I might self-publish I’m just writing in a notebook and tediously typing it up at home. What do you guys think? Is the time saved worth the hypothetical risk?”

John: All right, so this gives me a big flashback to my days when I was writing my first script. I was an intern at Universal. And so the first script I ever wrote was this romantic tragedy called Here and Now. And I wrote it basically while I was at work, when I was sort of at work in my job. Mostly I had a really mindless day job sort of like Cautious has where I was just filing stuff all day and really not using my brain at all. And I would go home and I would handwrite pages and then type them up over my lunch break at work.

And I was using my own laptop, but I think the same kind of idea applies is that you’re kind of doing it on company time and the question of could they control or own that work. I think you’re possibly asking for trouble using the company computer. That’s the only thing that gives me sort of pause. I think the fact that you’re still doing your job but you’re also writing at the same time, if your supervisors don’t care it’s going to be fine.

The fact that you’re using their stuff could be the problem. Even just using a browser or saving it online might be a problem. So my instinct would be to either get yourself a cheap laptop you can work on while you’re there. Write on it using your iPhone, your iPad. Write by hand and then type it up when you get home. But I think you could be asking for some trouble just because anything that’s edited in that computer kind of feels like it is their stuff.

Megana, you used to work at Google. What was the policies when you were at Google? If you were using the company’s computer to do stuff did they own it?

Megana: Yeah. I remember this came up during orientation. So my first day they have this policy that whatever you work on Google technically owns if it’s at the office or on company computer. And I remember being so confused. And I was like, well, what if I wrote a poem. Because if I wrote like an application, sure, that makes sense to me. But why would you guys want to own a poem that I wrote?

And the person who was leading our orientation, I think they brought someone from legal counsel was like technically we would own anything like that, and so I never wrote at the office or on my company computer there because I also saw that episode of Silicon Valley and was scared.

John: Yeah. It’s probably not going to be a problem, but this last paragraph you asked I’d only write scripts there because the production company would back you up. That’s not a guarantee. Like you hope the production is going to back you up. And, again, it’s probably not going to be a problem, but it’s like getting vaccinated before going on a trip or something. It’s probably not going to happen to you, but it’s better to ease your mind and not run into those problems. So if you can find a way to not write on their stuff that’s going to be a better choice.

Megana: And something, I don’t know if this is tricky advice, but I would just research a lot while I was at work, or I would do a lot of reading. Because they couldn’t possibly own that, right?

John: No, they can’t own your research. That’s another great point. If you are researching stuff for your project that’s great. And realistically what Cautious is describing, where maybe you’re typing into Google Docs documents, it’s completely on the cloud and no one is ever going to see it. It’s unlikely to be a problem, but still why take the chance.

Megana: Mm-hmm.

John: Cool. Well that’s a good question. We’re a pretty full episode so we’ll save the rest of these questions for next week when Craig is back. But thank you for helping us out with that. Maybe you can help us out with One Cool Things. So this is the part of the show where we recommend something. I’m going to recommend a really great episode of Slate’s Working podcast where they talked to this dialect coach named Samara Bay. Really smart and great.

So she’s the dialect coach who works with actors before they’re starting a role. So they are about to go in to shoot something, a British actor who has to play American, or an American actor who has to play an Irish accent. And she’s really smart about talking through the process and really thinking about there’s not just one accent you’re going for. You’re trying to get into the space where you can inhabit that character and then while you’re in that character have all the vocal ranges and expressions that you need for it.

She compares it a lot to how a costume designer works. You are trying to really suit the voice/costume of that character and make sure it really works for that actor and works for that piece and that period. So, she was just so smart and such a great way of looking at something that’s so challenging.

Because we think about dialogue being just the words we write and sort of these are the words in the right order. But it depends so much on how they’re delivered and how much that voice fits nicely. So, if you’re someone who writes dialogue, which is probably most of the people listening to this podcast, I would definitely check out this episode of the Slate Working podcast with Samara Bay.

Megana: Cool.

John: Now what do you have for us?

Megana: Well, I feel bad because I also was going to recommend a podcast episode.

John: You can do that.

Megana: I can? OK. I also feel like I’m cheating on Scriptnotes. I feel guilty.

John: But Craig is not here and also Craig rarely has one, or fills it in at the last minute.

Megana: So I have this podcast that I really love, in addition to this one. It’s called You’re Wrong About. And it’s a podcast hosted by these two journalists and each week they examine a historical event or a person in pop culture who was misunderstood or miscast in the popular imagination. And then they recontextualize the story with research and information that we have decades later.

And because they’re journalists they’re really good at parsing out what was the media narrative and why was it that way. And then following how the information gets weaponized. So I feel like for our listeners who like the How Would This Be a Movie segment, this is the perfect sort of supplemental listening.

And it’s also really fun. The female host, I picture her as the adult Daria. She’s very sardonic and her voice sounds just like Daria. And my personal favorite episode of this is they have one on the Exxon Valdez oil spill which does not sound sexy or fun, but it is so fascinating. And that’s one I’ll link to in the show notes.

John: So my recollection of the Exxon Valdez is that we did cast a villain. The captain of the Exxon Valdez was sort of penalized for his role in it, but my guess is that’s probably not actually accurate. Correct?

Megana: Correct. And like he actually had alerted Exxon to – like he might have made some errors, but like the way that the system and the company was treating regulations had already degraded so much to that point. And he had already alerted the company to say hey the way we’re running these ships is really unsafe. And there’s like a lot of twists that have happened in the past 10 years that I think, you know, nobody is going to keep paying attention – or most people do not pay attention to a news story 10 years later. And I think that’s how a lot of corporate malfeasance happens is that they can make really huge gestures and amends immediately and then 10 years later repeal all of that work that they’ve done.

John: Yeah. I remember that happening recently. A lot of stories came out about Y2K and it’s like, oh, Y2K was overhyped and it was a disaster that didn’t happen. And just recently I’ve seen a lot of recontextualizations saying like oh yeah it wasn’t a disaster because people spent five years working their asses off to actually make it not be a problem. So it’s those things, the nonevents that were nonevents because we actually did the thing.

Megana: Yeah.

John: Don’t make it into the news.

Megana: And they have a great episode on the Y2K bug.

John: Great. I will check that out. I will add it to my podcast app. And that is our podcast for today. Scriptnotes is produced, as ever, by Megana Rao. Thank you, Megana.

Megana: Thank you.

John: It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is also by Matthew Chilelli. 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.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you find 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 the bonus segments like the one we recorded earlier this afternoon with Dana Fox which is epic and we talk about, god, we talk about everything. We talk about sleeps, and naps–

Megana: Teeth.

John: And teeth. And all sorts of things. So you’ll find out about all the secrets behind how Dana Fox kicks so much ass. So sign up for Scriptnotes.net.

Megana: it is a life-changing segment.

John: Megana Rao has already emailed to get links to all the things Dana talked about, because it could change her life and yours as well. So Scriptnotes Premium, it’s good stuff. Megana, thank you for a fun show.

Megana: Thank you.

[Bonus segment]

John: And we’re back and we’re back here with our initial guest, Dana Fox. And I asked you here because I want to talk about naps. So my daughter takes naps, my husband takes naps, I don’t take naps. But you know who takes really god naps? Dana Fox. Dana Fox, can you talk to me and Megana about naps?

Dana: Thank you so much for knowing that this is really one of my best skills. And thank you for having me on the show to talk about the fact that when you asked me to be on the show to talk about naps, I’m not joking I was literally napping. And I woke up and I saw your email saying can you come and talk about naps. And I was like, yup. And I am refreshed as hell and I can’t wait to do it because I just woke up from a nap.

Yes. So napping controversial. I have a lot of things to say about it. I think one of the things that has sort of unlocked, not to be like all what color is your parachute about it, but one of the things that has kind of unlocked my max productivity in recent years is not trying to be someone I’m not anymore. Just being super exactly who I am. And I’m a napper, John. I think you know this because I worked for you. I was your assistant and I slept basically every day, middle of the day. I would so much rather shovel food in my mouth at my desk while working and then use my lunch break to sleep, which is what I did and you were so nice to me.

You would like walk in and I’d be fast asleep on some couch and you would just quietly walk out and you were just the best boss in the entire world.

But for me it almost makes me have two full days instead of just one day where at four o’clock I’m non-functional. I’ve done a lot of research into sleep, because I’m obsessed with it, and I need a lot of it. I think part of it is burn really sort of brightly and spastically when I am awake. So, just being alive is sort of exhausting for me.

And the research I did on sleep is that you need so much less of it in a nap to feel refreshed than you actually think you do. And I think half the reason that most people don’t nap is because they’re like, oh, I’m going to get groggy, or I’m going to lie down and I’m going to feel all this pressure if I don’t sleep, then what’s going to happen, and then I’m going to lie there freaking out about not sleeping for 45 minutes and that seems like a waste.

So the way that I have sort of combatted that is that I have this app that – I can’t think of the name of it – but I have this app that I call Fat Bastard because he’s like a meditation guy who talks in like a very thick Scottish accent and sounds like Fat Bastard from Austin Powers. And I started listening to it when I was pregger-tits because I was working on a TV show. I was a showrunner and I was super pregger-tits. And I was exhausted all the time. And I was like oh my god I have to sleep during the day or I’m literally going to die.

So I started listening to this sleep app that puts you to sleep for whatever number of minutes you have to sleep you sort of program into it. And it puts you to sleep and then it wakes you—

John: Like a digital tranquilizer dart. It just shoots you in the neck.

Dana: Digital tranquilizer dart. Full on Maui blow dart in the butt cheek. And you can do it pretty much any time of day. And you can have it put you to sleep like good night-night and it never wakes you up, or you can have it wake you up. And the key is for the naps is the wakeup. Because as I’ve discovered through my excessive research it’s about waking up not in a REM cycle.

If you’re in a REM cycle and you try to wake up it’s like coming out of wet concrete. If the app wakes you slowly out of the REM cycle and then wakes you up it’s as if – like so much energy. I wake up and I’m like bam. I bound out of bed. It’s incredible. And for me it’s a total game-changer. Unfortunately because I got addicted to the one where the guy was talking to me about being pregnant every time I take a nap he’s like, “Feel your baby in your belly.” And I’m like, mm, all right.

But by that point I’m already asleep so it doesn’t matter. It’s like the Scriptnotes thing. It goes ding, ding, ding and I hear that and I’m asleep.

John: That’s amazing.

Dana: I’ve listened to it so many times. It’s become totally Pavlovian.

John: Yeah, Pavlovian. So, you nap every day, is that correct?

Dana: I try to. But I would say I nap three weekday and both weekend days.

John: And what time do you go to bed? How much sleep do you get overnight?

Dana: Oh my god, John, this is where it’s going to get super weird where all of your wonderful listeners are going to be like she has a medical problem. She should go to the hospital immediately.

I get in bed at no later than 9:30 every night. And I read my book. Right now I’m reading about Ada Lovelace. It’s fascinating. I read on Kindle, which is a whole other conversation that will lead back to an aggressive John August compliment if you will allow me to.

John: All right.

Dana: Which is that I discovered on Kindle that I am dyslexic. I did not know I was dyslexic until I was reading my Kindle one night and I was like why do books make me so tired, why is reading so hard for me? How come reading has always been hard for me? And I was on Kindle and I pressed this button for the font that says Open Dyslexic and I was like I’ll just check out what this looks like. And it was literally like a superhero movie. I was like pow. And there was a light flash and everything was crazy.

And I looked at the book and I was like oh my god I just read 42 books. So I went from being a person who reads like maybe three books a year to I read a book a week now. I’m just a voracious reader and it’s all because of this font. And my sweet, sweet John August who has his incredible app, which is called Weekend Read, sent me an email saying that he put Open Dyslexic onto it so that I could have it. Because you’re nice to me and you like when I have nice things.

John: I do like when you have nice new things. So, the new Weekend Read has Open Dyslexic on it as a font choice.

Dana: Which was amazing. So anyway, back to the sleep thing. I go to bed at 9:30 but I read for about a half an hour to an hour maybe, ish. Sometimes I read for like seven seconds and then fall asleep, but mostly I’m asleep by 10:30 and I wake up at 7.

John: Wow. So you get a lot of sleep.

Dana: I like a lot of sleep. Yeah, it’s weird how much sleep I get.

John: Ricky Gervais apparently also needs 12 hours of sleep. Some people just need it.

Dana: Who does that?

John: And you get a lot done during the day. Ricky Gervais.

Dana: Oh, wonderful. I love that story. And I get a lot done all day. I mean, I don’t want to call it like mania, but I would say when I’m working I am an assassin. What’s next, OK. We’re doing this. I stand at a standing desk. I never sit down. I do yoga for 45 minutes every day Monday through Friday now which has like saved me during the pandemic so I didn’t murder my whole family.

And then when my whole family turns up dead you’re going to have to call the police because you’re going to have this on the thing. I’m totally not murdering my family. I love my family. They’re the greatest. But the pandemic was very stressful for all families, I’m sure. And I started doing yoga which completely saved me. But because it’s so hard it’s also another reason why I have to nap.

Oh, and John, can I tell you the other really embarrassing thing?

John: I want to hear it.

Dana: The first time I was on Scriptnotes I talked about breast pumps, so this is definitely not as embarrassing as that, which I’m so glad you made not embarrassing, because it shouldn’t be.

John: But we also tried to normalize breastfeeding. You know, screenwriters who breastfeed on the podcast. So Rachel Bloom breastfed while she was on the podcast. It’s fine.

Dana: It’s so sweet. I love it so much. It’s the best. These attitude-changing things actually super-duper matter, so I thank you for that.

But, no, this is sort of an embarrassing admission which is because of the yoga my back was hurting one day, so I started sleeping with a heating pad for my back. And now I don’t think I can give up the heating pad. It’s amazing.

John: I want to talk about all the things I now use to sleep and they’re all great, but I do worry if I were ever to be in an emergency situation and didn’t have all my things to sleep I just could never sleep again.

So, here is the things I need to sleep.

Dana: Tell me your stuff.

John: First off, I need the pillow between my knees.

Dana: Classic.

John: Because if my knees are touching each other, not doable. I need the white noise machine which has been a previously One Cool Thing.

Dana: Of course.

John: I’ve got to have the white noise machine.

Dana: Do you do the Rohm? May I ask are in the ‘70s style Rohm? Because that’s the best one I think.

John: Yeah. So the one I like so much is the one from the Wirecutter and it looks like a black little octagon or hexagon.

Dana: Oh, no, I don’t have that one.

John: Oh, I think the one you’re talking about, the one that’s sort of like a dimpled bell. Is that the one you’re thinking about?

Dana: You spin it and you can create hallow-ness based on how much air is coming out of it. It’s pretty dope. You would like it.

John: I know what you’re talking about. Yes. No, this one is digital, but it’s not looping, so it’s generating those noises. That’s important.

Dana: Oh nice.

John: But I started to need a Breathe Right strip, a nose strip, to keep my nose open.

Dana: Sure.

John: And at Scriptnotes producer Megana Rao’s suggestion I tried this mouth taping thing, where you tape your lips together so you can’t breathe through your mouth.

Dana: Oh my gosh. My father-in-law talks a lot about that. Does it work?

John: It works so well. Megana, are you still doing that?

Megana: I’m still doing it. And it really helps with my allergies because I think during allergy season I get stuffed up, so I breathe through my mouth so much more. And this kind of helps me I think regulate that. I don’t know exactly how the science works. But I wake up feeling better.

John: I wake up feeling so much better. So that plus my eye shade. So I need all of these things. And my melatonin. So I need all of this stuff and I sleep so well. But I need all of this stuff.

Dana: First of all, I support you and love you. And I know you enough to know that you’re not packing for anywhere without all that stuff. So I’m not worried you’re going to not have it. I can’t even imagine a scenario where you end up without it.

John: A mouth guard. Oh my god.

Dana: I was literally just going to say mouth guard. So I got a mouth guard and let me tell you guys, first of all, super sexy. My husband is like, yeah, this is great. But second of all I have a mouth guard that completely changed my life. Because I don’t know if any of your wonderful listeners have jaw clenching, but I was clenching my jaw because of stress. And I got this mouth guard that is different from all other mouth guards. It’s like the Passover, why is this different from every other night of mouth guards. And basically what it does that’s different. OK, this is what I learned. This is crazy.

Number one, the guy was like – I went to a specific dentist for grinding of your jaw. And he’s like do you drink sparkling water. I was like I’m a writer in Hollywood. I exclusively drink sparkling water. There is no other kind of liquid that goes in my body that isn’t a different flavor of La Croix. Like of course I drink, or La Croix, or however you’re supposed to say it. I call it the French La Croix because I’m fancy.

John: Yup.

Dana: So he was like, oh, you have to immediately cut that out because apparently sparkling water decreases something about your calcium and is like the enemy of jaw clenching. I was like that’s crazy. So I cut it out immediately and it was definitely helpful.

Then he was like I’m going to build you this mouth guard because 90% – he goes you know how everybody is probably telling you you’re too stressed out and you need to exercise more and you need this, and diet, and blah-blah-blah. And I said yes everybody is telling me that. And he said, well, it’s 10% of jaw grinding is that. 90% is tooth misalignment. And he’s like back in the day when you didn’t have dentists and you were like cavemen if something bad happened to your teeth your teeth would fix themselves. So you would lose a tooth and the other teeth would kind of like slide in to take care of it.

So really when your teeth get misaligned and don’t touch when you close your mouth your nighttime self is trying to fix your teeth for you. So all night long it’s going like let me fix it, let me fix it, let me fix it. So you’re grinding to try to fix the alignment of your teeth.

So the mouth guard I got, all it does is create a fake little tooth connection in the three places where my teeth aren’t touching. Boom. Literally night one the grinding stopped. I was about to have surgery for my jaw grinding because it was so crazy. It was so bad and like night one it was over, fixed.

Megana: I’m sorry. I am going through the same thing and I just had a dentist tell me that I’m going to need adult braces to fix it. And so this is…

Dana: But let’s talk later and I can tell you my guy. Because you’ve got to drive to Calabasas. Thoughts and prayers. But still he was amazing and he solved me because he said most people will tell you to get adult braces. And he said you can do that, but if you can solve it with a $400 mouth guard wouldn’t you rather do that? And I was like, yes, I would rather do that. And so, boom, solved.

Oh my god, we’ve got to sidebar after this.

Megana: Yeah. Well something else amazing I learned is that if you are jaw clenching it’s harder for you to get to REM sleep because–

Dana: 100%.

Megana: Your body is still moving and whatever muscles.

Dana: And do you know why? Thank you. Oh my god. By the way, thank you. I’ve never felt more understood by somebody. Do you know why?

Megana: No, please tell me.

Dana: Thank you so much for asking. The only time your jaw doesn’t do that kind of thing from when it’s trying to fix your teeth is in REM sleep. So it is literally trying to prevent you from going into this state that will make it so it can’t fix your teeth for you.

John: I mean, Dana Fox.

Dana: I mean, I’m not saying I’m an actual doctor.

John: Usually you come on this podcast to solve screenwriting issues, but here you are changing people’s lives, like people who have no interest in writing at all, but have teeth. People who sleep.

Dana: I have some other good advice, too. Some other things that have been really changing my life include color. Have I talked to you about color, John?

John: I love color. We did a whole episode on colors. But what are you doing with color these days?

Dana: Thank you so much. Well I have two different versions of it. Number one, when I’m writing a script I will put obviously like the storyline between this lady and that guy will be one color. Or the character will be one color. So I love to see color in a script because it ignites these different serotonin explosions in my brain. That makes me super happy.

Recently I had to pitch out an entire season of something and I was doing it over Zoom, which is sort of a different thing than being in the room, and I was trying to figure out like, OK, what’s my move. I’m like a good pitcher, but how am I going to do this differently on Zoom.

And what I did was I created this huge document which was very long, because it was obviously a whole season. And I was like how am I going to do this without seeming like I’m reading this document. So what I did is I went through and I took each idea and I did it in the consecutive rainbow colors. So red was the first idea. Orange was the next idea. A darker yellow so I could actually read it was the third. And then the fourth idea was a green. And the next idea was in blue.

And then every time I started a new episode I went back to red. So, I could like glance over with one eyeball and be like I know exactly where I am in this pitch, because I’m on the third thing I was going to say about this episode and now I’m like, OK, now there’s the next one and the next one. And I’m like, oh right, now I’m on the next episode because there’s red again.

John: I love it.

Dana: A delight.

John: Color. Color is good.

Dana: Color.

John: Dana Fox, thank you so much for solving all of our pitching problems, our sleep problems, our jaw problems. You are just the best. I cannot wait to have you back in Los Angeles.

Dana: Is it weird if I want 23 hours of my day to be on Scriptnotes and one hour of my day to be just my regular life? Is that weird?

John: That’s fine. That’s fine. That’s most people. Maybe get the premium episodes, get the premium feed. Get all those back episodes.

Dana: Just binge it. Just crack out on it.

John: I think your husband already has the premium feed, so he can share his URL.

Dana: Oh my god. I don’t believe that. I’d pay for it twice. I support artists. What are you talking about?

John: Thank you.

Links:

• Watch Cruella on Disney+
• Home Before Dark Season 2 on Apple TV June 11th
• WandaVision on Disney+
• Some Kind of Heaven on Hulu
• Didja see in Deadline about Timothée Chalamet To Play Willy Wonka In New Origin Tale, Kevin Spacey Will Return To Film In Franco Nero’s ‘The Man Who Drew God’, ‘F9’ Star John Cena Apologizes — In Mandarin — To China Over Calling Taiwan A Country, Amazon Confirms It’s Buying MGM For $8.45 Billion, Army of the Dead, Tig Notaro shot all her scenes alone.
• Dana Fox on Twitter
• Jac Schaeffer
• Lance Oppenheim on the web
• Slate’s Working podcast dialect coach Samara Bay
• You’re Wrong About Podcast – Exxon Valdez Oil Spill
• Dana’s nap app Positive Pregnancy with Andrew Johnson
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.