The original post for this episode can now be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/the-deal-with-deals).
**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.
**John:** And this is Episode 491 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show it’s all business, or mostly business. We’re going to be talking about writer deals, including new data from the WGA on median pay for feature writers. We’ll also look at overall deals, indie features, writer publicity. Plus I will speculate wildly on how I think Disney will make its next trillion dollars.
**Craig:** Oh, that’s exciting. I own some Disney stock. Not a lot. I think I own 100 shares. But that makes me feel like I am a Disney.
**John:** After you hear my pitch you will want to buy more Disney stock.
**Craig:** Oh my.
**John:** And in our bonus segment for premium members we will wade into the discourse on writers tweeting about writing and what is or is not a good line of dialogue. And I predict that we will use the F-word many, many times. So that’s a warning for people listening to the premium episode. The F-word will be dropped a lot.
**Craig:** At least 12 times.
**John:** But first we have follow up. In our last episode you and I struggled to find examples of female villains with redemption arcs and we asked our listeners to help us out. So, Craig, you had two suggestions for characters from previous films, right?
**Craig:** I did. Furiosa from Mad Max and Rose Byrne’s character from Bridesmaids.
**John:** Yeah. And so our listeners wrote in because they always write in. Megana got through a whole bunch of emails. Apparently a bunch of people were pointing out that the main T-Rex in the Jurassic Park movie is female. That’s not quite what I had in mind.
**Craig:** Nope.
**John:** I can’t consider that a villain with a redemption arc.
**Craig:** I mean, come on. Redemption arc.
**John:** There were other actual human women.
**Craig:** You and I know, because we play D&D, if you polymorph a character into a T-Rex, which you can do–
**John:** Oh yeah. So powerful. I’ve done it many times.
**Craig:** Many times. One of the things we know about polymorph is that T-Rex is a T-Rex. All it knows, even though it used to be a fully thinking person, all it knows as a T-Rex is who its friends are and who its enemies are, otherwise it acts like a T-Rex. There’s no moral arcs.
**John:** I know.
**Craig:** No.
**John:** Dinosaurs have no moral arcs. That’s a total thematic thing. Our listeners had great suggestions. So Harley Quinn, yes. Great suggestion. And, of course, you know Harley Quinn?
**Craig:** Oh, I know Harley Quinn. Of course.
**John:** OK. So Harley Quinn, of course, it depends on sort of where you’re finding here in her arcing, but the whole point of Harley Quinn is that she does arc and actually has some redeeming qualities. She’s also an anti-hero which is something a little bit different than a reformed villain. But it’s great.
Catwoman. Similar story.
Your point about Rose Byrne’s character, a lot of people pointed out Regina George in Mean Girls. And there’s actually quite a few of those examples of the bitchy girl who was actually better at the end.
**Craig:** Yeah. Well I would draw a little bit of a distinction between better at the end and morally redeemed. Sometimes fate punishes you to the extent that you are humbled, which is I think probably closer to what happens to Regina George.
**John:** Sure.
**Craig:** Similarly some of the characters that we deal with in comic books, like Harley Quinn, there are so many comic books, so many stories, that eventually it all turns into kind of alt-fiction in and of itself, because you have to continually redramatize everything.
**John:** Yeah. I 100% agree. Now, an example that came up on Twitter that I sort of pushed back against was Miranda Priestly in Devil Wears Prada.
**Craig:** Yeah.
**John:** And the very end of Devil Wears Prada like the most you get out of her is that she sees Andie and then sort of has a smile/smirk. But you see her take no actions to sort of reject her previous beliefs and move to a new place. And that’s sort of what we were describing when we talked about Darth Vader or other villains who are redeemed at the end.
**Craig:** Yeah. So Miranda Priestly is the devil in The Devil Wears Prada. And that’s fitting because she does serve the same dramatic role that gods used to serve in the old Greek stories. She is above and beyond humans. And in meddling with their lives or in punishing them or rewarding them she helps humans grow or change.
**John:** Yeah. I do wonder if since some of these counterexamples, we were talking about these sort of giant mythological characters who change, and maybe we’re looking at the wrong frame for those. Some of these examples of the Regina George’s and the Rose Byrne’s characters, or Angela from The Office, maybe our scale and our stakes are a little too high in that we are only looking for villains who are like intent on destroying the world and being true evil versus being socially jerks to our protagonist.
**Craig:** Yeah. All of these examples are perfectly good, but they don’t necessarily undo or contradict the larger point which is I don’t think that there has been a full properly diverse moral breadth of female characters. Breadth with a D. Female characters deserve the right to be just as bad and then good as male characters I guess is how I would put it.
**John:** Absolutely. And when there is an absence that also means there’s an opportunity for those stories to be written and told. So, let’s go do those. Also in last week’s episode on Secrets and Lies one of the things we mentioned was that characters who don’t lie seem unrealistic.
Louise wrote in to say, “I was interested in your take on how lying is a trait found in all people. While I’m sure that’s true for the most part, I’d like to share with you the reason I don’t lie or struggle to lie, and that is autism. I wonder if this is why I don’t see myself represented onscreen. One of the common misconceptions about autism is that we have no imagination. Now, I’m a writer and have a wonderfully vivid imagination and can create worlds, write prose, poems, and scripts. What I think people are seeing when they say autistic people have no imagination is that side of us that struggles to lie.
“When I recall a story about something that happened at work I cannot embellish, omit, or deny any part of that story. What you’ll get is the truth, because I struggle to say something that is not actually accurate.”
**Craig:** Well that’s an interesting point. My son is on the spectrum. I mean, autism now is a spectrum, we know. So, there’s many, many different kinds of spectral, spectrum disorders. Spectral is probably more related to ghosts. And he has no problem lying. [laughs]
**John:** Is your son a ghost?
**Craig:** He is so white that he might be a ghost. So he has the same complexion as my wife. My daughter is more like me. So I’ve often called – I used to call him Casper the Friendly Ghost when he was very little. And so there are people who are on the autistic spectrum who don’t have a problem with fabulizing or lying. Although, white lies, I will point out that a lot of people on the spectrum, across the spectrum, really struggle with the concept of white lies because that is a socially subtle technique. But there’s no question, I mean, I would never doubt Louise’s experience here that there are certain aspects of spectrum disorder where people really don’t have that gear.
It does make for a challenging character for a writer to have that character and not make that character be about the fact that they can’t lie. It’s a little bit like if you introduce a character that’s eight-feet-tall their height isn’t necessarily central to what they’re thinking, their principles, their values, their wants, their desires, their loves, their hates, but it’s hard to not notice that they’re eight-feet-tall. It becomes so much of an outlier that it starts to dominate the presence of that character.
So I think that that is the challenge is figuring out how to show somebody like that without making it sort of the – especially in a movie. In television you have so many episodes. You can perhaps flesh things out. In a movie, this character is going to be there for an hour and a half. It’s hard to not just make it about the fact that they can’t lie.
**John:** Absolutely. So, what I think Louise is helping to point out is that there’s a whole breadth of experience. And so for us to say that everyone lies is a stereotype, but it also is a set of expectations. And so the same way we approach the real world with expectations, we approach fictional worlds with expectations. And one of those expectations is that everyone sort of does the white lie kind of thing. And so if you have characters who aren’t doing that we’re going to notice and people in that world are going to notice, too. So just to be aware of that.
**Craig:** Absolutely. And I think this is going to be more and more of an interesting space to explore.
**John:** Agreed.
**Craig:** And it’s a tricky space. I also feel like the word autism at this point has been stretched across so many different kinds of spectrum disorders that at some point they’re going to have to re-fragment it somehow to kind of help target different tranches of that spectrum.
But, there are really interesting examples of characters that don’t lie in movies. I can think of two. There was the Ricky Gervais movie where he lived in an entire world where people couldn’t lie. And then there were also the aliens in Galaxy Quest. They had no concept of what a lie even was, which I thought was a very brilliant thing. First of all, they were fascinating. So while it was a part of who they were it didn’t dominate to the point where you couldn’t care about them. In fact, you cared very much. You started to care more about them than you did the humans because there was a certain innocence attached to their inability to lie or even perceive something as a lie. So there have been some examples. But I think we’re going to see more and better examples.
And, hey, you know what? Louise, if you’re listening to our show, that sounds like maybe you’re a writer and I think you should get into that.
**John:** Absolutely. Just as we said with female villain redemption, we’re noticing an absence of these characters. And you’re pointing out an absence that you have not seen yourself onscreen. This is an opportunity. So if there’s an opportunity to portray these characters better, more accurately, more fairly, go for it. That’s a call to adventure.
**Craig:** Yeah. And the one thing I would say is that nobody should make the error that people with autism are lacking imagination. Quite the opposite. Quite the opposite. I think their brains are more – they are more fertile engines than people who don’t have autism.
**John:** Yeah. All right. So some actual news from this past week. This past week the WGA published a set of findings based on a study of a thousand feature contracts over the last two years to look at what writers were actually being paid and how their contracts were structured. So, this has been a thing I always kind of wanted to do and I was so happy to see the guild actually doing it, which is to take what resources they have to really look at sort of not just writer pay at the bottom but what writers are actually making in the middle and what the current state of feature writing is in the town, in the business.
So they published this. We’ll put a link in the show notes to it, but I really wanted to talk through and dig through some of these numbers here because there are some things that kind of always felt true, but now we actually have some data to back it up.
**Craig:** Yeah. And before we dig into it we should probably do a very quick primer on the difference between mean, median, and mode. There are three different kinds of averages.
**John:** I would like you to do that. Talk us through it.
**Craig:** So mean average is the average that we’re used to doing in math class. You take a bunch of data points and you add them all up and then divide by the number of data points and that is the mean. And that’s a pretty – it’s generally the most useful. But there are times where it can get really skewed. And this would be one of them.
It’s one of the reasons why I’m glad the guild didn’t use the mean. Because if 80 people earn $100,000 and one person earns $20 billion the mean is not going to be very valuable.
**John:** Yeah.
**Craig:** Then there’s mode which you rarely see. That’s where you take the data point that appears the most often and that’s the mode. And then there’s median. Median is particularly useful in cases like this where there can be large swings. Median basically lines all the data points up from smallest to largest and then counts through and finds the middle one. And the middle one is the one.
So in my example of 80 people earning $100,000 and one earning $25 billion, well the median is going to be one of those people who aren’t $100,000.
**John:** Yeah. A way to think about sort of the division between mean and median is if I throw a cocktail party and Jeff Bezos shows up the mean net worth of the people in that room is a billion dollars.
**Craig:** Insane.
**John:** But the median would be a much more realistic measure for that.
**Craig:** Correct.
**John:** And interestingly I saw an earlier version of this report which both listed the mean and the median. And I argued for getting rid of the mean also for the reason that salaries for WGA have scale. So there’s a floor and that floor is not zero. So, it also throws off the math that everything is raised up from the bottom already.
**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. I don’t think the mean is particularly valuable. This is a wonderful case study in when and why you would want to use median. And we did learn some really interesting things. We were limited, of course, to what was reported, but again the median kind of helped soften the blow of that. There are some maximum reported numbers and I would suggest to people that they don’t dwell on those for a couple of reasons.
One, you’re unlikely to get that amount of money. Two, even more money has been made. So, there are things that are reported – the maximum is sort of like, OK, I guess it’s a nice dream or something, but really the numbers we want to look at are the real medians and there are some fascinating numbers that came out of this, so I’m really glad that we went through this.
And I guess we can start with the broadest of numbers which is what’s the median number for people who were on a one-step deal across all the studios. There’s two versions. There’s one that’s like everybody that employs anyone and then there’s just the studios. Let’s just look at the studios. The study median for a one-step deal for a screenwriter is $293,750. That is definitely more than scale. On the other hand we know, because we’ve talked this through, that that one-step deal is oftentimes abused into three or four steps. That $293,000 can be spread over two or three years. In Los Angeles minus taxes, agent, manager, god forbid you have a partner. So, while it sounds great, the important to thing to note is that’s a middle class number across time and deductions.
**John:** Yeah. And, again, we should define terms because on Twitter people were asking about this, too. Because you and I assume everyone knows what a one-step deal is versus a multi-step deal and they may not. So, if I sign on to write a feature for a studio, I’m going to be the first writer on this project, I might be offered a one-step deal. And what a one-step deal has is that we will pay you X dollars to write a draft of the script. You will turn in this draft of the script and that is all we are committing to paying you at any point.
**Craig:** Correct.
**John:** There might be optional steps down the road, but the only one we’re guaranteeing you is that one first step. And that’s what we call a one-step deal.
Now, when Craig and I started in this business one-step deals were actually rare. Most deals were multi-step deals where they said, OK, John, we’re going to hire you to adapt this book. This will be how much we’re going to pay you for the first draft. And then this is how much we’re going to pay you for a rewrite. And then sometimes even a second rewrite or a polish. There were guaranteed steps and that’s called a multi-step deal.
And if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a long time you would know that Craig and I have long railed against the idea of one-step deals, especially for newer writers, writers earning closer to the minimums, because it becomes an excuse to milk a lot of free work out of them because they basically – they know they can be fired at any point, or basically not brought on for the next step, and so they’re desperate to hold onto a project.
**Craig:** Exactly. And that’s why this studio median of $293,000 is in the context of all writers. That includes all of us. That includes you, me, Aline, somebody just starting out. So let’s talk about the way it works with new members. New members, the median for a one-step deal is $100,000. That’s scale basically.
**John:** Yeah.
**Craig:** Similarly, if you are not a new member but you don’t have a screen credit, and there are writers who can go many years, sometimes a career, without having a screen credit, the median is $140,000. So this is what I mean by middle class. That number, $100,000, minus agent, manager, tax, and again god forbid a partner, spread out across a year or two, that is a middle class number. And that number is not – it doesn’t seem to have moved since when I started.
I mean, my first job I think my partner and I split $110,000.
**John:** Roughly the same amount of money, yeah.
**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s 1995. Right? So, freaking 26 years ago. So that’s not great.
Now, we have been told by agents all along that once you get a credit everything changes and you make more money. It turns out this seems to be true. If you have one or more screen credits your median is $400,000. If you have two or more it’s $450,000. The credit obviously makes a huge difference.
**John:** It does. And so on Twitter when I was sort of threading through this to look at it I said arguably one feature credit is worth $260,000. And so the arguably is doing a lot of work there.
**Craig:** Yes. There’s some causality, correlation, and questions.
**John:** 100%. But, you look at the jump from $140,000 to $400,000 that is a big bump and it’s clear that a produced credit is having a huge impact there. And just the one produced credit is worth a lot more than the second produced credit. The jump is much bigger between the two of those.
Also keep in mind that we’re looking at one contract. And so in that contract you were able to say, OK, this person is now getting paid $400,000 versus what they were getting before. But over the course of a career if you’re booking a movie every year, every two years, that’s a lot of money in a writer’s career now that they have a credit.
**Craig:** Yeah. And there is no question that at least some of this very significant jump is specifically because of the credit. I mean, you can certainly say, look, if you have a screen credit there’s an argument to be made that you’re doing good work. It got made. Therefore you might be more in demand because of your talent alone, and so the number goes up.
But we know from talking to agents over the years who are relaying back what they hear from business affairs, that’s their opponent at the studio negotiating the deal, that there’s just a value. Like they have a formula. And if you have a credit it goes into the formula and you make more. No question.
**John:** Yeah. So we say there’s formula. We don’t mean there’s actually a spreadsheet that they plug it into, but there’s logic they apply to it. There’s things that they’re thinking through. So it’s not like they can literally just plug it in, because the other question I was getting on Twitter in follow ups on this was like, well, is a TV credit worth something versus a feature credit. And the answer is, yes, a TV credit is worth something, but it’s harder to calculate and it’s much more debatable.
You and I have both been in situations where we’ve talked with writers who are like, “It’s crazy, because I have a consulting producer credit on this TV show and they’re still trying to pay me as a feature writer like I’m just fresh off the boat.” And that’s reality. That is a thing we see all the time in studio situations.
**Craig:** Yeah. The television situation is just different, because credits are sort of distributed among the writing staff, if there is a writing staff. So any individual credit is just not viewed as significantly as an individual screen credit is viewed. Because even though many movies have multiple writers, it’s not like sort of at the beginning of a movie season a producer looks at a group of writers and says, “Each one of you is going to get a credit somehow this year. Each one of you is going to get an assignment. You’ll write a script. You’ll get a credit for that regardless of who rewrites it or how much it’s rewritten.”
So, it is definitely a different deal all together. Screenwriting is more entrepreneurial. That comes with rewards but it comes with a whole lot of risk as well.
**John:** Yeah. Now, for as long as we’ve been doing this podcast we’ve been railing against one-step deals and we actually finally have some data to back up how much one-step deals hurt newer writers, writers who have fewer credits. We can actually sort of point to some numbers here.
For newer members, or those without screen credits, a multi-step deal gives you a lot more benefit at the median and also at the max level. And most of this is because of studio projects. And this is important to understand because a piece of pushback we often get when we talk about like, oh, you need to pay writers for multi-step deals is that like, OK, well let’s split the same money between a first step and a rewrite, and so the writer is not coming out ahead. I would argue they are coming out ahead because you’re guaranteeing them another crack at working on this project and trapping them in free work.
But the truth is the writers who get a multi-step deal are getting more money in real dollars. And so for a new member a one-step deal median is $100,000. A multi-step median is $175,000. $75,000 more for a multi-step deal which basically is acknowledging that there’s a rewrite. They’re going to pay you for a rewrite.
**Craig:** Yeah.
**John:** For members with no screen credits the jump is from $140,000 to again $175,000. So, it’s not as big of a jump, but still significant.
**Craig:** Yes. It’s most significant for new members and that’s precisely where we want to see the significance. It’s also not a massive amount of money.
**John:** No.
**Craig:** And the argument that I have personally made to a number of studio bosses, they ultimately are not the ones who decide these things. It ultimately is the business affairs and the labor relations people. But to say, look, we’re going to guarantee new members an extra $75,000, which is cushion change to the studios, to help grow them as writers and to release them from the yolk of producer tyranny, because they’ll get a second bite at the apple. It’s a no-brainer to me.
And when you look at not new members, but people who have been kicking around for a while, the difference is barely anything.
Now, fascinating thing occurs with members with one screen credit. It goes down. I’m confused. How is this?
**John:** I have an explanation for it.
**Craig:** Go for it.
**John:** We talked a little bit about it in the chart above it. But essentially what happens is you and I both know that there are really highly paid writers who take a one-step deal to do something.
**Craig:** Yes.
**John:** And they’re only guaranteed for that one-step. So it’s artificially inflating one-step deals for a certain class of writers.
**Craig:** Got it.
**John:** You and I both have bene in situations where it’s a seven-figure one-step deal. That really skews things.
**Craig:** That makes total sense. And it is true that the more money you get the more likely they are to just give you one-step.
**John:** I can live with that.
**Craig:** Oh, of course.
**John:** Because the people who are being paid that big amount of money I understand why they’re doing that. It’s also a risk that they’re taking there. They don’t want to pay seven figures for a first draft and then be on the hook for another $750,000 for the rewrite. I get that. But it’s the writers closest to scale that really are suffering.
**Craig:** Absolutely. And this is what we – when I talk about entrepreneurial writing this is what I mean. If you get paid a lot of money for one step, your job is to take on the challenge of convincing them to pay you, again, a lot of money for another one. By doing a really, really good job on that first one.
When you’re a new writer it’s their responsibility to pay you fairly so that you can live. And support a family in a very expensive town. And they’re not doing it. And they need to.
And the people ultimately that they’re hurting are not the only suffering parties. They are also suffering. They just don’t realize it. They don’t know what they’ve done to themselves. They have excavated under their own house and as our generation starts to age out or lose interest in feature screenwriting they’re going to be in trouble. Because they have not grown the next generation, or the generation behind it.
**John:** You’ve already lost Craig Mazin. You lost Craig Mazin to television.
**Craig:** I’m gone. Bye-bye.
**John:** He’s gone. He’s out. So let’s talk about this report but also how writers can use this report. Do you think this will be useful for writers and their reps?
**Craig:** Yes. I do. At the very least I think if you are a new member you’re going to be able to say to your agent, “Look, when we ask for a two-step deal I don’t want to ask for it like I’m Oliver requesting an additional scoop of gruel. What we’re asking for is a small amount of money to get that second step, for good reason. It’s not that big of a deal. And it’s customary. I’m not asking for something that’s insane. We’re not saying, OK, give me…”
So I think it’s useful in that regard. And I think it’s useful for members who have earned a credit to say, hey, you know, there’s supposed to be a pretty good leap here. We should get that.
**John:** Absolutely. And I think it’s worth it for members to ask if you’re not at the median, why. If this deal that you’re trying to make isn’t there, well by definition a median should be like half the members are making more than this, half the members are making less of that. So maybe you’re in that bottom half. But ask yourself why. And is it because of the particular project you’re trying to pursue? Is it because of how your reps are pushing you? Is it because of some other factor? You’re not always going to be above the median, and that’s OK, but always worth asking why.
And as more people push to become above the median the median will rise. And I think that is one of the real potential upsides here is that we’ve done this report once, but now we have all the contracts coming into the guild. And the guild can systematically do this every year to see what is really happening on the ground in terms of writer deals. And is there a way we can sort of raise the median and not just be so solely focused on every three years trying to raise the bottom, raise the scale floor up.
**Craig:** That’s a great point. I mean, you don’t want to fall into the lake woebegone trap, like woebegone where all the children are above average. It is important to know that you don’t get to a median if there’s stuff below the median. And so if you are below the median it is not immediately evidence of a crime.
However, the idea is to keep pushing that median up. And I think this will be most interesting to agents who in theory should be either pleased or ashamed of the progress they’ve made on behalf of their individual clients. Everybody is competitive. Everybody wants to do well. If there’s no sense of how you’re doing the competition is not particularly compelling. But if there is, then it is.
And I think there are going to be a lot of phone calls after this sort of sinks to folks who are underneath that median. And I want to say to some writers, listen, you may hear something that’s uncomfortable. I remember years ago, many, many years ago, when my career wasn’t where it is now. I was talking to an executive who is like, “You know, you should really be doing these weeklies.” And I was like, oh, I really should be doing these weeklies.
So I called up my agent and I’m like why am I not doing these weeklies? And he said, “You know, if that guy really believed you should be doing weeklies he would have given you one. Those are rare and you’ve got to earn them. And you’ve got to get to a place.” And he’s like, “I’m not saying that you aren’t good enough to do them. You are. You’re better than a lot of people doing them, but this is not a meritocracy. You’ve got to break through the seal. And once you get in there you do a few of those and you succeed at them they keep coming. And they’re the best.”
And he was right. So you might hear some things that feel a little sting. Like, OK, there’s a reason I’m not at the median yet. That’s OK. Use that as rocket fuel to push yourself to do a little bit better.
But you might also hear some things where you’re like that’s not that compelling. We should be doing better.
**John:** Yup. So we’re going to have a link in the show notes to this report, but also in that same section there’s a report for TV writers on staff and actually a calculator to figure out sort of like how much they should be making per week based on what their deal says. Which is just completely opaque to me, but I hope to have somebody on at some point who can talk us through what that is because I have to confess even after years in the guild I don’t fully understand how TV writer pay is amortized across weeks and seasons. It is just so complicated. And this calculator is there to help us understand that.
**Craig:** It’s obscured by a fog of producing money. Everyone is a producer. Everyone is getting this producing money. No one – the guild isn’t quite sure. It’s all based on minimums. I don’t like that system. As now a television writer I look at how I’m compensated and it just doesn’t seem correct. None of it seems correct.
**John:** But, that’s a great segue to our next question which is from Tony who on Twitter asked, “Have you ever addressed overall deals or first look deals on Scriptnotes? I’d love to hear from your perspective what they mean.” And, Craig, you are under an overall deal or a one-step deal. You have a deal, unlike me. So, tell us about deals and what they are, what they mean, and why writers might want one or not want one?
**Craig:** Sure. Mostly you’ll find them in television, although I did actually have an overall deal in features many, many years ago with Dimension, part of a small company called Miramax, run by two fabulous guys.
**John:** Yeah. I have to say like an overall deal with Dimension feels like the bitcoin of its era. Just like, ugh.
**Craig:** It’s like having an overall deal in hell. Like congrats. You get to burn in this lake of fire exclusively for the following.
So, an overall deal is an agreement where a company is guaranteeing you money per time. Let’s say it’s per year. So you’re going to earn this much per year and for those – and it’s a term. Let’s say it’s three years. For those three years you are going to earn this much money per year. And then you’re going to kind of burn that money off by doing writing. So it’s sort of like we guarantee that you’re going to make this much money. And here’s a menu of things that you can do and the cost of those things. And as you do those things we kind of tally it up. If you go over the amount of guaranteed money, guess what, you get new money. If go under it, that’s OK. You’re never going to get less than that guarantee.
There are two kinds of overall deals. Well, I suppose there’s one version where there’s just non-exclusive in any way at all, but I’ve never heard of such a thing. They always want a price back. And so what they want back is either a first look deal or an exclusive deal. And exclusive deal, I have an exclusive deal at HBO. That means we’re going to give you this money, but hey dude, you can only write TV here. You can’t write TV for Netflix while we’re paying you this money. No chance.
Then there’s a first look deal which is, OK, let’s say I want to write something and I go to HBO and I say what do you think about this? And they’re like, meh, we don’t love it. If I have a first look deal I can go sell to somebody else. If I’m exclusive that thing is done until my time with HBO is over. Those are the two big differences. And those are the pros and cons.
Pro, if you’re exclusive you’re going to make more than if you’re first look. The pro of an overall deal you get a lot of money and it’s guaranteed. The con of an overall deal is you’re locked into a place, perhaps exclusively, and if there’s a change at the top you may feel like, oh god, I’m stuck somewhere I don’t want to be. And there’s an opportunity cost. If Netflix calls me tomorrow and says, “We have your dream. We bought the book that you love and you can make a series here,” I can’t do it. So that’s an opportunity cost.
**John:** Now let’s talk about logistics because in addition to saying like, OK, you’re going to do your projects here and you’ll write stuff for us, generally these deals come with other perks. It could be office space. It could be money for assistants and things like that. So tell us about that side of it all.
**Craig:** Yeah. So there are lots of ways to structure these things. Depending on the kind of writer you are or if you’re a producer and a writer or even a director. But it’s very common for these deals to include either a specific earmarked amount of money that goes to an executive, somebody that works for you that helps develop material. An assistant. Office space. Overhead. Just general costs of things. Paper. Pens. Computers.
Sometimes they will say as you’re making your overall deal, like this is my second deal with HBO. In the first deal there was like here’s an amount of money that we will send to your office. Here’s an amount of money – we will employ somebody to be your assistant. So that’s the overhead part.
In this new deal they’re like here’s a bunch of money. Spend it as you do. And some of it you’ve gotten for whatever overhead, but it’s really up to you to spend it as you see fit. And I just want to say sometimes that can be a trap. Because writers get so excited at the thought of having an office and an assistant and somebody to work for them because it makes us feel like we’re adults and we’re big boys and girls. And we get a bungalow on a lot. And we have a coffee machine. And a receptionist.
And what you start to realize is all that money, it was all from a bucket. They could have just given it all to you. You could have taken it home. And you can get stuck at a place where you don’t want to be all because you got lured in by a bungalow and a coffee machine.
**John:** 100%. So, I’ve had an assistant and an office for 20 years and I’ve never had an overall deal. It’s a thing, I just pay for it. And I run it through my production company and I just pay for it. I have a loan out. And that is another valid approach to doing this.
You talked about sort of the pros and cons. The opportunity cost of not being able to pursue projects outside of that deal can be a real issue. And that’s ultimately sort of why I’ve never been interested in pursuing one of these overall deals because I want to be able to hop from thing, to thing, to thing. And I don’t want to only be working for one person or one place.
But another thing that I think is crucial to understand is that you’re talking about this from the context of a writer, and writer-driven production deals are relatively common right now, but it’s really writer-producers. And so when you talk about you, or Shonda, or Benioff and Weiss, like they are writers, yes, but they are also – they’re helping feed a pipeline. And they are producing shows for a company and that is really the value. Not just that they’re so good with words. It’s that they can consistently and reliably create things that the network wants.
**Craig:** Yes. There are certain writer-producers who make deals to provide a lot of stuff. So, they’re not simply saying, OK, like for instance J.J. Abrams. They’re not making a deal with J.J. Abrams so that they can get J.J.’s next script. They’re making a deal with him so that Bad Robot is a pipeline with lots of people and they hire lots of writers making lots of things.
Then there are people that are kind of in the middle. I think of somebody like Shonda as having a few shows but she clearly has her hands in them, you know. And then there’s somebody like me, and I’m more a little bit like Dan and Dave where we make a show. That’s the show we’re doing. And we do that show. And they’re not necessarily saying and also can you please oversee 12 other shows. They kind of want the show that we’re doing.
Everybody is kind of different. In all honesty if I were more like a J.J. and I had that kind of business they would probably give me more money, but I don’t think I would be very good at that. That’s not my – I just don’t – my brain doesn’t work that way.
**John:** Yeah. And I think I’ve talked about it on the podcast before. I produced one movie that I didn’t write and I did not enjoy the process. An analogy for it is very much like being here’s the jet. You are allowed to give instructions to the pilot but you cannot actually touch the controls. And that to me is what producing without writing feels like to me. It’s like I know how to do this thing and I’m not allowed to do it. And some people are great with that. They can just run these giant corporations and oversee things. I’m just not the person who should be doing that.
And that’s fine.
**Craig:** It is absolutely fine. I have found in a couple of circumstances that I really enjoyed non-writing producing when it was a writer that I had a real connection with. And so I was able to emulate a good process that I had experienced myself as a writer from another producer. Say, OK, let’s have that process now where I’m doing this job and you’re doing that job.
But, again, it’s pretty bespoke. I don’t really think of myself as a company. Really it’s mostly I’m writing. And I think that’s how HBO thinks of me, too, to be honest. I don’t think they made a deal with me so that I would work on 15 shows at once. They want a show. And they want it to be good.
**John:** The last thing I will say in arguing for production deals and first look deals and overall deals is I think it does increase the stature of writers. And it does increase writers in terms of their supremacy, in terms of creating projects, and really being the shepherds of things. And the way that showrunners over the last two decades have really become powerful entities, my hope and my belief is that we will be similar kinds of trends in feature writers. Feature writers will make deals with places to actually be the driving force behind certain movies and certain franchises in ways that could be good for writers overall.
**Craig:** Without question. The most highly compensated artists in Hollywood are television showrunners, overall. Obviously there are individual directors that will make more than an individual showrunner. But nobody makes money the way that huge showrunners do. When you look at the kind of deals that Dan and Dave made, or Mike Schur, you know, Shonda, or Ryan Murphy, it’s startling. The numbers are eye-popping.
And it’s for a reason. Or Greg Berlanti. Because they are providing an enormous amount of content. And they’re doing it well.
**John:** Yeah.
**Craig:** I have argued a number of times, I had a very long discussion with the head of a studio about why movies should be doing it like television. I cannot for the life of me, having spent so much time in movies, and now in television, you just go wait a second, there’s actually no difference. We should be doing it this way. It’s crazy that we’re not. It’s crazy.
**John:** And I swear I don’t mean this to be a specific subtweet, but when I see an announcement of a project that is announced with a director but they’re now looking for a writer I’m like what are you doing. What are you doing that you’re announcing this director on this project without having figured out who the writer is for it? That does not make sense to me.
**Craig:** Pursuing an arbitrary institutional bias towards cinema, but they’re not making cinema. They’re making movies. And more and more they’re just making movies. And so it’s befuddling to me. And I don’t know why. I don’t know why. But you can see how protective the DGA is of their supremacy in features. I mean, they are absolute bulldogs about it. Bulldogs.
And, you know, tip of the hat. They got that one. And they, you know, they are making inroads in television. They’re being aggressive about it.
So, the other thing to just be aware of with this stuff, it needs to be mentioned, is when we talk about these big showrunners we are talking about writer-producers. We’re also talking about managers. And so there has always been an interesting question of how valuable this is to the collective workforce of writers. On the one hand it is very helpful for the Writers Guild to have individual writers with enormous clout and influence over studios. Or with studios I should say.
On the other hand, those writers/producers are employing a lot of writers. This is a strange, unholy wedding between management and employment of a kind. And there are times I think where it cuts in our favor, and I think there are times where it cuts against us.
**John:** Oh, yes. As a person who has been involved in a lot of those conversations. Yes.
**Craig:** Yes. And if somebody said, “Oh press this button and remove all showrunners from the bargaining unit,” I’m not sure I would press the button, but I would think about maybe pressing the button. Because it’s a really interesting question about whether writers would be better off if I pressed the button or not.
But there is no such button.
**John:** There’s no such button. Theoretical button.
**Craig:** Theoretical button.
**John:** On the topic of deals, John wrote in to say, “I was just listening to Episode 343, the one with the indie producer, and you said,” I think I it was me said, “’The situation I find even more frustrating and dispiriting is when you see a movie that’s gotten made that’s not perfect but there’s something promising there and they’ve clearly not thought about distribution at all.’ What sorts of distribution things should I be thinking about? Maybe you could do a little mini-topic on this.”
And so here’s my indie film mini-topic on thinking about distribution and the distribution. And so I made two-ish indie films. Go is technically an indie film, although we sold it off to Sony before we started production. And The Nines which was truly an indie feature. And in both cases we were thinking about sort of where it was ultimately going to end up. I went into The Nines thinking, OK, this is a Sundance-y kind of movie. The plan is that we are going to go to Sundance. We’re going to have a big screening. We’re going to get offers. We will take a domestic offer. We will take a foreign offer. We will do a very classic way of selling this movie.
And it was a movie of a size and a scale where that was a realistic way to go forward. But I had conversations with all those types of people before I put together a budget to start making the movie. That was the distribution plan.
The frustration that I think Keith Calder was hearing when he was on the show was that people see movies that are cool, there’s actually a cool idea there, and somehow they were able to scrape together the money to make this movie, but they hadn’t thought about like, oh, how are we going to get this in front of people’s eyeballs. And you have to do that.
I mean, in some ways you have to be able to think about what is the end of the process before you are starting to shoot this thing because otherwise you may be making the wrong assumptions about stuff. You might be spending money in the wrong ways. You might not be casting an actor who is useful in certain markets. There’s reasons why you have to think about sort of what the overall plan for the movie is before you start shooting it.
**Craig:** This is philosophically at the root of all difficult meetings between writers and directors and producers and studio executives and sales agents and all the rest. And it’s where art and commerce rub. This is it. This is the bone on bone part. And it can be tricky because it is practically true and I think most people, most artists would agree, if I want people to see this but no one is going to see it then I’ve failed. It doesn’t matter how good it is.
On the other hand if getting people to see it becomes the most important thing, and we are going to neuter it or mutilate it in order for that to happen, that’s also not good. I’ve watched that happen 400 times to things I was working on.
So, this is the big discussion that has to happen. But I think it’s fair to say that this is also why we need a diversity of minds when we’re putting these things together. And it is a valuable person, if you find that person who has a business sense and a creative sense at the same time, cling to them because they are valuable and rare.
**John:** Yeah. We talk about writing being entrepreneurial, but making an indie film is the ultimate entrepreneurial experience where you are based on faith and hope you’re making a thing that you believe will be good that will sort of get out in the world and will find a buyer and a market and an audience and all these things will happen.
And you have to have that slightly crazy like I know that this is a leap, I know this is a risk, but I’m going to take this risk. At the same time be mindful of what those risks actually are. And I’ve sat in screening, rough cuts of movies, and I’m there to sort of give notes to the filmmakers. But one of the awkward and most important notes is like how do you think you’re going to sell this. Who do you think is going to buy this and put this out there in the world? And in many cases that was the question they were afraid to ask because the answer was going to be maybe no one. And that’s not good.
**Craig:** Not good. Agreed.
**John:** But, I’m going to segue to where I think there’s a tremendous amount of money to be made.
**Craig:** Segue Man.
**John:** Which is–
**Craig:** Disney!
**John:** Disney!
**Craig:** Disney!
**John:** So, here’s how Disney makes its next trillion dollars. This is a prediction. I’m just going to record this in this podcast so…
**Craig:** This isn’t based on anything.
**John:** …five years from now when it happens.
**Craig:** It’s a prediction.
**John:** I can point back.
**Craig:** It’s a flat-out just guess. OK. I like this. This is great.
**John:** Craig, are you aware of the concept of NFTs?
**Craig:** No.
**John:** NFT is a non-fungible token. And what it really is is a way of taking a digital asset and reflecting who owns that digital asset. And you do it through the block chain, the same kind of thing that powers cryptocurrency. And it’s a way of being able to prove that this person owns this thing.
**Craig:** OK.
**John:** And so it could be a work of art. So Beeple who is an artist who I linked to as a One Cool Thing a while back, he is doing a big auction I think through Christie’s of his artwork over the last 500 years or whatever. And they’re basically selling his artwork for a lot of money. And what you’re buying is the exclusive ownership of one of those pieces of art. And it’s so hard to claim exclusivity in a digital way, but cryptocurrency and the block chain and NFTs are a way to do that.
NBA has a system called Top Shots. The closest equivalent would be a basketball trading card. But they are digital versions of that and there’s a big market for them and robust.
So you look at sort of an artist or you look at the NBA and they are selling basically intellectual property. They are selling artistic works. And no entity on the planet has more ownership of those kind of things than Disney.
**Craig:** Yeah.
**John:** And so you can imagine Disney selling exclusive collectibles for their Disney characters, for Star Wars, for Marvel, for Indiana Jones, for Pixar. And they already to this to some degree with the pins, the Disney pins. But what’s different about the NFTs is that if Disney sells a pin once and that pin goes up a lot in value and the traders want it Disney makes no more money.
**Craig:** Right.
**John:** But with this system Disney gets a cut every time it’s sold.
**Craig:** Oh boy.
**John:** It’s just so much money.
**Craig:** It’s a license to print money I say.
**John:** It is literally a license to print money. And so my prediction is Disney will do something like this. It will be its own system. They’ll brand their own whole way of doing it. Their whole marketplace. It will be sort of cryptocurrency based, but it won’t have to be as tied to NFTs, which have a whole environmental impact which is weird and complicated.
But there will be something like this and it will be huge. That’s my prediction.
**Craig:** I agree with your prediction. That just sounds like a no-brainer. I’m sure they have people working on it right now. Top men. Top men.
**John:** There’s just no ceiling to it. Here’s the debate. How greedy should we be at the start? That’s really the only debate they’re going to have.
**Craig:** You know who else is going to do this is Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro. So my son plays a lot of Magic: The Gathering, which is by the way so much bigger than I think I knew.
**John:** Absolutely.
**Craig:** It’s massive. And it is very much its own economy. And it’s a resale economy. And there are certain cards that are rare and so can be very high priced. And I can absolutely see them doing something like this as well where you own a card and literally no one else can have it. There’s one. And that can be sold and resold. That’s scary.
**John:** Is the Black Lotus the most famous one?
**Craig:** Yeah. So the Black Lotus, I think it was $75,000 on the market or something like that. For a card.
**John:** For a piece of cardboard. But its role within the system is what makes it so valuable. It’s not that the art itself is remarkable. It’s just that it can do a thing that no other card can do.
**Craig:** I mean, in the end all of this stuff that we call valuable is a piece of cardboard, or a piece of wood, or a bunch of wood and metal, or some colored oils on some paper. So ultimately the value is in our perception of it. And, you know, rarity is a thing.
Listen, I wouldn’t buy it. But it’s not for me. Other people would. That’s why it’s that. And this, god, look, the part about this that’s terrifying is that you can see it start to undermine the kind of common marketplace. The simple marketplace where everybody can buy a copy of a thing and it doesn’t cost a lot of money. And hopefully that does not go away. It would be a shame if it did.
**John:** And to be clear I don’t think that they will do it for their actual movies. You’re not buying the exclusive version of Cinderella.
**Craig:** Oh no. Definitely not.
**John:** You are buying a special Cinderella edition, pin. Not even a pin. This moment from Cinderella and it’s encrypted in a way that it’s clear that you own this one little thing. That’s all they have to do.
**Craig:** Well, when you think about when you and I were kids Star Wars came out and then they sold the Star Wars dolls. Dolls? Action figures. They were dolls. Let’s just be honest. They were tiny dolls.
**John:** I loved my little Yoda action figure.
**Craig:** Boys can have dolls.
**John:** He had a little plastic snake. It was great.
**Craig:** Even before, like from the first movie I had my Luke and my Han and my Leia and I would swap the cape off one and stick it on the other.
**John:** Totally.
**Craig:** No clue that they were worth a dime. And then what happens is over time the market starts to discover that there’s a value for some of these things. And then the question is how many of them are out there. And what shape are they in.
Now, if all of this becomes digital that just transforms that marketplace. It is no longer about tangible things. But maybe that’s good. I mean, look, the fact that these toys have now become – which people just buy the toys and keep them in the thing, the blister pack, and put them on their shelf. Or, like you say, put them in landfills. You know, there’s probably a good side to this. But you allude to the fact that all these block chain things require gazillions of computers running at very hot temperatures that require cooling, that uses energy…
**John:** Yeah. There’s problems.
**Craig:** I like your prediction.
**John:** Despite the problems, it will be a huge thing.
**Craig:** Yup.
**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a show that I’ve been watching on HBO Max. It is a British show but I see it on HBO Max. It’s a Sin is the name of the show. It is terrific. And so Russell T. Davies who did Queer as Folk and did Doctor Who and did lots of other great things–
**Craig:** Great writer.
**John:** This show goes back to the ‘80s and looks at a group of five young people growing up in London and parts around London and sort of the start of the AIDS crisis. And it is remarkably well done. You think like, oh god, that’s going to be depressing because of AIDS, and like yes there are sad moments in it. But it’s just so, so well done. And a thing I want to highlight in it, just really terrific craft is here. This isn’t a spoiler for me to say in episode three there’s a character who comes in and we’re like I recognize here but where do I recognize her from. And the show knows that you recognize her but don’t know where you recognize her from.
And then eventually it’s revealed like, oh, that’s right, she was this. And it puts together a puzzle piece in just a terrific way and lets the show break a rule about sort of forward motion in time. That moment is really well done, but indicative of just great writing throughout. So I strongly recommend people to check out It’s a Sin on HBO Max.
**Craig:** Yeah. And Russell Davies really is a champion. There are some writers, look, in our bonus episode we’re going to talk about writers behaving poorly. Let’s talk about writers who behave well through just brilliant writing. And there are certain writers that other writers revere. If you don’t revere Russell Davies you’re doing it wrong, because he’s just fantastic. And he’s fantastic as a writer.
It’s like you see all these things and you can see the writing coming through and it’s not surprising to me. Again, it’s through television where he’s able to drive it. And for it to come through. And so for instance he did A Very English Scandal. And he did Queer as Folk. These are huge – and not just brilliant series, but also series that change things. Change the way television functions. That’s when you know you’re some kind of writer.
He also worked on Doctor Who. You know what? He’s my One Cool Thing. Russell Davies is my One Cool Thing. Why not? He’s fantastic.
**John:** People should check out his other stuff as well.
**Craig:** I’ve never met him, but I would love to. I would love to meet him. That would be fun.
**John:** So I’ve deliberately not read the press stuff on It’s a Sin because I didn’t want to have any spoilers, but one of the things you watch the show and it feels like, oh my god, this was so written for 2020. And I’m sure it was written before 2020, but you look at how this show is people responding to a pandemic and the incomplete information and the misassumptions they’ve made at the start of the pandemic.
**Craig:** Yup.
**John:** Well that feels relevant. And the arrival of a protest movement that sometimes becomes violent in responding to systemic oppression. It’s like, oh, well that also feels relevant to 2020. So, I bring it up not because I think this was designed to be at this moment, but really good writing echoes to the place it comes out in.
So an episode or two ago we talked about the question of why now. Why is this a story to be telling right now? This felt so relevant to the moment we are in right now.
**Craig:** And that’s, and he also did Years and Years. That’s his thing. He just knows how to do that. And it’s beautiful and brilliant. Just a great, great writer.
I mean, everybody knows that I’m in this endless love affair with Jack Thorne.
**John:** Here you’re willing to cheat a little bit?
**Craig:** Yeah, well yes. And I think Jack would let me cheat. Because I mean I know him, but I don’t know Russell Davies. I just admire him from afar. And I just think he’s, yeah, British writers, what can I say. I love them.
**John:** That’s your thing.
**Craig:** That’s my thing.
**John:** And that is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.
**Craig:** Exactly.
**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.
**Craig:** Correct.
**John:** Today’s outro is incredible and it’s by Monica Storms. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, I’m on Twitter @johnaugust.
We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and the signup sheet for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting where we have links to lots of things about writing.
You can sign up to become a premium member and listen to bonus segments like the really filthy one we just recorded at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and these bonus segments.
**Craig:** And F-bombs.
**John:** Yes. Craig, thank you for a fun show.
**Craig:** Thank you, John.
[Bonus segment]
**Craig:** Come on, that’s so good.
**John:** So good. Craig, that got me kind of relaxed and mellow. But now I need to amp myself up because I’m actually a little bit furious.
**Craig:** Oh, yeah, well bonus segment coming your way.
**John:** As we talked about perception and things having value or not having value, I did want to talk about this last week there was a thing that happened on Twitter which was so annoying. So, this is not a spoiler, I swear. On this last week’s episode of WandaVision it was centered on grief and it featured a scene in which the characters of Wanda and Vision discuss Wanda’s grief over the death of her brother. And that’s an event we saw in Age of Ultron.
And so there was this actor-writer named Madison Hatfield who tweeted out a screenshot of one moment in this scene. And the caption includes Vision’s line there. The line is, “But what is grief if not love persevering?” And so on top of this screenshot Hatfield writes, “Do you hear this sound? It’s every screenwriter in the world whispering a reverent fuck under their breath. #WandaVision.”
And this became a meme. It became an object of discourse. And it was just so frustrating that people I followed on Twitter I wanted to shake and slap a little bit.
**Craig:** Ah, Twitter.
**John:** So I wanted to talk about writers tweeting about other writing. And especially reacting to a line of dialogue outside of the context of the scene that it’s in.
**Craig:** Everyone is stupid. First of all, so I saw this kind of issue coming up. And so I looked on Twitter just under that “Well what is grief if not love persevering” and generally it seemed like people really did love that line. That it was very meaningful to them.
**John:** I will say, my own personal experience is that line resonates especially well in that scene. I think it was a good line delivered in the context of a really good scene. So I thought it worked.
**Craig:** And as somebody that doesn’t watch WandaVision. Spoiler, I didn’t watch a show. I think that is a terrific line. I think there’s a really provocative argument that it’s making that I haven’t heard made that concisely before. And the construction of the sentence is excellent. So I understand why Madison Hatfield tweeted this because it sounds like she understood that this was a really good line. I mean, it’s Twitter exaggeration, you know, like every screenwriter in the world whispering fuck. No, probably many screenwriters went, “Wow, that’s pretty good. You know what? I would have been proud to write that. That’s a good line.”
But what problem did people have with it? I didn’t see one. Tell me.
**John:** So here’s what I saw is that people said, “Oh my god, this is such a cheesy Hallmark card line.”
**Craig:** No it isn’t. It isn’t. I’ve seen a lot of Hallmark cards. Never in my life have I seen one that had something like that in it.
**John:** Yeah. There were actually a lot of those people. And there was a whole sort of – there are two memes that sort of came out of it. And one of the memes I totally support which is using that as a meme structure to put in other screenshots of film and TV with a line in captions. That’s hilarious. I love that. And “reverent fuck” as a sort of hashtag to sort of encapsulate things.
But my frustration was that people who I follow on Twitter, some of whom are writers and some who are not writers, were calling out like the faux profundity of this moment and sort of slamming on WandaVision or the writer of this scene who was not our beloved Megan McDonnell. I’m not just trying to protect Megan McDonnell here.
And we’re ignoring the context of the scene and I just wanted to shout at them a line of dialogue only works in the context of that scene. Like Craig you responded that you think that’s a good line, but that line could be a terrible line in a scene if it didn’t build up to that thing. And that was the punchline to a setup. And without the setup it’s not meaningful.
**Craig:** Well, also, if you watched the scene and you didn’t like it and you didn’t like the line shut the fuck up. How about that? How about be a fucking professional? Since we’ve said fuck we can do it, right? We broke the seal on this episode?
**John:** We’ve broken the seal.
**Craig:** You assholes. We are in a sisterhood and brotherhood. We are supposed to look out for each other. As god as my witness I do not understand this snotty thing that people do where they go on Twitter and shit on other people’s writing. Give me your writing. Give me one hour with your writing and I’ll fuck you up. OK? So stop it. Just stop it. It’s so weak. It’s so déclassé. And what it really is is a redirected self-loathing.
We all are embarrassed by shit we’ve written. And so when we see somebody else doing it it makes us feel good, like oh good, I’m not alone in my shittiness. Let me take a shot at this thing and be haughty about it and superior. You’re not. Also that’s a really good line. I’m sorry. It is. It’s good.
And the obsession with lines anyway. Fuck that. Like that’s not what it’s about.
**John:** So in addition to like not shitting on other writers, I want to say just the point which other people made on Twitter but I need to sort of underline it here that like you not enjoying a piece of art is fine. Me enjoying a piece of art is fine. You slamming on me for enjoying a piece of art is bullshit.
**Craig:** Yeah. Go fuck yourself.
**John:** Exactly. Let people enjoy what they enjoy. And I’m coming into NFL threads and saying like, “Football is stupid.” That’s not helpful.
**Craig:** Yeah. And it won’t go well. Your daughter and my daughter both went to a summer camp here in California and at that camp my daughter learned a phrase. I don’t know if yours did as well. And it was don’t yuck on my yum. Have you ever heard Amy say that?
**John:** I have not heard that, but that’s great.
**Craig:** Fucking love it. So what happened is they would – somebody would say, “Eww, you like peanut butter and bananas?” And then the counselors were like, “Don’t yuck on her yum.” And it’s such a great concept. As long as somebody likes something and it’s not hurting anybody don’t explain to them why it sucks. Just let them enjoy it. Unless it’s Ted Cruz. Otherwise, let them enjoy it. For the love of god. Who cares? Right?
**John:** Agreed.
**Craig:** God, when writers do this, I mean, first all you’ve got to know everybody is reading everything. And everybody is sharing everything. They may not be sharing it openly. When you say dumb shit and you go after other writers, other writers behind the scenes quietly are texting that shit back and forth to each other. And that’s not going to help you. It’s just not. It’s just not.
**John:** I did notice that some of the writers who had been kind of wading into the conversation deleted their tweets. And it’s like, yeah, that was the right choice.
**Craig:** Good. You can make a mistake and then you – great. Correct it.
**John:** It’s why pencils have erasers.
**Craig:** Bingo. No problem with that. But if you’re going to plant your flag or routinely do this. There was a writer who was on Twitter and he would do this all the time. And I would occasionally just send him a private message and say, “What are you doing? Stop it.”
And I don’t mind being cranky old guy. You know? Come over here, youngster. Let me tell you how we behave. Because somebody has to teach the children. This is not OK. It’s not. Just stop it.
**John:** Cool. .
**Craig:** All right.
**John:** Thanks Craig.
**Craig:** Bye.
**John:** Bye.
Links:
* [WGA Writer’s Deal Hub](https://www.wga.org/members/employment-resources/episodic-quote-guide/writers-deal-hub)
and [Screen Guide](https://www.wga.org/members/employment-resources/writers-deal-hub/screen-deal-guide)
* [Tony on Twitter’s Question about Overall Deals](https://twitter.com/tonygapastione/status/1366787154643349510?s=21)
* [WandaVision Thread on Twitter](https://twitter.com/madhat31/status/1365773588586987522) and [meme](https://www.insider.com/wandavision-memes-what-is-grief-line-2021-3)
* [NFTS Are Transforming the Digital Art World](https://foundation.app/blog/nfts-are-transforming-the-digital-art-world)
* [It’s a Sin](https://www.hbomax.com/series/urn:hbo:series:GYBNNbABUnb1QoQEAAABA) on HBO Max
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Monica Storms ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/491standard.mp3).