Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/live-and-in-person).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 499 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show it’s another round of How Would This Be a Movie where we take a look at stories in the news and discuss how they would be adapted to a big or small screen. Plus, listener questions on writing routines and the seduction of supporting characters. And in our bonus segment for premium members Craig will talk about his trip to Canada and getting ready for a big expedition to make a television show.

**Craig:** Big, great, white North.

**John:** But Craig something feels different today. I’m trying to put my finger on exactly what is different about this podcast than other podcast recordings.

**Craig:** You can put your finger on my face.

**John:** You are three feet away from me. We are for our first time in more than 14 months to record a podcast live and in person across the table from each other.

**Craig:** Through the magic of Pfizer and Moderna we can now do this kind of thing. And I don’t know, it doesn’t feel like it’s been that long. I think our ability to adjust to insanity and then the undoing of insanity is remarkable.

**John:** It is incredibly remarkable. So, Megana looked it up. The last time we recorded in person was December 16, 2019.

**Craig:** Oh, wow. That’s a year and a half ago.

**John:** And I haven’t seen you in person since that time either.

**Craig:** Although, I mean, we see each other every week on Zoom for Dungeons & Dragons, which is far more important than anything else. It doesn’t seem like I haven’t seen you.

**John:** No. But we haven’t actually seen each other.

**Craig:** Weird.

**John:** It’s odd. I’ve seen Aline plenty of times. We’ve gone for walks.

**Craig:** Everybody sees Aline. If you say Aline’s name into the mirror three times Aline will appear and criticize your clothing.

**John:** So we normally don’t record this in person live, but we occasionally would together and it was lovely to get together. And now we can do this again. Except that you’re now leaving for Canada.

**Craig:** Right. Well, you know, a little last hurrah. Actually, I didn’t even think about that. But it actually worked out quite nicely.

**John:** Yeah. Lovely.

**Craig:** You ain’t gonna see me again.

**John:** Nope. All right, let’s start with some follow up. So we’ve been talking about the Scott Rudin situation. Anonymous wrote in to say, “Craig spoke about vulnerable people being particularly targeted by abusers because we don’t have those healthy mechanisms of what I call consent and boundaries based on histories of abuse or mistreatment carving away our self-esteem and ability to advocate for ourselves. That is a very important part of this conversation. But what is being overlooked is the very real practice of blacklisting that is still happening to people who come forward, especially if they aren’t already established or ‘famous.’

“What happens when you Google the names of the people who have come forward. If they weren’t already famous and even if they are they are tied inextricably to their abusers. And so many people with hiring and/or buying power will refuse to work with those who have may be seen as whistleblowers or worse troublemakers.”

Anonymous writes that “I was dropped by a rep after coming forward. So this is not hypothetical. I experienced blacklisting firsthand. And I’ve seen it happen to friends who have gone on record about abusers. I know it affected my acting career and I’m concerned it’s going to affect my ability to get literary representation.”

**Craig:** Well, that’s true. It’s unfortunate. One would hope that it is becoming less true than it was before. I think before when the default setting in Hollywood was let’s all just keep our mouths shut about this terrible thing and move on quietly then you were rewarded for keeping your mouth shut in theory. Things have changed, happily.

I want to believe that as more of this happens it becomes harder and harder to engage in this kind of worrisome practice. Also, I’m not sure there’s a purpose to engaging in the worrisome practice anymore. Why blacklist people who are complaining about say Scott Rudin? It doesn’t make any sense.

There is this gray zone where somebody can make an accusation and other people can doubt them. And then you can be assigned this troublemaker moniker. And we as an industry have the same challenges that every industry has. Every aspect or walk of life in our society is struggling with this because there is a tendency sometimes to just say, oh, well you’re crazy. I don’t want to deal with you anymore.

**John:** Yeah. So I think the Friends situation. Remember there was a writer’s room and there were complaints about PAs in that writer’s room felt like they were being mistreated. And it was complicated because you both want to have a vigorous debate and discussion within the room, but it was also clear that terrible things were happening in the room, or things that shouldn’t have been happening in the room were happening in the room. And so how do you balance that out.

When you have a person whose name is identified with it it becomes somewhat of a challenge. But I do agree with you that I think it’s less of a challenge in 2021 than it was in 2019 or 2017. I think we’re recognizing that people who are calling out this behavior aren’t troublemakers. They are just speaking to reality.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But the trend is certainly positive. I think sometimes of Megan Ganz who is the brilliant co-showrunner and executive producer of Mythic Quest and worked on Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Community. And she had a very public I guess confrontation with Dan Harmon who was her former boss at Community and who had engaged in just poor behavior. Really bad behavior. And I think you could call it – certainly it was abusive in the sense that he was her boss. And he made that work environment the absolute definition of hostile. And she handled it beautifully. It’s not like it’s incumbent upon the people who suffered to handle things beautifully. That said, she handled it beautifully.

And I do know that while if you Google Megan Ganz that will come up, so will a whole lot of other things. And I suspect that as the years go on she will continue to do outstanding work and be recognized for that which is correct. And the Google page rank of that unfortunate chapter in her life will lower down on things.

It is important to not be afraid to confront people. Even though there is some sort of risk there I guess I would just encourage people to note that it’s getting better. Not perfect but better.

**John:** One other thing you could note from both the Weinstein and the Rudin situations is that when people come together as a group there’s less focus on the individual person who comes forward.

**Craig:** Yes. So when it’s one person talking about one person our stupid little lizard brains turn it into a he said/she said. It’s our favorite phrase. Somehow that becomes, I don’t know, salacious. And then, you know, I would say that the group of people that need to think about this the most carefully are our dear friends the agents who are not known for their bravery. And as a group tend to shy away from things that seem like they are just going to be difficult. They love the path of least resistance and most money. And they need to not do this sort of thing.

**John:** Well you’re saying that because agents are connected and agents do have access to those whisper networks. They do have a sense of what’s going on. And they should not be sending people into situations where they suspect there is going to be a problem. And they can also have the ability to connect clients who are having similar things and hopefully make some changes.

**Craig:** And certainly if they have a client who does confront somebody or make an accusation they should really not ever contemplate just dropping that person because. So, for instance our anonymous writer here says, “I was dropped by my rep after coming forward so this is not a hypothetical.” Now, I can certainly imagine a case where somebody makes an accusation. A long stretch of time goes by. And then an agent says our professional relationship isn’t working here. Agents aren’t wed to you permanently. But they should not be able to just dump you – a little bit like the unions come in to try and unionize a shop. By law you can’t fire the organizing employees.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Not allowed to. And they still do it anyway. But you’re not allowed to. And you can get, you know, taken – dragged into labor court. And similarly I think if you’re an agent and you have a client who makes an accusation or confronts somebody about abuse you should not be dropping them at all. You need to wait and be respectful of that process.

**John:** Agreed. Back in Episode 494 we talked about typos in Three Page Challenges. And Frank from England wrote in to say, “When listening to Episode 494 a couple weeks ago my heart sunk a little when you said that you instructed Megana not to consider scripts with typos anymore. I totally understand your frustration with typos, but please just consider for a moment the circumstances of the writers who sent those first three pages of their script for feedback. In my case, I’m not only dyslexic but I was also abused throughout my childhood by my late mother. And I was also bullied at school and work. So, my circumstances make it very hard for me to trust people and make friends that can give me feedback on my writing.

“Please help to spread the word that readers can try to be a little bit more understanding as they read and judge someone’s script. I care very much about my writing and it probably takes me three times longer to write anything than a more abled writer. I imagine my lack of success as a writer is probably directly linked to my dyslexia and people judging me as someone who doesn’t care or doesn’t put effort into their writing.”

**Craig:** Well…

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** OK, so Frank I sympathize with you, but I’m going to disagree with you and I’m going to put sort of a firm thing down here for all of our benefit. Because of course you know me and John through the podcast, but you have no idea what we were dealing with when we were growing up at all. So, when you say that you were abused as a child and bullied as a child you don’t know whether or not that is the case for me or John or both.

Similarly, you don’t know if either one of us are dyslexic. As it turns out I am not. But I do have a son who is not neuro-typical and I have a lot of experience working with him. And I can tell you that what I’ve always told him, and what I’m going to tell you is your challenges are not everyone else’s responsibility. It is important for us to acknowledge that other people have different challenges. And it’s important for us to acknowledge that things may be harder for you than they are for other people.

However, the world will evaluate things the way they evaluate things. And writing, it is important to write with a concern for the reader. And that means typos. I don’t have a problem with you saying I struggle to write without typos. I do have a problem with you saying but also because I’m scared of showing it to other people, or concerned, or it makes me feel bad, or triggers me, I’m not going to. Instead I’m going to show it to you guys.

Well we’re also people, right? And I think there has to be somebody in your life you can trust that you feel safe enough with to help you with this. People want to help. And this is the mildest form of help possibly. Simple proofreading of three pages. You’re going to have to figure this out because we are weirdly the nicest people you’re going to meet when you send pages to the rest of the world. Oh boy.

So, what I’m saying Frank is I’m encouraging you to stretch a little bit here and confront a little bit of that fear to at least ask for the help required to get you where you need to be. It’s not wrong to need help. It’s not shameful to need help. But if you don’t ask for it then you are going to suffer unnecessarily.

**John:** I am also sympathetic to Frank’s situation and I want to sort of provide a little context around things. Because we get three pages and we don’t know anything about you and your situation. And you’re essentially anonymous coming into us.

It would be a different case if we were university professors, university writing professors and we see these pages and then we can talk with you and learn that, oh, you have these challenges. Great. So let’s take a look at those challenges individually. If we could look at you as an individual and not just a set of three pages, I think it is important to sort of acknowledge people’s backgrounds and histories and sort of what they’re coming to and sort of how we can best help.

But we don’t have that. And so putting a disclaimer on the top of these three pages to say like hey this is my whole situation. I’m dyslexic. Don’t judge me for these things. Sure. We could do it for the Three Page Challenge, but it’s not going to help you in the long run because everyone is going to read your script without knowing that context.

**Craig:** Yes. And that’s a hard thing to deal with. Because it would be nice if the world were willing to expand its tolerance for everyone. We’re not here to behave like the tough, uncaring world. We’re just two guys who are offering to read your stuff for free and then comment on it. And so, you know, we have certain standards that we indeed are allowed to have. So I strongly recommend again Frank, first of all, congratulations for working through the dyslexia. And congratulations on pursuing writing despite that.

And I know that there are other emotional issues that you’re struggling with and dealing with and I’m proud of you for writing this letter. Because it seems like you’re actually more capable of confronting these things perhaps than you’re indicating. All you need to do in this case, it’s pretty simple, find one person you trust and have them help you with typos. That’s it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Easy.

**John:** You could pay that person, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, geez, if you have to pay them. I mean, it’s three pages. Don’t pay them too much, Frank.

**John:** No. Megana also makes a very good point here is that the Three Page Challenge is in addition to us discussing them online we also post them online so people can download them. So, you want your best work out there. So your name is going to be linked to these three pages and it’s going to be Google-able. You do really want them to be the best possible pages you could put up there.

**Craig:** Yes. All this, we should add just because it’s been on our minds lately, it is important for us to hear from disabled writers. And we don’t ask people to identify who they are. We don’t even need names. But we’re certainly not asking people what their genders are, their sexuality, or their status as an able person or a disabled person. But if you are disabled and you want to let us know you are free to do that because we are – we do want a good cross section.

For a long time what we were concentrating on was just straight gender because our gender breakdown was horrendous. How is it lately by the way?

**John:** Improving.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** We haven’t done the numbers recently. And again we don’t ask when people submit. Megana, correct me, we’re not asking when people submit, are we?

**Megana Rao:** We’re not asking. I go based off of names sometimes.

**John:** We’re guessing based on names. We aim for inclusion in terms of making sure we have people, writers represented from across the spectrum. So, you know, you can speak up and let us know if that’s your situation.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Which reminds me, I meant to say this ahead of the show. We talk about equity inclusion a lot on the show. And there’s actually survey for WGA members. That’s going to be in your inbox as you listen to this episode. So, take a look there. If you’re a WGA member there’s a survey specifically looking at feature writers’ equity and inclusion which is a harder thing to measure.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so it’s going out to all the membership because sometimes TV writers are also pitching on features. And so it’s to everybody. But if you are a WGA member, WGA West member I think, look for that survey in your mailbox.

**Craig:** I can’t wait to fill it out. [laughs]

**John:** You love WGA surveys.

**Craig:** I love WGA email. I love WGA surveys. They’re my favorite.

**John:** All right. 497 we talked about the hierarchy of genres. And Jesse wrote in with sort of a three part discussion of hierarchy of genres. And I thought there were three good points and I thought we might tackle them separately.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** Number one, “Since the primacy of drama seems to be fueled by awards shows, isn’t it likely that we are all just living in the promotional universe established by big studios who have created these award shows in order to drive audiences to underseen dramas since dramas often have the lowest box office grosses?”

Do you accept this thesis?

**Craig:** No. And the reason I do not accept the thesis is because award shows are the result of voting. We just saw an interesting occur at the Oscars where it was quite clear that the Oscars and the production of the award show was assuming, as were all of the odds makers and pundits, that Chadwick Boseman was going to win for Best Actor posthumously. And so they put that category last, which it never is. And he didn’t win. And why didn’t he win? Because voters voted for Anthony Hopkins. And that’s how voting is.

Do you remember in 2016 when voters did a weird thing?

**John:** Uh-huh.

**Craig:** Now, by the way, I don’t want to take anything away from Anthony Hopkins. Sir Anthony Hopkins, one of the great actors of all time. I haven’t seen, it’s called–

**John:** The Father.

**Craig:** The Father. I haven’t seen it. But I imagine it’s an extraordinary performance because all of his performances are extraordinary. The point I’m making, Jesse, is that the award shows can’t predict anything. It’s the award voters that seem to love drama. And because they love it that’s what ends up coming out. The award shows are certainly used by studios to help try and push and promote things, although in this day and age I don’t know even know what that means anymore. Because it used to be that Nomadland would need to win an Oscar so that people would go see it in theaters. But Nomadland is on my computer. So no one is going to – I can see it – I don’t know.

**John:** It was a weird year. That’s why we’re not – we don’t really talk about the Oscars anyway, but I just felt like this year was just – it’s a Mulligan. There were some lovely movies made. But I’m not counting it as a normal year.

**Craig:** It was an odd year. Do other art forms have the same hierarchy? Of course.

**John:** Books have the same hierarchy. Painting, yeah, sort of like serious art versus–

**Craig:** Of course. Dogs playing poker, which I vastly prefer.

**John:** Sculpture does, absolutely. Dance, of course. You look at NBA dancers versus ballet. There is a higher and low form.

**Craig:** Yes. And also in music. Pop music is considered pop music. Pop music wins awards at pop music awards shows. But, you know, your fancier, I don’t know what you call them, critics are always going to – I remember when I was in high school Rolling Stone came out with like their 100 best rock albums of all time, or even 100 best albums of all time. And I remember there was like – there was an album by Richard and Linda Thompson in the top ten and I’m like, “Sorry who? What? Huh?” There was also Captain Beefheart, Trout Mask Replica.

Now, have you ever heard of Captain Beefheart?

**John:** I’ve heard the name. I have no idea what [unintelligible].

**Craig:** Richard and Linda Thompson are the Beatles as far as I’m concerned compared to Captain Beefheart and his album Trout Mask Replica, which is utter nonsense. I’m aware that a number of aging weed smokers are running to their computers or slowly crawling to their computers to write me angry dude mail about how I just don’t get it. The comedian Marc Maron who does his very big podcast has a great thing about Beefheart and how he tried to get into Beefheart and he failed to get into Beefheart.

Well, Captain Beefheart isn’t one of the ten best albums of all time, or Trout Mask Replica. The name alone–

**John:** I can’t even parse what you’re saying. Trout Mask Replica?

**Craig:** Trout Mask Replica. That tells you everything you need to know. It is garbage. And, sorry Captain Beefheart if you’re out there. It’s not very good. It’s just nonsense. It’s like – it doesn’t matter. The point is sometimes in the world of snooty critics weirder and more [a formal] and bizarre is considered better. There are still people that think that Revolution Number 9 is a great Beatles song when of course it’s garbage.

**John:** All right. So Jesse is asking what can we learn by the comparison, and I think what we can learn from the comparison is there’s always going to be the fancy version of things and the popular common version of things. And so you see that in dance, you see that in books, you see that wherever. And what is the actual impact of that in what we do in terms of screenwriting? It can kind of suck. That prestige thing can kind of suck.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** But also comedy writers do get paid good money.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** There’s recognition of despite the we want Aaron Sorkin to write these fancy dramas, that’s not sort of keeping the lights on in studios.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a gif – I say gif – that I saw this morning. I can’t even remember what the context was. But it’s from Mad Men. And Elizabeth Moss’s character is saying sort of tearily to Jon Hamm’s character, “You never say thank you.” And then he says back, “That’s what the money is for.” Which I think is freaking awesome.

And so, yes, for comedy writers the awards shows never say thank you. That’s what the money is for. The one thing that bums me out is that at least in the Emmys there is a full category for comedy. And there isn’t one in the Oscars and that’s a mistake. It’s just a permanent, endless mistake.

**John:** So you’re saying the Golden Globes people have it exactly right? By having a comedy–

**Craig:** Globes people do not. So they’ve combined comedy and variety, or comedy/musical. So they’ve combined comedy and musical together into one monstrosity where that’s why The Martian gets put up for Best Comedy or Musical for the Golden Globes, which makes no sense.

**John:** I would see a Martian musical.

**Craig:** Yes, well of course. But the Emmys have Drama, Comedy. And that’s great. And I think the Oscars should have Best Drama and Best Comedy. Because what happens to the world of comedy and comedy writing in features is that everybody just eventually gets embittered. Because you’re sitting there going there have been years where the comedy business held this whole thing up. And then everybody goes, “Boo, dumb comedy. Anyway, here’s a movie that four people saw.” Oscars!

And, you know, you start to feel like – no comedy? None deserves any award ever? For decades?

**John:** So here’s a difference I will point out is that when we talk about high art/low art, comedy/drama, in many of these other fields those art forms are completely separate. Ballet and hip hop dancing, they’re never in the same place. Where we’re all doing the same thing. We’re literally doing the same stuff. And for it to have a snootiness about it is ridiculous.

**Craig:** It is. And I’m not a member of the movie Academy, but you are.

**John:** I am, as is Aline.

**Craig:** As is Aline. So I feel like the two of you–

**John:** Singlehandedly we’ll start a revolution.

**Craig:** You could start a thing, you know, where we get – maybe comedy could be a category. I don’t know. Here’s what always blows my mind about the Oscars is that they hire a comedian to please the audience to tell jokes and then all the presenters come out and routinely there are little comedy sketches throughout as if to say we are aware that comedy is entertaining and wonderful. Also, no comedy is getting an award tonight. None.

That’s weird.

**John:** It is weird.

**Craig:** It’s weird.

**John:** It’s weird. Final point. It’s also useful to investigate our paradigms. We’re talking about awards and accolades, which would probably rank the primary genres drama, action, comedy, whereas viewership and likely cultural impact would rank them as action, comedy, or drama, which is another way of saying like viewers want to see things in a different order than how we rank them societally.

**Craig:** Yeah. And there’s a common argument where people say awards aren’t popularity contests. And if all that mattered was popular than we would give all the Grammys to the people who wrote the Baby Shark song.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Which I understand that. Which by the way they should. But I think that’s a pretty fake argument. Nobody really believes in the slippery slope of it has to be only popular or only whatever quality is. This is partly reason that people just don’t watch these shows anymore. I mean, the Oscar viewership hasn’t just dropped, it’s tumbling off a cliff.

I was looking at the numbers and it was horrifying. Now, maybe the people have just lost interest in awards. I don’t know. But I think part of it is that the Oscars generally do feel like they are awarding a bunch of movies no one has seen or in some cases even heard of. So, at least if they had the comedy category there’d be one thing that people had heard of. Because people have heard of comedies. Although, watch, then they’ll give it to some weird obscure comedy no one has heard of. Oh, Oscars.

**John:** That’s how it happens. All right, now it’s time for one of our favorite segments. How Would This Be a Movie?

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** And so this week I was scrolling through my Twitter, which Craig doesn’t scroll through Twitter as much anymore.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But Rachel Syme had this really great tweet that people were responding to and quote-replying to. And her question was, “What’s a photograph you would like to see made into an entire prestige TV series?” So people were like putting a photo in and saying like I want to say the series about this. And we’ll put a link in the show notes to this thread. But these were cool, iconic photos. The one that struck out the most to me was it looks like it’s the 1950s or ‘60s, a Black woman has her purse on her left arm. She’s smoking a cigarette. And seems entirely unimpressed by these military police soldiers who are standing right by her.

It just felt great. And I was like I want to see Octavia Spencer play that character. I don’t even know who that person is, but I wanted to see that moment.

So we often think about starting with a story, a story in the news, but sometimes just an image can be the feel for what the movie would be.

**Craig:** I remember reading a story about the Coen brothers and the creation of Miller’s Crossing which I love. And apparently it started with an image. It wasn’t a photograph but rather something that they had just imagined, but it was the image of a hat blowing by the wind through a forest. I just thought, you know, if I had that thought I would have probably been like shut up Craig. No one cares about a hat in the forest.

Those two geniuses, god, the excellence of those guys. Just the consistent excellence over the years. Just amazing.

Anyway, it is fascinating to think like – and if you watch Miller’s Crossing sure enough a big deal is that hat blowing along through the forest.

**John:** There’s a 2005 Brazilian film called House of Sand, or The House of Sand, by Elena Soarez, she wrote it. And I remember going to a screening and she was talking about it. And it was all just based on one photograph. And so the director had this photograph. I want the movie that could lead to this photograph. And so she wrote this elaborate story and it’s terrific.

**Craig:** It’s actually a great prompt if you’re stuck. Just pick some photo and go to town. Fun game.

**John:** So we asked our listeners to write in with their suggestions for How Would This Be a Movie. We’re going to start with the Super League, the European Super Soccer League, which was all over the headlines for about 48 hours.

**Craig:** That’s as long as it lasted.

**John:** I woke up to it and I didn’t know what it was. I don’t really understand European football. I assumed that somehow my friend Ryan Reynolds and your friend Rob McElhenney had somehow done something terrible.

**Craig:** No. Although I did hear a lot about it from Rob. So, the fascinating thing about European football, or as we know it soccer, is that their leagues don’t function the way our professional leagues function here. So Major League Baseball, the NFL, NBA, NHL, they are professional teams. And those are the teams. Every year a bunch of them are in last.

Now sometimes what will happen is a franchise will move out of a city and move to another city. But the point being your performance doesn’t impact whether or not you’re still a Major League Baseball team. Not so in Europe. There is the Premier League. So the idea is that’s kind of like the Major Football League. Individual teams by performance qualify to get into, or can drop out of it through poor performance.

So this speaks to this very odd culture. And it goes way, way back. And it is all tied up in super old European stuff that comes down to pride of city and all the rest of it. If you’ve ever seen videos of Mancunians singing You’ll Never Walk Alone you’ll understand. This is like it’s more than sports to them. It’s life.

And what happened was a bunch of the huge teams were like why don’t we all just get together and make our own league, because we’re the ones that make all the money. And we’ll make even more money like this. And the people not only from the teams that weren’t invited to this super league but the people from the teams that were, whose teams would have benefitted from this, were like, “Over our dead bodies. You are not going to topple the traditions of this system. It’s the way it is.”

And they were really speaking to the somewhat greedy capitalists who were trying to take away the beauty of the sport and make it even more exploitative financially. And it fell apart, oh man, when things fall apart in Europe it goes fast. It really does.

**John:** Now, let’s think about this as a movie because this – it fell apart so quickly that I’m not sure that there’s necessarily a second or a third act. But there are interesting moments along the way. And what I do like about this as imagining characters in it you have the team owners and the team owners have a specific agenda. And they’re doing a lot of things in secret, which is exciting. We love to see when people have secret plans and there are coded things for how they’re going to do stuff.

And then you have fans. And I think this idea of fan ownership and fandom we’ve talked a lot about in terms of movies and sort of Marvel fandom and how toxic they can be, but also there is that sense of local identity and culture and pride. And it’s grafted on to this team that also has a different motive. And that tension is really fascinating.

**Craig:** Yeah. It would have to be one of those sort of tick-tock movies. I don’t mean TikTok. But rather this minute, this hour. We’re going to tell the story of the craziest 48 hours in European sports.

**John:** It’s Chernobyl but it’s–

**Craig:** It’s Chernobyl but with soccer. And no one dies. And I think it’s a movie. I don’t think it’s a series. There’s just not enough there. But the problem with these stories ultimately is stakes. When they’re true stories and it ultimately comes down to rich people “we’re not able to get a bit richer” it doesn’t really that much. When you see a small team suffer because this happens and everybody wants to leave and there’s a grand tradition of working class British comedies in particular about sort of the downtrodden.

**John:** Billy Elliot.

**Craig:** Billy Elliot is one of the greats of all time. And The Whole Monty. And you could see–

**John:** The Full Monty.

**Craig:** Sorry.

**John:** It doesn’t really matter.

**Craig:** The Full Monty. Why did I say The Whole Monty?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** The Whole Nine Yards. I combined The Whole Nine Yards and The Full Monty. We’re not editing this out.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** We’re keeping this. I’m willing to be vulnerable and say that I said The Whole Monty. And now that I have said The Whole Monty it’s always going to be The Whole Monty.

**John:** Yeah. It’s going to be one of those, what do they call it when – now–

**Craig:** We’re keeping this, too.

**John:** What do you call it when you are convinced that it always was the Berenstain Bears?

**Craig:** Oh the Mandela.

**John:** It’s the Mandela Effect.

**Craig:** Mandela Effect.

**John:** It always was The Whole Monty is what I’m saying.

**Craig:** It always was The Whole Monty. There’s millions of people who believe it’s The Whole Monty. Our brains are terrible.

**John:** All right, so let’s talk about tone because what we have for references, of course Ted Lasso which is a stunning achievement. It creates a very specific tone that is positive and uplifting and human, but truly a comedy. Then we have the FIFA scandal which we’ve talked about before which was probably a drama. You could do it as a black comedy kind of, but it feels more like a drama. Where do we want this movie to land?

**Craig:** I would probably want it to go towards comedy because the straight dramatic story, there’s just no real drama there. The story is something bad almost happened, then didn’t. That’s not great.

**John:** Yeah. So a challenge with this story is that I agree with you that it’s going to be a tick-tock where we’re looking to two different sides of things. But you’re not going to have obvious protagonists. There’s not going to be a character who starts the story with one set of beliefs and has to change in a meaningful way. There’s going to be victors and losers and situations that are happening, but it’s not going to be a classic hero’s journey kind of story.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t really think this is going to be a movie.

**John:** Yeah. I think there could be something about it. But I agree. I don’t think it’s necessarily a movie-movie.

What is a more likely to be a movie is this Russian man who was trapped on a Chinese reality TV show.

**Craig:** Spectacular.

**John:** Who desperately tried to get voted off the show.

**Craig:** So great. So great.

**John:** Joanie Remmler, thank you for sending this through. We’ll link to a piece in The Guardian about it.

**Craig:** That’s Jonni Remmler. That’s Bo’s boyfriend, Johnnie.

**John:** Oh my gosh.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So thank you to Jonni Remmler, Bo’s boyfriend apparently who sent this through.

**Craig:** That’s right. By the way, interesting trivia about Jonni Remmler that I only knew – I learned this like a month ago.

**John:** All I know about Jonni Remmler is that he’s Bo’s boyfriend.

**Craig:** Correct. I’m going to give you a second piece of trivia. John, do you remember a song when we were kids, we were probably like in fifth or sixth grade. And it was this song. [hums]

**John:** Was it like a radio song or something we would sing ourselves?

**Craig:** Nope. It was a radio song. It was German.

**John:** Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a German song and the chorus was “Da-da-da.” It was by a group called Trio. But I think Trio was just one guy. And that was Jonni’s father.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** Yeah. Jonni Remmler’s dad.

**John:** Jonni Remmler’s Da.

**Craig:** His Da was Da-Da-Da. How cool is that? I love this story. I love this Russian trapped story. This is amazing.

**John:** So would you do this as the actual thing that happened, or would you – because I can imagine a Black Mirror version of this story. Or would you do what really happened?

**Craig:** I mean, I would take the concept. Someone is already working on it. Guarantee you, someone is cooking on this. So, you take the concept. And the concept here, what had happened was this Russian – he looks like a kid. He looks like he’s 16 or something. A young man. He’s working as a PA or something on a Chinese reality television show where I guess they put a bunch of teens on an island and force them to compete as teen idols or boy bands or something.

And they asked him, because he’s very good-looking. And so the producers were like, hey, do you want to be on the show. And he’s like, oh, this is really boring, I guess fine.

**John:** And when we say very good-looking, he looks like an anime character.

**Craig:** Right. He is absurdly good-looking actually. He doesn’t seem real. And they were like do you want to be on the show? And he’s like yeah, sure. And then what happened was he couldn’t get out. He did not like it. He did not enjoy performing. He wasn’t good at performing. He can’t sing. He hated doing it. And he just wanted to leave and get voted off. But the problem was he was so obvious about it that everybody was like no.

So it was a little bit like the Sanjaya Syndrome, you know. Definitely Sanjaya was – this is, already now people are like who?

**John:** Who?

**Craig:** Sanjaya was a contestant on American Idol.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And he was a good-looking kid, very sweet. There were probably 40% of the people voting for him honestly liked him.

**John:** This is probably season four or five, so it had all been established.

**Craig:** More than half of the people that were routinely voting for him week after week were basically doing it for the LOLs, because he stank. Sorry Sanjaya, you were not great. And similarly I watched a video of this kid, so he just does a half-hearted Russian rap. He’s terrible. And everyone is still like, “Yes!” And there’s this whole, I guess it’s like a Chinese cultural thing called – did you see this called 996? 996 is the Chinese shorthand for you work from 9am to 9pm six days a week. So everyone is like if we have to 996 so do you, Russian kid.

And they would not let him go. And that to me is a basis for a very funny movie. Like that feels like a Will Ferrell kind of thing.

**John:** It is a Will Ferrell kind of thing. So, that sense, so thematically the sense that fame is a prison. That the thing you most wanted becomes a trap in and of itself. That we create these illusions and you sort of get stuck in these illusions. So the fact that he sort of stumbles into it is a choice, but if you wanted at the start it does change his approach to it.

**Craig:** I would say that this feels like the most straight down – and why mess with the straight down the middle on this one? There’s this kid. He’s a PA. He’s working on this show. He is kind of at love from a distance with this boy or girl that’s competing. And that person is really good. That person should win. And then they’re like hey good-looking guy. And so he starts doing it and he hates it, but everybody keeps voting for him. And now the problem is he might – and then the two fall in love, except that then he’s like doing better than the good one because of the joke of it all. And now he wants to get out and he can’t. He’s trapped. That person dumps him.

And then he has to actually get good or something.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then there’s the end. But it just feels like one of those movies. It would be enjoyable to watch because it would be just mainline that into my veins.

**John:** I think you’re smart to focus on adding a character who can be a love interest or some other person we can care about, because if it’s just him versus the producers we’re stuck.

**Craig:** There must be love.

**John:** There must be love. Next one, sent by Robert Hilliard, is Out of Thin Air: The Mystery of the Man Who Fell From the Sky. We’ll link to a Guardian article about this. So this tells about a Canadian Airlines flight and a person who fell out of the wheel well of this and crashed through to a patio. And spoiler is they never actually found out who this person was. But the article goes through the history of people trying to hide in the wheel wells of passenger jets.

**Craig:** Which seems like just a horrendous idea. Although oddly some people make it. But they went through the reasons why it’s unlikely that you will survive. So first of all you get into the wheel well. There’s a chance that when the wheel comes up that the gear will crush you to death.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** But congrats. Somehow you managed to avoid that. Great. As the plane ascends you are not in a pressurized area. The temperature will drop to some horrifying minus whatever 30. And then there’s a little bit of heat coming off of the hydraulic cables, but not really enough to keep you from going into hypothermia. Plus, the air is so thin you barely get enough oxygen. Typically you just go into some hibernative of–

**John:** Hypothermia and you sort of hibernate. Your body just sort of shuts down.

**Craig:** Your body shuts down.

**John:** And so the problem with that is ultimately the wheels are going to come back down and it doesn’t come down right before the ground. It’s like you’re thousands of feet up in the air and the wheels come down and you drop out of the plane.

**Craig:** Yeah. In fact they were saying that they will find bodies not at Heathrow but on the kind of approach.

**John:** The flight path.

**Craig:** The landing approach to Heathrow. Because that’s where those flaps open up. And then unconscious people just sort of tumble, half-frozen, to the ground. So, just word of warning to our listeners, don’t.

**John:** Don’t do this.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Especially if you’re in Europe. I mean, that Ryanair. I mean, it’s like–

**John:** Plus, you’ll try to do that and they’ll try to sell you headphones.

**Craig:** Ryanair will. You know, Ryanair, I flew a lot of regional airplanes when we were making Chernobyl in Europe. And I believe it’s Ryanair. They run lotteries on the plane.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** That’s crazy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Anyway.

**John:** Will We Crash scratcher?

**Craig:** Yeah. A little scratcher before we go down. I don’t see a movie here.

**John:** I don’t see a movie here either. And also I left this one because I wanted to say let’s not even perpetuate this trope of like going into the wheel well. Because I could see this being in a movie and people saying like oh that’s a thing I could do.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** It’s not. The wheel well is an even less likely air vent.

**John:** Yes. It reminds me of the air vent problem.

**Craig:** You’re not going through a duct. And – by the way, I was playing Spider-Man. So there’s Spider-Man and then it turned into Miles Morales when the PS5 came out. And in the beginning of Spider-Man they do a very typical thing for videogames where they throw you into an action sequence. But it’s designed to really teach you how to do things. And in that he is crawling through these massive vents. And he remarks, “These vents are huge and really clean.” And I thought, OK, I’ll give it to you. All right.

**John:** Hang a little hat on that.

**Craig:** You’re winking. We’re cool.

**John:** Our next How Would This Be a Movie are The Saboteurs You Can Hire to End Your Relationship. This was sent in by Brian Erickson. We will link to a BBC story on this. I think this is the most promising of the potential movies.

So essentially again we’re in Japan where all these kind of crazy stories come from. We talked before about the fake families you can hire.

**Craig:** Right. Fake families.

**John:** This is a situation where you hire somebody, these are firms that are usually connected with private investigation agencies basically to seduce your spouse and therefore they start an affair and then you can break up with them and it’s sort of their fault.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And also it makes the divorce easier because they think they’re in love with another person.

**Craig:** Yes. And I think the specifics of divorce in Japan, but surely also here to some extent, it is that if you have evidence of infidelity it just gets put in a different category. It’s all terrible. Terrible thing to do. So, it’s immoral. But it is kind of like the anti-Hitch or something. Interesting.

There have been quite a few movies that propose these jobs that sort of exist but don’t really exist, like there was The Best Man where I think was that Kevin Hart where the idea is like I’m a best man you can hire because you don’t have one. But that’s not really a thing. And this is sort of a thing, but not really a thing.

If it were me I would probably want to steer away from the idea of like we’re professional breaker-uppers because that seems a little broad and have it more be like you seem like the kind of person that – like I just watched you steal some guy’s wife. Can you please steal my wife? And then what happens?

**John:** Yeah. I like that as an idea. Honestly kind of like Strangers on a Train, like a crisscross. What if we were to help each other out? What if we seduced each other’s wives and get ourselves out of this situation.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or, honestly as you said this, husbands that get each other – that’s an interesting thing. You want that complicated relationship between this person you are using to break up a relationship and really get into sort of why are you doing this, what is the nature of love. What if it starts fake but becomes real? Those are interesting things. And tonally you could do this as a comedy, or you could do this as a pretty dark drama.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a version of this where you have, let’s say it’s two women who agree to crisscross. They want to get rid of their husbands and make the divorce go well. So you seduce mine, I seduce yours. We get pictures and we’re done. And then what happens is they each begin to fall in love with the other one’s husband. And then they also start to feel jealous that the other one has taken their husband. And so therefore the love is rekindled, so you’re not going to steal my guy. And then there’s a competition of a kind.

And you could do that with two men, two woman, men/women. You could do any version you want. Kind of all is fair in love and war kind of thing. Could be fun. Or it could just be dark and depressing.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, there’s definitely the noir version of this which could be kind of great. Basically either I’ve hired this person to do this thing, or this is an old friend who I’m getting in to do this thing. And we owe this, but then real feelings start to get involved and it just becomes complicated. And complications are why we make movies.

**Craig:** Complications are why we make movies.

**John:** That’s good. Our final How Would This Be a Movie has no plot really at all. It kind of goes back to how we framed this thing. Here’s a photo that sets up what is this movie. So this is in Turkey. These high end basically castles that were being built for rich people, but they’re sort of like townhouse castles. You have to look at the photo, but basically it looks like–

**Craig:** So weird.

**John:** Like Cinderella’s castle, but stacked all together.

**Craig:** Tiny. So like tiny versions of Cinderella’s castle. And there’s like a hundred of them and they’re identical in rows. So it’s sort of the height of luxury and not luxury. They really nailed something that has never existed before. Who was going to buy those?

**John:** I don’t know. But people did buy them. People put in the money to build this and then because of economic collapse and Covid and everything else they’ve lost all their money. So it’s this ghost town of these half-built townhouse castles and it seems fascinating.

You could set a story here but there’s not actually a story. I think what I want to get to is it’s a fascinating place to put something, but I don’t think the actual falling apart of the plan to build these things is the story.

**Craig:** It’s more of a location that I could see somebody using for interest. The problem with that location is it doesn’t seem real. So when you look at these photos you think to yourself – well you think, OK, this is in a journal. It’s real. However, you could also make that with Photoshop in four seconds. Because that’s what they literally did in real life. They Photoshopped a bunch of these things and just made them for real.

So there’s a sequence in Skyfall where James Bond goes to the villain’s island, Javier Bardem’s island. And they used a real place. It was an island where the Chinese built this massive city and then never put anybody there. It’s just a huge abandoned city with multiple structures just sitting there. And it was a cool location.

This thing I don’t even know if it would be a cool location because I think people would watch and go, “Oh, it’s like CGI.”

**John:** You wouldn’t believe it.

**Craig:** No, you wouldn’t believe it. It’s weird. It’s like the house of mirrors. It’s the strangest thing. Turkey.

**John:** Turkey.

**Craig:** Turkey.

**John:** Yeah. Choices. All right, so of the movies we discussed today, or potential movies, which one do you think could actually happen? Because we have a good track record of things happening.

**Craig:** We do. I actually think Russian man trapped on Chinese reality show feels like something that not only can but will be made for a streamer. It just feels funny at its core. I know what the plot is. I don’t have to sit there and wonder. The whole arc has been spelled out for me. I can do it. And it would be fun. People would watch it.

**John:** I think Will Ferrell is the right kind of tone approach to it as well. My second choice would the saboteurs to end your relationship. I think there’s a version of that.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Thank you to everyone who sent in these things.

**Craig:** Thanks folks.

**John:** These are great. Now, we get more stuff that people sent in. It’s time for Megana to come on and talk us through the questions people have asked.

**Megana Rao:** Hello.

**John:** Actually, Megana before you start I want to get some clarification. So yesterday on Slack you asked a question should I send through the How Would This Be a Movies to Craig and to Bo and I answered “yes” on Slack. And then I saw you give a thumbs up. And then that thumbs up disappeared later on. And so then I typed, “Oh sorry, yassss.” It’s a tone situation.

Talk me through this. Did you interpret my “yes” in a negative way?

**Megana:** Just because it was my kneejerk reaction I was like oh man that was a dumb question. He just said yes, not exclamation.

**Craig:** Did you put a period at the end of yes?

**John:** There was no period at the end of yes.

**Craig:** Oh, so that was less horrible I guess.

**John:** The tone was like yes.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Megana:** And even though I know you were joking, I so appreciated the “sorry, yassss.” I loved it. I loved it.

**Craig:** Let her off the hook.

**Megana:** I loved it.

**Craig:** I think the iPhone thumbs up is a great – like everyone likes the iPhone thumbs up.

**John:** Is that correct Megana? Does everyone like the iPhone thumbs up?

**Megana:** Yeah. I love the iPhone thumbs up.

**Craig:** Yassss.

**John:** So from now a thumbs up will be the answer rather than a yes or even worse a sure.

**Craig:** Oh sure. Sure.

**Megana:** But “yassss” is the–

**Craig:** Yassss is obviously.

**Megana:** I welcome that whenever.

**Craig:** Sometimes Bo will ask me if I want coffee. I do like a 15-A “Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaas.”

**Megana:** But I didn’t mean to remove the thumbs up. I think that was an accident. Because I was trying to re-thumbs up because it didn’t show up for me.

**John:** I gotcha. All right. Let’s get to some questions now that we’ve gotten that taken care of.

**Megana:** OK, great. So Malachi in Indian asked, “I was wondering if you guys write every day. And if so, what does that look like when you’re not working on a specific project? I’ve been in a bit of a writing slump lately, mainly due to the pandemic/depression, and not being able to experience things. No input equals no output. But I’ve been wanting to write during this time. When you guys are in this situation do you sit down every day and just write anything? Do you use idea generation? I journal every day and I try to brainstorm ideas, but is there something more I can be doing to keep working my writing muscles until I find my actual ideal?”

**John:** Craig, do you write every day?

**Craig:** No. I’m supposed. But I’ve also come to understand that there are days where I just don’t have it. And I will say it out loud. I’ll just say, “Oh I know what this day is. This is one of those days where I don’t have it.”

I used to feel a little bit of guilt. More than a bit. But over time I began to realize that those days were actually not indicative of some sort of problem. They were just indicative of being a human. And that there were other days where, you know, I would write more and it would all catch up. It’s kind of regression to the mean as it were.

So, there are days where I don’t write. But there’s never a day where I don’t have something to write, nor is there ever a day where I don’t know what I’m supposed to be writing. For Malachi, it seems like part of what’s going on there is Malachi isn’t really quite sure what to write at all. Maybe a little switch of genre might help you Malachi. Consider just doing a short story. Like three pages. Five pages. Real nice short one. A poem. Just write something.

Write something that you can actually start and finish. It’s a nice feeling and it gets the muscles moving as you would say.

**John:** I was going to say. Give yourself a prompt, a challenge. Say I can only write 300 words. I have to tell a story in only 300 words. Do something that sort of forces you outside of your normal comfort zone is a good idea.

I attempt to write every day. And so I attempt to leave space in my day every day to write. And so it’s always on my daily agenda for like write sprint on this project. And so either it’s a thing I owe somebody, or it is something I’ve wanted to work on for myself. So I’m always giving myself the brief to write. Do I always actually generate words? No. But like Craig I sort of give myself permission to say like it just didn’t happen today. But I try not to give myself that permission too much because then stuff doesn’t get done.

**Craig:** And you don’t. As it turns out you really don’t. It’s not one of those things where you think I don’t have it today, but really. I do. I just don’t want to. And then 12 days in a row you’re like I don’t have it today. Give myself a break. That doesn’t happen. You want to write, it’s just sometimes it ain’t there.

**John:** What I do find generally helpful is I will say like I really don’t have it today, so I’m just going to take quick little notes. I’m going to just jot down some little things. And sometimes that’s all I do. But sometimes it’s like oh actually pieces start fitting together and you’re like I didn’t think I was going to write stuff, but I wrote stuff.

**Craig:** And the things we do in between help. Reading helps. If I’m not writing, maybe I’m going to read something. I’m certainly not going to do nothing today. So what can I do to just keep my mind working or focused on narrative? Solving puzzles, always a good one for me.

**John:** Or take a shower.

**Craig:** The shower is the greatest of all. I want to get a house that’s just a huge shower. Like you walk in, there’s the little antechamber where you get to take your clothes off, and then you go to the next room and it’s like a little air lock. And then the next room is the entire house entirely open, just nozzles everywhere.

**John:** It can just be like a concrete floor with the gentle slope you don’t really notice so that all the water drains.

**Craig:** All of it. And just showers firing down at you from all directions. Incredibly wasteful.

**John:** So the half-finished Turkey village. It had hot tubs on every floor.

**Craig:** Shower Town. If they sold it as Shower Town I’d probably buy a block or two. Because I understand it’s cheap right now. There’s no one there.

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

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Please.

**Megana:** Thinking of creative work as work. Do you take days off? Do you write on vacation? Do you write on weekends?

**Craig:** Oh, days off. I’m supposed to take days off. So the other side of the some days you don’t you have it, like OK my job is Monday to Friday. I’m supposed to be writing. Well, Thursday comes along. I don’t have it. I didn’t write. Saturday comes along, I suddenly do have it, and now I do write. And this is annoying to the people who love us. And I beg forgiveness, but sometimes you’re just like, oh god, I got it. Get away from me. I need 20 minutes. Which I think is 20 minutes, and it’s three hours. Because you’re just in the zone. The flow, you know.

It’s not great.

**John:** I will say when I was doing the Arlo Finch books I had to be the most disciplined by far because otherwise those books would just not get written. I needed to write a thousand words a day. And so even when we were on vacation I would say like I still need an hour a day to write. And so I would just – to the family was all clear and I’m going to take my computer downstairs to the hotel lobby and I’m just going to write for an hour. And I got a lot done.

And I think sometimes just, again, constraints to help writing so much, if I only have an hour I will get an hour’s work done in that time. And stuff does finish.

**Craig:** And I will say my wife has probably picked up on this, and I don’t know if Mike has picked up on this, and maybe they don’t tell us but I’m hoping. That they know that if they give us the hour when we shouldn’t be taking it we’ll be way more fun after that hour is over. The difference between I wrote today Craig and I didn’t write today Craig is pretty severe.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a grim kind of sloggy, self-flagellating misery to didn’t write today. And then the guy that wrote and got stuff done it’s like my legacy is secure. Onwards. I’ve stolen that from Patton Oswalt. I’ve stolen so many things from Patton Oswalt at this point–

**John:** Have you ever met him?

**Craig:** Yes. A couple of times. He wouldn’t remember. Wonderful guy. So nice. So fun. One of the funniest people in the world, ever.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** Patton Oswalt. We should get Patton Oswalt on the show.

**John:** 100 percent.

**Craig:** Only because I just want to hang out with Patton Oswalt. I mean, I want to hear what he has to say. I don’t want to put him down. I want to hear what he has to say. He actually writes a lot. He gets called in on so many – he does a whole bit on punching up animation which is amazing. So great. But we’ll have him on the show. He’ll talk about it.

**Megana:** Thank you guys for that.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Megana:** And so Dana asked, “Why do we screenwriters tend to make our supporting characters more interesting than our protagonists? Any tips on avoiding this tendency?”

**John:** Yeah. This is Supporting Character Syndrome. This is a well-documented thing. Here’s why. It’s that supporting characters don’t have the burden of having to shoulder the plot and the story on their backs.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** They’re not required to [protagonate]. They’re not required to grow and change. They can act purely on their own ego and id. They can do what they want to do.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, they are designed to be entertaining. The only reason they can exist is because they push forward as amusing. They’re not as real as protagonists. They are not accountable to emotion and inner life. They are there to be – they’re often bigger than life. They’re absurd. If you actually had to live with supporting characters after a week you would probably kill them because they’re not real people. But they’re fun.

**John:** They’re fun. So I do a presentation on want in movies, and I talk about supporting characters because supporting characters tend to have really clear, easy to identify wants. And they go for it. And they’re not held back by other constraints. And there’s a reason why, especially in animated movies that go through long development, so often the supporting character becomes the main character. They get rid of the main character and they bring that supporting character in as the person driving stuff. And it’s good advice. You’re most interesting, fun character should be driving your movie.

**Craig:** Correct. Although there is a joy in the Sebastians of a movie. So Sebastian, the crab – is he a lobster or a crab?

**John:** He’s a crab.

**Craig:** He’s a crab. Seems weird that I wouldn’t know that.

**John:** I say that with the definitive–

**Craig:** Totally. Yeah. I think he’s a crab.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** And his entire existence is to just be kind of like the nanny. And just be like, “Oh, Ariel, don’t do that. Oh no! Ah! Aw! Ooh! Go ahead.” But when he goes home, like does he have a day off?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Because what happens on his day off? Does he just go into his shell, his little crab shell, and just sit there and stare blankly waiting for somebody to come along whose romantic life he can meddle?” That’s the thing about side characters. They don’t have any other – they only exist when the protagonist is looking at them.

**John:** Also a great example is the Frasier Crane from Cheers. When Frasier becomes the hero of his own show he has to be modulated and softened a little bit and you have to surround him with much more extreme characters.

**Craig:** Wackadoodles. Right. So he’s way less broad than he was on Cheers, because he’s centered. But then you do have–

**John:** You have to have a Niles. But then if you try to make the Niles show you’d have to change Niles and surround him with – Maris would have to be just a literal monster.

**Craig:** There would be wacky people all about. And Niles would be the somewhat more boring one, but the realer one. Yes. Absolutely. This is just the way it goes and there’s nothing we can do about it. Nothing.

**John:** All right. Let’s ask one last question.

**Megana:** Cool. Also, I think Sebastian has a successful career as a composer also, or a conductor?

**John:** That’s a very good point. So he has a busy life independent of just taking care of Ariel.

**Craig:** When you say successful, Megana, doesn’t he appear to be enslaved by King Triton? I’m just putting it out there. I don’t see money.

**John:** I would say that in underworld cultures the difference between patronage and servitude is murky, which also mirrors the European, in a 13th Century.

**Craig:** That is problematic. I think we have realized just how problematic. Well, look, The Little Mermaid was already problematic.

**John:** It’s incredibly problematic.

**Craig:** Change for your man.

**Megana:** We have the basis for the spinoff now.

**Craig:** I know. I do want a spinoff of just – maybe about Sebastian’s kids. Or was he even allowed to love and have a life?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Because if he had children they would just be like why did dad do this? Dad? You had no agency. Flounder. What does Flounder do?

**John:** No. I mean, Flounder hangs out with Nemo. Yeah.

**Craig:** Flounder is not in Nemo. Oh, you mean there’s the crosspollination of those. So he hangs out with Nemo. And Nemo is like, oh, Flounder is here. Great. And then Marlin is like just come on, be cool Flounder.

**John:** Absolutely. They’re cousins or something.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s your boring cousin who has nothing of interest.

**Megana:** I would love that movie.

**Craig:** It’s a fun.

**Megana:** OK. So Unprotected wrote in and asked, “Dear John and Craig, should I bother trying to protect myself in a situation where I’m trying to break in and a well-respected, mid-level producer wants to take a feature pitch out with me based on his idea? I’d be doing all the work and wouldn’t be able to do anything with the materials if it doesn’t sell. But does it matter? Should I just move forward for the experience alone and the contacts that could result from it?”

**John:** My answer is yes. My answer is you need to have the experience of taking a pitch out. If this person actually has some connections and can get you in rooms and get you practiced doing that thing. Hopefully you get a job, and you get the job writing. That would be awesome. But if you don’t you’re getting the experience of what it’s like to be taking a pitch out. You get some contacts. You get better at doing this part of the job. That’s my gut.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. Keep in mind that you’re going to want to write something. So even if you’re just pitching it’s important for you to write something down. You don’t have to worry about the leave behind/don’t leave behind thing because they’re not asking. This is your original work. So you have copyright on it. And the reason you want to write something down here is so that there is actual literary material that is evidence of your authorship and participation so that the well-respected, mid-level producer can’t deny the existence of you and just have somebody else do it.

So, I would say yes. Especially because he’s not asking you to write a whole screenplay. But just rather this pitch. Yeah, you’d be doing all the work. Just the one thing to look out for, Unprotected, is to not let the well-respected, mid-level producer just note this pitch to death for years. Really give yourself a timeline. Do it expeditiously. And don’t be afraid to say, listen, I understand that there’s things that we have to polish and figure out, but we’re just two folks. The buyers may have their own feelings and things that they want to tweak. And honestly they’re not going to not buy this because of that one thing you just said.

You’ve got to just limit the scope of the work and then get out there into those rooms and pitch.

**John:** Yeah. The other thing to keep in mind is that if this mid-level producer really wants you to be going out and pitching this person should also have connections with managers and agents and can get you started on that process as well.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. And you’re going to need somebody like that because you need somebody in your corner.

**John:** Yup. All right, Megana, thank you for these questions.

**Craig:** Thanks Megana.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. I have two this week. The first is a Twitter thread by the Internet Archive People about how they digitize old LPs. And so there are a bunch of old albums that only exist in physical copies and the Internet Archive is trying to digitize them so that the music on them can be saved and preserved and found again.

It’s really cool. They basically have to clean these discs and put them on special turntables. And it’s all calibrated in really cool ways. But the turntables actually have four different play heads on them simultaneously with different styluses so they can get different versions of what comes off of it, because I don’t really know physical albums that much, but like what the needle is tremendously effects how the sound comes out.

**Craig:** Yes. Oh my god. The world of those people with all their fussiness about that stuff. Yes.

**John:** So this is not about vinyl being better. It’s about vinyl eventually will go away and so you need to be able to hear that music again.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** How to save that.

**Craig:** I like that.

**John:** My second one is something that’s specifically for Craig. Craig, are you aware of Dr. Fill in terms of the crossword puzzle universe?

**Craig:** Of course. How dare you? Of course I am.

**John:** I assumed you would. I’m going to link to a Slate piece here talking through the history of Dr. Fill and sort of what’s happened. So basically the same way that AI can play chess and Go and master these things, AI can obviously solve crossword puzzles. And there were two approaches to doing this. The first was just brute force where it would just take the grid and throw words at it and figure out what pattern of words could actually fill it up. That works. The other version would be to take a look at the clues, the questions, and use that to figure out what words could be in places.

The two teams came together and put it together and now it won a big crossword puzzle competition.

**Craig:** And there’s a little bit of a controversy. So Dr. Fill, that’s Fill, in the crossword we call Fill is the stuff that goes in the grid. The letters. Typically not the ones that are the theme answers. The fill is the stuff in between. And there’s a little bit of controversy because what’s happening now is a number of constructors are being asked to create puzzles that Dr. Fill can’t beat humans on. And their whole thing is like we don’t care about Dr. Fill. We just want to write good puzzles that humans enjoy solving.

There is in a way a bit of a pointlessness to the deep blue chess engine and Dr. Fill solving crossword puzzles. You know, OK. Cool. But whatever.

I think we’re growing up. We understand now that just because we can make software that solve crossword puzzles faster than human cans doesn’t mean that the computers are better than us. It just means they’re fast. They’re fast. And they don’t enjoy it. Dr. Fill derives no joy.

In many ways Dr. Fill is the Sebastian of programs.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Pointlessly serving his master without any question as to why.

**John:** Yeah. Because when you complete a crossword puzzle you get a blast of happy chemicals in your brain.

**Craig:** Just waves of dopamine. Waves. It’s my crack.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** Your other crack though is D&D.

**Craig:** Oh yes. So here’s my One Cool Thing. We got an email from a listener named John Harmston. And John, day one listener of Scriptnotes, to all the way back then. And he is a dungeon master. And he’s been designing an adventure for Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition. Because anybody can design their own adventure using those rules.

And he said that he had really used a lot of the things he had learned from our show in the creation of it. And I looked at – it’s currently on Kickstarter. And it’s called Dawn of the Necromancer. I already like that. Because I love Necromancers. They’re the worst. They should die, ironically.

And what I loved about this was that it is big. So, this is an adventure. Right now I’m DMing you guys in Dungeon of the Mad Mage. Dungeon of the Mad Mage takes characters from fifth level to 20. That is the longest run ever that I’ve ever dealt with. Dawn of the Necromancer takes you from 1 to 20. This is a big long adventure.

**John:** This would probably take years to get through.

**Craig:** It seems like it would. And he’s clearly put a lot of time and thought into it. And specifically into making sequences cinematic. Because a lot of times, as you know, it’s sort of like go into a room, fight things. And so he’s really tried to make it somewhat innovative in that regard. So I immediately was like, yeah, I’m going to kick some dough in and back this thing. He is past his initial requirement amount. So he will be making this.

But one of the things that was listed is they have their stretch goals. I do love a stretch goal. So one of the stretch goals was to provide battle maps. It says, “If we get 250 social media shares we will add digital battle maps of every major encounter to every pledge level.” And I was like, hey John–

**John:** Craig needs that.

**Craig:** I do. So I’m like how many social media shares would being One Cool Thing on Scriptnotes count for?

**John:** Hopefully a fair number.

**Craig:** And he was like maybe all of them. So, John, I feel like I’ve done my duty here.

**John:** We’re going to get some digital battle maps.

**Craig:** I want those maps. And then I want you to put dynamic lighting lines on for Roll 20. So that’s like a whole other thing. But I’m totally into this. I’m excited. Who knows? This could be the next grand adventure that we all play.

**John:** I’m very excited for it.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** That is our show for this week. But you will want to tune in next week because next week is Episode 500.

**Craig:** Oh. My. God.

**John:** And we will be announcing something very, very historic.

**Craig:** I’m getting fired?

**John:** On the 500th episode. Yeah. Basically we’re sending you off to Canada and you’re fired.

**Craig:** I feel like I’m the Russian guy. How do I get off this show? I’ve been trying. I clearly don’t prepare. I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do. [sighs heavily]

**John:** [sighs heavily] Thank you, Craig. It’s so lovely to see you in person.

**Craig:** Likewise. I will see you next from Canada.

**John:** Yes. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Andrew Smith. 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.

We have t-shirts. 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 transcripts and sign up for the 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. Craig, thank you for being here live in person.

**Craig:** Thank you John for having me in your home.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Craig, you are headed off on Sunday to begin production on The Last of Us.

**Craig:** Well we’ve been in preproduction for quite some time, but finally at long last I ran out of runway here. I like to stay home as long as I can, but it’s time. We don’t start shooting for a few months, but there’s an enormous amount of prep to make a lot of television. So indeed I am heading up to Calgary, Canada. And learning all sorts of things. I haven’t flown.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** In over a year. So there’s all sorts of stuff. And I have all sorts of paperwork. This is exciting. But, yeah, I’m heading up there for a while.

**John:** So we will back on our normal Zoom things rather than being in person, but I’m curious like we’ve talked before about writing on set. And this is sort of a different stage where you are still writing scripts for the show.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So you’ll be in a hotel room or some sort of rented property for an extended period of time alone. Do you like that?

**Craig:** Well, it’s not quite that desolate. I will have an apartment. I’m in the same building as Bo and Jack, so I’m never alone in my building. That’s always nice. But we have production offices. So I go into the office. And I work there and I see people. So it’s not quite that isolated. But it’s a bit like when Covid happened. I’m permanently quarantined human being. So, it’s not a huge thing for me. The bummer is just not being – I’m going to miss my wife. And that stinks. But once the Covid situation improves and travel becomes a little bit more fluid back and forth between the countries then obviously it’s very easy for me to shoot back home and then shoot back up there.

As opposed to when we were making Chernobyl where it was just, oh boy.

**John:** Oh boy. So, I went through more of this having to work away from home doing Big Fish for years and years and years. And then all the international versions of Big Fish, or like the Boston version, or the London version. And it is a weird thing. You get to a certain point in your career where you’ve had some success and I can set my own destiny. And then like, oh, I’m in a rental apartment for a time. And I’m just like I have all this stuff that’s not here with me and it’s just me and my laptop and I’m making do.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it can get a bit much. It’s fun to be in a new city. It’s a bummer now. But when I first went to London for the initial casting phase of Chernobyl we got to go to some excellent London escape rooms and just walked the city. It’s one of my favorite cities in the world. And similarly Vilnius is a beautiful city and got a lot of escape rooms in Vilnius. I got to escape rooms everywhere.

Well, the escape rooms are currently not open in Calgary but they have quite a few. So as soon as those open up we’ll be digging into those. And getting to know that city as well. So I do like the new place aspect of it. But you begin to feel like an astronaut. You know, like I know I’m not on my normal planet. And it can get in your head a little bit.

**John:** Now friends of ours have had shows in production where sometimes they’ve been on set, but a lot of times they’ve just been literally at home in Los Angeles watching a live feed of what the cameras are seeing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And is that appealing to you or not appealing to you?

**Craig:** It’s not. I mean, some of it will happen, and particularly on this show because there’s still a few episodes left to write while we begin the very long process of shooting all of this quite massive season of TV. There are going to be moments where I’m going to probably be in a trailer near the set writing while keeping an eye on the monitors. And then I can always walk over there and discuss.

The problem with being really remote is there is a magic to being with people, particularly actors. And also there’s a magic to walking the space and understanding that space, whether it’s something you’ve built on stage or it’s a location, to understand the options that are available.

In general we’ve gotten, all of us I think have gotten better at video conferencing stuff. It’s not as weird as it used to be. But, you know, being in person is a thing.

**John:** Yeah. I remember being on my first doomed TV show, DC, and one of the lovely things about it, this is because we had standing sets, I could sit on the bed in one of the set rooms and just write a scene that takes place in this thing. And that was great to actually sort of be like right where you’re doing stuff.

**Craig:** It’s kind of fun, right? It feels Hollywood when you do stuff like that.

**John:** It does.

**Craig:** I remember, oh, I think it was the third Hangover movie there was a scene, it wasn’t quite working, and it was on stage. And so Todd and I just found some stoop of some other thing that was being built there and sat there and rewrote that scene. And I remember thinking this is Hollywood.

**John:** This is Hollywood.

**Craig:** This is so Hollywood. Look at us. Writing guys doing writing on set. It’s kind of fun.

**John:** Where I think I’m going to have the biggest trouble adjusting is that I went out to lunch with friends, sitting outdoors at a restaurant, and it was great. But it was also overwhelming and really exhausting. And I realized that I’m just not used to being around physically other people. And there’s a mental energy that’s required. And so I feel like being in an office and later then being on a busy set will be – it’s going to be hard for me to build up the stamina for that.

And remembering people’s names. Seeing people – realizing that people can actually see me.

**Craig:** That’s – remembering people’s names has always been a tricky one. I didn’t have any – when I did my little acting stint on this season of Mythic Quest, upcoming on May 9th or something like that, it was very enjoyable because I did actually derive energy from – I guess it’s that extrovert/introvert thing. What recharges your batteries? And I did like it.

It wasn’t too jarring. But I think in general in life Covid or not Covid at some point I usually say, oh, I’ll be right back, and then I disappear for 30 minutes because I need to be alone. And that’s important.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s actually one of the nice things about acting is that you get to like ahhhhh and then like, OK, we’re turning around, and then you get to go be alone.

**John:** Yeah. It’s nice. No responsibilities.

**Craig:** None. Zero. You’re like a child. It’s wonderful. They dress you. They comb your hair. If you drop something they pick it up. [laughs] It’s wonderful. Really. I’ve been thinking about just making the full switch. Oh, just falling backwards into that warm pool of acting. So nice. Maybe I’ll get an Oscar.

**John:** That would be amazing.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s the only way.

**John:** Got to work on the EGOT.

**Craig:** Yup. Oh, yeah, EGOT. That’s the thing. Ooh, a Tony. That’s what I want next.

**John:** A Tony is good.

**Craig:** I want the Tony.

**John:** I got my Grammy nomination, but that doesn’t really count.

**Craig:** Yeah. That doesn’t count. So you need a Grammy, an Oscar, a Tony, and an Emmy. So I have an Eeh. That’s my E.

**John:** Travon Free got three quarters of his way to his EGOT. So Travon Free, a writer who did Two Distant Strangers. So happy for him to win his Oscar. But he actually predicted this is where my Oscar is going to go. He had a spot on the shelf for where it goes.

**Craig:** Damn. That’s confidence. So our composer on Chernobyl, Hildur, had not gotten any awards or nominations or anything. And now she’s got EGO.

**John:** Oh wow.

**Craig:** In one year she got an Emmy for Chernobyl, she got Oscar for Joker, and she got Grammy I think also for Joker. So, she just needs a Tony.

**John:** And she’s already in the music industry. So the Tony is – but that’s not the kind of stuff.

**Craig:** Well, if they make a Chernobyl musical I think she’s got a shot at it. It’s the only reason to make a Chernobyl musical is to get her the EGOT.

**John:** Yeah. The kind of music she does is not Tony kind of music. It’s not Broadway music.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I think what would happen is we want to pair her up with a Seth Rudetsky.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh man. That would be the best pairing in history. I’d pay money to see that my friend.

**John:** Bleak but witty.

**Craig:** Bleak but witty. In your face.

**John:** [laughs] I can see that on the marquee.

**Craig:** Bleak but witty.

**John:** Bleak, but witty.

**Craig:** Yes. Icelandic and so Jewish. We’ve never had Seth on this show.

**John:** No, we’ve not.

**Craig:** We should get Seth on this show. I’ve been on his show.

**John:** Within the next 500 episodes we should try to get him.

**Craig:** Yeah, we’ve got another 500 to go.

**John:** Thanks so much, Craig.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Rachel Syme Twitter](https://twitter.com/rachsyme/status/1387803897276870656?s=21)
* [Russian Man ‘Trapped’ on Chinese Reality TV show Finally Voted out After Three Months](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/27/russian-man-trapped-chinese-reality-tv-show-voted-out-lelush-vladislav-ivanov-produce-camp) by Helen Davidson and Andrew Roth
* [European Super Soccer League](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/sports/soccer/super-league-soccer.html) by Tariq Panja and Rory Smith
* [The Saboteurs You can Hire to End your Relationship](https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200731-the-saboteurs-you-can-hire-to-end-your-relationship) by Christine Ro
* [Haunting Photos Reveal a Massive Abandoned Town of Disneyesque Castles](https://www.architecturaldigest.com/gallery/haunting-photos-reveal-massive-abandoned-town-disneyesque-castles) by Jessica Cherner
* [Dawn of the Necromancer](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dawnofthenecromancer/dawn-of-the-necromancer-5th-edition-adventure) on Kickstarter
* [How the Internet Archive Digitizes Old LPs](https://twitter.com/internetarchive/status/1386423512810721284?s=20)
* [Dr. Fill and AI](https://slate.com/technology/2021/04/american-crossword-puzzle-tournament-dr-fill-artificial-intelligence.html)
* [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 Andrew Smith ([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/499standard.mp3).

You can find the original post of this episode [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/the-thing-youre-not-writing).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 496 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we’re looking at those projects that are not the ones you’re currently writing, with some suggestions for keeping them in mind without letting them take over your entire brain space. We’ll also be answering listener questions including what to do when you have a crush on your producer.

**Craig:** Oh my.

**John:** Oh my.

**Craig:** Oh my.

**John:** In our bonus segment for premium members Craig and I will discuss which words we’re willing to lose forever.

**Craig:** Oh, OK. That sounds like fun. Sure.

**John:** But Craig some really breaking news. Had you ever heard about this producer Scott Rudin? And some alleged bad behavior? An article came out this last week detailing this in the Hollywood Reporter. It was an article by Tatiana Siegel. And did this shock you?

**Craig:** [laughs] Not only did it not shock me, but it was a bit like after five years of people finally doing something about the predatory large cat problem someone stood up and went, “Wait, there’s also a tiger. Why don’t we talk about the tiger?”

People have known about Scott Rudin since you and I showed up in Hollywood.

**John:** Yeah. And in 1994 there was a movie called Swimming with Sharks.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Which I remember seeing at the Laemmle Sunset Five. And it was about this abusive producer, playing by Kevin Spacey, and it was widely discussed that this is based on Scott Rudin. This is who Scott Rudin is.

**Craig:** My understanding was that it was a conglomeration of Scott Rudin and Barry Josephson.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** But Scott Rudin, also there was an article that was written about Scott Rudin in the ‘90s that detailed the horrendous things he did and the tenor of the article – and I would also say the reception of the article – was kind of like “awesome.” Like “what a legend.”

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And I know people that worked as his assistant and everything you ever heard was true. And I guess in my mind I thought like does Scott Rudin just get a pass because he’s always been this way? Kind of like South Park gets a pass on everything. I guess. But finally somebody was like enough already. Enough already with this guy.

**John:** So what’s weird is I had Megana check our back emails because I knew I had spoken to a reporter at the New York Times over a year ago about Scott Rudin. It was sort of like – and this reporter’s question was like after Weinstein do you think there’s a market to talk about Scott Rudin and all of these stories of abusive behavior. And so I spoke with this reporter and said like, “Listen, I never worked for Scott Rudin. But all I’ve heard is very consistent stories about the people who work for him. And not writers who work for him, mostly, but really his employees being just horribly, horribly mistreated.” And so I could say that, but I didn’t go on the record because I didn’t know anything.

And so that story never happened, but this story finally did come out. So, I want to both praise the Hollywood Reporter and Tatiana Siegel for writing this story, but it’s also I’m sort of grappling with this, yeah, why didn’t we address this earlier?

**Craig:** Well, we get used to things. There’s like a weird background noise thing that happens and your brain just becomes inured to it. And then one day someone says, “You do realize, right, that this weird thing has been going on for the last 20 years and it shouldn’t be going on?” And there’s just a moment where everybody goes, yeah, what the F.

And I’ve never worked with Scott Rudin. And nonetheless I believe everything I’ve read about Scott Rudin because it’s been said by so many people for so long in the exact same way. You know, there are cases where you can question people, but when you have a Cosby situation where 50 women all tell the same story that story has got to be true. And in this case you’ve got so many assistants telling stories of things being thrown at their heads. Things being broken on their hands. And people being sent to the hospital. And people being physically, emotionally, mentally abused.

**John:** Yeah. The HR person leaves in an ambulance due to a panic attack.

**Craig:** The HR person left in an ambulance.

**John:** Can you imagine being the HR person in that office? How would you even possibly do that? Because you’re constantly churning through these people who are not being treated in any way that should be happening.

So, bringing this a little bit more local, you know, the last couple of years we’ve been talking about #PayUpHollywood and we’ve been talking about the treatment of assistants in Hollywood, and specifically focusing on pay but also respect. And this is a situation where these people who are working for Scott Rudin were not being treated – maybe they were being well paid, but they were not being treated with respect. And they were working insane hours and in abusive situations. And it’s all part of the same thing, too.

If you see the value in a person as an individual you’re not paying them well and you’re not treating them wall, it has to stop.

**Craig:** Not only do I hope that it stops immediately, but I think it’s probably valuable to outline a path for Scott Rudin to perform some reparations here. Because, look, it may be that somebody actually files criminal charges against him for physical abuse, and if that happens then he will be held accountable by the criminal justice system. However, in the absence of that because of statute of limitations or any other reason this is a very wealthy man. An extraordinarily wealthy man, because he’s an extraordinarily successful man.

And to add a little bit of a strange kind of quirk to this, he’s different than Harvey in this one particular regard – well, first of all, because he’s not necessarily being accused of sexual assault, but also Scott Rudin is brilliant. And he has remarkable taste. And Harvey was an idiot. I like to say “Harvey was” because I like to imagine that he’s not alive. It just makes me happy.

So, Harvey is dumb. Scott Rudin is brilliant and has tremendous taste. And so there is this world where you want him to be a good person, because he does participate and help create and bring into the world a lot of really interesting art. With all of his money it seems to me that he could perhaps take a moment and then just start giving it back to all of the people he hurt. Just start writing checks, Scott Rudin.

You can’t buy away pain. You can’t buy your way to a clean soul. This isn’t papal indulgence time. But you can do what you can do. And if I were advising Scott Rudin right now I would say, hey Scott, sell a bunch of stuff, get out your checkbook, and make things right between you and your god. Because you’ve hurt a lot of people. And he has.

**John:** Yeah. This idea of a reckoning is so different between the Weinstein situation because like there were actual crimes committed in the Weinstein situation. Like the criminal justice system was involved and it’s not clear that any crimes have been committed here. There was bad behavior. And it sort of goes back more towards the discussion we had a couple weeks ago talking about what do you do when everybody knows. Everybody know, there’s a whisper network saying this person is toxic, this person is bad. But it’s not at a level where there’s actual crime.

We’ve seen this in some cases where showrunners get ousted because they are not running their shows well and they’re being assholes to their staff. But in a weird way with Scott Rudin, there’s no person employing Scott Rudin. As the producer he’s the person who is coming in with the rights and running the show. And so it’s really a matter of people choosing not to work with Scott Rudin until there is some reckoning, some way to sort of address what’s happened here.

**Craig:** Which I think is almost certainly going to happen. The thing that keep people glued to abusive humans in this business is either the fact that they are relying on that person for their livelihood or they are afraid of what that person can do to them. If you are one person standing up and saying “I am Spartacus” you may get your head lopped off. If everybody stands up and says “I am Spartacus” no one is getting their head lopped off.

And right now I think finally everybody just stood up and said, “Enough already. We’re all Spartacus.” And at that point Scott Rudin is not capable of hurting, damaging, or destroying anyone’s career. So these other folks who have been afraid of him and what he could do I assume are no longer afraid. I hope they’re no longer afraid.

Obviously you and I aren’t afraid, because we’re saying all this stuff. We are not afraid of Scott Rudin, apparently.

**John:** Apparently.

**Craig:** If this show is off the air next week you’ll know why.

**John:** You’ll know why. I think a thing we can also do as people who make films and television is really look at the role to which we are glamorizing abusive bosses. And I think there is such an iconic role, you know, from the Miranda Priestlys, to sort of all the other asshole bosses. And where we sort of like, oh, they’re the kind of villain but we also kind of love them. Maybe we need to take a sharper look at sort of what we’re doing here. Because I think we might be sort of extending the cycle for these people to sort of stay in power.

Because it’s a belief that you’ve gotten the power because you were this power. And you stayed in power because you’re this person. And it’s OK because you are this person. We see this in politics as well. So maybe we need to really look at sort of our role in glamorizing this type of behavior.

**Craig:** Yeah. I feel like generally we are – we meaning Hollywood – a little bit behind the world. We tend to echo what we see in the world. We rarely create something, some new movement. But in a positive way I think the world has moved on a little bit from that idealized cliché.

I don’t think people want that anymore. I don’t think they want to see the romanticized vicious boss who brings out the best in you. It’s a little bit more like Whiplash where we say, oh, look, it’s the romanticized brilliant but abusive mentor that pulls the best out of you, and then we go, wow, actually we don’t like that guy at all and he’s no good. And he wasn’t. He was no good.

So, that seems like where we’ve evolved. But, yeah, you know, bad sign when your HR person is leaving in an ambulance due to a panic attack. That’s probably a red flag, right?

**John:** That’s never good. So, we’d all heard of Scott Rudin but until this week I had not heard of Zachary J. Horowitz.

**Craig:** Who?

**John:** So Zachary J. Horowitz was a smalltime actor. He was arrested this past Tuesday on federal charges that he ran a massive Ponzi scheme.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** He was defunding investors of $227 million.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** And he basically had all these make believe licensing deals with HBO and Netflix and other platforms. So, I was going to save this for a How Would This Be a Movie, but it’s also newsworthy and it’s also a chance for us to talk about licensing deals and sort of how this could possibly happen. But I will point everybody to the article. We’ll put a link in the show notes.

So this guy is a smalltime actor. Zach Avery was his acting name. And he just had small roles. And the classic cliché is you can’t get arrested in Hollywood. He was able to get arrested in Hollywood for defrauding $200 million worth of deals on movies that didn’t exist and were not going to exist. It’s just kind of fascinating that this could happen.

**Craig:** Wow. So I love a Ponzi scheme. I mean, I don’t like participating in them and I don’t like that they exist. I just enjoy reading stories about them because they’re fascinating. Like everybody knows the phrase Ponzi scheme. I think most people understand the vague idea of a Ponzi scheme. And yet people still keep falling for Ponzi schemes.

But in looking over this particular story it sounds like this guy was a bit more Madoff-y in his Ponzi scheme execution because he was fully forging emails from nonexistent HBO executives or Netflix executives. So he was running quite a scam.

But, I mean, OK, just a psychological question for you John. Do you enjoy the process of keeping a bunch of lies in the air?

**John:** I absolutely hate maintaining lies. And so talk about abusive bosses. Back in my days as an assistant I had a boss who was absolutely obsessed with just stirring up stuff and just would have all these lies going. And so as the assistant who was answering the phone I had to have a sense of like what his lies are so stuff wouldn’t get tripped up. And I hated it. I hated it so much. And I don’t know how people who lie a lot can sleep.

**Craig:** Yeah. This guy, I guess one way to explain it would be some sort of sociopathy. I don’t know if that’s what’s going on here. But the lies weigh on you to some point. Everybody lies a little bit, so every now and then you have to lie a lot. Sometimes you choose to lie for bad reasons. But, you know, this kind of full on massive lying, he took everyone’s money, told them that they were going to get 40% returns within a year, and then he turned around and bought a house for $6 million.

**John:** It’s a nice house. We can put a link to the Zillow.

**Craig:** It’s a nice place if you want to buy it.

**John:** It’s nice. It’s available.

**Craig:** Yeah, you can buy it. And so he knew at that moment it was never going to happen. That just seems crazy to me.

**John:** That’s the thing that I really do wonder about. Because if this were a protagonist in a story that we were writing you’d be like you know this can’t end well. There’s no way you’re going to get yourself out of it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** This isn’t going to be The Producers’ Springtime for Hitler where like suddenly something is going to happen [unintelligible]. No, no, you’re breaking the law and it was going to catch up with you.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like he said, OK, you’re going to give me a whole bunch of money. Like he told one investor you give me $750,000 for the distribution rights to a movie called Bitter Harvest, which is ironic, and that I will pay you back within six months. I’ll pay you back $1 million. Well that’s a pretty good deal.

**John:** That’s a good deal.

**Craig:** And he sent that investor an agreement between I guess himself and HBO to distribute the film in Africa and Latin America for three years. But the president of operations for HBO Latin American Holdings was not a person. He made it up. So he knew there was no way in six months he’s sending this guy $1 million. So I guess the deal with the Ponzi scheme is you find some other sucker, you tell that person–

**John:** You pull their money.

**Craig:** — I’m going to pay you back, and then you just send the first guy his money. Meanwhile this is your life now, just this sweaty – it seems like it’s worse than whatever your life was before.

**John:** Yeah. It’s challenging. So, I think part of the reason why he may have been able to do this for a time is that the way that small budget films get financed and sort of internationally financing and licensing deals is really complicated. And it does seem like backroom shenanigans magic to get all this stuff to happen. And in making this you’re not really kind of seeing the final film, or the promise of making this movie is so far off in the distance that it is all kind of a wild west market feel to it.

And so people who are not especially savvy who could get into it could say like, oh, well this is just how it works. And I could see people being gullible up to a point. But ultimately you’re going to be asking for your money and you’re going to be asking to see the finished movie. And you’re going to know that something is wrong.

**Craig:** Yeah. Eventually you will get caught. He has to know. I assume all these guys have to know they’re going to get caught. I mean, do these guys sit around going I know that every Ponzi scheme perpetrator in history has been caught, because the whole point of a Ponzi scheme is that it is untenable and will collapse. But I will be the first. I will be the first to get away with it. Is that what he thinks? Or is he just like this is going to be a wild ride for a couple years and then I’m going to prison?

**John:** My hunch is that you start small and it just sort of escalates and escalates. The avalanche sort of keeps building on itself. That’s my guess.

Because reading through the Bernie Madoff things it seems like he didn’t enter into it with the intention of sort of it getting as big as it did. He basically had to cover a float or something and then it just ratcheted up and up and up. So once you’re in you can’t get out.

**Craig:** Yeah. Once you’re in you can’t get out. I guess that’s true. So it’s a little bit like the non-business version is that movie Shattered Glass that Billy Ray did about–

**John:** Exactly. A small lie.

**Craig:** It just rolls.

**John:** And it escalates. Like if you’re faking one source. I actually tried to get a different set of rights for Shattered Glass and I wasn’t able to get it, so Billy Ray was able to make that movie.

**Craig:** He did a good job.

**John:** He did a good job. Good job, Billy Ray. Last week we talked about titles and we singled out some bad ones. Josh in Chicago writes in, “Quantum of Solace was actually the only remaining unused title of the Ian Fleming James Bond story titles. The other two are Bond in New York, which probably won’t be a great movie title, and the other is Property of a Lady which would have actually been kind of perfect for that movie, although I don’t hate Quantum of Solace. And it’s better than No Time to Die which sounds pretty lazy.”

**Craig:** Did Josh just “actually” us?

**John:** Yeah. And so I cut out the part of it – he did have a sentence in front of that question that says like “I hate to be the guy to ‘well actually’ you.”

**Craig:** OK, well he sees–

**John:** He recognized “well actually.”

**Craig:** I’m not sure that saying “I’m about to well actually you” gets you off the “well actually” hook. Although, it is interesting. I didn’t know that Quantum of Solace was an actual Fleming story. I will say that Quantum of Solace, that was a tough production because it happened during the writers’ strike, so there wasn’t really much of a script. There had been a script but it needed a lot of work. And then the writers’ strike happened and so Marc Forster was sort of forced to make that movie without a finished script and they kind of did the best they could.

If you don’t like Quantum of Solace, Marc Forster has made some terrific movies. He’s a really good guy, too. So if you don’t like that movie I think it’s probably just good evidence that writers are important. I think he would probably be the first person to tell you that as well. But No Time to Die is – I just refuse to call anything in the movie business lazy, even titles.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Everything is exhausting in movies. Everything. Everything just takes sweat and energy and time and thought, even the stuff that you think is lazy or looks lazy as far as I can tell. Even Zachary J. Horowitz was working hard.

**John:** He was working hard.

**Craig:** He was working harder than we do.

**John:** Zach Horowitz was working really hard for that $227 million.

**Craig:** That guy was sweating.

**John:** Yeah. I like the title No Time to Die. You don’t have to like that title. It reminds me of A View to a Kill. It reminds of The Spy Who Loved Me. It just feels like, oh, there’s some danger in the title. It’s great. Property of a Lady is not a James Bond title. That is some sort of E.M. Forster adaptation. And Bond in New York is not–

**Craig:** Yeah, Property of a Lady is a very odd title. I agree. I guess that’s why it is the – Bond in New York sounds like a comedy. It just sounds like a goofy film. And then Property of a Lady also sounds like a lesbian romance, or maybe like a bondage film. See, there’s a bondage-ness into it, like property.

**John:** Bound in New York, but Bond in New York. Sure.

**Craig:** Bound in New York. Property of a Lady. This is a good – you know, we should just get E.L. James on it. You’re right.

**John:** So this conversation is making me excited to see the James Bond movie in a theater which I’ll be able to do, which is great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I’m sorry that movie got pushed back more than a year, but I’ll get to see that movie.

**Craig:** You know, I love Bond. I do. I love me some Bond.

**John:** Now several people wrote in about the new entry in the mockable IP category, which is the Peeps Movie.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** They’re making a Peeps Movie. And I’m going to just say I think an animated Peeps Movie is not as terrible of an idea as it could be because Peeps have faces. They don’t have much of a face, but they do have faces and they are animals. So I can imagine a Peeps Movie existing in the same way that an Angry Birds movie was surprisingly successful.

**Craig:** That’s the new bar? It has a face? [laughs]

**John:** Does it have a face? I mean, Slinky had no face.

**Craig:** No. Mr. Clean has a face.

**John:** Mr. Clean has a face. He’s got a handsome face.

**Craig:** Handsome.

**John:** There’s a demographic that will absolutely show up for a Mr. Clean face, Mr. Clean Movie.

**Craig:** That’s right. When you like sort of like pretty well built older daddies.

**John:** Yul Brynner types.

**Craig:** Yeah. With the earring. He’s saucy. Listen, the Peeps Movie, that’s silly. But, you know, if they do a good job and it’s funny, I mean, this is – I think you and I have said this before. This is one of the great plagues that Chris Miller and Phil Lord have visited upon the world is making a brilliant movie about Legos and so everyone is like, see, Legos was good. Well, if you have Chris and Phil it’s pretty great. Otherwise you’ve just got a Peep. You have a very poor grade quasi marshmallow snack that almost no one likes.

**John:** Yeah. No one really cares for–

**Craig:** No one wants a Peep.

**John:** But I have to say I’m impressed by the Peeps Company because they really went out all out this Easter. You got that Peep Pepsi promo. You got this happening. Whoever is doing their marketing and sort of their brand management just really deserves some money. I hope it’s not Zachary Horowitz.

**Craig:** Well now I am rooting for Zachary Horowitz. I want Zachary Horowitz to go into business with Scott Rudin.

**John:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** Like Scott Rudin, there’s only one guy that’s willing to work with him and it’s Zachary Horowitz.

**John:** I mean, it’s just like you want to see Kong vs. Godzilla but it would just be Kong versus a paper bag.

**Craig:** Jerk vs. Dickzilla. I’m down. Let’s do it.

**John:** So good. All right, let’s move onto our main topic today which is that project you’re not writing. It came to me because this week I’m nearly finished, I’m surprisingly nearly finished, with this script I’ve been working on for a very long time. And I’ve said before on the podcast because I write out of sequence the ending has been done for a while and so I’ve been working on these middle parts and this week I realized, oh wow, I only have like four scenes left to write. And it’s like that’s exciting.

But it got me thinking about all the other things I’m kind of working on, or that might be the next thing I start to write. And we haven’t talked very much about how you think about the things that are sort of on your maybe to write plate and sort of how you work through those.

And, Craig, I’m curious right now obviously you’re so focused on The Last of Us, but in the constellation of Craig Mazin how many little planets are spinning around, other things you could be writing?

**Craig:** Great question. Let’s take a look at my folder called Scripts in Progress. That’s the folder where it’s like stuff that is in progress or should be in progress or will be in progress. I have very clearly two other things that I’m thinking about for – sorry, three, three – three things that I’m thinking about for the immediate post-The Last of Us future.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** And I guess one of them would also be The Last of Us if we earn our way to more seasons of The Last of Us.

**John:** And are those features, are they TV? What are they?

**Craig:** Oh, my friend, it’s all television now.

**John:** It’s all television now.

**Craig:** Oh yes.

**John:** Now, in addition to those I’m certain you have other projects that are sort of like they’re little fireflies in your brain that are sort of like, oh, at some point I could write that. Do you have a system for keeping track of those other things that are sort of like, oh, you know what about a movie like this? Do you have a way to track those?

**Craig:** My system generally is at some point I will mention something to someone, whether it’s an actor, or an executive, or somebody and they’ll say, oh, yeah, let’s do that. And I say, great, I’m really sorry I mentioned that because I actually have this other show I have to do right now. And they’re like that’s OK. When you’re ready let’s talk about it. And I say great. And then every now and then they’re like…and I go thank you. You’re right.

And I want to do it. So the reminder system is oddly other people. If I mention something and nobody else wants to remind me about it, nah, maybe it’s not that good.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Maybe it’s just like, meh, nobody seems to care about that. So, other people bug me about it which is good. And then I have a couple of things that I’m bugging myself about just because I know I really want to do them but they’re very ambitious, they’re very long, large aircraft carriers. And so I need to kind of know that I have the time for that. And it’s hard to contemplate those things right now just because I am in the middle of building an aircraft carrier.

**John:** You’ve got to launch that aircraft carrier soon.

**Craig:** I’ve got to launch it. Yeah, it’s like that thing from The Avengers. It’s like an aircraft carrier that also flies.

**John:** Flies, yeah, exactly. Really under-addressed in The Avengers universe is like, wait, how does that thing work? It’s like these giant fans that somehow keep the whole thing? If we have the technology to do that then there’s more things we should be able to do.

**Craig:** There’s so many problems with physics in the – like there’s a moment, I think it’s the first Avengers movie where Robert Downey Jr. gets thrown out of the top floor of his building by Loki. And he’s falling from a skyscraper and his suit catches up to him and links itself onto him. And he blasts his arm blasters at the ground to stop from falling. And there are people right under it.

**John:** Yeah. [laughs]

**Craig:** Now straight up they should be destroyed. Just simple equal and opposite reaction. They should be destroyed. But they’re fine. It’s outrageous.

**John:** I mean, Tony Stark’s suit, we get a lot of discretion for it because obviously he’s still a human being inside the suit, so if it’s traveling at these remarkable speeds he would just be jelly at a certain point. It would crush him.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, inertia would be such that it’s the acceleration that kills him.

**John:** Yeah. Acceleration.

**Craig:** So, yes, some of the accelerations are so fast that, correct, he would absolutely – well, first, he would pass out completely. But, yeah, there would be compression of his spinal cord. It would be horrible.

**John:** But no one wants to see that movie.

**Craig:** No. I mean, he stops on a dime and you’re absolutely right. The inside of that suit, everything should be liquefied.

**John:** Just pouring out of the bottom.

**Craig:** Right. And then they open it up, they crack it open, and it’s just goo drips out. Oh god.

**John:** Yeah. Like one of those mummy sarcophagi.

**Craig:** Yeah. We need a physically correct Avengers, which would be about three or four minutes long, because almost all of them would die immediately.

**John:** Yeah. So that will not be on my maybe to write list, but it could be. So, I was looking through what’s in my head of things that could be the next thing to write. And it’s a long list. What I do is, I’ve talked before about my daily lists, my little sort of daily cheat sheets. Which is every day I sort of fill out this is what I need to do today. And on those preprinted sheets I do have a list of like these are the other things that are sort of kind of in development in my head.

So they include one picture book, which could also become an animated movie. Two middle grade novels, but not the size of an Arlo Finch, so not another trilogy. One biography. A movie adaptation of an off-Broadway show. A new Broadway show based on existing songs. The Shadows, which is that movie that I still hope to direct at some point, but it needs some rewriting. A rewrite of an old screenplay that Craig has read that has a great title but needs a lot of work. A series adaptation of a short story I wrote.

**Craig:** Jesus.

**John:** An animated series based on rights I control. The adaptation of Arlo Finch.

**Craig:** God.

**John:** A moderately budgeted sci-fi thing that sort of feels like a Charlie Kaufman movie.

**Craig:** What the?

**John:** And an expensive, really expensive monster movie. Sort of like a Legendary kind of movie.

**Craig:** Wow, Megana,

**John:** Megana.

**Craig:** Megana, I think you might need to start buying John cocaine. [laughs] He needs cocaine. He’s not going to make it through without cocaine.

**John:** And what’s crazy is I actually had to give up caffeine, so I don’t even have caffeine in my body anymore to do this.

**Craig:** Oh good lord. Well you’re not doing any of that.

**John:** I’m not doing any of that.

**Craig:** I don’t know who you’re fooling. You just read a list.

**John:** But if I could clone myself I would assign one of me to each of these projects and it would be great. And I would be just so productive. But I’m only one person.

**Craig:** You know, you are only one person. And I’m struggling with this all the time. As we get older and older you start to realize that the time that you have is limited. The time that you have just in total is limited. And then also how much time am I going to spend on this as opposed to on things I like.

**John:** Yeah. The opportunity cost.

**Craig:** Right. There are opportunity costs. And I do remind myself sometimes that one of the reasons I was ambitious was to get to a place where I could enjoy things in life that I didn’t have an opportunity to enjoy when I was younger. Well, OK, then if you get there and you don’t actually enjoy any of them then, you know, it’s not as much fun. You’ve got to give yourself a little bit of celebration.

**John:** Absolutely. So, let’s talk through the framework of thinking about these ideas, these projects, and helping to decide which ones you’re going to write. Because obviously we’re in a certain place in our careers where we could do a lot of these things, but really any writer probably has a constellation of ideas and they’re picking sort of which one I’m going to do next.

And so let’s talk through some ways of thinking about which one to write next. So, my first and obvious question I ask all the time, is this a project you would actually pay money to see or to buy? Is this a thing that if you were just a consumer you would say like, oh yes, I want this thing? Because if it’s not it’s not worth your time.

**Craig:** It is not worth your time. You have to be very, well, you kind of got to be weirdly judgy with yourself.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You can’t do all of it. You just can’t. And there are things that I think are tempting because they seem like they would be super fun, or super cool. And then you have to just go through the process in your mind. Imagine yourself on page 63. Or imagine yourself on episode four of seven. How do you feel?

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And if you don’t feel good with that thought experiment…

**John:** Yeah. Some projects I regretted writing, I’m thinking back to an ABC pilot I did. It was called The Circle when we shot it and Alaska when they sort of put it up. And I wrote the pilot. We shot the pilot. It was all really quick and easy. And I never sort of stopped to think, wait, would I actually want to write this show every week? Do I actually run this show?

And it was just kind of a waste of time. I think I was doing it because I had the opportunity to do it. And it was clear I could sell a show, I could set up a show, I could write a show, I could shoot a show. I was sort of doing it to prove that I could do it, or that I could do something that was kind of down the middle and sort of like a straight procedural. And it was the wrong thing for me to be spending my time on. And so I wish I would have asked that kind of question ahead of time. Because it wasn’t the kind of show that I would have tuned in to watch honestly.

**Craig:** Well that’s an important thing. And there are times when you take a little bit of a leap of faith. You think I don’t know if I’m going to like this or not until I do it, so let’s just do it and see.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** But definitely if you think to yourself I don’t actually want to watch this, then – I mean, listen, I got put through the ringer making spoof movies.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I love spoof movies. And I really enjoyed the stuff that worked that was the stuff that we wanted to do that Bob didn’t ruin. I love that. And so even though it was miserable, at least I could go but this made me laugh so much. Just sitting there watching Regina Hall and Anna Faris doing what they do. I would laugh so hard. So there was a joy there.

And then there are things I’ve worked on where everyone was super nice, very pleasant, and I was bored to death.

**John:** Yeah. I have been there as well.

So, in that introspection asking why you’re doing this thing, two questions have come up. If what’s inspiring me to do it is sort of the question why has no one made this movie before, that’s not enough of a reason. So that is trying to complete the universe and have this movie exist because it doesn’t exist yet, that’s not enough of a thing. I’ve also found myself of sort of grudge writing. Where like someone will piss me off and say that I couldn’t write a certain thing and therefore I will decide like well therefore I have to write this thing.

There’s a movie I wrote called Fury which never sold as a spec. And it was really just because I was so angry at what had happened on the second Charlie’s Angels that I really wanted to write something that was dark, and mean, and really wasn’t me, but just sort of reflected this mood I was having. And it was the wrong thing to write and just a waste of time.

**Craig:** Yeah. When somebody tells me I can’t write something my general response is you’re probably right. [laughs] And then I don’t write it. So, I think that’s probably less healthy than your instinct which is to say I’ll show you. Because I think oftentimes you can show people.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But your point is well taken. Revenge is really just another kind of – it’s another side of the pride coin. And preserving pride or making somebody – because the other person who said that you can’t write a thing, and then you go write a thing, they forgot already. They forgot three seconds after they said it.

**John:** McG wasn’t sort of like the one, oh, I’ll really get him when I say this. Like, no, that wasn’t what was happening there.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, it’s like you spend all this time doing it and then the movie comes out and then you find that person at the premiere and you’re like, yeah, how about me now? And they’re like, yeah, that was great. I loved it. Terrific. And you’re like, wait, what?

**John:** What?

**Craig:** You said I couldn’t do it. What? I did. Oh, Jesus, I don’t know, I must have been having a weird day.

Anyway, you just spent three years trying to prove me wrong. That’s a weird move.

**John:** Yeah, self-own there.

Ask yourself what is interesting about the idea. Is it the world situation or is it the character? And if it’s the world situation and not the character you’re going to really struggle. It has to be about that character and sort of unique situations that they find themselves in that story. Because you can’t write a space, a cinematic space. You have to write characters. And make sure you’re really doing that.

What Craig said about you may discover while you’re doing it sort of how stuff fits together. Great. But then maybe that means you need to spend a couple days working on a little part of it and seeing what it actually feels like under your fingers. Because nothing will reveal the problems in an idea more than actually trying to write it.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a great line from a very early article that Dennis Palumbo wrote, he of our Episode 99, when he used to write a column for Written By, the Writers Guild Magazine. He said that a lot of times there are these lines of dialogue that we are so desperate to keep not because they’re good but because they meant something to us when we wrote them. They were evidence to ourselves that were a certain kind of writer. And that syndrome can spread to even the choice of what to write. I want to be a certain kind of writer. I want to be seen a certain kind of way. Or I don’t want to be seen a certain way.

All of that stuff is actually quite artificial to what’s good. And if you can ask yourself among the various things you want to do which feels true to me, that has nothing to do with what anybody else would think or feel, but rather what I want, what I truly want, you kind of need that. And if you have that you can maybe get rid of the other ones.

And then the ones that you have that you feel are true and not about making a point or anything, then give yourself the opportunity to fail. Because you might. You might get halfway through and go, oh man, you know what? I wanted so hard to do this. Truly and honestly. I just can’t. No problem. You tried. No big deal.

**John:** You tried.

**Craig:** Right. But, you know, you’ll only find out if you try.

**John:** One last thing about this list of projects that are sort of in your head is that it’s important to remember that Craig was checking in a folder to see what those things were, but our brains don’t work like folders or like shelves. The only way ideas sort of stay in our heads is by rehearsal. And so every once and a while they have to come up and they take up some brain cycles to do a thing. And that can be good and sometimes when you’re sort of rethinking through an idea it can mutate and morph and become a bigger thing. And so doing a periodic review of them can be useful because you may think like, oh, I didn’t know how to do that before but I do know how to do this now.

A situation I encountered when I did The Nines is I had these three different ideas that were competing for attention in my head. One was about an actor under house arrest. One was about what happened when I was on the first TV show I did with Dick Wolf. And the third was sort of this forest mystery. And they sort of combined and ganged up on me and said like, wait, wait, wait, we’re all the same idea. And they found a way to sort of take up more brain cycles by stitching themselves together to be one idea. So, I think it is important to just occasionally go back through your list and see what is it about those things that were interesting to you. Is there something that’s interesting to you about them now that you have the ability to do them that you didn’t have before?

**Craig:** And don’t be afraid to let it go. It’s not quitting.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** It’s maybe a sense of shame like am I just not doing this because I’m, and here’s that word again, lazy. Or am I not doing it because I’m afraid? That may be true. Or it may be true that you’ve changed. Or you’ve just lost interest. That happens.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, in some ways it’s analogous to our situation in the US with vaccines. We have so many vaccines that it’s like, wow, it’s so great that we have three vaccines that work. And I see people who are panicking trying to decide between the three vaccines. You don’t have to decide between the three vaccines. Get a vaccine. They’re all good.

**Craig:** First one they can put in your arm. Take that one.

**John:** Take that one. All right. Let’s get to some listener questions.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Megana Rao, our producer, could you come onboard and talk to us about the questions we got in the mailbag this week?

**Megana Rao:** Hey guys. OK, great. So Tanner asks, “I have a question about something I read in a Hollywood Reporter article. They said a project was shut down indefinitely with a source saying that it ‘suffered from script issues.’ Mind you, this is the only time the actual person responsible for the existence of this project is even referred to. So my real question is what is really happening behind the scenes that results in a ‘source’ saying that a movie ‘suffers from script issues?’”

**John:** Oh Tanner. Thank you for asking this question.

**Craig:** Great question Tanner.

**John:** And it really is a good question.

**Craig:** Lies. Lies, Tanner.

**John:** Lies. OK, so here’s what happened. At some point there was a script that most people agreed on. Like OK we’re going into production with this. Maybe we’re going to make some tweaks. And then something went wrong and people involved in the movie have a different idea about what the movie should be. And it is not the screenwriter’s fault. The screenwriter didn’t do a bad job. It is that the people who are making the movie, including the stars, the actors, the studio can’t agree what the movie is and they’re calling it “script problems” but it’s really “we don’t know what this movie is problems.”

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a little odd that a movie studio would agree to make a movie to the point that it would have to be shut down if that movie was based on a script that had script issues that were sufferable. It is so easy to blame a document. It’s hard to blame people, right? The director has a drug problem. The director and the actor started having sex. There was an actor that quit in the middle. Somebody got fired and then a new person was hired and said, “I don’t want to make this movie.”

There’s a billion human reasons why suddenly something just stops. It may be that everybody sat around and said we want to make this movie, but we know that – we all love the idea, we just don’t like the script. Let’s see if we can fix the script, and then we can’t, and then it gets shut down. That can happen.

But a lot of times when you read this it’s just somebody blaming a document for a human problem that occurred.

**John:** Yeah. It could be a bunch of problems as well. They couldn’t get this movie to be made at a certain price and so they’re saying the script was too expensive. Well, it’s not the script. It’s that you couldn’t find a way to do this. And sometimes movies kind of get put on a track to production when there’s the assumption that like we’re going to figure it out when the time comes, and you don’t really figure it out. Or people don’t come to the same point and same place. And it’s blamed on the script, but it’s really not the script’s problem.

And Craig and I have both been in situations where we’re doing emergency rewriting on projects we’re just being thrown into and when you come in as a new writer on those projects you say, oh, this is not about the script. This is about people’s visions for what this is supposed to be. And I am just – you’re paying me a lot of money not really just for my words but for my ability to withstand the pressure in this room.

**Craig:** Yeah. And oftentimes there’s a lot of Hollywood politics at play that make it easiest to just say “script problems.” If you’re running a studio and you’ve agreed to make a movie with a big super star actress. And then as you’re walking through this thing you decide, you know what, I just actually don’t want to make this movie with her. I don’t like her. And I don’t like her in this process. But I can’t fire her. And the reason why is because she’s represented by this massive agent at this huge agency that is also representing four other people that I’m currently in business with and I really don’t want to screw that stuff up.

So let me just kill this movie and blame it on the script. That sort of thing happens all the time. So, when they say that it suffered from script issues all you can know for sure is that the screenwriter was the least powerful person involved.

**John:** Yeah. So right now they’re in production on the movie version of Uncharted, the great videogame. That movie has been in development for ten years. I know so many people who worked on that thing.

**Craig:** Longer I think.

**John:** Yeah. And I guarantee you there are many terrific, terrific Uncharted scripts. So, it was never the scripts that were the problem. It was just they couldn’t get all the elements together. And so at any point you say, oh, we could never get the script right. But it’s like, no, you could never get all the things together and you’re going to blame the script.

So I hope that movie is great. But they could have made that movie a zillion times if they had the right combination of elements.

**Craig:** It’s the combination of things, right? Because sometimes you have a script that you love and then you have a director that you love and an actor you love, except none of them agree. And so you go, all right, what do you agree on? Well, we want it to be more like this. All right. Well let’s move that script aside and let’s bring a new script in. OK, well that script they like but now the studio is like but we don’t really like this script. So, OK, let’s get rid of this actor. The actor is gone anyway. They had an availability issue. We need a new actor. And now the director is gone. They’re going to do different things. We need a new director.

And this dance begins again. And I would argue that part of the problem with film development and these projects being shut down and this sort of endless development cycle is simply this. The writer is not in charge. And when the writer is in charge this doesn’t happen. They don’t have television shows that are developed over the course of 12 years. It just doesn’t happen. They either make it or they don’t.

Because the writer writes it and that’s the vision that matters. And then everybody else comes onboard or doesn’t. But it doesn’t matter. Somebody is going to come onboard and they will make the show. I don’t understand why – I don’t understand why the feature business is the way it is. And I was in it forever.

We need another question. Yeah, Megana.

**John:** Please, another question.

**Craig:** Another question, Megana.

**John:** Let’s get Craig out of his funk.

**Craig:** Megana, bring us another question.

**Megana:** OK, well this one comes from David from Vancouver, British Columbia, and he asks, “When you’re outlining a movie when do you zero in on what the tone will be? Or is the tone something you discover while writing the screenplay? You’ve talked about clichés that trap writers before on the podcast. But how do writers get unstuck from tonal clichés? For example, the heist movie where everyone is witty and cool, or the gritty thriller where the deaths are raw and shocking.”

**John:** Hmm.

**Craig:** You have done Vancouver proud, sir. That’s an excellent question.

**John:** To me, the tone of what it’s going to feel like comes before I’ve written anything down. The initial vision of what kind of movie it is we’re making, that tone is just really baked in from the start there. It’s what it’s going to feel like. And that comes really, really early on.

I’ve said this on the podcast many times before, but with the first Charlie’s Angels it was just – we got tone first, which is basically in a meeting with me and Drew and Amy Pascal, describing what the movie felt like and who the girls were and sort of what the spirit of it was well before we got into plot or outline of story.

**Craig:** I’m the same way. Because so much of what needs to happen precedentially before I can start writing is the determination of character and point or purpose of show or movie. Tone seems to me to be essential to that. I don’t know how I can determine who the character is and what this thing is about if I don’t understand the tone. And it’s just as important to know what the tone isn’t.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** A lot of times I feel like part of my job is being able to explain to other people what I am not going to do. Because everybody’s mind goes in interesting squirrelly directions. And people are constantly drawing on the things that they are familiar with to try and help to find something that they are not yet familiar with.

So, there’s no way I can go forward until I know basically what the tone is. It can evolve. Just as the outline of the story can evolve as you’re writing. And you will find some things. And you will be able to go backwards and change some things here and there. And you will never be able to be tonally perfectly consistent on a first draft.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** As you go forward you will be able to then go back to those early pages and say, ah, I know more now than I did then. Let me adjust. This line is too broad. This is too indicative. This is too subtle. This is the space where this is supposed to be much funnier and that just feels very dramatic.

But, you sort of need to know beforehand. And, David, you’re saying a great thing which is how do I not do for instance the heist movie where everyone is witty or cool. Here’s how. By saying I’m not doing the heist movie where everyone is witty or cool. I know what it is, so I’m not going to do it. At all. There you go. You’ve done it.

**John:** Yeah. And I would say it’s a cliché to do the it’s this movie meets this movie, but one thing that’s useful about, you know, it’s Ocean’s 11 meets Mrs. Doubtfire. That gives you a sense of what tone you’re sort of headed for. And so even if you can’t perfectly articulate in a sentence this is what the tone of the movie is, you have to have a feel inside. This is how the characters are going to be acting. This is sort of the colors of this world. And so being able to think that way is really important.

And if you don’t have the ability to describe that tone you’re probably not really ready to write anything quite yet.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** All right, now Megana, I see this question on the Workflowy. I’m excited to get to it, but it’s also long. So I would just say do your breathing exercises because it’s a long one to read. But I’m excited to hear it.

**Craig:** And do it all in one breath. [laughs]

**Megana:** Oops wrote in and she’s asked, “I think I’ve got a crush on one of my producers. I really, really don’t want this to be a thing, but dammit I think it is. We’ve been working on a film together these past couple of years and have gotten along like a house on fire. I should point out that he’s not my big boss, just part of the team. The film has just been green lit and the mutual appreciation of each other has just kind of grown, a lot, and quickly.

“Like other folks have started to notice. We’re both professionals with credits and what not, but we’re also both in the earlier stages of our careers. I suspect the last thing anyone wants is to put a foot out of line, especially given the power imbalance and the fact that, you know, we have to work together. I want to add nothing untoward or inappropriate has happened or been said. It’s all so wonderfully respectful, which obviously makes me like him more.

“You know when you just know someone feels the same way? But is this like a thing? I was in a long term relationship up until 18 months ago, so I’ve never really dealt with anything like this in my career before. I’ve heard all about the on-set romances of friends and colleagues, so is this just the hype of getting a film set up? Is it my ego being inflated by the fact that he seems to be really into my brain? Or am I just being a dumb teenage girl with a crush again after some heartbreak? Could it be something real?

“And more to the point, what do we do about it? If we decide to shag like bunnies we have to wait until after the wrap, right? Please help.”

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** Let’s tell Oops exactly what to do. You know who needs to help here?

**John:** Oh god no. Sexy Craig cannot make an appearance here.

**Craig:** Oops, I did it again.

**John:** Before Sexy Craig weighs in here I will say, I’m going to be Rational John. And Rational John is going to say I Googled it, I looked it up. So one-third of married couples meet online in 2021. But of those who do not meet online, nearly 22% met through work. 19% through friends. 9% at a bar or club. And just 4% at church. So, you know, this could be your soulmate. This could be the person you’re supposed to be with and don’t discount that. Don’t run away from love.

Your correct in trying to put some limits on it at least while you’re in production, because you are going in to do this big job and it is going to be awkward if you are trying to date while you’re doing this thing. But you know what? I think you’re in love. And I don’t think it’s necessarily a problem.

**Craig:** Well, you don’t know if you’re in love yet.

**John:** No. And I should say that. You have pre-love right now anyway right here. You have possible love. And don’t run away from possible love.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’ve got hormones. You’ve got the madness swirling in your brain. We’ve all had the madness swirling in our brain. It’s wonderful.

**John:** I love the madness swirling in the brain. It’s good stuff.

**Craig:** It’s great. It’s also dangerous. But I agree with John. Look, you’re an adult. And the producer is an adult. You mentioned that there is a power imbalance, but you also point out that he’s not your “big boss, just part of the team.” So I would argue that the power imbalance is not massive. This isn’t somebody that theoretically is going to be able to hire you/fire you in that moment. They’re not your direct supervisor per se. And I think that adults are allowed to get into each other. And adults are allowed to have relationships. And like John said when you work together that’s going to happen. I would hate to think that we have become so terrified of violating that we don’t take advantage of mutual affection. That’s what keeps the world going.

It can also, listen, as we all know it can also collapse. And sometimes people reveal themselves to be horrible once you get to know them. But I want to be optimistic here. Because, you know, I met somebody, John met somebody, people meet people, and then you fall in love and it works. You might be having – first of all, when you say “am I just being a dumb teenage girl with a crush again after some heartbreak,” I don’t know how old you are now, Oops, but that actually never changes. Like I’m still a dumb teenage girl with a crush again after some heartbreak. We all are. It never changes.

We’re all just – our bodies get older, but we are all in our minds always a child. So, yeah, that may be part of it. Or, he may be the guy. And my advice is to maybe tiptoe up toward it, because you want to avoid is going, OK, I know that we both feel this week, but let’s just wait until after wrap. And then he goes, “I’m sorry, we feel what way?” [laughs] “Oh no, no, no, I don’t feel that way about you at all.”

And then that would be awkward. And you can kind of tiptoe up to it.

**John:** Yeah. Or you can say like, hey, how about when we wrap we go out for a dinner, just the two of us.

**Craig:** Right. Or if that feels a little formal given what’s going on, you can be like, OK, can we just talk about what’s up? What’s up? What are we doing? Help me out here because I’m trying to figure out what we’re doing. And then you can put a boundary down and say, listen, here’s the story. Let’s make it through this production and then, you know, then yeah, let’s see what happens. And then that will only make things – by the way, I guarantee you, side note, if he’s like, “Yes, I am into you. You’re into me. I agree we should wait until after wrap,” you guys will be in bed within three days.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just going to happen. Because once you both agree that you’re eventually going to sleep together–

**John:** Yeah, once you set the limits you’re going to both blow your limits together.

**Craig:** It’s like, OK, John, you and I are going to order a pizza.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** But we’re going to order a pizza like next week. And then you’re like, uh-huh. And then the two of us are just like pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza. So, I think, Oops, that you should remind yourself that even though you might feel like a teenage girl you are an adult. You are an adult. You are your own human being who deserves to love and be loved. And you should not be afraid. You should just be aware and alert. And it seems like you certainly are.

**John:** Yeah. I would also say the fact that she’s known him over a course of years of development and liked him over this time is a good sign, too. Because when I see on-set romances that are doomed it’s because it’s happened in this hot house of production where people work these crazy hours and they basically see no one else.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s like you’re trapped on Survivor and you have like a showmance.

**Craig:** A showmance.

**John:** It’s a showmance really. And this doesn’t feel like a showmance. First off, you’re being fully rational in what you’re writing here. And it’s happened outside of production. So, I have hope here. I think you’re making the right choices. I would encourage you to just note all your feelings, because these are great feelings and you’re going to use them in your writing.

And also just congratulations on your movie going into production.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is exciting. I hope something wonderful happens here.

**John:** And if wonderful things happen, Oops, please do write back in with an update.

**Craig:** Megana, how did we do there? What do you think?

**Megana:** OK, because I do have a follow up question because I feel like some of the advice was–

**Craig:** Wrong.

**Megana:** Well, no. But just to be clear we’re telling Oops to not have this conversation until production wraps, right?

**John:** No. I think we’re saying – my pitch was to have the conversation now is like, hey, how about when we wrap we go out and have a dinner, you and me.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I’m saying a similar thing. Like now she should say, listen, I feel like something is going on here. I don’t know if there is. But if there is let’s just talk about it and let’s maybe if this is something that feels like – like if you feel the way I feel, let’s just agree to hit pause until we wrap. And then, you know, let’s go have a drink and see where it goes.

**Megana:** Hmm.

**Craig:** Megana is like, no, no, no.

**John:** I want to know what Megana is thinking. Tell us.

**Craig:** Megana is like I hate both of you. I quit.

**Megana:** No, not at all. I’m just – like a part of this is the forbidden aspect. And I wonder like – I don’t know if she should just continue – it’s just so fun like reading this whole question was super fun. And I’m pitching that she should just let this tension ride out.

**Craig:** Oh my god. You’re a sicko. I love it.

**John:** I get, so in some ways it’s that sense of like the thrill of the tension and the thrill of the possibility might be more enticing than the actual what could happen there.

**Megana:** Right. I feel like having an adult conversation, I just wonder if that’s going to like suck all of the air out of this crush.

**Craig:** Ruin it. OK. I like where Megana is going with this. See, you know what? It’s a good point, because you don’t want to clinical this thing, right? You don’t want to be an HR person about it.

**John:** No. No.

**Craig:** Right? So, I get what you’re saying. Maybe, ok, so then the other possibility, this is so much fun, the other possibility is just go for it. Just go for it. Because like honestly, again, we’re adults.

**Megana:** No, I think my advice is more like, you know, that sort of like Victorian romance–

**John:** Don’t say a thing.

**Megana:** Yeah, like did he look at me?

**Craig:** But then nothing ever happens.

**Megana:** Well, until after production.

**Craig:** Oh, you mean like so just keep the flirty, thinky like maybe/maybe not/maybe/maybe not. How long is the production? That’s what I want to know. [laughs]

**John:** Indeed. Craig, it’s The Last of Us, and so it’s going to be a long–

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** It’s going to be another eight months.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** So I’m thinking back to college and I started flirting the woman who was the student body president. And we would sort of exchange notes in each other’s mailboxes, like literal physical mailboxes in the office. And it was so exciting to sort of be in that space.

**Craig:** Oh my god. True.

**John:** That’s so fun.

**Craig:** It’s true.

**John:** Yeah. And I don’t think Oops is going to be able to resist how compelling that is.

**Craig:** Oh, but you know what? Now I want to tell a story about a crush that I had. So, there was a girl named Sima, I won’t say her last name, because now she’s a lady and lives somewhere I assume and has a life. I don’t want to blow her up on a podcast. But it was like a summer thing. And I met her, we were in a summer academic program. Because nerds.

**John:** Nerds.

**Craig:** And this was in the ‘80s and we were on a college campus and they had like a little computer lab where you could type messages to each other on this computer using Unix commands. This was like pre-AOL and pre-everything. And we would just send each other messages. And I could, I mean, I was so head over heels for Sima. It was unbelievable.

And she professed that she was the same for me. But very like the most chaste relationship I think I’ve ever had in my life. She was very proper and very we’re not going to do stuff because I’m a lady. And I was like I respect that.

And it was very Victorian. It was. And it was very much like I will send you letter through the future. And it was wonderful. And then, you know, you go your separate ways because that program ends and I wonder where she is today. Anyway, oh my god, boy, she was, oh. She was beautiful.

And, I don’t know if my wife is going to listen to this podcast.

**John:** Does your wife usually listen to Scriptnotes?

**Craig:** I don’t think so. But you know what? Literally I was 16 years old. I was 16.

**John:** You’re forgiven.

**Craig:** I’m forgiven.

**John:** And you got married just shortly thereafter.

**Craig:** I got married like nine years later actually. Or ten years later. But, man, Sima. Boy, am I just like, I couldn’t have been more in love. But, I was a child. We were children. Oops is not a child.

**John:** Oops is not a child. Megana, so let’s say Oops were a friend of yours. What advice would you give her?

**Megana:** I would say enjoy the flirt. Have fun. I wouldn’t, I don’t know, I wouldn’t have this conversation until after production. I just think it’s such a gift. I don’t know, to me this feels like the most fun part of a relationship, this period where you don’t know what the other person is thinking and that excitement. Why wouldn’t you prolong that?

**Craig:** Because you got to get somewhere, man.

**John:** Yeah.

**Megana:** Maybe I’m just revealing my own personal character.

**John:** But also I think maybe – the age difference may be a part of this, too. Because Craig and I are at a place where we can’t wait forever. And you’re in your 20s. You can wait a little longer.

**Craig:** We’re almost dead. [laughs]

**John:** We’re nearly dead, so everything has to happen right now. That meeting can’t be pushed off till Friday because I might not be alive on Friday.

**Craig:** My god, I’m running out of time. That’s true. Megana, you’re younger. You can be like, you know what, I just want to flirt for a year. And we’re like a year? I won’t be here.

**Megana:** I do think no matter what we say it seems like there’s enough momentum here that her relationship is just going to move forward in one of these directions.

**Craig:** I hope so. I mean, I root for love.

**John:** I would urge Oops to take any of our three pieces of advice and please to write in with an update when it goes so well. Because we’re all rooting for you.

**Craig:** Send wedding pictures.

**John:** Ooh, that would be so nice.

**Craig:** I love a wedding.

**John:** Megana, thank you for your questions and for your epic reading a very long question there. So thank you for that.

**Megana:** Thank you guys.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is an article by Peter S. Ungar called Why We Have So Many Problems with Our Teeth from Scientific American. And, Craig, what were teeth originally? On evolutionary terms where did teeth come from?

**Craig:** Oh, well, where did they come from? Like why did they happen in the first place?

**John:** Why did they happen? Fish originally did not have teeth.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because teeth were soft. I assume because animals evolved exoskeletons to prevent from being eaten and so in a competitive fashion other animals evolved bits of bone that would crush through those exoskeletons.

**John:** Yeah. But teeth are not actually bits of bone. Teeth are modified scales, which is interesting. And so basically they’re scales on the outside of fish that gravitated into their mouths.

**Craig:** Gross.

**John:** And became useful.

**Craig:** Gross.

**John:** And so what you have in your mouth right now are a bunch of modified scales and they’re really strange inside. So it’s just a good article talking through sort of what we know about teeth and why teeth are really complicated and so different than all the other parts of our body. And so I just like it. I respect our teeth more knowing the stuff I learned in this article.

**Craig:** In a strange bit of serendipity I went to the dentist yesterday.

**John:** Nicely done, Craig. And had you been putting off going to the dentist during these Covid times.

**Craig:** I sure had. But nothing went wrong. So, I have a lot of ways in which I lost the genetic lottery. I don’t have a well-regulated appetite system. I’m prone to overeat. There’s also I get headaches. My eyes were crappy. But my teeth are spectacular. I’ve never had a cavity. Not one.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** Not one. And they look at the X-rays and they’re like, geesh, I mean, those are really good teeth.

**John:** So that could be the microbiome of your mouth or something.

**Craig:** Something. And he said, flat out, this is definitely genetic. It’s not like you get a special blue ribbon for how well you brush because I’m not the best brusher/flosser in the world. Although I did just get this cool new, I’m not going to make it my One Cool Thing, I have something else, but this new Oral B electric brush. Because I’m an idiot, it has an app. But it shows you on the app like, oh, you’ve done enough on the upper left of your teeth. Move along.

You have to brush so much longer than I thought you did.

**John:** It’s a full two minutes. I have the Ultrasonic toothbrush, the same kind of thing where it buzzes when it’s time to move on to the next thing.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, so I assume that a good seven seconds of brushing was basically the idea. No. Incorrect.

Well that’s fascinating. I will read more about our teeth. My One Cool Thing is a bit sad. No, it’s rather a lot sad. But Paul Ritter was an incredible actor. I got to know him because he played Dyatlov in Chernobyl. But he had been around for so long in England acting both on stage and in films and on television.

And unfortunately we lost him early this week. He had a brain tumor. I don’t know if it was something that was sudden, or if he had been sick for a long time. He certainly never let on anything to us. But he was not only terrific on screen, but off-screen just the most lovely guy. The most unassuming, humble person. He just – whatever the opposite of difficult is. I don’t want to say easy. It’s got weird connotations. He was so agreeable and amenable and generous and lovely.

And we put him through all sorts of torture, because his character was one of the only ones that was exposed to radiation and then lived.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So we had to have him shave his head before he ever showed up, which he was like done, no problem. Shaving my head. And then we had five or six different stages of radiation sickness, or health. And he just never made a peep. Just did his job and did it beautifully.

And there was an outpouring of love and affection for him this week from all of the people that worked with him primarily in the UK. He was just beloved. I hope he knew that. And I hope that his family, I’m sure they know. But it was such a shock. He was so young. He was 54 years old. And I just was, well it was a rough day. He was a wonderful guy. And so we will miss Paul Ritter in all sorts of ways. And I hope his family and loved ones have an easy path through their mourning.

**John:** He was remarkably talented. I only knew him from your show, and then to see the obituary that sort of talked through his whole career ahead of time you recognize that no one gets to his place and just appears. It was a huge body of work leading up there.

**Craig:** Incredible stuff. And he was so funny. I mean, people who know him from Chernobyl will not know how funny he was. He was hysterical. And was the star of this long-running sitcom in the UK called Friday Night Dinner. And he just was awesome. He was a great guy.

**John:** Cool. All right. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Nora Beyer. 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 I’m on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust.

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 talking about which words we’re willing to get rid of.

Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thanks guys.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right, so Craig this last week on Twitter I asked the question if you had to give up one common English word what would it be? Mine is “sure.” I don’t need it. And it got a huge number of replies and people had their choices like which words they’re excited to get rid of. Craig, which word leaps to mind for you? What word would you want to get rid of? Or be willing to get rid of. You don’t have to hate a word. You just have to say like I just don’t need that word.

**Craig:** I’m happy to discard “spiritual” and “spiritually.” Those all connect, the two of them. I can get rid of those. I don’t know what they mean. I’ve never known what they meant. And I feel like everybody that uses them doesn’t know what they mean either. They are simply placeholders for things that we don’t understand.

We might as well just say something that I don’t understand. [laughs] That’s what spiritual means to me. I’m sure everybody else is like are you insane and they’re going to write letters. And I understand that and I acknowledge that.

**John:** It’s a very different answer than a lot of people gave. But what I like about that is you’re arguing to get rid of the word just because there’s no agreement of what we’re actually meaning by this word, so we should just not have it because everyone is putting their own meaning on it and we can’t know what that meaning is supposed to be.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it does offer a potential for abuse, because I think a lot of people will just trot that word out, gain some unearned credibility, and then take your money.

**John:** Yeah. I get that. So, a common word that came up was “very.” People wanted to get rid of very. And I–

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I want to defend very.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** So I think there’s a high school English teacher had an idea of like the word “very” is never needed. You should just use a different word.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** I don’t get it. There’s times where you need an intensifier.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** And everyone language has intensifiers and they do serve a meaningful purpose. And I can’t imagine, especially writing dialogue, without a character’s ability to use very.

**Craig:** Yeah. Is he unhappy or is he very unhappy?

**John:** We know what that means.

**Craig:** Right. It’s a discriminator. It gives us a difference between one thing or another. It’s important.

**John:** Yeah. So is he angry or is he irate? Well, I guess irate could be very unhappy, but that’s not useful in the same way. You’re trying to measure a scale. So I think we need very.

**Craig:** Yeah. That music is loud. Oh, well, you know, deal with it. No, no, it’s very loud. Very is probably connected to verily, right? I wonder, is it?

**John:** It is. Yeah. That’s the origin of it in anthropology. So it’s a truthfully. It’s vrai in French.

**Craig:** There you go. It’s vraiment loud.

**John:** Vraiment. People argued for getting rid of “just.” And I can see it. I think just is overused.

**Craig:** No, it’s essential. It’s an essential word.

**John:** I think just is useful. It’s a connector.

**Craig:** I just got here. That is so much different than I got here. It is really – why, oh, now I want to get rid of those people. Can I get rid of people?

**John:** French has a whole way of doing just in like having very recently accomplished a thing. And so we need just for what we’re doing here. People want to get rid of like. Yes, is like overused? But you need to have – I think it’s really useful to have a term that is less than love and indicates an affection for. Also you need the word for similes. It’s so useful to form similes.

**Craig:** I think if people said, look, we don’t mind keeping like to show affection, I like it. It’s nice. But we’re willing to get rid of it as the useless filler which is a substitute for as or similar. You know what? We could actually live with just “similar to.” Akin, or similar.

**John:** Yeah. We’re not improving the language to get rid of it, but if we had to get rid of something.

**Craig:** If we waved a wand and eliminated that usage of like we would also then eliminate like people who were like talking like this. Like.

**John:** But there would be another filler word that would take its place.

**Craig:** There would. It would probably be the Swedish, liksom.

**John:** Liksom.

**Craig:** Liksom.

**John:** “Fine.” Can we get rid of fine?

**Craig:** Lots of different definitions of fine.

**John:** Well that’s the problem. I’m being the most expansive. So if we get rid of fine you can’t use those four letters in any version.

**Craig:** God, well, I mean, no. Because there’s such wonderful uses of fine, like the tiny particulate matter. It’s fine grit. Or I have levied a penalty against you. It’s a fine. Yeah, no, fine is – or fine as in beautifully made and crafted. A fine silken tie or whatever. But I think people are probably, what they don’t like is “fine.” Yeah, cool.

**John:** And sure.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Interesting. Emma Pressman writes, “I want to get rid of interesting.” I take that as a personal front.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re coming at you now. That’s right at you. Interesting is overused, but not as overused as amazing. Amazing is – people are constantly saying they’re amazed. I’m amazed, like really? You stopped and you just stared? Amazing.

**John:** And sometimes words drift. Like awesome and awful used to be synonyms and they drifted different ways.

**Craig:** I mean, I love that. I love that awful is bad. It’s full of awe. Awesome and awful mean the same thing.

**John:** Yeah. Another frequent suggestion is literally.

**Craig:** Well.

**John:** And literally is a case, it’s misused so often that maybe we would be better off if we didn’t try to use it.

**Craig:** Well, at this point what literally has become is another intensifier. And to that extent I don’t mind it. I’m not going to be such a prescriptivist that I say, OK, well yes we understand that when we say literally what we mean is figuratively. But because we all understand it, it works fine.

**John:** Yeah. We get it. The only ambiguity comes up in places where we don’t have enough information to know whether we are talking literally or are we talking figuratively. And then we just need to make better choices about how we’re saying this.

Beth Schacter, our friend, writes, “Nice.”

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I’m thinking–

**John:** You’re thinking of Into the Woods?

**Craig:** Yes. Exactly. How did you know?

**John:** Well, I’ve known you for all these years.

**Craig:** Because you know me, right? She’s not good, she’s not bad, she’s just nice.

**John:** I don’t want to lose that lyric because it’s so meaningful.

**Craig:** For that lyric alone, just to preserve the Sondheim of it all, I would say we can’t get rid of nice. Also the city of Nice.

**John:** Well, they can rebrand themselves. It’s fine.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** They can do it. Nice is one of those things where if you were to describe a character as nice, like what? It’s not helpful.

**Craig:** It is so mild that it’s almost become an insult. Which is what Sondheim was playing on. That nice is the most bland of commendations. Nice. It’s nice. I think noice has to stay.

**John:** Without noice what is the purpose of living?

**Craig:** What is anything? What about Megana? Megana, what word are you willing to shunt and fire into space?

**Megana:** I guess, well I’m not prepared to answer that question because I’ve been preoccupied with something else.

**Craig:** Oh.

**Megana:** I don’t mean to “well actually” this conversation.

**Craig:** Oh, do it.

**Megana:** But, John, you say “sure” a lot.

**John:** I do. I say “sure” all the time.

**Megana:** I saw your tweet last night. And I was like, huh, am I losing my mind? And then I looked through our Slack and I typed in “sure” and I just have pages of responses from John that are just like, “Sure.”

**John:** Yeah, so I would say–

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** I’m willing to – sure. I’m willing to give up sure. I’m willing to make the sacrifice. A word I use commonly. So, I want to stress, I said commonly used words. So I was looking at the list of the 500 most common words in English as I was making my choice for myself. And so sure would be a big thing for me to give up and I do use it a lot, but I could replace it. Because honestly on Slack I just use that little thumbs up little icon instead of sure for most things.

**Craig:** That’s nice that you would give up something that actually hurt to give up.

**John:** Yeah. If it’s not a little pain, if it’s not a little sacrifice, then what is it worth?

**Megana:** Because I wonder if this is like a Gen-X/Millennial thing, but I remember when I first started working for you and you used “sure-period” a lot, and I was like oh my god John hates me.

**John:** Oh no!

**Craig:** I have heard this. That there’s this thing about like a period on a text means anger. And I’m like, no, it just means grammar.

**Megana:** Well, it’s like why would he go through the effort of putting a period there unless he was feeling very upset at me.

**Craig:** Oh my god, because it’s correct. [laughs] Because the period is correct. It’s like why would he capitalize the first letter of a sentence? It’s correct.

**John:** I do find myself using “yup” a lot instead of other yesses, just because it’s a friendlier yes, or a friendlier OK. Because OK can seem passive-aggressive.

**Craig:** If you ask Bo she’ll tell you–

**Megana:** Oh, do you think that?

**Craig:** That yup is friendlier? Oh, you think yup is worse?

**Megana:** My communication with John is just taking on a whole other – this is great.

**Craig:** So every time he says “Yup” you just cry and curl up into a ball?

**Megana:** Yeah. I’m like, oh, well I guess he does not think “yup” and he’s actually really upset about this.

**Craig:** So just to be clear you think that when John says “Yup” he means not yup.

**Megana:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** But you know that he’s not an organic creature, right? Like you know that he is circuits. Of course he means yup.

**Megana:** Sometimes I get a cool exclamation mark, and to me that means yup.

**Craig:** Whereas if I got that from John I would start worrying that something was up.

**John:** Yeah. So Scott Rudin doesn’t use – how does Scott Rudin end his texts? Does he say, “Yup.”

**Craig:** Yup, period.

**John:** Period. There’s going to be a whole exposé on me that’s really about, “Yeah, he’ll send these really passive-aggressive texts like, Yup.”

**Craig:** That’s amazing. There’s a whole study of John interpretation here that needs to be figured out. I’ve been using Yazzzz a lot lately. Yazzzz.

**John:** Yeah?

**Craig:** Yaaazz. And it’s usually if it’s something that I really, hey Craig, I’m going to grab coffee, do you want a coffee? Yazzzz. Like a child screaming for it. Yeah. But I could see like yes-period would be a little possibly cold.

**Megana:** Horrifying.

**Craig:** Well, OK, horrifying is strong. No. Horrifying would be, “You’re fired.”

**John:** I do feel like we need to have a study of the previous Scriptnotes producers and just see how they interpreted all these things to see whether there’s a generational shift or whether I’ve changed.

**Craig:** This is where we discover a trail of tears behind you.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Wow. Man, you’re going to get Rudin’d. You’re on the verge of Rudin-ing. It was just a mild discussion about texting and then suddenly #TheJohnPartyisOver. What did they say? The John is Over Party. That’s what it is. It’s the somebody-somebody-is-over-party.

**Megana:** I’m very grateful that my only conflict at work is what John means by sure-period. I’m very, very grateful.

**Craig:** Just copy me and I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you anytime. I know what it means.

**John:** What Craig though does, Craig basically does not respond in words anymore. He only uses gifs.

**Craig:** Yes. By the way, solves everything.

**John:** Which, by the way, I learned this last week means that you are a Gen-Xer and not a Millennial because only Gen-Xers use reaction gifs anymore.

**Craig:** Cool. I’m good with that. I mean, here’s the deal, I’ve got like you have, we’ve got a Gen-Zer who thinks that Millennials are ancient.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** Their whole thing is just to write a random word back at each other. Someone will say like, hey Jess, do you have the homework from today? And then she’ll write back, “Frog.” And then they’ll write LOL. And they know what this means. I don’t. Whatever. Old. Megana, you’re old, too, now. It’s happened.

**Megana:** Oh, I don’t like where this conversation is going.

**Craig:** It’s happening.

**John:** Really it’s just communicating in Snapchat selfies back and forth. And I don’t understand what’s happening. But that reaction face is what it is.

**Craig:** It’s so weird.

**John:** Basically you have to be your own gif is what I’ve learned for Gen-Z.

**Craig:** I like a nice gif. I like a nice gif because it says, hey, I’m a friendly guy. You know, I’m happy. Look at this funny gif. Look at this fun gif I found of me as Lisa Kudrow saying something silly. That’s me.

**John:** That’s it.

**Craig:** That’s it.

**John:** Thanks guys.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**John:** Bye.

**Megana:** Bye.

**Craig:** Yup. [laughs]

Links:

* [“Everyone Just Knows He’s an Absolute Monster”: Scott Rudin’s Ex-Staffers Speak Out on Abusive Behavior](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/everyone-just-knows-hes-an-absolute-monster-scott-rudins-ex-staffers-speak-out-on-abusive-behavior) by Tatiana Siegel for The Hollywood Reporter
* [California Employment Lawyers Association](https://cela.org/)
* [Hollywood actor arrested in alleged $227-million Ponzi scheme](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-06/hollywood-actor-zach-avery-ponzi-scheme-arrest)
* [Peeps Movie](https://www.cartoonbrew.com/feature-film/an-animated-feature-based-on-peeps-candy-is-in-the-works-203878.html)
* [Why We Have So Many Problems with Our Teeth](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-we-have-so-many-problems-with-our-teeth/) by Peter S. Ungar
* [Paul Ritter, British Stage, Film and TV Actor, Dies at 54](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/09/theater/paul-ritter-british-stage-film-and-tv-actor-dies-at-54.html)
* [John’s Twitter Thread on Words We’d Lose](https://twitter.com/johnaugust/status/1379584905969950721)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Nora Beyer ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

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