Scriptnotes Transcript

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

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode was recorded just a few hours before the WGA officially announced that it had reached a deal with WME thereby ending the two-year agency campaign. Now I promise Craig and I will talk about it all next week, including revealing the contents of that encrypted thumb drive I gave him backstage before our live show in Episode 431. You remember that. We set that up a long time ago and we’re going to pay off that set up I promise on next week’s episode. But today’s brand new episode is really good so listen to that and watch the feed because we might put out this next episode a little bit early if we get it recorded in time. Enjoy.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 487 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we unwind a Twitter thread with great advice on getting staffed as a writer on a TV show. And we look at the state of assistant pay in Hollywood. We then fulfill our cultural obligation as a podcast to discuss GameStop, specifically do we really need three movies about it. Plus, listener questions. And in our bonus segment for Premium members we’ll share awkward dating stories from our past.

**Craig:** Sorry. I was just getting coffee.

**John:** We’ll share awkward dating stories from our history.

**Craig:** That actually – you should keep that as it is because that was awkward. And I think it’s important to just own awkward moments. It really is. So I think that’s wonderful. Actually quite lovely. We had an awkward moment that was applicable. I love it.

**John:** Fully, fully applicable.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** Yes, exactly. Comedy comes from awkward moments and acknowledgement that the specific awkward moments are also a universal phenomenon.

**Craig:** They’re the best.

**John:** My present awkwardness is they are jackhammering a building behind my office right now, so if you hear some background noise that Matthew is not able to cut out that’s what you’re hearing is a jackhammer. Don’t worry about it. I’m fine.

**Craig:** It’s not awkward. That’s just annoying.

**John:** No. It’s not been nerve-wracking all day. I’m not jangled.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Nothing like that.

**Craig:** Nah.

**John:** In our crucial IP update the Uno Movie starring Lil Yachty was announced this week. So, the toymaker, Mattel, has announced a live action heist comedy is in development. It’s written by Marcy Kelly and set in the underground hip hop world of Atlanta with Grammy-nominated rapper Lil Yachty eyeing a starring role. So, phew, it’s good to have one piece of IP that has a plan. It didn’t announce who the studio was for it, but Mattel is on the case and naturally the Uno Movie is going to revolve around underground hip hop which is just a natural fit there.

**Craig:** I’ve got to say, like if you’re going to do it, right, you might as well just blow it up and do it. When I first read this article it seemed almost like someone had done Mad Libs. I need a noun. I need a famous rapper. I need a city. But, you know, I guess the point is what you can’t do – we know you can’t do this. You can’t do the cards come to light at night and number four is to figure out how to join the blue cards. Blech. So, screw it, let’s go all the other way and make it about Lil Yachty.

**John:** Yeah. We wish nothing but the best for Marcy Kelly and the whole team [unintelligible] and making this movie.

**Craig:** It’s a heist movie apparently.

**John:** A heist movie. Sure. We love a heist movie. Got a plan. So Uno joins the Mattel films in the works, including American Girl, Barbie, Hot Wheels, Magic 8 Ball, we’ve talking about before. Major Matt Mason, I don’t know who that it is. Is that a GI Joe kind of character?

**Craig:** Huh? Who? [laughs] Oh, ha-ha. OK. Matt Major. Matt Mason. I got to be honest that’s a WTF for me and you and I are not young, so we should know this. Unless is it a new thing?

**John:** It could be. But, I mean, it doesn’t feel like a new thing. It feels like a very old thing.

**Craig:** I’m looking it up right now.

**John:** Masters of the Universe. So, I would say that Masters of the Universe is a genuine IP in the sense of like they were characters. They were doing things. There was a cartoon I remember about it.

**Craig:** They made a movie before.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** With Dolph Lundgren.

**John:** Thomas and Friends. View-Master. View-Master is a strong contender there, because think about what View-Master is.

**Craig:** Oh my god, dude. Do you know, this is crazy.

**John:** Tell me about Matt Mason.

**Craig:** There needs to be some sort of intervention at Mattel. They’re out of control. Major Matt Mason was an action figure created by Mattel. He was an astronaut who lived and worked on the moon. When introduced in 1966 the figures were initially based on design information from a Life Magazine, Air Force Magazine, and other aviation and space interest periodicals. So this was before we landed on the moon, Major Matt Mason in 1966. Come on.

**John:** I’ve got to say I am genuinely fascinated by that idea because there’s some sort of like retro future thing where it’s just like it’s the ‘60s vision of what space would be like. There’s some kind of great comedy to make there. They’re probably not trying to make some great comedy there. I’m rooting for it. It’s Matt Damon in The Martian but he’s on the moon and, yeah, it’s great.

**Craig:** Well, maybe if there is some sort of – or if there’s an amazing nostalgic take that’s like meta or something. Here’s the point. You can do something interesting and creative with just about anything. The question is why that thing. So, one thing that these companies do in a strange way that is I think not terrible for artists is it limits the artist’s focus to a thing, like we can sit around and – I can write 100 different things. I can write anything I want. Well here comes a company saying, “Or, here’s a puzzle. Figure this out, smart guy. Major Matt Mason.” And you go, well, I’ve got an idea. You’ve focused my attention.

So, you know, Wishbone. What the hell is Wishbone?

**John:** Wishbone I believe is a dog. Let’s see what Wishbone is.

**Craig:** Oh golly.

**John:** It could be an American salad dressing. It could be a football formation, obviously.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** A computer bus. Is a boom for wind-surfing?

**Craig:** It’s the clavicle of a bird.

**John:** In popular culture, American children’s program. I bet it’s the American children’s program. Let’s click through that Wikipedia article.

**Craig:** Wishbone.

**John:** And yet I don’t see any Mattel connection to Wishbone. So, I don’t know.

**Craig:** Do you think that they think they own the bone? [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. That’s possible. I’m finding an article from July 15, 2020 which is that there’s a Wishbone movie in the works from Mattel and Universal. This is a Variety article. So there’s something here.

**Craig:** I’m going to get an angry phone call now. Stop bagging on our Wishbone movie. I’m not!

**John:** It’s about a Jack Russell Terrier. So now we know.

**Craig:** Oh, OK. So he was a dog. It’s a dog movie.

**John:** It’s a dog movie.

**Craig:** Fine. Great. Wishbone. Mattel.

**John:** Yeah. Uh, OK.

**Craig:** Huh?

**John:** In further follow up, in one of our Three Page Challenges last week we looked at a scene in which a character got electrocuted when using a vibrator. And you and I both expressed skepticism about that scene.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Some of our listeners wrote in including Kate from LA and many of them were pointing towards the Hitachi Magic Wand which does in fact plug in and therefore could conceivably electrocute someone if used in a bathtub. So I want to acknowledge that, sure, there was some cis male bias here in our ignorance of this plug in vibrator being a real thing.

But I also want to defend ourselves for saying I don’t think it was a great beat in those pages.

**Craig:** No. And I am aware of the Hitachi Magic Wand. It is the Cadillac of vibrators, John. The Hitachi Magic Wand famous for being the solution to women like the character in those pages that can’t have an orgasm. But I did a little research, because I love Googling vibrator and electrocution.

**John:** The most research Craig has ever done for an episode apparently.

**Craig:** By the way, there are vibrators that – so I thought, OK, if I Google vibrator electrocution I’m going to get a lot of stories about Hitachi Magic Wands falling into tubs. I got none. Zero. My guess is probably because everybody’s bathroom now to code has the GFI circuit on, so it would just trip a breaker and not.

But there is apparently a new generation of vibrators that electrocute you on purpose.

**John:** Oh yeah, electrical stimulation. Sure.

**Craig:** Yeah. That just seems like you’re, I mean, I don’t know, it just seems like you’re asking for trouble.

**John:** Sure. I think whatever someone likes in that area is phenomenal and fantastic.

**Craig:** Until it kills you.

**John:** Until it kills you. So, getting back to that specific use of it in that script is it relied too much on the fact that it was a vibrator being used in a bathtub with water apparently, which didn’t seem – that’s what I wasn’t necessarily believing and felt like a bit of a stretch and wasn’t working for me in those pages.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** But I want to acknowledge that I was wrong. All vibrators are not battery-based. I got you.

**Craig:** Yeah. That is true. Hitachi Magic Wand. Been around for a long time.

**John:** It’s a classic. So we’ll put in links in the show notes to both the Hitachi Magic Wand and stories about electrocution, which there are basically none.

**Craig:** The person that you think is jackhammering behind your house may be using the Hitachi Magic Wand. It is apparently very loud.

**John:** Oh my gosh.

**Craig:** That is the one thing that I read. If you’re in an apartment with thin walls other people will know that you are Magic Wanding.

**John:** All right. Continuing our follow up, about two years ago Craig and I started talking about assistant pay and sort of the problems assistants were facing based on emails we got in from people. We’re starting to have that conversation. But at the same time Liz Alper and other folks were talking about the PayUpHollywood movement. They stated this group called PayUpHollywood.

So we’ve been working with them to try to figure out what are the issues, how do we get assistants and support staff in Hollywood paid better. Then over the course of the pandemic, or when the pandemic started, it became less of an issue of pay equity and just sort of survival. How do we make sure that people who are working in these positions can actually afford to keep living in Los Angeles? So that became a source of urgency.

We raised a bunch of money for support staff, Liz and I and Megana, who is also on the call, were instrumental in trying to get that money out to people facing this kind of crisis. Now it’s time for sort of an update on where we’re at with assistants, assistant pay, and so I wanted to invite on two folks who know a lot more about this than we do at the moment. Liz Alper is a writer whose credits include The Rookie, Hawaii Five-0, Chicago Fire. She’s a WGA board member and the cofounder of PayUpHollywood. Welcome Liz.

**Liz Alper:** Hi. Thank you guys so much for having me.

**Craig:** Hey Liz.

**John:** Jamarah Hayner is a political consultant who founded the public affairs firm JKH Consulting. In her career she’s worked with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and then California Attorney General Kamala Harris. Welcome Jamarah.

**Jamarah Hayner:** Hey guys. Great to be here.

**John:** Give us the sense of where we’re at right now. You just put out a big sort of survey and results of that survey. But can you give us the 10,000 foot overview. What’s happening in the assistant and support staff landscape right now at the start of 2021.

**Liz:** So right now the big takeaway is a lot of assistants and support staff are very, very broke. Unfortunately because of the pandemic about 80% of assistants and support staff didn’t make $50K in the last year. In Los Angeles in order to be considered not cost burden, which is basically making three times what your monthly rent would be. The average is $53,600 per year. When 80% of assistants and support staff are making well under that, I think 35% were making less than $30,000 in 2020. It’s sounding alarms.

And obviously we’re in such a weird predicament because nothing like the pandemic has ever really happened before. I don’t know, John and Craig, if you guys can speak to this but I’ve never been in Hollywood during a recession that’s actually impacted the industry as strongly as the COVID-19 pandemic has. But what we’re seeing is that we’re losing a lot of assistants to financial stress and there aren’t necessarily supports in place to help them out of this time and keep not just their bank accounts in tact but keep them on this same upward trajectory that they’ve been on. It’s derailing a lot of careers.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t think there’s ever been anything like this. There have been turn downs. There was obviously the major economic crisis of 2007/2008. When I graduated college in 1992 there were some lovely headlines about how it was the worst year ever to graduate. The recession and blah. But what we didn’t have was a combination of a downturn in the economy and an inherent kind of state of economic despair.

So, if you had a couple of bad years you fought back, but what you weren’t doing was paying exorbitant rent and exorbitant other things while also not getting paid much. Generally speaking the prices of things kind of moved up and down with the amount that you would earn. Generally speaking. It doesn’t seem like that works that way anymore. So, one of the things that I looked at in your beautifully designed presentation is how many support staff had been essentially – have been relying on friends and family to essentially help them survive, even though they have fulltime or in many cases more than fulltime jobs. And 19% of support staff are as reported having had to move back in with family or friends or relocate out of the city because of lost income from COVID-19. That’s one out of every five. That’s awful.

**Liz:** Yeah. It was kind of devastating looking at these results. I think Jamarah and I can both attest that we knew that 2020 had not been a good year for most of us but seeing how hard hit the assistant and support staff community had been impacted was really, really hard to read. We read every single one of the thousand plus survey results that people took and we’ve read all of the anecdotal messages that they left. A lot of people just saying I don’t know how I’m going to get through this next year if things don’t turn up.

The other thing that people were really shining a light on, and we made sure to include this in our survey as well, was that not only were they making less money that they had in previous years but because the people who were working from home were working from home they were being forced to take on the additional office costs that would normally be paid when you’re working in an office. So things like extra electricity. Increased power bills. Buying a printer. Buying paper. All of these other expenses that you tend to take for granted when you’re in an office setting, all of that piles up. And when so many were reporting that, you know, my hours have been cut, I still have the same workload and in addition to that I’m actually taking on added expenses to compensate for not having an office space, you’re sitting there going how are assistants and support staff paying more to do their jobs than ever before when at this point the studios and the companies should be stepping in to say how can we relieve this financial burden that you guys are under to make sure that our businesses are working as efficiently as possible because we’re making sure that our employees can work as efficiently as possible.

**John:** Jamarah, when we were first talking though these issues, this is a system that was inequitable, it was broken in so many ways. And so we were trying to highlight those issues. I remember the roundtable sort of gatherings we had where we would talk about what they were experiencing. And it feels like in many ways it’s gone from being broken to just like shattered glass on the floor. We sort of long for the problems we used to have in the system.

But, as we pull out of the pandemic, as we sort of imagine a life sort of outside of this sort of crisis, what are some ways we can think about building back the system better? Because I’m wondering whether some of these assistant jobs are just not going to exist in the same way that some of these systems will be there in the same way. What are ways we can think about getting people back to work and getting them back to work in a way that was better than how they left it?

**Jamarah:** Yeah. I mean, I think one of the really great things about PayUpHollywood is, as difficult as these realities are right now, is that this movement is working. Right? We’ve seen major employers and studios, Verve, ICM, WME, CAA, UTA leading with increasing pay rates for assistants. So, I want to make sure that doesn’t get lost in this, right.

So when we are organizes, when we’re speaking up, when we’re telling the truth about our realities and encouraging people to be intentional about how they’re running their companies, we actually make progress in really significant ways. So I think as we start to move out of sort of panic and recovery mode into rebuilding that increased attention is really, really critical. Not just sort of across the board we’re all going to get back at this together, but realizing that there are some real inequities that have existed for years and exist more so now.

You know, Liz talked about people relying on their families. For assistants and support staff that come from families that themselves are feeling economic stress right now, they may not be able to help chip in a few hundred dollars a month for your rent. So parents and other supports aren’t going to be able to be there. So I think it’s not just about lifting everyone up but being really intentional about naming those inequities which we know exist. We’re putting the out data to show it exists. People know this. They’ve gone through it themselves if they were assistants back in the day. And really leaning into that.

But I think that we know as PayUpHollywood that when we speak up and we speak loudly and speak boldly we get results.

**Craig:** And if we had not, I say we, I mean it’s you guys, but we were sort of cheerleading there early on, if this hadn’t been in place already and hadn’t already won some victories I shudder to think of where we would be right now.

**Liz:** Yeah. I completely agree with that, Craig. Because I think you guys say cheerleading and I really say instigating and invigorating kind of this movement. Because I think the difference between now when assistants are speaking up and the difference between all of these past years that they’ve been speaking up without anyone listening is people like you and John and other showrunners are speaking up in support of these assistants. And making sure that their voices are amplified. Their concerns are amplified. And you guys take them seriously. And there’s a level of care and respect that hasn’t been there before. And that’s so important to making sure that this movement succeeds.

**Craig:** Philosophically there’s something I wish I could say, oh no, I can. I have a podcast, so I’m going to. To the people who work in Hollywood who employ support staff, whether they’re like me or John and they are running shows, writing movies, or if they are working at a studio as an executive or anything like that, I think because Hollywood is so success-focused, obsessed with winning and earning and money and quotes and how well you do and how big your house is and all that stuff, that there is almost this philosophical fear of staring closely at something that isn’t what you would define as financial success in Hollywood.

So, when you are employing people I think a lot of folks in Hollywood just don’t want to look at this stuff because it makes them uncomfortable. And rather they would just like this person to magically show up. You have no emotional accountability to them whatsoever. They do their job and they go home and you don’t have to think about it ever. And I submit respectfully that we do. And that financial success is not the only kind of success there is. And more so you’re not going to be able to get financial success if you are burnt out and chucked aside, or if you are barely keeping your head above water, or if you have to live at home, or borrow money from friends just to stay afloat. That it is important for all of us to look at these numbers. And then act on them.

Because the amount of money that is required to move people from the “I’m drowning” column into the “I’m breathing” column is not that much. It’s certainly not much for the corporations. And I know it’s not much for big showrunners. I know it’s not. I know it’s not much for big actors. I know it’s not much for big directors. It’s entirely doable. You just have to be willing to look at it and give a damn. And that means, oh my god, thinking about somebody else. So, there, I’ve said it on my podcast.

**Jamarah:** Hey, Craig, I’ll raise you there. I would say a lot of the content that is being created these days is about racial inequality, income inequality, and we see that whether it’s the beginning of a season or during awards. So, I would say that if you are part of a production that is doing great work onscreen talking about these issues, keep those issues in mind as you go back into your office and pass that person in front of the desk. Or think about the person that you’re calling to do something for you at 11pm at night. The issues are the same. And if you can talk about it in the screen you can live it out in your life.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Thank you so much. Because, I mean, look, Hollywood hypocrisy is beautifully florid. It’s everywhere. It always has been. But this is one area of hypocrisy I think where maybe we can just go, nah, we’re not going to do that anymore. We can’t all sit around and applaud Parasite and then go home and be the rich people from Parasite. We can’t do it. You’re not allowed to do it anymore. It’s got to stop.

So pay attention and just look at this stuff. It’s not petty. It’s not beneath you. If you don’t have to worry about these things and somebody is working for you that does have to worry about these things then you have to worry about these things. You are accountable to the people you employ. I believe that.

**John:** Now, Liz, before the pandemic you and I had many phone calls where you were talking heroically with the head of a major agency about assistant pay at that agency. And made some great progress and I want to commend you on that progress. But some of the stuff that came up in terms of like assistants working at that agency were the demands of wardrobe and lunch and hours and clocking in and clocking out. And it occurs to me that as people go back to work they stop working from home and start going back to work new systems are going to need to be figured out. And what I’d love to make sure we are empowering support staff to do is to help make some of those decisions about how work should work now. Because just getting back to work safely is going to be a challenge. It’s going to be so interesting.

You as a writer working on a writing staff, I assume you’ve been working remotely all this time. And same with the support staff for this. And getting people back into a room is going to be challenging and I want to make sure that we are thinking about support staff in those conversations.

**Liz:** Yeah. I completely agree with you, John. Because I think right now a lot of what support staffers are facing are – they’re being asked to come back to potentially unsafe conditions. A lot of the support staffers who took this survey reported that their employers were taking the pandemic seriously, which was great. But if you look at some of the anecdotal stories that are happening on Twitter, some that were submitted to us, a lot of the people who are being put in charge of monitoring Covid testing on sets are assistants who are being paid less than a regular PA rate daily to be in charge of this very, very important aspect of production.

And then there are other things that we’ve tried to tackle with PayUpHollywood and we’ve realized that the scope is so big that it’s almost impossible for us to figure out every single issue that every single assistant is going to be facing. A wardrobe assistant is not going to have the same problems as an agency assistant.

And I think that’s what we were talking about at the end of the survey when we were encouraging employers to actually talk to the support staff in their company because different support staffers are going to have different needs. We just received an email from someone who said, “I can work from home. My company is OK with my company working from home, but I can’t afford to live in an apartment that has central air or even decent air conditioning. So come summertime I am going to be dying because I don’t have an office to escape to or a coffee shop to escape to because I literally cannot afford to pay for AC on the salary that I am given.”

And I know in the grand scheme of things that seems so small, but that’s one of the discomforts that support staffers are putting up with right now, in addition to being underpaid. In addition to having to adjust to their employer’s new schedule and potentially not being considered in the plans of restructuring the company and how that works within a pandemic.

So, there’s a lot going on and we can’t be the only ones who are catching all of the problems. We do need every employer and every company to actually start stepping up and start investigating what it is that their support staffs need from them. Because it’s going to be unique from case to case.

**John:** Thank you both very much for this update. Thank you especially for the survey and the results of the survey. We’ll put a link in the show notes to both the press release that went out, but also this terrific infographic you guys designed.

**Craig:** It’s lovely.

**John:** That walks us through where we’re at at the start of 2021. Can we have both of you guys back on a year from now to sort of tell us what next year’s survey results were and hopefully we can see some progress along these lines?

**Liz:** Yeah. I think that’s the goal. Every year we’re just tearing out the old foundation and putting in a new one. And then building upon it.

**Craig:** Let’s see how we do. I’m just going to be the guy that just keeps banging the shame bell walking alongside these rich people going, “Come on, people. Come on. These assistant are sitting there going through your bills. They know what you pay your pet psychic.” I hate pet psychics.

**John:** Liz and Jamarah, thank you so much.

**Liz:** Thank you guys.

**Jamarah:** Thank you guys.

**Craig:** Thanks Liz and Jamarah.

**Jamarah:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** Cool. All right, moving on. So this past week, past two weeks, one of the biggest stories in the United States has been GameStop. And this has been a significant event in world news, so I can see that. But it has also been a source of a bunch of folks tweeting at us and emailing us saying like, “Hey, do you see there’s a GameStop movie in development?”

We often talk about How Would This Be a Movie. This is a situation where there’s a story in the news and suddenly there’s like three movies that are brewing.

Keith Calder, a previous guest, tweeted, “Is it possible to short the movie adaptations of the GameStop story?” To take a little meta quality there. But for folks who are listening to this episode in 2026 and have no idea what GameStop is or was Craig would you talk us through the briefest version of what happened?

**Craig:** Yeah. GameStop is a videogame brick and mortar company. And they are publicly traded. A number of large institutional hedge funds, I think the big one was called Melvin I believe, they bet against it. So, they took out short positions on it that basically said we are betting that in the future the share price is going to be lower than it is now. And if that is the case then we are going to make money.

A lot of people feel like hedge funds essentially which generally short stocks are kind of ruining everything. I don’t know enough about finance to agree or disagree. All I can say just as a person is it’s like when you go to Vegas if you play Craps and somebody comes and bets against the people at the table it’s like screw you man.

So, anyway, there is a sub-Reddit called Wall Street Bets and they like to kind of work together to buy stuff and I guess maybe the combination of GameStop being something that a lot of people that are Reddit-y are familiar with/nostalgic for, plus the idea of just sticking it to these hedge fund dickheads rallied the folks on Wall Street Bets together and they just decided we are going to start buying GameStop. We’re going to buy it regardless of its earnings, its potential, anything. We’re just going to buy the stock.

And they did most of that through a trading site called Robinhood. And what happens when you buy, buy, buy? Price goes up. Price goes up. Price goes up. Price goes up. And if they make the price go up high enough all the people that had bet against it using their various metrics would lose millions, possibly billions, possibly their entire hedge fund. Gone. And it very quickly became this underdog story of a bunch of people on the Internet essentially turning the same sort of trickery, nonsense gaming that a lot of our financial industry runs on against them.

So, it was incredibly attractive. And so the price went from $35 to like $400. Alas, it has plummeted recently all the way down, I think it’s currently in the $60s. So that’s where we’re at.

**John:** So looking at this from, pulling back and looking at it, you can see, OK, there’s some stuff that feels a little bit movie-like in the sense of sticking it to the man. You have clear class divides there. There’s a sense of it feels like a heist movie that’s being done sort of through the Internet in a way. You could ascribe good motivations to these sub-Redditors and the folks who are buying the thing and sort of driving up the price and perhaps saving this struggling business.

There’s different ways you can approach it that feel like there’s a narrative there that could go towards a movie. And yet it’s not clear where we are in the act structure of this story. It feels very, very we’re still in the news cycle of it. So it seems premature to be talking about this as a movie, and yet there are three movies in development.

So let’s talk through at least what we know of so far. MGM has acquired a book proposal of the events written by Ben Mezrich. He was the guy whose previous books were adapted into the films 21 and The Social Network. So he feels like a person who would be good at writing this kind of stuff.

Netflix is apparently in talks with the Zero Dark Thirty screenwriter, Mark Boal, about a film that would star Noah Centineo who is the star of To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. That’s a possibility. And then RatPac which is the Brett Ratner company has apparently bought the life rights to the guy who created the sub-Reddit. So that’s another way to sort of approach it. And these are three potential movies, three different approaches to sort of how they’re getting into it. One is buying a book written by a guy who is really good at writing books about this thing. One is bringing on a big screenwriter. One is getting the life rights.

I don’t know that there’s one right approach to it. I don’t think we’re going to see three movies come out of this though.

**Craig:** Not a chance. Not a chance. We will see one, maybe two. This is the danger. So there’s risk and reward. Just like all of the betting on Wall Street itself. This is a story that people are fascinated with.

Now, what people are fascinated with today is not necessarily what they’ll be fascinated with tomorrow or two or three weeks from now. What this story has going for it is that it is about something that feels very relevant to what it means to be an American right now. Economic inequality. This kind of Wall Street machinery that both the left and the right are resentful against. The sense that we are not really in control of our economy. And then here comes these folks that sort of prove it. And then get turned on, you know, by the powers that be as the powers that be kind of influence Robinhood to shut down a lot of the trading there.

But we don’t know how it ends. Right? So we don’t know necessarily what the full story is here. So the bet is that you are going to have a story that ultimately turns out to be something that is a full story, A. B, will still be relevant when the movie comes out. Won’t feel dated or like yesterday’s news. And, C, will feature characters that are fascinating and feature actors and filmmakers that people connect with. So, that’s the big gamble. And the additional risk that you’re dealing with is the fact nobody owns facts.

So, there could be 17 other Wall Street bets GameStop Robinhood movies quietly in development. There could be people just writing specs right now. So, what do they have going for them? Well, if you can find somebody like Ben Mezrich who has proven to convert things like this into books that then can be converted into very good movies, that seems like – you know what you’ve done? You’ve hedged your bet. That’s pretty good. I’m going to keep doing money analogy. I like it.

So that’s what it is. It’s basically gambling. You’re gambling with ideas.

**John:** Let’s talk about two book adaptations that feel appropriate here. So obviously Ben’s book, The Social Network, which is about the rise of Facebook and the infighting that happened at the early days of Facebook, an advantage that The Social Network is that it has characters. It has characters who are interacting with each other in physical spaces and can actually have arguments.

And so Aaron Sorkin is a great writer, but he also had really good real life people who can become characters who can actually do things cinematically. That’s going to be a challenge for any writer who is looking to adapt the GameStop story because these people are not in rooms together. They are people working with their own agendas separately and the movie has to stitch them together in ways that they would not naturally be there together. The conflict between two characters on a screen is going to be challenging to do in the GameStop movie because they’re not physically there together.

So, someone who is making money through Wall Street bets or who has spent money – has spent money in through Robinhood and has seen their net worth go from $5 to $300,000, that’s transformational for that character but you’re basically going to be probably inventing that character because that’s not going to be a real person or at least a person who is going to have conflicts with other folks in the world of your story. That’s going to be challenging.

The other book that came to mind as I was looking at this was Hillbilly Elegy which was a big bestselling book talking about sort of coming off of the 2016 election a lot of people were using that as a way to look at and explore a story of white working class people that had been underreported. And so there was an adaptation of that, but it was a challenging adaptation and did not sort of set the world on fire in its cinematic form. And I wonder and worry if that could be a similar kind of problem with this story which is so amorphous and kind of hard to hold. There’s not a plot to it.

**Craig:** Well, there is a plot in the sense that there’s a beginning, there’s a middle, and eventually there will be an end. The question is what will that end be? And will it feel like it justified the journey? So we’ll find out. There are some fascinating stories that I’ve read. You can look. You can go to Wall Street Bets and just read through individual people saying I think I screwed up. I put all of my money in this and I just lost it all and I haven’t told my wife and I don’t know what to do.

I mean, there are people that are talking about suicide on there. It’s terrifying. So, there is a kind of like dream and nightmare scenario going on there that I think is kind of fascinating. But you’re right. To wrangle it into one compelling narrative they are going to need to focus on some individuals. I will say that I do believe that we have an appetite for process stories, arcane process stories, more than Hollywood used to think. Hollywood generally the rule was that people are idiots and what they like are boobs or cars going fast or something exploding. And not that they don’t, but movies that come along like The Big Short which are deeply process movies, or The Social Network which is very much a process movie, people lean in. They want to actually see how the things that they interact with on a daily basis work under the hood. They really do get interested in that.

Whereas it used to be that diving into the weeds was a recipe for people not showing up, well now it kind of works. Is this a theatrical release? Well I don’t know if there’s going to be theaters anyway. But, no, I would think that this very much feels like it should be a play on Netflix or HBO or Apple or something.

**John:** Yeah. So I remember during the time of The Big Short, the movie The Big Short, not the actual real events, you and I, I think, both had sit down with Adam McKay and or Charles Randolph, the writers who adapted Michael Lewis’s book, and really good conversations you and I each had about sort of how challenging that process was and how to find character stories that could help illuminate really complicated situations about the housing crisis and sort of what actually happened there and how to visualize and narrativize those stories. And that’s probably what’s going to need to happen here. The way that we are sort of trying to obliquely get around what a short squeeze is, we’re going to have to find good ways to visualize that so the audience can understand that.

But I agree there is sort of a hunger for that. The same way that we have hunger for military thrillers where they explain sort of how some warship works. We do love to see that and we love to see people demonstrating their expertise in a very specific field.

So, it’s all conceivable and possible. I think my biggest hesitation is that we just don’t know what the third act of this is at all. And are we going to look at the events of GameStop five years from now as being like oh that was a big positive transformational event, or the start of something horrible? And we just don’t know yet.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think it’s going to end poorly for the people who invested in GameStop. That’s just my guess. Because in the end there is this interesting – what’s the game theory, the problem of the commons?

**John:** Yes, the tragedy of the commons.

**Craig:** The tragedy of the commons. This is a classic tragedy of the commons situation. Eventually, and it’s already started to happen, people who can walk away with a massive amount of money are going to. And this in fact is kind of the problem with the whole thing. There’s a fascinating discovery of how human behavior underlies all this stuff. And there is a little bit of a sadness in how we celebrate the underdog in our traditional fictional narratives, but in real life the underdog almost always loses. And what does that mean about us and our society and the American dream?

So, interesting things to look at. I do think that it will end – my guess is that it’s going to end poorly for people that bought into GameStop. My guess is that the billionaire hedge fund guys will remain billionaires. But that in and of itself is an interesting ending. We’ll see how it goes.

**John:** I’m hoping that Steve Mnuchin produces at least one adaptation of this. Because really who would be more qualified than Steve Mnuchin to – he’s a Hollywood producer who was also a Treasury Secretary. So he should be the person who should produce this.

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**John:** Boy. All right. So we’ll flag this for follow up. Obviously we’ll see what happens to any of these three movies or other adaptations along the way. But it’s a great example happening in real time of the urgency which people feel to acquire rights to hold down this thing which as you point out anyone could do. So we’ll see what happens.

**Craig:** Anyone could do.

**John:** Craig, you have left Twitter, although I do see you replying to other people on Twitter sometimes, but you have mostly left Twitter, so you may not have seen a really good thread that happened this past week.

**Craig:** I didn’t.

**John:** Rachel Miller put together a thread with advice for people who might be staffing or looking to staff on a TV show. And I thought it was terrific. And it also occurred to me that a Twitter thread does not work especially well at all on a podcast. So I reached out to Rachel and said hey would you mind recording your Twitter thread so we could actually talk about it here, because I thought your advice was flawless and succinct and so brilliant. But it needed to be working in an audio format. So we reached out, Megana worked with her to record this all.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I thought we would go through her advice and listen to it, but also respond to it and see what people could do, how people could implement this in their own lives. So, some context, Rachel Miller, she is a founding partner of Haven Entertainment, so she’s a producer rather than a writer. She’s also a founder of a nonprofit, Film2Future, which is a pipeline for underserved LA youth in Hollywood. She was just staffing a show for a streamer. And so she and her showrunner/partner read 368 scripts and they reached out to another 50 people to check availabilities for five writer spots for the room.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** And she said that the truth is that the odds are not in your favor, but there’s some things you can do to help improve your chances of getting staffed. So, let’s take a listen to her advice.

**Craig:** OK.

**Rachel Miller:** One. Write something buzzy. Your sample needs to be something that cuts through the noise, that makes us remember your script after reading 368 scripts. For staffing, we aren’t necessarily looking for a pilot that sets up a series, just something that makes us remember you and your writing.

**John:** Yes. And so I remember when we’ve had TV showrunner guests on before them talking through like I will read the first couple pages. I just need a sense of can this person write. They kind of don’t care about the plotting overall. They just want to know is this a person who has an interesting voice. Is this someone who I want to keep reading?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Rachel:** Two. Work on the first 15 pages, make them sing. If the first 15 pages aren’t good, it’s unlikely that we will keep reading, but if they are, we will most likely keep reading to the end of the script.

**Craig:** Well, because if the first 15 pages are good the next 45 are also probably going to be good. I mean, if you write well you write well. That’s how it kind of goes.

**John:** Absolutely. And so it also speaks to don’t hold back crucial things, oh, I don’t want that reveal to happen. I would say really do focus on that initial experience. So when we talk about the first three pages of this Three Page Challenge we really are getting a sense very quickly whether this is a script we want to keep reading.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So just make sure that works.

**Rachel:** Three. Have a second sample ready to go. Many times we asked for a second sample to read more of a writer and was told they had none. A second sample should show off something different about your writing, we should not read two versions of the same story in two separate samples.

**Craig:** That’s reasonable.

**John:** Yeah. That’s great advice. You know, when I talk to people who are looking to staff I ask them sort of what they’re sending out, but also what else have you got. Because you want something that shows some range. It doesn’t show the same person every time.

**Rachel:** Four. Make sure you have a bio and credit list and that your rep has it and it is updated. For a bio, tell us something that makes you unique. You never know what someone is looking for in a room so adding something specific that separates you from everyone else is always helpful, especially if you are a lower level writer and a ton of credits a good bio is key.

**Craig:** Hmm. Well.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, you’re not hiring writers for your show, but there’s other folks who you’re reaching out to. You’re trying to find out information about them. Do you find yourself Googling them? Are you looking for information about them? Or are you just taking what the reps send you?

**Craig:** Yeah, so I’m not hiring writers, therefore the people that we’re talking to we will generally get IMDb breakdowns on them. And sometimes if it’s a certain kind of person, particularly actors, but also for department heads, if there’s an interview online I’ll watch it. Interviews are fascinating. If you ever have a chance to be interviewed for anything – maybe you’re not on a staff or anything but you’re a writer and somebody has interviewed you for any little tiny program, well any little tiny program is going to be Google-able. Anything. Right?

And so take it seriously. Take that interview seriously. Be gracious. Be interesting. Don’t be me, me, me, me, me, but just be fascinating. Somebody might find that. Those things matter to me more than – look, honestly, this one is not my – bios are fake. That’s the bottom line. Bios are super fake. Like all resumes are fakes. Everybody who has ever written a resume knows that resumes are fake. So, I don’t put too much credence in those, but an interview. Well that’s something.

**John:** Yeah. So before we started recording this episode I was on a Zoom with some strangers who I’d – people I’d never met before. And I found myself just Googling them while we were talking. And I was curious the difference I saw between like some people I could find information about them that sort of helped me get a bigger picture of them. And some people were just un-Google-able. There was nothing out there that was helpful. Or the only thing I could see was like in 2016 this person obviously went to Harvard. But I couldn’t figure out really what they’d done in the time since that time. And so if they’d had a site, if they had other stuff out there that could help me get a sense of who they were that would be great. And so I think that’s the advice that Rachel is giving too, to make sure that if it’s an official bio or some other site that it gives some sense of who you are as a writer because you may not even have a rep who is there advocating on your behalf. The script could have just been handed in by somebody else.

**Craig:** Right. Right. Exactly.

**Rachel:** Contact info. And this seems easy, but it wasn’t. Make sure your correct rep’s info is on your script, is on IMDb and Studio System, and on your website. It is very difficult to actually contact a writer if there is no way to get in touch with that writer. Make sure your website is up to date as well. And if you don’t have reps, make sure your contact info is on the script.

**John:** Yeah, so for Three Page Challenges I’ve been happy to see that that’s actually improved. I’m consistently seeing contact information on the Three Page Challenges that we’re getting in. Stick in an email address there and they will email you if someone is interested. And we know people who have been featured on the Three Page Challenge who are getting contacts from reps and managers because there’s something they liked. And they can just reach out to you directly. They don’t have to go through Megana. That’s good.

**Craig:** Yeah. How are people missing this? I don’t understand. I mean, that’s one where – when you are going through all this stuff, everybody who is going through this has 12 other things they also have to do. Any tiny friction point is going to hurt. And if you’re interested and you want to talk to somebody and they didn’t put their contact info on I’m already angry at them for their weird judgment. So unless the script has blown me away I’m just going to keep going.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just weird. Like how do you miss that?

**John:** The other thing I would add, if you are a WGA member you should update your Find a Writer profile because that is a way you can give your contact information, show who your agent is if you have one, your manager if you have one, attorneys if you have one, and include some samples. It will take you 20 minutes to do and that is another way people can find you. So, update that in the directory.

**Rachel:** Six. If you hear about a staffing job and you have no reps and you think you are a perfect fit, take your shot and reach out to the producers with an email explaining why you feel you might be a perfect fit. Not all producers will say yes to reading someone unrepped but some will and it’s worth taking a shot. Just make sure you specify why you think you are a perfect fit. Do not attach the script in the original email. That will get your email immediately deleted. Wait till the producer writes back and says it’s OK or not to send the script.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Yeah. And so you and I have always been skeptical of query letters and sort of that sense of like, “Hey, I have this thing,” but it sounds like what she’s talking about is being very specific and targeted towards like this person is making a medical investigator show set in Philadelphia and I am a person with a background as a medical investigator in Philadelphia and I’m a damn good screenwriter. You should reach out to that person.

**Craig:** The second part is the key. You have to be able to say, listen, now that I’ve told you this thing you and I would both agree that I would be an idiot to not try. Right? I mean, so that’s the key. You just don’t want to do it and be like, “I’m not repped and I don’t know anything, but I love the stuff that you guys are doing and I think I’d be a great fit.” I love it when people say, “I think I would be a great fit.” And I’m like do you? What does that mean? OK. But there’s no evidence. You know?

**John:** You know who is a great fit? Zoanne Clack when she’s getting hired on to Grey’s Anatomy. She’s a doctor.

**Craig:** She’s a doctor. Exactly. That’s a great fit. That’s a fit. Exactly. That works. Not, oh, you’re a great fit because we have a job and you want a job? That’s not fit.

**Rachel:** Social presence – if you have a website, make sure it works. Even if it just lists your contact info, make sure it’s not a dead site. Think about joining Twitter, Instagram, all the other socials. Being part of a writing community is always helpful but also it’s a way to express yourself so a producer, or showrunner, or exec can get a glimpse of you. There is a flip side to this: Think about what you are posting. No one wants to hire someone who is constantly negative about other people, other shows, other rooms. Build your writer community. Often a showrunner or producer will reach out to their friends for personal recs and those scripts will always go to the top of the pile.

**John:** Great. And I’m glad she’s pointing out the double-edged sword of having social media because that is a way of sort of showing your voice and showcasing what you’re interested in. It gives me a sense of who you are as a person. But in giving me a sense of who you are as a person I’m going to decide like, oh, I don’t want to be anywhere near that person. That person seems like a real bummer to be around. So, you’ve got to be really mindful about what you’re putting out there.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think if you’ve written a good sample and they like it and you are not on social media at least for me that would not be a problem for me whatsoever. Most people are too online. And I guarantee you, no matter what I feel about you, if I’m going to read 100 of your tweets I’ll find two that piss me off. No question. That’s anyone. Anyone. Much less somebody sitting there and digging back through your history.

So, I’m not sure about that one to be honest with you. I don’t know if that is good advice. That one I’m questioning.

**John:** But I think of like Ashley Nicole Black who we only know – we were only sort of put in contact with through Twitter. And has been a guest on the show twice and is just a phenomenal writer both on Twitter and in real life and is doing great.

**Craig:** But we’re not hiring her. And she’s not doing great because of Twitter.

**John:** I don’t know if there’s really any correlation between her Twitter use and her writing. I think it enables other people to find her.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, there is that. I like the idea of having a presence on the web where you can express yourself in a controlled way and you’re not kind of necessarily – believe me, it’s not like I’m saying don’t be on Twitter. It’s just be really careful. I think that the potential for trouble is actually greater than the potential for benefit in terms of if you’re not on it don’t – I’m just saying if you’re not on it and it’s not your thing, don’t feel like you have to be.

**John:** Yup. This is a good place for me to plug on the 18th of February I’m going to be doing a WGA panel on public relations and social media for writers.

**Craig:** Oh great.

**John:** So if you have other thoughts on that you can join us there.

**Rachel:** OK, so now you’ve got a meeting. Now what? One, be enthusiastic. Tell us what you liked about the show, what excites you? What part or what characters are you most interested in writing about? Have show pitches ready to go. Some showrunners won’t want to hear them, but some will. At least have them ready in your back pocket should a showrunner ask. Read the materials before the meeting. Sometimes you’ll just have a pilot, sometimes you’ll have a pilot and a book. Sometimes it will just be a link to watch. Make sure you do all your homework and Google the showrunner and producer. Come in as prepared as you can.

**John:** So, it’s not surprising that she’s saying to come in prepared. And we’ve talked about going in for meetings and going in for general meetings, going in for specific meetings on a project. But I think our biases as feature writers is it’s always like how are we going to approach this project that’s here in front of us. And what’s different about going in for a meeting with a showrunner is that you’re responding to that person’s work. And so you have to be super positive about the thing that they’ve made and how great that is. But also sort of being able to “yes and” and sort of talk about where the series can go, what’s exciting to you about that, which is a subtly different thing than going in to meet with a producer about the Uno Movie.

**Craig:** No question. And beyond the evidence that you are a worker, and an adult who reads what you’re supposed to read and knows what you’re supposed to know, actual demonstrable passion for a show is going to move you further than almost anything else. And you can’t fake it. It’s got to be real.

The reason you do all of your homework in addition to your actual passion for the show is because it is not only a sign that you are an adult. It is a sign of respect for the people that you’re sitting with. They wrote that stuff. They’ve been working on it. They don’t want somebody sitting there going, “Yeah, I guess I could work on this. You know, I’ll come in and do what you need, whatever you need. You like what I wrote, I’ll write some stuff like that for you.” Well, get out. Get out of my office. You make me feel bad about myself and my show.

What I want is for you to come in and say, “I love what you do. I love your show. It means something to me. I want to be a part of it. I want to learn from you. And I want to leave my thumbprint on it. I want to influence this because I care about it.” Then I lean forward and I go who is this? I want to know you. And, again, you can’t fake that. It’s got to be real.

**John:** Yeah. So don’t play hard to get. I mean, the opportunity to get hard to get is when there’s multiple people who want to hire you for a job for a slot. That’s fantastic and then you can maybe get your price up a little bit. But, no, you want to seem like the person who has passion for this specific job who they can imagine being in a writer’s room or writer’s Zoom for weeks on end with and not dread seeing you.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Rachel:** Four. Write a thank you note after the meeting. Your reps or an assistant will forward it on. It looks great. Five. Most importantly, be yourself. Again, you’ll never know what exactly the needs of the room are. And what mix the showrunner, producer, or network are looking for. So being yourself is always the best answer. Break a leg out there.

**Craig:** Yeah, being yourself.

**John:** Great advice. So thank you notes. I’ve generally not done them. Maybe I should do them more. I’ve always liked it when I’ve gotten thank you notes when I’ve been interviewing for people to come work for me. I do notice when those thank you notes come through. So that’s a good idea. I just haven’t done it.

**Craig:** [laughs] You like getting them, you just don’t like writing them.

**John:** That’s so totally true. Just like the opposite is true. I prefer to give a present than to give a present. I don’t really like getting presents.

**Craig:** Sure. Well, no, I hate getting presents because mostly it’s just an exercise in me trying to convince you that I don’t want to throw this thing out. But I do like writing a thank you note. And I’m sort of the opposite. I don’t really care about getting the thank you notes so much, but I like writing them because, again, it’s just to show respect I think mostly. Just to show respect, no matter what the power dynamic is. Whether it’s somebody that was trying to get a job from me or somebody that I’ve been talking to about a job. I do that because it just feels, I don’t know, nice.

But the be yourself advice is always the best advice. It is true that there’s stuff going on that you’re not aware of and never will be aware of that sometimes qualifies you or disqualifies you within seconds. And you have no control over it. It just is what it is. And so you can’t calculate your way to success. Be your enthusiastic, passionate, authentic self.

**John:** So I want to thank you Rachel Miller both for writing that lovely Twitter thread and for recording it so we could talk about it here on the air. So thank you again Rachel Miller.

All right, I think we have time for one listener question. So **Megana Rao:** if you could come on board and talk us through a question that we could answer from the mailbag. Because I see there’s a bunch here, but maybe this top one would work for us.

**Megana Rao:**: All right. Great. So Oscar asks, “What are your thoughts in showing something in flashback versus hearing a monologue about it? Let’s say you have the limited resources to actually shoot that flashback. What would be reasons you would cutaway versus leaving it as a monologue?”

**John:** That’s a great question.

**Craig:** I love this question so much because I literally was confronting this very question just a couple weeks ago in thinking about a future episode that I have yet to write of The Last of Us. And the answer Oscar is you’ve just got to feel it. Because there are some stories you really do want to be in. And then there are some stories that you want to hear. And I can’t tell you why one thing feels like it’s better to hear than another other than to say if it seems like if you’re in it and it’s happening it might feel possibly melodramatic as opposed to if you’re just hearing about it and that person can kind of play against some inherent melodrama than maybe that’s a reason to have somebody relay it as a story.

If you think that the story would be fantastic to see and not really a good story to tell then you don’t really have that option. But, if it’s something that you think the storytelling would kind of contrast with. And a great example is in Jaws. So there’s Robert Shaw delivering that amazing story about what it was like floating in the water after the USS Indianapolis is hit a torpedo I think. And they’re all floating in the water and then the sharks come.

Well, you could say it, but then it’s sort of like, oh look, a camera is there and people are in the water and it’s a big action sequence and people are screaming. But having him kind of tell that story with that weird smile on his face because that’s how he covers up the pain, and he’s slightly drunk, and you can tell every now and then inside of the story he starts to reveal feelings and then, no, not at all. And the way he ends it as if to say, “Well, there you go. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.” That becomes fascinating because now the story isn’t about plot, the story is about character. So that’s your choice. You’ve got to figure it out. You’ve got to feel it.

**John:** Yeah. I would say that whatever movie or TV show you’re doing you also are setting some rules for yourself about are you the kind of thing that tells stories or flashes back. And if there’s one flashback in the whole movie or the whole TV series well that’s weird. It feels like you’re just breaking the rules to tell that one thing. So there has to be a really good reason why you are doing that thing.

Also, you need to ask yourself do you have a good person to tell that story. Is there a person who actually would be an interesting narrator to tell that story and who their choice to tell that story within the scene is meaningful and makes sense? Because it’s not just the story. It’s the scene in which the story is being told. And if you have that moment where it actually really makes sense for this character at this moment to tell that story, that’s awesome. But if you’re just dumping information at the audience that probably is pushing you back more towards a this is the movie wants to tell you, show you what happened, versus this character wants to tell you what happened.

**Craig:** Yeah. You never want your story to feel like, oh, they just needed to save money. Or, oh, they just needed you to know a whole big bunch of crap and they didn’t want to make you sit through all of it because it’s boring. It’s got to be a great story. That’s the key. It’s got to be a great story.

**John:** We have many great questions here so I think next week will probably end up being a mailbag episode because I was just looking through this outline and some primo questions being sent in to ask@johnaugust.com, so thank you everyone who has sent those through. And thank you Megana for sorting through all of these.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Thing this week. The first is an article by Dan Froomkin entitled “What the next generation of editors need to tell their political reporters.” What he’s arguing for in this piece is basically that we need to stop having politics reporters or political reporters and relabel them as government reporters. Because when you start talking about politics you inevitably move to a this side versus that side and to a sort of sports team kind of reporting on things which is not actually helpful for the good of the nation or for people understanding what’s actually happening.

So, it was a really interesting framing. And I think it could potentially be really useful in terms of what if we just talked about what government is doing and what the issues are and stopped talking about it as a race. And I think some really good points being made in there. So, I will point you to Froomkin’s article there.

And once you’ve read through that long piece I think you need a palate cleanser which I will send you to. This is a clip of Whitney Houston and Brandy singing Impossible from the ABC version of Cinderella. And I just – this is behind the scenes of them recording this. And it’s just such a reminder of what – not just what an instrument Whitney Houston had but just how much life she had. It was just so good to see her so joyful as she was singing this. And as she’s ribbing Brandy to actually sing on pitch, it’s just great. So I loved this little bit. I’m going to play a little clip for you here Craig so you can appreciate how good this sounds.

**Craig:** I would like that. Yes.

[Song plays]

**John:** That made you smile right?

**Craig:** So good. I mean, just – just the GOAT. Just unbelievable.

**John:** And it made me remember that like I think too much about the tragic end of Whitney Houston. And I need to move past that and appreciate the joyful beginning and middle of Whitney Houston and what she was able to do.

**Craig:** Effortlessly.

**John:** That I got to be alive while she was singing like that.

**Craig:** Just effortlessly. I assume you’ve watched the famous clip of her singing the National Anthem at the Super Bowl.

**John:** Oh yeah. Yeah.

**Craig:** And when she redefined, literally redefined the melody at the end of the National Anthem. No one else had done Free-hee. No one else had done the octave jump on free. And now you have to do it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** She just made that. She made it. She invented it. It’s amazing.

So my One Cool Thing is, I know I’m off of Twitter, but if you are lurking on Twitter which I think is perfectly fine because it’s free to everybody there is a fascinating woman named Stella Zawistowski. Stella Zawistowski is part of the crossword world. She’s often in the mix at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. The big one in Connecticut. And she’s got a great – this is what makes her especially fascinating. This is her, what do you call the little bio thing on your Twitter profile: “Personal records…” I’m going to do it backward from the way she does it because I just like the reveal of it. “Personal records: New York Times Sunday crossword, 4 minutes, 33 seconds. Back squat 265 lbs.” That’s right. Stella Zawistowski not only can solve a Sunday Times puzzle in under five minutes, but she is a powerlifter. There’s a picture of her doing it. It’s impressive.

So that’s a combination you don’t see too frequently. Not to rip on my fellow crossword people but we are not known for our brute strength. [laughs] So, Stella is. But what I love about Stella lately is that she’s been helping people with understanding and getting into cryptic crosswords which I’ve talked about on here before. And she has a hashtag she’s been doing called #ExplanationFriday where she shows a clue and gives people a chance to get it right. And then she gives you the answer and explains how the clue works, because that is how you learn how to do cryptics by sort of going back and reverse engineering the clues and learning the conventions and the tricks and all that fun.

So, it’s a great way to start learning, because honestly I’ve become too bored with regular crossword puzzles. I need the cryptics. So, cryptics or metas. So, Stella Zawistowski for all of your powerlifting, crossword, and cryptic clue needs. @stellaphone. @stellaphone.

**John:** Excellent. And that is our show for this week. So, as always, Scriptnotes is produced by **Megana Rao:**. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did our fantastic outro this week. So stick around and listen to that. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter I am @johnaugust. Craig is not really on Twitter so don’t at him.

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

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

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on awkward dates. So stick around for that. Craig, thank you for a good episode.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

[Bonus segment]

**Craig:** That’s great to see. What are they saying?

**John:** I don’t think they’re saying anything.

**Craig:** Just Latin sort of just chanting?

**John:** Just Latin chanting.

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**John:** It’s great. I also love that it’s so creepy and yet beautiful. I mean, it’s joyful and creepy at the same time, which is just a uniquely church-y kind of thing you can do.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. That was beautiful.

**John:** Yeah. Our topic this week is also potentially creepy and beautiful. Adam in Los Angeles wrote in to say he wants to hear us talk about bad dating stories. And here’s a situation where I think I probably have more dating stories than you do just because you met your wife in college and probably didn’t date a lot post-college. What’s your dating history?

**Craig:** I didn’t date at all post-college. I dated in high school and I dated in college. I mean, dating in college is really just like I sleep with you, I sleep with you. But then I met my wife my junior year and it’s been her since. So, yeah. I’m out of that whole scene man.

**John:** I was dating up until I was 30. So I have lot more dating history.

**Craig:** You’ve got some stories. Yeah.

**John:** I’ve got some stories.

**Craig:** Tell us stories.

**John:** But let’s go back to high school. So my most notable date, I have two things from high school that are embarrassing, which most high school dating is kind of embarrassing. This first one though I remember very distinctly. So, I got set up with a friend of a friend. A girl named Tonya who I didn’t know at all, but she was friends with other friends and apparently she was really into me and I didn’t know who she was. But we got set up.

So we talked on the phone and we ended up going to see a movie for our first date. And, Craig, that movie was Fatal Attraction.

**Craig:** That’s working.

**John:** That’s working really, really well.

**Craig:** Everything about this situation is clicking.

**John:** Absolutely. So this girl who is apparently a little obsessed with me takes me to see Fatal Attraction. So we see Fatal Attraction which is a really good movie, but also not a good first date movie.

**Craig:** No!

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So then we go back to her family’s house and her parents aren’t around because her parents are gone for the weekend or something. And I was like I don’t kind of feel safe here. And so I should stress she’s lovely and so I’ve met her at the high school reunion and she’s great and phenomenal and happily married and everything else. But it was not a good experience for me.

**Craig:** No, that must have been – yeah, you walk into the house, there’s no one there. It’s the reverse right. Normally you go, OK, I’m the straight guy. I go home with this girl. I walk into the house. The parents are gone. Woo! Party time. And then not the case in this circumstance.

**John:** It was not the case in this circumstance. Do you have a high school story?

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve got some high school stories. Sure. I’m trying to think of a bad, a really – well, I’ll tell you actually prior to high school you know there’s like the awkward early crush, like so now you’re talking like fifth grade crush.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** It’s not quite a date story. But I had this like beyond crush on the girl who lived across the street named Sandra. And I told my friend Eric about her. And he was like you’ve got to write a love letter to her. And I was like what, no way. And he convinced me. And I did it. I wrote a love letter to Sandra. And I walked across and I put it in her mailbox because you could do that. And then I went home. And then I had terrible regrets. I had terrible regrets. What have I done? She’s going to tell everybody. I’m going to be laughed at. She’s not going to like me.

So I went back over there. It had already been taken out of the mailbox. I rang her doorbell. She came out. And I basically said, yeah, none of that’s true.

**John:** Oh no, Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah. I just took it all back. And she must have – look, I’d like to think, this is the most charitable imagining. Sandra got this. We’re all like 10, OK? Sandra go this, read it, and went, “Huh?” And then I came to her door and she’s like, “Oh, hi.” And then I say this crazy stuff about how I didn’t really mean it and it was all just a joke. And she was polite about it and then she went back inside and went, “What?” And then just moved on with her day like what the hell was that about.

**John:** Yeah. And that’s very classic comedy. Something that was so important to you and it meant nothing to her at all.

**Craig:** I hope. I hope. But, yeah, you know, I don’t have too many disastrous date stories I must say.

**John:** So this isn’t even really a date story, but it actually has a similar dynamic. So this is in, I don’t know if it was in high school, or maybe it was I was back for summer in college. And I ended up making out with this girl at a party and, whatever, you make out with somebody at a party. And then I guess we exchanged phone numbers or whatever. But she’d said like, “Oh, I work at Fashion Bar in the Crossroads Mall.” And I think she had said something like, “Oh, we could get lunch or something.” And so I showed up at like where she worked.

**Craig:** Oh, you’re a stalker.

**John:** Yeah. And in retrospect I’m looking at this from her perspective. She could not get away from me. So I regret that. But I fundamentally did not understand that I was meeting her at work. It was just weird and I’m embarrassed now to even sort of tell that story.

**Craig:** You know, it’s important to hug yourself.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And forgive yourself. We all have done these stupid, stupid things. Just, you know, everyone has one. But that’s not too bad, you know.

**John:** It’s not too bad. I didn’t keep stalking her in any way like that. I think in going there I was like, oh, we’re not going to be able to have a conversation there. And so therefore I should just–

**Craig:** Right. What is Fashion Bar?

**John:** Fashion Bar was some sort of retail clothing store. I think there was a Fashion Bar Men’s and a Fashion Bar Women’s. It was a private chain.

**Craig:** Got it. So she could be like, “Look, I know we made out at a party, but if you want to stay here you need to buy a sweater.”

**John:** That’s pretty true.

**Craig:** And use my sticker for the sale.

**John:** Now, Craig though, you missed out on all dating in your 20s which was the beginning of online dating and all that stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah, never done it.

**John:** I’ll quickly talk you through some of the highlights of that. So, not an online date, but I do remember an Aspen gay ski week, meeting a guy on a chairlift and sort of flirting there. And then it’s like, oh, come by my place. I’m like, great, I’ll come by your place. And then he ended up living in New York and so we had phone conversations. So you never had to do a lot of phone dating either.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But I remember this one conversation where he said, “Oh, you’re exactly the kind of guy my therapist wants me to date.”

**Craig:** Oh no.

**John:** That first red flag. And so he was like an investment guy. And I was a broke aspiring screenwriter. And he’s like, “I keep dating these sort of like hot guys who are wrong for me. Listen, I’ve got the money, I can get your surgery. I can get you a trainer. Basically I can change you into the thing that I want to date.”

**Craig:** Wait, he was Pygmalion-ing you?

**John:** He was trying to Pygmalion me.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, hold on a second. You don’t necessarily want to turn down free surgery. What was he offering?

**John:** I don’t know. You could be dealing with a completely different host here.

**Craig:** That’s so weird.

**John:** So weird.

**Craig:** That’s psycho. I can get your surgery. That’s what you want from somebody. That says love.

**John:** Yeah. I wish I could figure out this guy’s name to sort of see where he’s at now in life.

**Craig:** If only we could cut into you and rearrange your meat. Then…

**John:** Do you need all your ribs? I don’t know that you do.

**Craig:** Oh my god. That’s terrifying. All right, well, you know.

**John:** That’s dating.

**Craig:** Hey, he was open with you at the very least.

**John:** And so the one last sort of Internet dating story I’ll share. I will say that I do miss dating in my 20s because I like seeing people’s apartments.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s a thought. Sure.

**John:** It’s nice going to see people’s apartments. A guy who, an Internet date, and we ended up going out to lunch at like a Baja Fresh. And Baja Fresh is a chain in Southern California that is known for, they have a salsa bar. And you can have lots of different kinds of salsa there to put on your burritos and your tacos. And this guy got like 15 little cups for salsa. And filled them up with pico de gallo, the chopped up tomato thing, and just sort of ate that as a salad.

**Craig:** What? [laughs]

**John:** That should be a giant red flag. And it was a giant red flag. There was not a second date.

**Craig:** I don’t know. I mean, what if that was just this adorable affectation that he had and he was amazing. He’s like the best husband ever to somebody and they’re like, “Oh my god, Jimmy, the one thing about him is the pico de Gallo thing, but otherwise he’s perfect.”

**John:** Other than like stalking that girl at Fashion Bar.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** He’s a good guy.

**Craig:** Other than the fact that he came to my house, delivered this love letter, and then 20 minutes later came back and said the whole thing was fake, he’s great. We suck. God we suck.

**John:** So you shouldn’t judge people by the worst thing they’ve ever done. Which in your case was mail fraud.

**Craig:** Mail fraud. Exactly.

**John:** And in my case was stalking at a retail store.

**Craig:** And Aspen gay ski week guy’s worst case was just being Jame Gumb from Silence of the Lambs and wanting to cut into you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s terrifying. “You’re the kind of person my therapist wants me to date,” what that means is I don’t want to date you.

**John:** Indeed. It really does. It frankly does. It’s like you’re not a thing I want, but I want to want you.

**Craig:** You’re the kind of food my dietician says I should be eating. OK, I get it. I’m asparagus. Screw you man.

**John:** Fun stuff. Fun times.

**Craig:** Bad dates.

**John:** So you haven’t dated in forever, so do you miss any part of that life?

**Craig:** No. Not at all. I mean, I don’t know – it seems to me like it’s chaotic and disruptive and scary. Fraught with pain. I mean, I’m painting a terrible picture of it. I guess mostly the reason why is if you’re not dating, if you’re in a monogamous relationship and you have a lot of friends who are dating they don’t come to you with good dating stories. They come to you with the disasters. That’s all you hear are just – I was on my skateboard and it went great. Nothing happened. Crazy. And I came home. You just hear like fell off my skateboard, smashed my face into the ground, lost five teeth. Traumatized. That’s the kind of dating story I would get. Just the disasters.

**John:** Yeah. I think I miss being young. I miss my youth. But I think if I were to ask that person then like what do you want, I totally want exactly what I have now which is like a really happy marriage and family and all the stuff. So I’m just the luckiest person alive. So I don’t miss that dating.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well that’s the idea. That you know what you want. You get what you want.

**John:** I won.

**Craig:** You’re happy with want you want. And you don’t need to, for instance, surgically alter Mike.

**John:** I do not.

**Craig:** He’s perfect, except for this one slice.

**John:** No, no. Perfect.

**Craig:** I want to meet this guy. This guy sounds awesome actually.

**John:** Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you John.

Links:

* [Lil Yachty Uno Movie](https://deadline.com/2021/02/mattel-uno-lil-yachty-1234687330/)
* [PayUpHollywood Results](https://drive.google.com/file/d/10movS-DYGCxXdFf0daf1XnVSAmv2bWH4/view) and [article](https://medium.com/@elizabeth.alper/the-2020-payuphollywood-survey-results-are-here-3e5c6be8744f)
* Thank you to [Liz Alper](https://twitter.com/LizAlps?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) and [Jamarah Hayner](https://jkhconsultingservices.com/about/)!
* The Gamestop movie at [Netflix](https://deadline.com/2021/02/netflix-gamestop-stock-movie-screenwriter-mark-boal-noah-centineo-scott-galloway-makeready-1234684568/), [MGM](https://deadline.com/2021/01/mgm-ben-mezrichs-the-antisocial-network-wall-street-1234684378/), and [RatPac](https://www.wsj.com/articles/reddits-wallstreetbets-founder-sells-life-story-to-movie-producer-ratpac-entertainment-11612440001?cx_testId=3&cx_testVariant=cx_2&cx_artPos=0#cxrecs_s)
* [Rachel Miller](https://twitter.com/RachMiller) [Twitter Thread](https://twitter.com/RachMiller/status/1357048517143851008)
* Check out Rachel’s nonprofit [Film2Future here!](https://www.film2future.org/)
* [What the next generation of editors need to tell their political reporters](https://presswatchers.org/2021/01/what-the-next-generation-of-editors-need-to-tell-their-political-reporters/) by Dan Froomkin
* [Whitney Houston and Brandy singing Impossible from Cinderella](https://twitter.com/ivyknowIes/status/1357387970807005185?s=20)
* [Stella Zawistowski](https://twitter.com/stellaphone)
* [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/) also we’re now offering annual memberships!
* [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 Matthew Chilelli ([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/487standard.mp3).

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 485 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we make good on our promise to explain Hollywood’s guilds and unions. Then we’ll tackle the problem of good and evil, law and chaos, as it relates to character alignment and whether it’s helpful for writers to be thinking along these axes. And in our bonus segment for Premium members we will talk about the screenwriting guru/QAnon connection which is as obvious and obnoxious as you’d think.

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh, I can’t wait. Can’t wait.

**John:** Yeah. But before we get into any of this, Craig, I know you are a person who loves puzzles.

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** I suspect you also love mysteries.

**Craig:** I love mysteries.

**John:** I could see you in another life becoming a detective.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, I have a mystery for you to help me solve. And there is an answer. I promise.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** Since about Thanksgiving a thing I’ve noticed is when I wake up in the mornings my fingers smell sweet. Not like maple syrup, but kind of like an agave syrup. Just they smell genuinely sweet. And this was incredibly puzzling to me. I wondered what could be going on.

I found what the answer was. But I’m curious what your process might be towards figuring out what was going on.

**Craig:** OK. Well, I suppose the first thing I would do is to try and determine when the crime occurred. So, before I would go to bed I would very carefully smell and taste my own fingers to make sure that they weren’t already sweet.

**John:** And, yes, I smelled my fingers before going to bed and they did not smell sweet. It’s only when I woke up in the morning that they smelled sweet.

**Craig:** Interesting. So then the next thing I would do would be to figure out if there was something where maybe inside of my pillowcase or something that there was some sort of – maybe there was something in there that was rubbing off on my fingers. So I would check the bedding, for instance.

**John:** Yeah. And so I did check that. And I noticed nothing – like my pillowcases did not smell like it. My pillow didn’t smell like it. I couldn’t find that smell anywhere else. It was only on specifically my fingers.

**Craig:** Fingers. Next thing I would ask is are you wearing any sort of mouth appliance at night.

**John:** I am. I wear a mouth guard at night.

**Craig:** Ah-ha.

**John:** I could not imagine sleeping without a mouth guard.

**Craig:** OK. So now what I’m wondering is when you wake up in the morning and you’re smelling the sweetness on your fingers is it after you’ve removed your mouth guard or before?

**John:** It is both.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** So before I’ve taken it off I do smell it and I still smell it after I take it out.

**Craig:** OK, so it’s not for instance perhaps you’ve done a good job scrubbing and cleaning your mouth guard and gotten some residual toothpaste on it or something like that.

**John:** Yeah. That would be a natural thought, but no.

**Craig:** Right. And it’s not for instance that you’ve left any sort of toothpaste residue around.

**John:** No. Nothing. And I would say it’s not minty. I don’t want to – it smells more like kind of like a syrup. I don’t want to go typically maple syrup, but it’s that kind of sweet. Or sort of like baked goods sweet.

**Craig:** Hmm. Mm. OK. All right. I’m now engaging my literal gray cells. My little gray cells.

**John:** How about this. Why don’t we keep talking about the mystery as we go through this episode, so we can actually get to some of the screenwriting stuff? But we’ll come back to this mystery, because there will be answer by the end, I promise.

**Craig:** Great. Like in between–

**John:** You won’t have to flip to the back of the book.

**Craig:** Right. Like in between our topics. OK, great.

**John:** All right. So some follow up. In a previous episode we talked about, or I sort of brought up that I never see female characters grappling with ethical concerns. And some people wrote in with some suggestions. But one of the best ones I thought was Joshua who writes, “In Contact the character of Dr. Ellie Arroway, played by Jodie Foster, is ultimately forced to reconcile her atheism with a transcendent experience she cannot prove, culminating in a memorable congressional hearing where we see her struggling mightily to make sense of what she’s gone through and what it means for how she sees the world and herself.” Let’s listen to a clip.

**Male Voice:** Then why don’t you simply withdraw your testimony and concede that this journey to the center of the galaxy in fact never took place?

**Jodie Foster:** Because I can’t. I had an experience I can’t prove, I can’t even explain it. But everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real. I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever, a vision of the universe, that tells us undeniably how tiny and insignificant and how rare and precious we all are. A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater than ourselves. That we are not – that none of us are alone. I wish I could share that. I wish that everyone, if even for one moment, could feel that awe and humility and that hope…but…that continues to be my wish.

**John:** So that’s not quite what I’m talking about in terms of an ethical concern. It’s a revelation that I don’t often see female characters have, but it’s not the ethical concern that I’m thinking about in terms of like 12 Angry Men.

**Craig:** Right. I love that movie, but that’s the part of the movie that I don’t particularly love because it seemed kind of forced in there. There was a slight sense of an engineered ethical conflict when in fact because we were sort of on the journey with her we kind of got it. There actually really isn’t – she’s not struggling mightily to make sense of what she’s gone through because there’s a pretty clear explanation. Aliens did stuff. [laughs] You know? How they did it and why they did it that way they kind of explain. So, there’s not really a question of did I see a ghost or was it something else. So, I agree with you, not quite what we’re getting at.

**John:** Yeah. But what I do like about that example is that is a character who is encountering a moment and her being male or female is not relevant to this. And that we more often see a male character in that spot. So I do want to give it some partial credit for that reason.

**Craig:** Partial credit.

**John:** Let’s also give partial credit to the eight sequence structure. So we talked about this in Episode 483 and we were very dismissive of this idea of an eight sequence structure. A colleague and classmate, Scott Murphy, he went through USC at the same time I did, we were in different programs. He was in the graduate screenwriting program and I was in the Stark producing program. But he said that at USC they actually taught that. And that’s how they taught that. And so he felt it was a little unfair that we were dismissing it based on kind of the first Google result I got, which I guess that is kind of true. I hadn’t done any deep research.

And he says that the first thing that I brought up was the most extreme version of sort of a labeling of what all those sequences would be. And that really the point in teaching eight sequence structure is to get people thinking about sequences rather than 30-page acts. And to really be thinking about sequences having a beginning, a middle, and an end, which sounds more like the kinds of things that you and I would say. There’s a notion of scenes, there’s a notion of sequences, and they build out to become bigger things.

So I want to give some partial credit to this idea of sequences rather than capital-S Structure.

**Craig:** I still don’t quite know what the value is in terms of teaching people how to create something, because while it is true that you can break these things down into sequences, I mean, you could also break it into sub-sequences and have a 16 sequence structure. But the real question is well what do I write in the sequence. So there’s supposed to be a sequence here but what am I supposed to do? And what if it doesn’t fit inside of this? And what if it’s just a simple moment? It feels pedantic.

**John:** And pedantic also in the sense of like I can understand why it is maybe a useful teaching way to get people to think about smaller blocks of story rather than 30 pages, you know, thinking about something that’s achievable, and beginning, middle, and end. But it’s also really clear to me how a way of teaching something can quickly morph into becoming a prescribed formula for how things have to work. And it feels like maybe that’s the mistake I was making at looking at this one sheet, but also what I worry about sort of over-generalizing this eight sequence structure is that this may be a useful way to teach people how to build up blocks that sort of become a bigger thing and understand what sequences are. But it’s not the magical formula.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I think when you mistake the formula for the actual reality of the script that’s the problem.

**Craig:** I could definitely see myself teaching a class, something that would arrive at an eight sequence structure. But I would kind of want to begin with one sequence structure. Meaning let’s just talk about what your story is from beginning to end in a very big sort of bird’s eye view. So that we understand the rough movement of it. That’s one sequence.

Now let’s divide that into two sequences. So, halves of that big thing. Let’s talk about what happens in this first half. Now, great, we’ve done that. Now let’s divide each one of those again. And lo and behold, just like that, you’ve got yourself–

**John:** You’re getting there.

**Craig:** You’re getting there. You get yourself four and you do it again. And off you go.

**John:** Yeah. And we’ve often talked about there’s a fractal quality to storytelling is that like there should be movement within a scene. There needs to be movement within a sequence. Movement within whatever you want to call an act to get to this whole story. And so every scene is like its own little movie. Every sequence is like its own little movie. So I can understand, again, why it is helpful to be thinking that way as you’re teaching. I just worry then coming back and trying to impose that as capital-S Structure. And any time somebody brings up structure my [unintelligible] just immediately come up because I feel like that’s, you know, you’re giving us a formula and that’s not going to work.

**Craig:** Yes. It’s not going to help me make a thing.

**John:** So, one revelation of this past week is Megana has gotten in a bunch of emails about IP stuff and we now have an umbrella term for it. We’re going to call this Mockable IP.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** So the things like the Slinky Movie, mockable IP. Josh who is pitching sort of a packing peanuts or plywood thing, he said the criteria for a mockable IP is the product should be something real that a company sells. It should be something that makes zero sense as a movie but you can still see someone from the company pitching it to a studio executive’s office. And, third, that it will never, ever be a movie no matter what. Those feel like useful criteria for us to be thinking about with these kinds of IP.

**Craig:** Well, that’s where I disagree with Josh. It was number three.

**John:** You think some of these things will happen?

**Craig:** I think in fact they must be possibly a movie. For us to consider it, because otherwise again we can come down to things like gravel. For us to consider it it has to be something that you know what they might make this. If we talk about, like Slinky, we would do that all the time, and they did it. And we were scooped and they did it. And, yeah. So it has to be something that can be a movie.

**John:** Maybe this number three is like they could make it, but it would immediately be mocked. The mockability, I guess that is begging the question literally. But that’s a crucial part of this.

**Craig:** Right. And good use of begging the question. Thank you.

**John:** Really, I was so excited when I realized I could use that term properly for once. But I also want to, as we talk about this mockable IP, call out a clip that was on the Stephen Colbert show, the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, by a listener who directed it, Ballard C. Boyd. It’s a great – got to combine two things we love in Scriptnotes which is Queen’s Gambit, the Scott Frank show, and Rubik’s Cube. So this was The Queen’s Gambit Rubik’s Cube limited series they were pitching. Let’s take a listen to a clip.

**Female Voice:** I wasn’t just handed my seat. I had to overcome so much. Sexism. A sprained wrist. Temporary color-blindness.

**Male Voice:** You may be the greatest natural talent I’ve ever seen. But you must master the opening move known only to distinguished players. It’s called “turn the left bottom middle forward to the front-facing part. It’s not like chess.” We don’t get to have cool names for things.

**Female Voice:** It may be just a block covered in little stickers to you, but to me it’s the entire world. Oh, also drugs. I do tons of drugs. You don’t know me.

**John:** So we’ll put a link in the show notes to the full trailer for that, but I thought it was a delightful way to combine two things we love in Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** That’s one way to do it. We got some other suggestions in here I see.

**John:** Go for it.

**Craig:** Erica suggests Scrub Daddy. Now, I got to say, that’s possible because it has a face. It’s the goofy sponge that has eyes and a mouth. And I think there’s like a Scrub Mommy and a Scrub Baby. So, I could see a scrub family.

**John:** Yeah, little Scrubbing Bubbles. I love them.

**Craig:** Yeah. Chuck says Fidget Spinner. No.

**John:** No. Because one company doesn’t own it.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not a thing. It’s a thing, but it’s not.

**John:** I guess there was the Emoji Movie which no one actually owns, but still I don’t think fidget spinner is going to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. But emojis are literally everywhere, all over. The fidget spinner was a fad that’s already gone. I don’t think it’s a thing.

Let’s see, Philip from LA suggests Pogs. No.

**John:** I barely remember Pogs. They were sort of – I was in a gap between Pogs. It was elementary school but I think I’d outgrown them by the time they became a thing.

**Craig:** Pogs came back in the ‘90s. And, no, no. Nope.

Danny from St. Louis suggests Preparation H. Now, Danny, now you’re just being silly. This is real. You have to take this seriously. [laughs]

I like Sophie’s though. Sophie I’m pretty sure is touching on something that has been in development. Chia Pet. Surely that’s been, like scripts have been written right?

**John:** Yeah. There must be scripts written about Chia Pet. Or at least parody scripts for Chia Pet.

**Craig:** Or at least parody scripts. And then finally Matt, we do get this suggestion a lot, Pet Rock. For sure. But Pet Rock–

**John:** Dwayne Johnson is in it. It has a meta quality.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, it would have to be a period piece because pet rocks did exist happily in the ‘70s and never after.

**John:** Yeah. I had a pet rock for like a day and a half maybe. And then I realized that it was just a rock with some googly eyes attached to it. And I stopped paying attention.

**Craig:** I didn’t understand the joke. Because I was too young. I got a pet rock. I was like seven. And everyone was like there you go. And I’m like, OK. But, wait, why? And they’re like, “Well, it’s kind of making fun of the whole idea of toys.” What?

**John:** Why would you make fun of toys?

**Craig:** Right. What do you mean the idea of toys? Let’s just back up to that for a second. So this is my introduction to irony. Pet Rock.

**John:** I think all the things we’re talking about, they have to have eyes. That’s really what it comes down to. If you have to add eyes to it that’s a problem. So, there was an animated Rubik’s Cube cartoon at some point, but it was like Rubik’s Cube and then they added eyes to it. Well that’s disturbing. Versus like Pac-Man, he already had eyes.

**Craig:** Well, the Slinky doesn’t have eyes, but of course Slinky isn’t a character. It’s about the people that made the Slinky. What do you think about – you know what, that movie, the Seth Rogan animated movie that was basically all just food.

**John:** Food. Yeah. And so they added food to it, but I think they got away with it because it was just so–

**Craig:** Dirty.

**John:** It was such an absurd concept. And it was really dirty.

**Craig:** It was dirty.

**John:** It was really, really raunchy.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was dirty.

**John:** Like Towelie is one of my favorite characters in South Park and that’s just a towel with eyes.

**Craig:** A towel with googly eyes.

**John:** Who is really stoned.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** Really red googly stoner eyes.

**Craig:** I remember the paper clip guy from Microsoft that everybody hates. It’s a paper clip with eyes.

**John:** Oh yeah. Clippy. Yeah.

**Craig:** And eyebrows weirdly.

**John:** Yeah. Well it’s important because you can’t get full expression without that.

**Craig:** Right. Yes.

**John:** So, Craig, interstitial here, do you have any more questions here about my sweet, sweet fingers?

**Craig:** Yes. This may be violating HIPAA. Do you have diabetes?

**John:** I do not have diabetes. Happy to report I do not have diabetes.

**Craig:** OK. I have another question for you.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** Does this happen every single morning, or some mornings?

**John:** Every single morning.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s interesting. One possibility was that it was related to a food you were eating.

**John:** That was a thought I had as well. I thought perhaps around Thanksgiving I was baking yeasty things that maybe there was something about the baking or the foods I was eating that were specific to the season. But it continued.

**Craig:** OK. I have another question for you. Even though you like I are in the brotherhood of the bald, do you put any sort of product in your hair or any sort of skincare product that might have an odor to it?

**John:** The answer to your first question is no. I don’t use Rogaine or any sort of topical hair product. So it’s not that. But, I do want to say that you are getting close to the solution there. Yeah.

**Craig:** Interesting. Wait, what about Mike?

**John:** No, it’s not Mike. So it is my own situation here.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** The second part of your question was a skincare product. And, yes, I put on a moisturizer. The moisturizer does not smell like that though.

**Craig:** I see. I see. I see. OK. All right. Well we should probably take another break.

**John:** We’ll continue on and we’ll talk about unions and guilds.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So this was something we promised we were going to do I think last week. And there’s actually two kind of news hooks for it this week because – we’ll put a link of the Deadline article of Hollywood Unions Celebrate the Inauguration of President Joe Biden and VP Kamala Harris. The Most Pro-Union President and Partner in the White House. So all the unions and guilds were very excited and little tweets about that.

And also Biden fired the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board. And then the replacement person for that. So there’s going to be a new person there. And I will say that doing guild stuff that the people who have been running NLRB has been a challenge for the WGA. You don’t want to go to them for help because they might side with the other side. So, those were two things in the news just this week that are related to Hollywood guilds and unions.

**Craig:** It’s a big deal. And John is right. You can’t really overestimate the impact that these things have on unions and the way they not only just conduct their week to week business but also how they go into negotiations. Because ultimately when you’re negotiating with companies as a union or when you’re trying to figure out how far to push things with management in between contracts your leverage is that maybe they’re violating the law. Or maybe there is an issue of law that is undecided that could be decided in your favor. Or, maybe there’s an issue in the contract that’s undecided that could be decided by mediators or arbitrators or eventually be heard by the National Labor Relations Board.

And if that government body is skewed to be anti-union you are automatically and reasonably way more gun shy about all sorts of things. The meddling that the government can do to hurt unions is not limited just to how they decide disputes. Sometimes it comes down to just aggravating paperwork.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** When I was on the board way, way back when in the mid-2000s the Bush administration changed the rules. So every union must every year file a financial report that is publicly available. And basically under the Bush administration they changed the rules so you just had to report way more information. It was more burdensome to the unions to put it all together. And also it just was like you had to just open your kimono completely. Everybody should be able to see everything. And it was, you know, designed ultimately to kind of put their thumb in the union’s eye.

Over the decades since the big unionization movements in the early part of the 20th century the government has steadily chipped away. Steadily chipped away at organized labor and their power. And this is a much needed course correction on that part.

**John:** Yeah. So in this conversation we’re talking about unions and guilds as they exist in Hollywood and really only in the US. And so that’s necessarily going to be very limited to this because while there are international Writers Guilds they are more like professional societies because they’re not true unions where they’re representing employees. And we’ll get into some of sort of why the unique way we do it in the US allows for writers’ unions that wouldn’t exist or make sense other places.

And I started to put together a lot of links to the history of organized labor in Hollywood and I realized we are not a history podcast. We are going to mess up way more than we’re going to illuminate, but we’ll have some links in the show notes to that. Important things to understand in terms of background, the film industry is about 100 years old. It’s centered in Los Angeles. Radio and television was originally based out of New York. Even though more production moved to LA, there was still a lot of late night TV and news largely stayed in New York. That still exists. You still see the shadows of that in sort of how the unions are set up.

Interestingly, the first of the Hollywood unions IATSE, created all of this because they were the teamsters who were part of Broadway, sort of vaudeville, Broadway stuff. So it goes even back before there was film there were unions that were involved in the film production.

And, Craig, I remember when you were on Karina’s podcast did you play Louis B. Mayer? I’m trying to remember who you played.

**Craig:** That’s right. I was Louis B. Mayer.

**John:** So, this is a thing I did not know and I’ll put a link in the show notes to this, too, but I hadn’t realized the degree to which Mayer and the birth of the Oscars was really a response and an anticipation of organized labor.

**Craig:** Yup. So Louis B. Mayer, sensing that the artists under this control were starting to organize and come together and talk, and thus threaten his hegemony – and he really was the king of the council of kings – he very brilliantly created the Oscars because his theory was if you are possibly in danger of having to compete for resources with artists hold up a shiny trophy and they’ll forget about you and just fight each other for it. And that’s exactly what happened. [laughs] And continues to happen to this day.

So, the entire awards industry is in and of itself a massive distraction that not only gets artists competing with each other, but gets them competing with each other in a way that allows the entertainment industry to also make money off of their competing with each other. It’s spectacular.

**John:** It really is a remarkable achievement.

**Craig:** Remarkable achievement.

**John:** So a thing that’s important to understand is that when you talk about unions they only make sense really when you talk about the fact that there are employers and there’s somebody that you’re negotiating with and against. And so you can negotiate with the studios individually, with the streamers individually, but you tend to negotiate with them as a group. And that group that you’re negotiating with is the AMPTP, the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which is the Academy, which I got that confused when I first got out here because it seems like they’re two big organizations that run movies and stuff. But AMPTP is the collective body that we negotiate with as unions and guilds for our contract.

And you look at the different kinds of unions and guilds that there are, there’s a wide range. So you have actors, you have writers, you have directors, all of whom are sort of doing kind of intellectual labor, artistic labor. And then you have much more sort of physical crafts and trades peoples. You have grips and electricians and teamsters who are driving trucks. And you have all the other sort of unions that are involved in actual physical production.

And they seem so disparate and yet there are some commonalities, so I wanted to talk through some of the commonalities before we get into sort of why the different unions and guilds are positioned so differently.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So what are some common threads, Craig?

**Craig:** Well, all of us are working gig work. So, typical union jobs you work at let’s say the Ford plant building trucks. That’s your job. Year in and year out, your job, welder on the line. That’s what you do. And you do it at one place for one employer. In Hollywood everyone is essentially freelancing for their entire careers.

So, you’re getting work from movie to movie, from script to script, from edit job to edit job. Everyone is constantly looking for the next thing because our businesses are organized around shows and movies, not around the steady production of a single product, like for instance a Rubik’s Cube.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So we’re not all together on the same floor, nor do we have longevity in a position or vis-à-vis each other or with one product. We’re constantly moving and swirling around.

**John:** Yeah. And we should say this idea of skilled labor, like welding is a skill and there’s training that goes into it. The same way that somebody who is working as an editor has a certain skillset. A welder has certain skillsets. But that welder is going to probably be working at the Ford plant for years and years and years and years and really has one employer. Versus this editor who is going to be hopping around from various jobs to various jobs. And it’s cobbling together enough money to make a living through many jobs rather than just one job.

There are exceptions, of course. There’s people who have been on TV shows for forever, but in general you’re hopping from place to place to place.

**Craig:** Yeah. Those are pretty rare. And similarly where somebody that is in a union as a nurse will have the potential ability to work at dozens of different hospitals, clinics, healthcare centers, etc., we’re more like professional athletes who can work for a single organization of teams. And our teams are Disney, Warner Bros., Sony, Universal, and Paramount, and their associated television networks and things like that.

**John:** Yeah. So there’s an oligopoly in the sense that there’s a very limited number of buyers. And so the big names, I don’t know if it’s 75% of employment, they represent a huge amount of the actual employment is to and for those people. So they have a lot of power because they are the buyers of note.

What is interesting about us as writers and which we should get into this is that we are doing work-for-hire. So intellectual property is commissioned from us. The people who are hiring us to do the thing, they ultimately own the copyright. And therefore as writers, as artists, we are an employee of the commissioner. So same with like an artist who is working at Disney animation, they’re drawing stuff but Disney owns everything that they’re drawing for Disney.

**Craig:** Yeah. And this works against us and it works for us. I mean, the only good part of this and we are unique in this regard here in the United States is that we can be a proper employer, therefore we can have a proper union. And as a result of our proper union we do have certain benefits that are better than some of the benefits that other similar artists receive elsewhere even as they retain copyright in their country. Because these large corporations here are exceptionally good at exploiting reuse. They’re really, really good at it.

Do we get enough of the share of that reuse? As sufficient amount as we should? No. Is the insufficient amount that we get typically more than what other people get in royalties elsewhere? Yeah, it is. So, it’s an interesting thing. We have a tiny piece of a very large pie which sometimes adds up to more than the entire piece of a very tiny, tiny pie. A little miniature molecular pie.

**John:** And so we talk about residuals and we talk about back-ends on things and that is an important part, especially for writers to maintain a career, but there’s other kind of fundamental union things which are also important. So things like worker safety and safety on a set. These are things that come about because of unions. Minimum hours/maximum hours. Just other sort of quality of life issues that are only possible because we have unions. So, it’s very easy to be myopic and only think about this in terms of how this works for a writer, but unions help everyone in all these different trades.

So let’s talk about the different unions.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, in Europe a lot of these other things that unions do like enforcing safety and things like that the government does.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Our government is less interested in mandating things and so you do find situations where in order to attract production and employment people will just sort of look the other way. I mean, very famously we have a massive problem in our industry with lack of sleep. We know that. There should be a statutory cap on how much you can work, how many hours in a row. And that’s it. No more. We don’t have it. I don’t know what the number is. I don’t know if there is a number.

I’ve worked 20 hour days. I’ve done it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** On set. It was terrible. Because you didn’t have a choice. So, that’s the kind of thing where our unions have to sort of step in where our government has failed.

**John:** Absolutely. So, things like – that kind of worker safety, but also it’s through unions that we have healthcare. In other countries the healthcare would be a national priority.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And we don’t have that here. Pensions are also through a union. So these are crucial things that were one sort of strike after strike over the course of time for the different unions.

So let’s talk about what the unions are. There’s SAG/AFTRA, which used to be two separate actor’s unions which then got combined together. They represent actors, but both in film and television and in radio. Other performers under AFTRA, I always get confused sort of what the boundaries were between this. I would say my general impression, and I think Craig alluded to this last episode, is that SAG/AFTRA is often fighting with itself more than it’s fighting the town.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, SAG in particular has a long history of kind of the bitter internal feud between I guess you could call them the more militant folks and the more pragmatic folks. Pick your adjective. But they’ve been struggling with that for a long, long time. And that all came to a head when they merged with AFTRA which was something the pragmatists really wanted to do. AFTRA definitely covered things like voiceover work for radio. I could never quite tell exactly how the division worked. But they are combined now.

They are definitely a much larger union than the Writers Guild or the Directors Guild. That said, they don’t have the kind of employment requirements that we do. You don’t become a Writers Guild member for life. I mean, technically you do, but what happens is if you don’t work after a while you become post-current. So you’re still a member of the union but you don’t get any of the benefits. You’re not voting.

**John:** You’re not going to vote.

**Craig:** You’re not voting. That’s the big one. You don’t have a say on whether or not for instance a new contract gets approved. You need to have some employment skin in the game for that. Not so with SAG. I believe once you’re a member you’re a member.

**John:** And that really does change things a lot. SAG has not gone on strike, at least during the time that I’ve been working for here. If SAG were to go on strike it would shut down everything because we have not just actors in dramatic stuff, but all of our hosts in late night. Those are all going to be SAG people. And so it would be a big deal if it happened. It hasn’t happened. Could it happen? Sure. You never know.

Let’s talk about the DGA. So DGA represents directors the same way that the WGA represents writers, but the DGA also represents assistant directors, so the folks who are running – keeping the sets running properly. UPMs, that class of sort of folks who are making sets function is covered by the DGA, which is odd to me. It’s very different from what we’re used to in the WGA.

**Craig:** Yes. Well in particular because certainly the UPM job and the AD job are not primarily creative positions. They primarily are positions involved with the management of a production. Scheduling. Coordination. Budget. The employment of others. Management. This is going to come up again very quickly when we talk about the WGA and the reason we need to talk about it is because there’s a rule, it’s not a secret, it’s a rule – management is not allowed to be in a union. That’s just a rule. Which makes sense. You know, because if your boss could be in the union then you just get out-voted by a bunch of bosses and then what’s the point of the union?

So what is a manager roughly speaking the way the government defines it is somebody who is directly in charge of the hiring or firing of other employees, or the management of their time and how they do their job. That’s management. Well…

**John:** You definitely see that in the DGA. You see that in the WGA as we’re going to get to. But you also see it in this next, the biggest of the unions I think, we’re going to talk about which is IATSE. So IATSE is everything else you can imagine that is probably a Hollywood job follows under IATSE. And there are a tremendous number of smaller guilds within IATSE, locals, who specialize in one area of it. So there’s classically the Editors Guild, which is underneath IATSE, and over the last year has had real frustrations with sort of the lack of attention being paid to their specific specialty within there.

Within each of these places, though, you know, you’ll see that there are people who are responsible for hiring for other people. It’s just a thing that necessarily happens where you’re looking at, OK, I’m going to be in charge of this department so I need to fill my ranks. There’s a management function there. So it’s complicated.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think if you’re talking about sort of foreman type position, that’s acceptable. Some employees have a higher position of authority than others. So, I get that. You know, a pit boss that works for a casino is still an employee. And the dealer is an employee. And the pit boss is looking. But the pit boss is not hiring or firing the dealer.

And in IATSE there’s probably not a ton of situations where there’s specifically – I mean, technically it’s always the producer who is hiring or firing. Sometimes it’s the UPM in the DGA. IATSE is a great example of too much of a good thing. It is – you want a union to be sizable enough that you have collective strength. That’s the value of collective bargaining. If you have a union that represents six people at one Subway, it’s not that great. If you had a union that represents all Subway employees, I mean the sandwich, not the metro, then they can get something done.

IATSE, what they’ve done is conglomerate a lot of unions together because individually there may not be enough say onset painters to have collective strength. But then they create locals and they get bundled together. And then IATSE is the meta bundle of all the bundles. But the problem is that if you’re in one of these smaller locals, like for instance the Animation Guild. You’re just not going to be able to convince IATSE, all 100-and – I don’t know how many people are in it, 100,000? You’re not going to be able to convince all of them to go on strike so that your 30 members can get a slightly better deal. So you’re stuck. And that is not a great arrangement.

**John:** It is not a great arrangement. And something you’ve often brought up on the show, a somewhat analogous situation, is screenwriters, feature writers, within the WGA. And that folks who primarily write features in the WGA can feel like their issues are not getting as much attention as TV writers who are the bulk of the membership of the WGA. That’s changing now and there’s – obviously people do a lot more of both. You are now a TV writer. But it’s a genuine concern. And so you’re always having these conflicting instincts to broaden your base so that you can represent more kinds of people and sort of protect yourself. And to specialize so you can really focus on your core constituencies.

And there’s not going to be a great answer for that. You know, we often will talk about videogame writing is very much like screenwriting. There’s clear analogs between how those work. And maybe we should represent and protect videogame writing because that is clearly going to become something that is like animation. We want to make sure we don’t miss out on that.

But, are we going to do the best job representing those videogame writers? Is it pulling focus away? There’s a lot of writing that happens in reality shows. Not just where you aim the camera, but also all the narration. Shouldn’t all that writing be covered by the WGA? Sure. Maybe. But are we going to lose focus in trying to organize that work? So it’s always tough. It’s always going to be decisions and conflicts.

**Craig:** Yeah. And we’re hamstrung a bit by the law, again. For instance, we can’t necessarily compel union membership for people that are working in Canada. In fact, we can’t at all because they’re not here and jurisdiction sort of stops at the border. So, in videogames there are a lot of people, a lot of companies, that are foreign, international, and they’re not American. And there are a lot of writers that are working overseas. Also the entire videogame industry is vigilantly anti-union. So, one of the tricky things is to try and crack into those places is you’ve got a company where there are 400 people, all of whom would love to be in the union and they’ve all been told you can’t be. And they can’t. And then somebody else comes along and says, “We’re going to successfully unionize four of you.” That becomes hard to do.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then there’s suddenly a ton of resentments and difficulties and problems. So, they just cracked down on all of it. They are brutally anti-union. And this, again, is why the more strength and pro-union impact you can have at the governmental level, and it has to be the federal level. They’re the only ones. This is all federal. If you get that federal level then some of these things start to tilt your way. If you don’t, running up hill in shoes made of ice.

**John:** The last sort of evergreen issue I want to make sure we talk about is that we usually think of unions representing the minimums. Basically trying to raise the minimums and protect the people at the bottom. Basically to set a floor on things. And that they’re not especially focused on what we’ll call above scale. So scale being the minimum you could pay somebody. Above scale being whatever beyond that. So much of the work that happens in the WGA is above scale. It’s beyond sort of scale payments. And Craig mentioned earlier in professional sports the player’s unions are sort of similar in position to us in that they are going to set minimums, but most of the members are working way above that and are going to have issues that are not the same as the lowest members. And there’s a natural conflict there. I mean, the degree to which you’re focusing on those bottom line issues for people making scale versus people above scale. And it’s challenging to balance those two demands.

**Craig:** It’s made more difficult by the fact that a number of the people in the Writers Guild who are making a lot of money are management. They just are. Showrunners who are hiring and firing other writers. They’re management. And so the Writers Guild is engaged in kind of an interesting dance. It comes more powerful vis-à-vis the companies by representing those powerful members of management, showrunners. And in theory that increased leverage helps them get more stuff for everyone. I don’t know if that’s true though. [laughs] So, it’s an interesting thing. And it does create kind of weird situations where you’ve got very wealthy people coming out there and saying things like, “Everybody needs to strike.” And you look at them and go, “That’s not a problem for you. You could strike for the rest of your life. You’re fine.”

There are tensions within our union because of the vast disparity of income which is even wider – well, I don’t know if it’s wider than the overall income disparity in our country, but it’s up there. I mean, we have writers that are scratching by and barely earning the right to have healthcare and making maybe $40,000 in a year gross. And then we have writers who are making $70 million in a year. So hard to hold that ship together perfectly, or even well.

**John:** Yeah. It’s an ongoing challenge. And it’s kind of always been this challenge. And it’s probably only accelerating. But let’s talk about the WGA because it’s also important to remind everybody that there’s actually two WGAs. So there’s the Writers Guild of America West and then there’s the Writers Guild of America East. They’re technically separate unions. They are sister unions. And luckily, thank god, we get along really, really well. We haven’t always gotten along really well.

I’ve been lucky to be on two negotiating committees within this last year and honestly Zoom makes it so much easier for everybody to be on the same conversation. Because traditionally what would happen is the WGA West handles all of the negotiations for the film and TV contracts. So we deal with the AMPTP and the WGA East basically takes that deal and their members vote yes on the deal.

Usually what would happen is that several representatives from the WGA East would come out and sit in on all these negotiation sessions and say, yes, great, and that would be it. Or raise their concerns about specific things that are of concerns to the East members. In these last negotiations we had a full contingent of East folks who were in all of those Zooms and were participating and that was great. So I think things are closer than they’ve ever been. But it’s important to understand they are different unions and they are kind of representing different priorities.

Theoretically any member of the West could also be a member of the East. But the East also represents. They’ve done a lot more organizing in online writing. So, organizing websites that have writers and they’re going through and representing those writers, which is great but also very different and I don’t know on the West side whether we’d want – it becomes an issue of how broad do you go. Would they be a good fit in the West? I don’t know.

**Craig:** I don’t understand this anymore. [laughs] It’s pointless. This exists literally because it exists. It’s just – it started–

**John:** It’s just because of history.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because of history. But it has long outlived its actual practical purpose. To the point where the Writers Guild West processes residuals for all Writers Guild West and East members, mails the checks to the Writers Guild East for them to just put in Writers Guild East envelopes and mail to their members. We are done to that amount of silliness. And the arcane nature of how the council and the board vote, it all is an unnecessary – what do you call it? Cruft? If that what it is in code? It’s organizational cruft. There shouldn’t be a West or an East. There should just be the WGA.

**John:** Yeah. So traditional arguments against it is that what I said in terms of East actually represents some kinds of writers that are not sort of classically West writers. And, yes, West represents some news folks too, but I don’t know that we do an especially good job of that. Traditionally it’s been like, well, how do you have national meetings? How do you actually have somebody – basically you can’t get everyone in a room together. In the age of Zoom it’s become much less important. And so the fact that none of these people have been in rooms for a long time, maybe it’s less important than it’s ever been before.

It’s hard to do that sort of on the ground work and have the meetings and do the stuff with membership when people are spread hither and yon. But it’s probably more possible – it is more possible now than it’s ever been before to conceive of some unification. But to me I would say having been on the board recently and been through this last bit of negotiations, it’s just not a giant priority for me. It’s I think a lower priority for me than it is for you.

**Craig:** It will remain a low priority until there’s a problem. And there have been problems and there will be problems again. And that’s when it will become – this has to be solved. We have writers all over the country. Basically if you’re west of the Mississippi you go to the West. If you’re east you go to the East. You’re right. You can switch. You can’t be in both at the same time. But you could switch. And it’s all just – we have two award ceremonies running simultaneously.

**John:** It’s goofy.

**Craig:** It’s just dumb. It’s dumb. And there’s duplication. We have two executive directors. Why? And sometimes it actually does cause problems when, for instance, in credit administration. If you are in a credit arbitration with a writer from the East there is a chance that the East may handle the arbitration instead of the West. Well what’s the difference? Well, there is I believe one lawyer on the staff of the Writers Guild East. There are about 12 lawyers just in the credits department of the Writers Guild West, all of whom are the ones that essentially take the lead on all of the negotiation, arbitration, and enforcement of credit rules with the companies. You want those guys running the arbitration because that’s what they do.

**John:** You want the cardiac surgeon who has done 100 of them rather than the first one.

**Craig:** And it just – let’s just fold it all together. You can have two. If you need an office over there, like people go to a physical office anymore. I mean, all that stuff is going away. So it would be ideal to solve this before it becomes a problem again. Because the actuality is when you look at the constitutions of the Writers Guild West and East, if the East wanted to cause a major problem it can. It has a way to do that. It hasn’t in a long time, happily. But it would be nice to get rid of it. Pointless.

**John:** Yeah. Last thing I probably should have stressed earlier in this conversation is that a frequent question I get is how do I join the Writers Guild. Or how do I join the Screen Actors Guild or anything.

**Craig:** Fill out this form.

**John:** It’s actually one of those amazing things where you don’t have to do anything.

**Craig:** They’ll find you.

**John:** They will find you. Once you’re hired to work on a project that is union-covered you will be required to join that union. A certain requirement has to be met. But you can’t join until you have to join and then you have to join and then you’re in. That’s really the simple explanation for it.

**Craig:** They will hunt you down. And one of the reasons they hunt you down is because when you become a member of the Writers Guild you are required to become a member of the Writers Guild. And therefore you’re required to send them quite a fat check for initiation. So, believe me, they get you. You’ll know. You’ll know. Congrats. Surprise.

**John:** Yup. All right. So that’s a quick overview. There’s obviously a lot more we could talk about with the guilds and the unions, but I want to make sure that we get some more time to resolve the mystery of the sticky fingers.

**Craig:** Mm, OK.

**John:** Not sticky, I should stress. Sweet, not sticky.

**Craig:** Sweet. Not sticky. Sweet. So, I was sort of getting close when I was talking about potentially some sort of hair product. So my theory is that you’re touching something that has that smell on it and it is transferring, but it’s happening while you’re sleeping. And I’ve already investigated the bedding, the begging material. It’s not that. It’s not your mouth guard. It’s not any sort of skincare product, as far as I can tell.

**John:** Going back, it is a skincare product. That’s the distinction. But none of the skincare products smell like that.

**Craig:** Oh, interesting. So perhaps there is a skincare product that when exposed to the air oxidizes and turns into a different smell.

**John:** That is essentially what has happened. That is the answer to the mystery. And so it is this facial moisturizer I put on. It’s like the last thing I put on at night. And it doesn’t have any smell at all. But somehow overnight it has like vitamin C in it or something. That changes – basically I don’t wash my hands afterwards because it’s just moisturizer. And the chemical reaction that happens is it smells sweet in the morning.

And so I was able to test this out by – that was my theory – and so what I tried is like, OK, I’m going to put this stuff on but I’m going to put it on with like a Q-Tip and not actually touch it. And so I tried that for two nights and then I went back to using my fingers. And that is exactly what is happening. It’s a chemical reaction to the moisturizer I’m putting on before bedtime.

**Craig:** Right. I have never done that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s important to moisturize.

**Craig:** Everyone says that. Everyone says it. I’m not going to do it. You know I’m not going to do it.

**John:** You’re not going to do it. You’re just not going to do it.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** I come from a long line of men that just stupidly don’t care about the largest organ in their body. It’s the skin.

**John:** Craig, can I ask you a question about sleeping? Because we played D&D till pretty late last night. And then I know you had to take your puppy out to pee. And yet when I look on Twitter like you were up hours before I was. So I worry are you sleeping enough?

**Craig:** Sometimes I am. And sometimes I’m not. And it’s really weird. So I didn’t have to wake up that early. I had my alarm set for a bit later. And I just happened to wake up that early. Sometimes when I wake up earlier than I should I don’t feel tired. And I’m fine. Right now I don’t feel particularly tired. I’ll probably sleep longer tonight.

There are sometimes where I get like eight hours and the alarm wakes me up at eight hours and I feel like I could sleep another 20 hours and I’m miserable. It’s really weird. I can’t quite explain it. But, yeah, I only slept I would say four hours last night.

**John:** Yeah. That would not be enough for me.

**Craig:** It’s just natural. Yeah, it’s weird. Normally I would be a zombie, but I don’t know. Coasting on adrenaline.

**John:** One of the tweets that I saw recently from you was about D&D alignments as pertaining to crossword puzzles. And so what I saw in your tweet from January 17 was you can imagine like a Tic-Tac-Toe grid and in it was different layouts of crossword puzzles and they’re identified as being lawful good, neutral good, chaotic good. And so it was a meme that you were sharing.

And I want to talk quickly about D&D alignment charts and that idea of the nine kinds of alignments and whether they have any relevance to the work that you and I do as writers.

**Craig:** Sure. So the classic breakdown in Dungeons & Dragons is there are three general axes of goodness. There’s good, there’s neutral, and there’s evil. So that’s kind of your moral approach. You are a person that is – you believe in some sort of moral positivity, you just don’t care, or you’re just actually evil. And then those are divided into kind of ordering mechanisms. There’s lawful, neutral, and chaotic. So, lawful, you tend to follow some sort of rigid code. Neutral, you sort of make decisions on the fly as you need to. And chaotic, you don’t follow any rhyme or reason. You’re all over the place. And you can apply those to any of those. So there’s lawful good, neutral good, chaotic good. Lawful neutral, true neutral, which is neutral-neutral, and chaotic neutral. And then lawful evil, neutral evil, and chaotic evil.

**John:** And so classically you see that arranged as a Tic-Tac-Toe grid where true neutral is the center square.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so my first exposure to I think morality or sort of the concept of regimented morality was in fifth grade playing D&D for the first time and seeing this alignment chart, which I don’t know that it pre-dated Gary Gygax and the original D&D or not, but it was my introduction to this idea of systemic kind of morality and approaches to these things. And we’ll put links in the show notes to a bunch of different memes about Arrested Development or Marvel, Harry Potter, or Star Wars, looking at that grid with classic characters from those mythologies and how they would fit into that grid. And it’s useful to some degree I guess. But I wanted to talk about sort of what’s good about it and sort of the pros and the cons of it.

I guess for me it’s useful to distinguish between approaches to a problem as a hero, so lawful good versus chaotic good. I can see the differences there. And imagining a lawful evil, like a really organized orderly evil versus a pure chaotic evil can be helpful. And so I think as I’m approaching my own writing to some degree I’m aware of that as an approach. I’m never – in no character breakdown have I ever written like somebody is lawful good for a screenplay. But it is somewhat useful as a framing device if you’re thinking of a character’s approach. What would you say?

**Craig:** I probably get – the only use I get out of it other than entertainment when somebody breaks down a show that I love into these characters. It’s the Game of Thrones alignment chart. Who’s in what? But I do think that it’s good if you find yourself feeling like you’re stuck between two easy, obvious polls and you can go, oh, this is just like a good guy or a bad guy. Well, it’s good to think in these terms and think about what would happen if – what does it mean to be chaotic neutral? And what would happen to my character if I took away their sense of morality? I didn’t make them evil. I didn’t make them good. I just made them not care. What would happen if my bad guy didn’t really follow a code, but also wasn’t a lunatic. And these things are interesting.

Look, the classic boring ones are lawful good, which is just like–

**John:** Dudley Do-Right.

**Craig:** Yeah. Superman. Lawful good. And then chaotic evil is just a monster like a wolf-man running around and biting people. It’s chaotic evil. But then you have these really interesting ones like chaotic good. And lawful evil. And true neutral, which is very rare. So it’s fun to kind of challenge yourself a little bit if you feel like you’re stuck. But, I mean, it’s a pretty blunt tool. I wouldn’t go too far.

**John:** It’s a pretty blunt tool. We’ve talked before about the Myers-Briggs personality assessment. And this is really kind of a version of that. Because like the Myers-Briggs you’re looking at two polls and sort of putting people on a spectrum between these two polls. And grouping them together in ways that sort of feel like, OK, if someone were lawful but they’re also good this is what the characters would be like. But you can really do that for any qualities that have two polls. Anywhere there’s a spectra of how they could come out. So you could look at this in terms of like how much is this person a planner versus an improviser? Are they serious or are they funny? Are they warm versus cold? Introverted versus extroverted?

You can really take any two opposites there and look at where a character is on that scale and as you combine the other things you kind of feel what they’re like. But I do just worry, even going back to eight sequence structure, it can just become a lot of busywork, a lot of ticking of boxes that’s not actually doing the work about what is making that character interesting, distinctive, and specific to this story.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, in the end if you can neatly fit a character perfectly into one of those boxes then they’re not a person. They’re a box.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah. I would say the last thing that’s been helpful for me thinking about alignment or these opposites is that it’s useful – once you’ve figured out who your hero is, who your protagonist is, thinking about who the polar opposite of that character is can be really helpful in terms of thinking about your villain, your antagonist. What is it about that antagonist that is uniquely challenging to that protagonist? And that can be a useful starting place for thinking about who is the person to put opposite your hero.

All right. We have time for a few short questions. Let’s invite Megana Rao, our producer, on to ask some questions that our listeners have sent in. Megana, what have you got for us this week?

**Megana Rao:** OK. So Adrianne from LA asks, “These days every company has its own streaming service that exclusively exhibits its content. Disney has Disney+. Apple has AppleTV+. And now Netflix creates originals not shown anywhere else. How is this not a modern day violation of the Paramount decrees? And how does this all factor in with the termination of the Paramount decrees? Please help me understand. I’m so confused.”

**John:** Yeah. So it’s a separate piece of that. The Paramount consent decrees are about studios owning movie theaters. Basically said that the studios were not allowed to own movie theaters. That’s going to go away and studios are going to buy the movie theaters. That’s kind of inevitable.

What you’re describing, Adrianne, is a little closer to Fin-Syn which was the change in the ‘80s I’m guessing that allowed for networks–

**Craig:** I think so.

**John:** ‘90s? When was it?

**Craig:** I think it was the late ‘80s or possibly early ‘90s. Yeah.

**John:** Regardless, there was a time in which NBC could not own its own programming. They basically had to buy from somebody else. That changed. And that’s kind of more like what we’re talking about here. A form of vertical integration. I think it’s not great. But it’s where we’re at.

**Craig:** Yeah. So Fin-Syn or financial syndication laws were why networks licensed their shows. So the way network television used to work is a studio like say Paramount would produce a show like Star Trek. And Star Trek cost a whole lot of money to make. And the network that showed Star Trek would pay Paramount a license fee per episode of some amount to run that show in Primetime, or syndication, or whatever.

And, if you could make enough of those then you could rerun them and that’s where you make all your money, and so on and so forth. And then for the network their whole game was pay out less in licensing than they take in in advertising. That was how that business worked. It has not worked that way in decades. John is absolutely right. Fin-Syn is what you’re thinking of here.

Paramount decrees really just referred to the brick and mortar buildings where they show movies and obviously that’s also gone. So, hopefully that helps you understand. Basically imagine all the possible barriers there could be and then get rid of them all. There you go. That’s what we got.

**John:** Yup. Megana, what have you got for us next?

**Megana:** So Tara asks, “My script made the Black List, got me agents, and several generals, and we’re finally getting a little heat. I’ve been writing in my free time for 20 years, but the business end of this is all new to me at 46 years old. My team is brilliant, but here’s my question for you and Craig. We’re trying to build a package. We may be close to getting the perfect lead attached. And the perfect director is tentatively interested. Hopefully I’ve got meetings with them in the next few weeks. What should I ask them and what can I expect them to ask me?”

**John:** Great. First off, Tara, congratulations. That’s awesome that you’re getting this together.

**Craig:** Good job.

**John:** And I’m guessing this is a feature that you’re putting together. I mean, it could be a limited series. It could be a TV pilot. But when we say a package, don’t worry or mistake the idea of a packaging fee, the kind of thing we’ve been fighting against for in the WGA. A package is a grouping of great bits of talent together to make this thing attractive to buyers. So it’s awesome this is happening for you.

Those questions when you’re talking to a big actor or director is sort of what attracts them to the project. What are they excited about? What are the questions they have for you? What is it about their previous work that you have questions about? Talk about the thing you’re hoping to make. Talk about the sort of – just get a sense of whether this is a shared vision for things. That’s the most crucial thing is to feel like what is it going to be like working with this person.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I just want to point out that if I were on your team I would – this is a great sentence. My team is brilliant, and you can see them sort of sitting up straighter in their chairs. But here’s my question for you and Craig. And then they’d go, oh, dammit. You know, there is no special questions. There’s no secret handshake. I don’t know what they’re going to ask you. Because sometimes they ask great questions and sometimes they ask terrible questions.

I can’t tell if you’re talking about a feature or if you’re talking about a movie – it feels like you’re talking about a movie. So a lot of times with movies the directors barely want to even acknowledge that you are a human in the room, which is terrible, but true. And I hate that.

So, just have the conversation. And if you have the ability to decide in some way, to help decide who is getting this and who is doing it, then have the conversation and then just check your gut after. The only thing you need to make sure of is that the person that you’re going into business with, if you have any control over it, agrees with you about what this is, and what the tone is, and why it’s good. And if they don’t, then they’re not the perfect lead or director. That’s kind of what you’re about to find out.

**John:** Yeah. And that’s a longer conversation. Maybe we should put that on the list. What do you do when there’s a person who is circling your thing who you don’t really like? And I’ve been in Tara’s situation where there’s been a director and it’s like, ugh, how do you shake that person away without burning bridges? It can be challenging. So maybe we’ll ask Megana to put that on the list for follow up, because getting rid of somebody you don’t want is sometimes harder than attracting the person you do want.

**Craig:** True, true.

**John:** Megana, thank you for these questions. I see there’s a whole bunch more we have on the Workflowy, so thank you to all the listeners who sent in questions. Anything more you want to share, Megana?

**Megana:** No, I think that’s great. Thanks guys.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is type related. So, the New York Times has banner headlines occasionally for really big things. One of them was recently Trump Impeached and Trump Impeached Again. When you have letters that are next to each other you have to sometimes worry about how those letters are bumping into each other. In the case of impeached, when you have that uppercase, the E and the A next to each other looks kind of weird. There’s actually a lot of space. And so you’ll do some kerning to try to get those things a little bit closer. But then if they bump it feels weird.

So I’m going to link to an article that goes through the New York Times’ decision to build a special ligature, a special combination EA for headline situations where those capital letters are showing up next to each other so it forms one kind of letter glyph. And ligatures are pretty common in type overall. You’ll see them a lot with FL or FFL. There’s special combinations for those things because otherwise the letters would bump together in weird ways. I love ligatures and so I loved this little article explaining how and why they created a special EA for the word “impeached.”

**Craig:** Impeached. I also see they used it in Biden Beats Trump.

**John:** Yeah. Special.

**Craig:** Biden Beats Trump.

**John:** Feels nice.

**Craig:** I just like the sound of it. Thank you, John. My One Cool Thing this week is a website called Wordlisted from a gentleman named Adam Aaronson. There are a few resources on the Internet that allow you to – well, they give you a little bit of a helping hand if you are constructing a puzzle, and they can certainly give you a very big helping hand if you’re trying to solve a puzzle. And I probably cited some of them before like One Look for instance.

This one is quite the Swiss Army knife. First of all, it allows you to upload your own dictionary. And you’re like, what, I don’t have a dictionary. Well, a lot of puzzle folks create word lists. So, some terms that may have not made it into the dictionary or phrases, for instance, that they can sort of add on to the regular dictionary. And then you have all sorts of options doing simple pattern searches where question marks are missing letters and asterisks are missing strings of letters. There’s anagrams. Hidden anagrams where if you need to figure out, take the word MATE, how many words have an anagram of MATE inside of it. So, “steamed” for instance would be an example of that.

There’s letter banks where you put in eight letters and it tells you all the letters that come from just using those letters, with repeaters. There’s sandwich words. There’s replacements. Deletions. Prefixes. Suffixes. Consonancy. Consonancy is when two words have the same order of consonants but the vowels are different. Of course, there are palindromes.

And it’s all sortable by length or by alphabet. It’s a wonderful tool. And it’s free. So, thank you, Adam Aaronson. Yes, thank you, thank you, thank you. So you can find this. Wordlisted. We’ll throw a link in the show notes for you. But if you’re listening at home it’s Aaronson, that’s with two As. Aaronson.org/wordlisted.

**John:** Very nice. And right underneath that link we’ll also put a link to Rhyme Zone which is a thing I use as a writer all the time and I think it’s the best online rhyming dictionary. And so if you need to rhyme something, a very good tool for that.

As we wrap up, I need to give a special shout out to Megan McDonnell, our former Scriptnotes producer, who has her first produced credit this week. So episode three of Wandavision, the Marvel show that I think is just delightful, has a nice little credit that says Megan McDonnell, because she wrote it. So we’re very, very proud of Megan and–

**Craig:** Well, you know what? That’s your first credit. That’s a big deal.

**John:** Yeah. It’s awesome. First of many credits to come. So, congratulations to her.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** Scriptnotes is currently produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week, and thank you so much for people sending in outros, this new one is by Malakai Bisel. It’s great. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll 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. You get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re going to talk about right after this on QAnon.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** And we’re back. So James in New Zealand wrote in to say, “It’s been reported that one of the top QAnon influencers is a ‘failed Hollywood screenwriter.’ That started me pondering two things. One, what is a failed screenwriter? Most of us, present company included, have failed in some aspect of screenwriting. Two, do you think most screenwriters would be good at creating conspiracy theories? At its core it’s about writing a compelling story. I’m wondering if there’s a Save the Cat template for conspiracy theories.”

So, Craig, the confluence of things in our lives. So, many, many years ago there was a guy named Script Shadow who was a thorn in our collective sides, well before the podcast even started I think. But the QAnon guy is not the guy who is this guy, but there’s relations. Basically Script Shadow had reviewed one of these guys’ scripts and they sort of knew each other, the QAnon guy. And another listener wrote in with a longer explanation of sort of the history behind all this stuff.

I am not at all surprised that some of the QAnon folks are aspiring screenwriters.

**Craig:** Me neither. And this guy apparently was kind of haunting Franklin Leonard for a while on social media because he didn’t do well on the Black List. It’s not like Franklin sits there just digging into screenplays one by one and adjusting the scores and giggling. He doesn’t do that.

So, this was a grouchy guy that wasn’t getting the pat on the head that he thought he deserved, which is something that entitled people have in common. And so question number one. What is a failed screenwriter? I don’t know. I think if you abandon screenwriting, if you wanted to try and be a screenwriter and it didn’t work out and you didn’t get paid, or you got paid once and never again, and you leave it, then your attempts to have a kind of ongoing career as a screenwriter have failed. And that’s most screenwriters. I mean, honestly most people out there are failed screenwriters if they’ve written a script. Because very few screenwriters are able to kind of keep that going. It’s unfortunate. That’s the way it is.

Do you think most screenwriters would be good at creating conspiracy theories? No. Here’s the thing. I’m not surprised that a guy that was struggling to be a successful screenwriter was not struggling to be a successful conspiracy theorist because conspiracy theories are by definition overly complicated, pointlessly involved, illogical explanation of simple things. They are the opposite of elegant.

We are always trying to create elegant plotting that is simple, and compelling, and there’s not a lot of like weird rules stacked on top of each other of why this thing actually doesn’t work this way, but really this way. And that’s all these conspiracy theories. They’re terrible screenplays.

When you look at the QAnon screenplay for what’s going on you go, “Wait, what? That’s terrible. That’s just bad writing. That’s not how humans are. It’s not how organizations work. It’s not how anybody behaves. This is ridiculous. Ridiculous.”

Every single one of these conspiracy theories fails the “yeah, but why” test. Like, oh, didn’t you get it. There’s 17 flags behind him and Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet. But why? What does that actually achieve? Nothing. Nothing! Oh my god.

**John:** So, Craig, you’re saying that a screenwriter wouldn’t be great at creating conspiracy theories, but a screenwriting guru, or a wannabe aspiring screenwriter guru, that does feel like the sweet spot. And that’s apparently who this person really was.

So this is a person who was not successful as a screenwriter but then ended up setting up a website about how to make it in Hollywood. Basically giving all his tips. And that feels like such a great connection there.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because you’ve discerned a pattern for success and you’ve broken the code of Hollywood and now you’re going to expose the real secrets within it.

**Craig:** Grift. Utter grift.

**John:** And that feels exactly – yeah, but grift and self-delusion are all part and parcel with a conspiracy theory.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** It’s an elaborate mythology that you’re building and that you have the actual secret for seeing past the illusion.

**Craig:** Well, the level of either self-delusion or just outright, just shamelessness required to, A, not succeed at something, and then, B, subsequently take people’s money to inform them how to succeed at the thing you could not succeed at is mind-blowing. Mind-blowing.

So I looked at a couple of the articles and I saw the nature of the way this guy would post things. And it was terrible. It was just a lot of “don’t you get it.” A lot of these aimless questions. Like, “You might have missed it. Don’t you get it? Think about this.” Just open-ended.

You know, like when people accuse a television series of not being accountable to its own stuff, like it starts to make up mysteries and rules and things and then it never actually pays them off. And that’s bad. That’s all this stuff is. It’s literally like you never got anywhere. I mean, there are people who have been, I hope, that a lot of the people who were caught up in this silly cult now understand, OK, that’s what it was. And I hope that they didn’t lose too much money. I hope that they didn’t lose too many people in their lives and family members. I hope that they didn’t hurt anybody. I hope that they can just gently return to sanity. They deserve the right to return to sanity.

But now that they’re hopefully able to see they can see that this was just a ridiculous game of Lucy pulling an imaginary football away from Charlie Brown day after day after day.

**John:** I think who I’m angriest at are the people who clearly didn’t believe any of it, but were using it to maximize – the Ted Cruzes. Who clearly doesn’t believe a single bit of it.

**Craig:** Of course not.

**John:** But is using it, the furor over it, to advance his own aims. That drives me crazy. I want to both be able to punish him and provide a ramp back to normal society for the folks who got caught up in it like it was Lost. And didn’t understand this is not actual reality. And I’m curious to figure out what are the best ways to get people re-involved in a normal functioning society and feeling like what they do matters because it actually does matter.

To me it feels like them volunteering at a soup kitchen a couple Sundays in a row might get them thinking about the world outside of them that’s beyond their screens. I don’t know.

**Craig:** Well, you know, people got stuck in their homes. And they were frustrated. And they were afraid. And they were being fed a fascinating story. Obviously they were inclined to want to believe it. I don’t think anybody who has been voting for the Democratic Party their whole lives was suddenly grabbed hold of by Q and went, “Oh, wait, hold on a second.” The willful manipulators, the crooked Bible-thumping fake preachers are always going to make us angrier, always, with their deceit and their nonsense which is so blatantly tuned to earn them money.

A lot of the leaders of this Q movement were selling Q merchandise. And their platforms were monetized on YouTube. And Facebook. And Google and Facebook should not only be ashamed, but they’re the ones who need to do the penance. They’re the ones who have screwed us.

But, yeah, this QAnon guy, that’s perfect, isn’t it? Freaking screen guru selling consultation fee sessions while he’s also just – he’s like, here, let me go ahead and grift you like this, and with my other hand I’m going to grift these people like this, because I’m bad.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** Sorry. We can’t always be hopeful. But, yeah.

**Craig:** Ugh. Ugh.

**John:** Thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

 

Links:

* Ballard C Boyd for Stephen Colbert’s show [Queen’s Gambit Rubik’s Cube](https://news.avclub.com/stephen-colbert-has-the-next-the-queens-gambit-all-squa-1846107922)
* [Hollywood’s Unions Celebrate Inauguration Of President Joe Biden & VP Kamala Harris: “Most Pro-Union President” & “Partner In The White House”](https://deadline.com/2021/01/inauguation-hollywood-unions-celebrate-president-joe-biden-vp-kamala-harris-1234677017/) by David Robb
* [Biden Gave Trump’s Union Busters a Taste of Their Own Medicine](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/01/peter-robb-alice-stock-nlrb-fired.html) by Mark Joseph Stern
* [Impeached Ligature EA](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/21/insider/banner-headlines-letters.html)
* [Wordlisted](https://aaronson.org/wordlisted/) by Adam Aaronson
* [Rhyme Zone](https://www.rhymezone.com)
* [Wandavision](https://www.disneyplus.com/series/wandavision/4SrN28ZjDLwH?pid=AssistantSearch) check out episode 3, written by [Megan McDonnell](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6876585/)!
* [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 Malakai Bisel ([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/485standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/sexy-ghosts-of-chula-vista).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has one bit of swearing so just a warning if you’re in the car with your kids.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 486 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show it’s a new round of the Three Page Challenge where we take a look at listener’s pages and offer our honest feedback. We’ll also discuss some of the most common mistakes we find in these samples and how you can avoid them.

Plus, we’ll look at irony, which is not ironic. It’s just a topic.

**Craig:** It’s a topic.

**John:** And in our bonus segment for Premium members we will discuss money and happiness.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Can’t wait to see what happens.

**John:** And what is the relationship between money and happiness. So, for these bonus topics you and I just sort of come up with them last minute, realistically I come up with them last minute.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** And so I emailed out to all of our Premium subscribers saying like, hey, what do you want us to discuss in bonus topics. And at last count Megana had gotten 165 suggestions for bonus segment topics.

**Craig:** Oh boy. So, we’re locked into this show for at least another three years is what you’re saying.

**John:** Yeah. That’s basically what we’ve come down to.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** But, Craig, there’s big breaking news because this last week Craig Mazin announced that he is no longer going to be on Twitter. Tell me about this.

**Craig:** It had been something I was thinking about for a long time. I mean, I didn’t do the big huffy cancel your account thing. I’ve just made my account private. I’ve stopped tweeting. And I turned my notification filter down to the most narrow band, so I don’t really get any. So, if for instance – the thing that’s different, like I quite Facebook many, many years ago. If you quit Facebook you can’t really see much on Facebook. With Twitter you can. So, sometimes if I’m reading an article it will link to a tweet, so I’ll be there, but my days of tweeting and responding, that’s over.

And it’s because I just kind of felt a growing list of issues that were part of the Twitter experience. Some of which I think people generally are familiar with, like the addictive nature of it. Also, I felt like Twitter was starting to change the way I was thinking about things as I learned them. So, information hits you, like news hits you, and without even trying or thinking about doing it I start to have a reaction. An opinion begins to form immediately. Twitter demands your opinions now. Now! You must have it. And that’s probably not good.

There are a lot of things that I just don’t need to have an opinion on. There are a lot of things that I don’t need people to hear from me on. And I think that there was something that happened, you know Bean Dad, right? Remember the whole Bean Dad fiasco?

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** So when I was reading the Bean Dad thing and I saw how that was all going down I thought to myself I think Bean Dad probably thought he was going to get love for this. I think that’s what was happening. I think Bean Dad was like people are going to applaud my story. They did not. And it does seem to me that underlying a lot of the interaction that people do on Twitter at least, maybe it’s just me, I don’t know, there’s a sense of like I think people are going to like this. And I don’t want that. I actually don’t want likeability or approvability or agreeability to be behind opinions I have or things I say.

And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, every day without fail a number of people would have some advice for me on The Last of Us. Who we should cast. Who we shouldn’t cast. What it should be about. What it shouldn’t be about. Who I should be working with. And I don’t do well with that. It’s not that I don’t care. I do care what people think. It’s just that there’s no way to actually do something that way. For every person that feels very strongly that it should be blue, there is somebody else who feels incredibly strongly that it should be yellow. And so you can’t make everybody happy and people are very emotional about it. And they’re very insistent. And it just starts to mess with your head. And I want to just be somewhere quiet. And make the show without feeling like I’m surfing people’s feelings, because my own feelings are so hard to surf at times.

So, all of that kind of added up to “it’s time.” But there were some good things about Twitter, I think, for me in particular. I thought Twitter made me a more empathetic person. I do.

**John:** Talk more about that. So empathetic in terms of you’re seeing different people’s experiences, you’re seeing their opinions and understanding sort of what it might feel like from their perspective?

**Craig:** Yes. But the way to get – Twitter is really good at getting under the hood of those things. Because there’s a lot of culture where people say through essay or interview this is how I feel, this is my experience, this is what’s hard. There’s a lot of fictionalized narrative and drama that does all of that. But it all feels a little bit crafted.

And on Twitter what happens is you see people in a very under-the-hood specific way talking about not only how something good makes them feel, but specifically how something bad makes them feel. Like I don’t like this and here’s why. And I think it’s normal for people who are – look, nobody wants to feel bad about themselves. Let’s just start with that. We avoid that shameful feeling if we can. So here’s something, an aspect, that you can feel shame about. If you are wealthy you can feel shame about the money that you have compared to somebody who doesn’t. If you’re white you can feel shame about the way that racial superiority has kind of shaped the world and you continues to do so. If you’re straight you can feel shame about the fact that people who are not are being limited in their freedoms or are being mocked or made miserable.

And for a lot of people I think when somebody confronts them with a possible mistake, their first instinct is to say, “No, what I just did is actually, no, you should not be upset about that because I don’t want you to be because I don’t want to feel like I made you upset.” That’s really underneath all of it. I don’t want to feel the shame of knowing that I made you feel upset.

So instead I’m going to tell you why you should be upset. And Twitter is really good at allowing the upset person to explain it. And to get out of like the cycle of people going, “I’m offended,” and other people going, “Oh, god, you people are offended by everything.” And that whole like people yelling in each other’s face it kind of still happens on Twitter, but there are times where people explain it and then you suddenly go, “I think I understand not only why you’re upset but why you’re upset that other people aren’t upset.” I’m starting to understand.

**John:** For sure. And I think the rise of threading made that more possible where you can provide additional supporting evidence behind those claims. So some things I’m hearing from you is that it was not just the consumption cycle of Twitter, and the doom-scrolling which we’re all familiar with, that was part of it. But really the need to have a reaction to things and then to feel the need to process any new piece of information in terms of like what is my take on this, what is my response to this, just become exhausting. Particularly when it’s something that you’re in the middle of creation, like The Last of Us, I can totally see why it makes sense to jump off that.

I’ve at times taken the Twitter app off my phone which sort of breaks the cycle of it. And I found that to be helpful. This feels like a nice natural step for you, too.

But I do have a question for you because one of the things I’ve appreciated about Twitter is the sense of being caught up on the popular culture and sometimes it’s stupid culture that you don’t need to be caught up on, and sometimes it’s fun.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So three things in the Trending Topics of today, and I’m curious whether you even know what they are. Jewish space laser.

**Craig:** I know what that is, because I built it. [laughs]

**John:** Harsh advice for writers.

**Craig:** Not familiar with that, but I can imagine what it would be.

**John:** So this was somebody had harsh advice for writers. Your writer friends are also your competition. And so people sort of jumped off of that, in reaction to that, but also made funny responses to it which is just delightful to read.

Mount Rushmore 2.

**Craig:** No. No clue.

**John:** I just made that up. But it feels like something that could be on Twitter, right?

**Craig:** I do love Jewish space laser. We are blamed for so much. I wish that we had the ability to make a space laser. She said that it caused the forest fires, where Marjorie Taylor Greene said forest fires in California were caused by a large laser in space that was possibly built by the Israelis? Is that about right? Something like that?

**John:** That’s about right.

**Craig:** That’s all I need to know.

**John:** Or there was Jewish money behind it.

**Craig:** There’s Jewish money behind it. Yeah, because the one thing I can tell you as the most Jewish person you know is that we love forest fires. Oh, boy, do Jews love forest fires. Yeah, it’s our favorite thing. What a lunatic. Good lord.

**John:** Yeah, she is.

**Craig:** She’s nuts.

**John:** Good lord. All right, some follow up from previous episodes. Back in 483 we had the episode Philosophy for Screenwriters and I had pointed out that I didn’t see a lot of examples of female characters in stories having to make ethical or moral choices. Andrew wrote in to say, “Isn’t Sophie’s Choice a classic example of a female protagonist with a moral debate?” Yes, Andrew, you are right. It’s like literally called a Sophie’s Choice. And it’s a thing we use all the time. So it’s a very good counter example in terms of just like a character having to grapple with an impossible decision. So, Sophie’s Choice.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a very specific decision that rarely will people have to make, but yes it is. No question.

**John:** And Airy wrote in. She said, “Regarding the female character philosophical question, in Godzilla: King of the monsters,” which I’ve seen, “Vera Farmiga’s character Emma has a bit of a villain philosophical speech where she explains why it’s a good thing to let the titans roam free and take back control of the earth.”

And I will say that it’s a really odd moment in this movie that I guess I was surprised to see a female character having that sort of villainous turn. So, yeah, that’s another counter example. There aren’t a lot of them, but I do like that people are finding some of them and I think it is still a very fertile ground for people to create female characters who are grappling with these decisions.

**Craig:** Yeah. Women can root for the destruction of all humanity, too.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They can be just as good as men at rooting for the destruction of humanity. I love those speeches. Those are my favorite. Isn’t there like a factory that makes that speech and they just update it?

**John:** There is. Well it’s always the eco-terrorist who really wants to turn his back to the Stone Age.

**Craig:** Look what we’ve done to this planet. Why should we be here? We’re a virus. We’re a parasite. Yup, factory just churned out another model.

**John:** Oh, it’s good stuff. J. Harris wrote in to say, “Could you discuss the use of irony within your screenplays, including situational irony, verbal irony, dramatic irony, cosmic irony, and tragic irony?” And it occurred to me that we have not really talked irony as a literary concept very often in the podcast. I think it’s because I don’t like the term. I find irony to be one of the most pedantic sort of – just the fact that you’re trying to split this into five categories of irony kind of drives me crazy.

And yet I think the use of irony is so fundamental to narrative and to dialogue and just to so many different things. I thought we might spend a few moments talking about irony as it is used in screenplays.

**Craig:** Sure. I do talk a little bit about it in the How to Write a Movie podcast, mostly I think in terms of what we’re breaking down here as possibly situational irony. That’s probably the one I think about the most when I think about writing.

**John:** Yeah. And so we’re not going to reference the Alanis Morissette song because I think that’s partly what turned me off of ever using the word irony.

**Craig:** It’s a song about non-ironic things.

**John:** Yeah. And the pedantry of sort of like well it’s a bummer but it’s not ironic. Well, ironic is maybe just not a great word for it. But it’s a phenomenon and it’s a feeling that permeates so much of what we write. So let’s talk about this umbrella feeling of irony, even if we’re not sort of going to zero in on the subcategories of it.

Irony in a very general sense is the contrast between expectation and reality. What you thought you were going to get and what you actually get. And in many ways to me it feels like the punchline to a joke, even if it’s not a funny joke. It’s the idea of you thought you were going this place, but I took you this place.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think contrast between expectation and reality is an excellent way of thinking about it. And I would just add one little Philip to that and that is that the reality that you weren’t expecting is related to what you were expecting.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** So, if a banker is walking down the street and a piano falls on him and kills him, that was not expected. It’s also not ironic. But if a safe falls on him and kills him, he’s a banker, got killed by a safe which is a thing he uses at the bank. There is a connection between the thing that wasn’t expected and reality vaguely. And that’s where you kind of start to feel the usefulness when we’re writing because it is a fun and interesting game to figure out how to connect the surprises in some sideways interesting contrasting way with what you thought you would get.

**John:** Yup. And so I want to avoid talking about a character being ironic, because I think when we say that we really mean that a character is sarcastic and is sort of using words in a specific way. I want to talk about irony more in the sense of what it’s doing for story. So let’s look at how irony is often helping to create the conflict, the tension, the plot itself. A classic example is the audience knows something that the characters don’t.

So, the audience knows that, oh, that’s actually the characters mother rather than his sister. Or that there’s a bomb underneath the table and they keep lingering around this conversation. There’s a tension being created there because that is suspense, that is comedic. At the end of Romeo and Juliet all the trouble of the poison. We know that the poison was real, or not real, and the characters in that scene don’t. So, we feel the tension because we have information the characters don’t.

**Craig:** And typically this will be referred to as tension. I mean, while technically it is a form of irony, it’s pretty rare that people would call it ironic. It’s that feeling that you get when Clarice Starling shows up at a house and it’s supposed to be a billion miles away from where Jame Gumb is and whoops, actually he’s right there. That is the house. And she’s there and she doesn’t know he’s the guy and we do.

So, that’s tension. But technically irony, yes. Typically we don’t use it that way.

**John:** Yeah. More classically sort of ironic is in Aladdin he wants to become rich so he can impress Jasmine, but she’s repulsed by his riches. And sort of the fancier he gets the less she likes him.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s irony.

**Craig:** Good old backfiring. Yup.

**John:** In The Incredibles Mr. Incredible gets sued for saving a person from suicide. There’s an irony underlying that situation. So because the suicide and saving the life are related and they’re not related in the ways you would expect them to be related. It’s helping to ignite the plot of the story as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s pretty common that you create these odd details that make you think, oh, how strange. Irony tries to make sense of the chaos of reality. So, it’s not just that some random thing happens to somebody to help them or hurt them. But it’s almost as if somebody, like God, or a writer, did it in such a way as to make a comment about that person and their life. Like, oh, you wanted – have you ever seen, I’m not a huge fan of the movie itself, but there’s a movie called Wish Master. Have you ever seen Wish Master?

**John:** I have not, but I have a sense of what may happen there. Is there a Monkey’s Paw kind of quality there?

**Craig:** There sure is. So the Wish Master is a gin, you know, that’s the root of genie. But he’s evil. And he’s released from his captivity and he grants wishes. And whatever you wish for you get. But only in the most literal sense, which ends up killing you every time. And so it’s just one situational commentary/irony moment after another. Backfiring supreme.

**John:** On the thread of like what you’re wishing for, the whole category of situational irony, like because of who you are this is ironic that it’s happening. In The Wizard of Oz everyone wishes for, everyone wants the thing that they actually already have. Scarecrow actually is quite smart, but he’s looking for a brain. That’s natural.

Darth Vader is Luke’s father. Harry Potter has to kill Voldemort, wants to kill Voldemort, but the only way he can do that is to let Voldemort kill him. So there’s a reversal of expectation there.

Classically The Twilight Zone episode, which are all sort of Monkey Paw situations. The main character wants to be left alone so he can read, but then his reading glasses break so he’s stuck there alone but can no longer read the books he wants to read.

Oedipus is searching for a murderer who is actually himself. Those are examples of sort of situational irony where a fundamental reveal in the plot, in the story itself, is character’s misassumptions about themselves or their situation.

**Craig:** And I think we like it as an audience because it does organize stuff. Irony implies intention. If someone has to die in a story you could just shake a big old bingo roller full of little balls with possible deaths on it, pull one out, and kill her. But that doesn’t feel as interesting to us as something that is intentional. Well if it’s intentional then it’s probably going to have that ironic vibe.

**John:** Yeah. We like there to feel like there’s some order and some sense to the universe. And so when we see a twist ending that works really well it’s probably because like the punchline to a joke all that setup was there, you just weren’t anticipating the setup taking you to that place. And that’s the pop. That’s the little bit of surprise you get.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** But even when it’s not the whole movie, or the whole story, we use irony in smaller places to provide some texture and some detail. So, you have a married couple in counseling and they find out that their therapist has been divorced three times. There’s an irony to a divorced marriage therapist. You have a fire station burning down. You have a police car that the tires have been stolen from it. There’s an irony to that that feels – it makes the world feel just a little bit more, I don’t know, detailed, textured. It makes it feel like there’s some intention behind it.

**Craig:** Interesting. Yeah. It’s just more interesting. I mean, because you could, I mean, look the marriage counselor when they say, “Well what about you? What’s your secret?” And she says, “Oh yeah, no, I got married when I was 22 and we have the occasional fight, but mostly it’s been wonderful and we don’t really have challenges and we’re still married. It’s been 40 years. And the secret is just, you know, like all these things that I showed you on this worksheet, yeah, just do the worksheet. That’s great.” That’s super boring. It’s super boring.

And we like the idea of a failure somehow having some wisdom from their failure that they can impart that helps other people, but they’re struggling to help themselves. This is interesting. Our minds are wired to contrast. You know that vision and hearing are entirely based on contrast. So, hearing in particular, if someone plays a pure tone at a frequency and just keeps playing it you’ll stop hearing it after, I don’t know, 20 seconds. Because it’s not changing. So the little fibers that are twitching against the nerves in your ear, they activate because it’s a new. And then after a while they’re like, OK, we get it, we’ll stop. This hasn’t changed. The way that they encode videos, you know, with MPEG and all that stuff is basically by just encoding the things that change. Why encode the things that don’t?

So, this is kind of how it works for us when we’re watching stuff. We want those weird changes of things we would expect because that’s the information that makes it through our filter. Otherwise, boring.

**John:** Yeah. But we want things ideally to change in a way that matches to some degree our expectations. And so as you said earlier, if it’s just random then eventually you’re going to give up on it because you cannot follow what’s actually happening.

**Craig:** It’s just noise.

**John:** So it has to feel like, OK, there’s an intention that’s taking you to a place. And so often dialogue, irony and dialogue, is giving you that texture and giving you that bit of surprise. That little pop that keeps you coming back to it. And so sitcom writing is so full of joke after joke after joke, and it’s these little bursts of ironic surprise that sort of keep you going through it.

Generally in verbal irony it’s the difference between the literal meaning of something you’re saying versus the figurative meaning of what someone is saying. And so that’s how you get into your double entendres, your shade, your sarcasm, your passive-aggressive, “the good news is we’re all going to die.” It’s all those things that sort of have a little bit of a spark that sort of keep you engaged in a thing, keep the ball up in the air.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Irony is a useful way to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Use it.

**John:** Use it. Use it, and use it smartly. And so be thinking about it not just on a big story-wide scale, but on a smaller scale. And I would urge people to not be thinking about these little subcategories of stuff, because that’s literary criticism and papers you write when you’re a sophomore, but it’s not the kind of work that you’re doing writing a new scene in a script.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Your use of irony and use of these techniques is setting a tone for what your script is doing and the way the characters talk, the way the world works. And as long as you’re consistent with it it’s going to be great. But if you try to dial that in for the first time on page 60 it’s going to bump.

I remember a script I wrote at Paramount years, and years, and years ago I had this one great line of dialogue and I was so excited about it. And my executive called it out. “That’s a great line for a completely different script. It just does not make sense here.” And I’m like, yeah, you’re right. Just it’s a great line.

**Craig:** Yeah. Irony is a fundamental ingredient. You can’t bake cookies without sugar and then sprinkle some sugar on these little flour dough balls and call it a cookie. It’s got to be in there. You just have to plan it.

**John:** All right, well let’s move to some actual writing on the page that we can look at and see if there’s any irony on display there. This is our Three Page Challenge. So for folks who are new to the podcast here every couple weeks we open up the mailbag and look through and see these submissions that our listeners have sent in, generally the first three pages of their script. It could be a TV script. It could be a feature script. And we look at what we see and give you our honest opinions on what we’re seeing that works and what could be a little bit better.

So we get in a zillion of these. And Megana Rao is responsible for looking through all of these. I want to invite her on because before we get started on these three specific ones she and I were looking through some of the examples and had some general guidelines and suggestions for everybody else sending stuff through. So, Megana, why don’t you come on board here?

**Craig:** Take it away, Megana.

**Megana Rao:** Hey guys.

**John:** Hey. So, how many of these samples do we get in on a given week in preparation for a given episode?

**Megana:** I usually look through about 100.

**John:** That’s a lot. And when you’re looking through them are you mostly focused on this is an interesting story idea, these are interesting problems I’m seeing, this is really good, this is really bad? What are the kind of things that bring it up to this next level for you?

**Megana:** Yeah, I think I’m looking for people who are taking risks, doing something interesting, or within three pages are quickly establishing the world and giving us some character development. And I think recently as I’ve been getting better at this, filtering through what’s just not going to work, too, issues of formatting or if I can read in the first couple of lines the writer is just trying to do too much within the description, I think it’s much easier for me to filter those out.

**John:** Yeah. We don’t want writers to ever be embarrassed. We don’t want people to feel like, you know, these people are doing this voluntarily which is great and awesome and so thank you for sending this in, but we don’t want to embarrass somebody and it does nobody any good for us to slam on somebody.

We want this to be helpful and educational for the person who sent it in, but really for everybody. And so we’re trying to find that balance of like examples that have enough things to talk about that can be improved but also have some good things to talk about as well.

Some of the pages you’ve sent through recently in this last batch, some things that I noticed, I’ve put them into kind of two buckets. One is sort of sloppiness where I just sense that this writer did not proofread carefully. And there were mistakes where like the wrong word was used. There’s extra spaces in places. It’s not even that it’s formatted wrong, they’re literally just typos. And second is unfamiliarity with the screenplay format. And it’s great that some people are sending in some of the first stuff that they’ve written, but I also feel like they have not read enough screenplays. And I think the great thing about 2021 is you can find the scripts for any movie that’s ever been produced online.

I just feel like you need to read like 30 scripts and really get a sense of what that format feels like. Because sometimes I get stuff in that’s like, oh, that’s just really don’t know what a screenplay is or does. And they just need to take in that format a little bit better.

**Craig:** I agree with all of that.

**John:** Some other sort of ongoing things I’ve noticed in a lot of these pages is confusion about punctuation. Confusion about where do commas go. You can make different choices about where to put some commas, but some of these commas are just really in the wrong place. I see semicolons sometimes. Almost never have I seen a semicolon used properly. If you’re thinking about using a semicolon you really need to stop, take a few steps back, maybe look up what the usage of semicolons is, and see if that’s really the right choice.

**Craig:** It’s not. [laughs] It’s not the right choice ever in a screenplay ever.

**John:** I mean, I can think of, having written 120 or more scripts, I’ve probably used a semicolon in a screenplay three or four times. It’s just not a common thing you’re going to use in a screenplay.

**Craig:** I literally don’t think I’ve ever done it.

**John:** Yeah. You probably want a colon. You may want two dashes. More likely you want a comma or a period. Simplicity is generally your friend there.

A thing I noticed in this last batch is people tend to not put a space before parenthesis, and so they’ll have a character’s name and then there won’t be a space for the parenthesis, the character’s age, or what the description is of that person.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Put a space there. That’s great. Same with brackets. You’re doing like day or night or after something, just give us that space before then.

Lastly I would say on the title page, Written by, Screenplay by, Story by, those are all credits you’ll see. Something you’ll never see on a real screenplay is Story Edited by.

**Craig:** Story Edited by?

**John:** Or Story Editor. That’s not a thing.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. That’s not a natural credit.

**Craig:** Don’t do it.

**John:** Written by, Screenplay by, Story by, nothing else is really appropriate for the stuff that you’re sending in to us.

**Craig:** The semicolon of credits.

**John:** It is.

**Megana:** And I guess the only other thing I’d add is verb tenses. I see a lot of people, just even within the three pages, flipping through a bunch of different verb tenses and that’s just something I think to be mindful of.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s talk about that. Because screenplays are written in the present tense. And they’re never written in the past. They’re always in the present tense. And you can use the present continuous, like “Joe is putting on his shoes when he hears a noise.” “Is putting on his shoes” is great and fine. But you’re not going to use that for everything. Use that in cases where action could be interrupted. Most of the time you’re going to be using the simple present. “Joe puts on his shoes. Joe opens the door to find something.”

If you’re using present tense continuous there’s got to be a reason why you’re using that other than just the normal present tense.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think there’s just a lot of overcomplicated – all right, so John and I have a slightly different view about whether you should be going back over your stuff, but I’m such a go-backer over my stuff. And at least in this point I think even if you don’t want to creatively go back over your stuff just take a moment to go back over your stuff just for compression and concision. And just look for the bunch of words and things that maybe you just don’t need. And just concise it up a little bit if you can. It does help, right, because there’s a buildup of stuff over time.

We start to think of the things that have survived a month, or two, or three of rewrites as worthy of lasting all the way to the screen, but maybe they’re not. Maybe it’s just that you haven’t roughed them up when you could have. And these little dinky things, sometimes if you don’t do it right away you’re never going to get around to it and it’s just suddenly – there is a cumulative effect of too many words. “Too many notes,” as the emperor said.

**John:** And what Craig is saying about going back over your stuff, I think just so that everyone is clear, I try not to go over my last week’s work before I start on today’s work. I try to stay within the scenes that I’m working on. But in that scene that I’m working on I will go through that hundreds of times to keep tightening it up and to keep working on it.

And so he and I are both believers in, yeah, there’s probably your first approach to how you got through that scene, but there’s going to be a tighter version of that. There’s going to be just better choices of words and really making sure everything fits lockstep. Because screenwriting is very concise. You’re trying to use the fewest words to create the best effect possible.

So, sometimes we don’t see that in the pages that we’re getting and we’d love to see more of that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And as a reminder we’re going to be talking through with some descriptions of these things, but if you’d like to actually read the pages we have PDFs. They’re attached to the show notes of this show. Or you can go to johnaugust.com. So you can read along with us as we go through these.

**Craig:** Let’s get onto it.

**John:** Cool. All right. Let’s talk about specifically the three pages that were sent through this week. Megana, can you give us a summary of this first one which is Echopraxia by J. Vernon Reha.

**Craig:** Or An Interdimensional Coming of Age Ghost Story.

**John:** Which we’ll talk about as well.

**Megana:** OK, great. 19-year-old Bianca fiddles with the radio as she drives through a quiet neighborhood in Memphis, Tennessee. She approaches a stop sign, but instead of slowing down she accelerates through the intersection and crashes. Time slows as we watch the fall out of the crash and ghostly images of dead squirrels in buildings flicker on screen. Bianca speaks to us in voiceover as we watch the scene of the accident from a bird’s eye view.

Police and paramedics ID Bianca’s body, but find that the car she crashed into is mysteriously empty.

**John:** Great. Craig, so you set up the first question here. So Echopraxia Or An Interdimensional Coming of Age Story. This is by J. Vernon Reha. I bumped on that subtitle.

**Craig:** Well these are more common now. I have to say. This is sort of – it’s a trend. Nobody wants to just write a thing that’s called Rebound or whatever you might want to call something like this. So, it has become common to do these funky, twisty titles like for instance Echopraxia. There’s also a trend to do funky, twisty titles where you say something like Rebound, colon, and then some sort of Charlie Kaufman-ish overly worded musey kind of Synecdoche, New Yorker-y kind of thing.

And in this case J. Vernon did both. Echopraxia or An Interdimensional Coming of Age Ghost Story. This is essentially a promotional choice. I don’t think that J. Vernon is expecting that there’s going to be a movie with this on the marquee, or in whatever the tiles are on HBO Max or Netflix. This is really about getting people to go, “Oh, I think I’ll read that one from the pile.” That’s my guess.

**John:** Yeah. I think that’s a fair guess. And a couple of the other samples we got through had something kind of like that. It kind of annoys me and yet I can see why somebody does it. So, I’m not going to come out strongly against it. I can’t imagine some buyer is going to go, “Ugh.” It doesn’t feel kind of fair on the title page and yet I can see why people do it.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s promotional. But, you know.

**John:** Well let’s get into the pages itself. So, the first page of this is essentially the car crash and going up into the car crash. And that first line was an example of sort of the not putting a space before the parenthesis. It’s not a big deal, and yet at the same time it’s like the first word I see a problem. And that doesn’t give me a lot of faith in what’s going on.

Mostly what I wanted to see in this opening section, because I think some of the writing of the actual crash is really nice, is stuff was in the wrong order. Stuff was in the wrong place. So it says, “I/E. CAR – MORNING,” well right now the writer is starting on Bianca. But then later on it’s talking that it’s early, the sun is still rising. We keep hopping around in terms of are we talking about the day or are we talking about Bianca. Give us one thing, then give us the next thing, then give us the next thing.

So I feel like if you’re going to set up what time of day this is, or what this feels like, what the neighborhood is like, do that first. And then get us to Bianca. And then get us into the crash.

Craig, what are you thinking?

**Craig:** There are a lot of really interesting things going on here. There are some things that are also poking out where I just think I’m not sure how this works practically. So, for instance, “She turns on the corner of Fourth and Lake.” And then you point out, “It is early – the sun is just rising.” OK, couple of things. There is practically no difference between the sun rising and the sun setting, unless we literally see a west or east sign with an arrow, like in a cartoon. We don’t know which one it is. So we’re going to need some other indication that this is morning. Any other little indication would do if that’s what you want.

Similarly, turning on the corner of Fourth and Lake, is that important? Do I need to know it’s Fourth and Lake? Do I need to know it right now? If I do, I need to be outside of the car. I don’t want to see her turning on the corner of Fourth and Lake. I want to see a car turning onto Fourth and Lake. If it’s just her, I just need to see that she’s turning. That’s all. She turns to head down a different street. It’s early. The sun is rising. Did the sun just get into her eyes? Has it shifted? You know, give me some stuff there.

This is where it gets a little trickier.

**John:** Craig–

**Craig:** Go on.

**John:** Let’s just talk through sort of how you might do that on the page. So I could envision, if the first slug line of this was “A quiet residential road in Liberty, Tennessee, a suburb of Memphis, one of those neighborhoods where all of the homes are eerily similar. It’s early.” And then some other description about dew on the laws. You know, newspapers on sidewalks. Whatever you want to do there. And then a car turns onto Fourth and Lake. And then we are interior the car afterwards. That’s a much more natural way to sort of – it helps us see what are the shots. It lets us visualize the movie a little bit more easily.

**Craig:** Yeah. Or stay inside the car the whole time. And then we don’t get out until the crash happens. So you have choices to make. “Bianca is pretty, but nondescript, with a face you could forget.” Well, why don’t we just start by saying, “This script is fine, but nondescript, with a story you could forget?” Why would you want to advertise? This feels like a reaction to a “hot but doesn’t know it.” But it’s not actually giving me anything. I don’t know what she looks like at all. And I definitely don’t want to be told that I need to cast an actor whose face is so generic I’ll forget them.

I want to know what her hair is like. I want to know what she’s wearing. I want to know if she has makeup on.

**John:** Are her nails painted?

**Craig:** Are they dirty?

**John:** A 19-year-old young woman could be a zillion different things, so give us some choices here.

**Craig:** “She Flicks through radio stations,” so J. Vernon capitalizes flicks, which I think is OK. At first I was like, oh, is that a mistake, but I see there’s a flick, flick, flick, flick thing going on. Flicking through radio stations is something that was far more common when you and I were learning how to drive. Because now you tap, tap, tap I think to get through radio stations at this point. But I get the point. What I was a little bit more concerned about was that this is being intercut with the following: “A child runs into the street for a ball. Flick. Squirrels chase each other up a tree. Flick. A man and his wife shout indistinctly behind an open window. Flick Flick Flick…”

How are we supposed to get to any of that? Are we just dead-cutting to a squirrel? Are we dead-cutting to a window and people maybe behind it and you can’t hear them. Are we dead-cutting to a kid in the street which you know you’re going to think is going to get run over? How do we do that? And why?

**John:** Yeah. And how does it relate to Bianca? Is she noticing this? I assume that we are in POV because of how this scene started, but this didn’t feel like POV, so–

**Craig:** Right. It doesn’t feel like POV. And the reason that I’m kind of picking on this is because I really like what happens next.

**John:** Very much.

**Craig:** And that’s what sort of matters. And so I’m wondering maybe we don’t need all this junk because really what’s important is that she does something surprising which is she intentionally crashes into another car. And I would love to know, since it’s day, I don’t know why we’re being blinded by approaching headlights? It’s morning.

**John:** I noticed that, too.

**Craig:** I’d like to see what kind of car that is. That’s actually going to be very helpful for what comes next. Is it a Prius? Is it a pickup truck? What is it? Then she crashes. The description of the crash was fascinating. I mean, obviously we’re getting into science fiction here but it was really cool.

**John:** Yeah. So this is the moment that gave me some hope because I felt like the writer was picking very specific visuals to dramatize what was actually happening here. So I love a good car crash in slow motion. And I love how it’s going to feel. I love the description of glitching. It let me know that something unusual was about to happen. And that was great. And so I loved that we got there.

So, if earlier it was just more normal and got to that moment, great. If earlier, you gave us a sense that something was odd and then we got to that, great. But I wasn’t led into this moment with any confidence. And so if I had been a little more confident going into it it would have felt even better.

**Craig:** Yeah. Then the first line comes from Bianca, who has just theoretically killed herself. And it is in voiceover, “Sometimes I wonder if I have a personality.” That’s not kind of – you want that line, whatever that line is, it needs to grab you by the face and go here we go. This is fascinating. She’s making a statement. And it doesn’t quite do that. It’s a little bit more of a thinky line than a grabby, shocking line.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s close. And I would have loved to have – there’s going to be a first line, and whatever that first line is I would have pulled it up earlier towards the crash so that we have something to anchor us to before we get to this sort of wide open street scene, or people we’ve not established before looking at the results of the car crash. I would love to hear that line somewhere in that car crash scene.

But I like the voiceover over all as a feeling. And so I was, you know, excited to see it. I don’t think the line is quite right, but I like where it was headed.

**Craig:** Yeah. Tonally it seems like it’s dancing around the right thing.

**John:** So, Craig, the answer to your question, they are both gray 2004 Ford Fiestas.

**Craig:** Now I see.

**John:** Which feels like well that’s got to be important. I feel like that is an intentional choice. And yet I don’t know what’s important and what’s not important because there hasn’t been any signaling to me as a reader. So if that feels like the kind of thing which is so important that I might underline it or bold face it or somehow call it out or stick it on its own line. Because that’s weird.

**Craig:** I’d go further.

**John:** Why would two identical cars crash into each other?

**Craig:** That to me requires actual direction on the page. First of all, gets its own paragraph for sure. And then her car we now see is crumpled. Her 2004 gray Ford Fiesta is crumpled and smashed. We come around to see the other car on its back. Also gray. And then as we move around the back we see an upside down the word “Fiesta.” Then we go it’s the same exact model and make. Two of the same cars just smashed into each other. Because you want the audience to go Whoa, not like, Huh, those are similar.

**John:** Yeah. There must have been a sale on 2004 Ford Fiestas.

**Craig:** Meh.

**John:** So then we get into two detectives, one with glasses and one with a beard, talking. I want to cut most of their dialogue because it was just yada-yada. They’re basically saying that she’s alive and stable, but there’s no other body in the other car. I felt there were ways we could visually see that and get to that point and have it be the moment of discovery rather than two people talking about something that has already happened.

It would be great to see people looking in the car and there’s no body in the other car. There’s no person in the other car.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Rather than reported moments, seeing the moment feels better to me.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. I mean, you can do a thing where a detective shows up and he walks over to the other guy and he says, “OK,” and the guy is like, “Yeah, she’s…” And they’re wheeling her into – that’s Bianca Armitage, 19, no criminal history, family has been alerted. We’re running a tox screen. Looks like she’s going to make it.

OK, what about the other guy? Or what about the other car? And the cop says, “There was no one in the other car.” And that’s it. And just like, what?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s weird.

**John:** What? What?

**Craig:** We don’t need this back and forth. “It’s the strangest thing.” No one ever says that. Ever.

**John:** A real head-scratcher.

**Craig:** It’s the strangest thing. Real head-scratcher. These guys are actually diminishing the drama of the situation that you’ve created by kind of being weirdly bland about it.

**John:** Yeah. So I can envision a scenario in which the crash has basically just happened, or we’re coming in like 30 seconds later and there are neighbors who are like looking at Bianca and like, OK, she’s alive in there, and they’re looking. And then we dolly around to the other car and there’s nobody in the car. And that’s surprising. That is shocking. That’s a cool moment. And then we reveal that the license plate is blank. Like that is really creepy and interesting and goose-bumpy.

But having these detectives who aren’t going to be important characters have this dialogue isn’t doing it for us.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And then going to the reporter.

**Craig:** No. No, no.

**John:** That just has to go.

**Craig:** No, no, no.

**John:** I never believe the reporter covering this thing. You don’t cover car crashes like this.

**Craig:** No. I mean, Memphis is – maybe in some tiny, tiny Podunk town in a county where nothing ever happens. But this is Memphis, Tennessee. It’s not necessarily New York, but it’s a real city. And, no, car crashes happen all the time. They stay on somebody going, “A car crash happened.” It’s just, no. No.

**John:** So, I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about this on the show, but at the end of my street there are car crashes all the time, or at least there used to be car crashes all the time until we finally convinced the city to change how traffic flows and put in some one-way turns and things like that. But I would just be watching TV and I’d hear the squeal of tires, crash. And like, OK, it’s a crash. And so I’d put on my shoes, I’d get my phone, and I’d go down. And so I’ve had to deal with so many flipped over cars over the last couple of years.

**Craig:** Oh god. Jesus.

**John:** And it’s terrible. And so I know what these crashes are like and never does a news crew show up. I mean, this is Los Angeles. But even in Memphis, Tennessee a news crew is not going to show up. This is just not realistic or believable.

**Craig:** It’s not news.

**John:** Not news.

**Craig:** It’s not news.

**John:** It’s not news. Then we get to the hospital room and I’m curious what happens next. And so I will say that the good writing of the car crash and of the mystery of like, wait, where is the other person in the other car, who is Bianca, is Bianca possessed by some other spirit, I’m fascinated by all of those. So that’s what makes me curious about what’s going to happen next.

**Craig:** And that is exactly how I would think about rewriting this. What would the person watching this be most curious about? And I can assure you it is not a reporter talking about a crash. It is not two detectives yapping back and forth in a bland way. I want to know, wait, was there somebody in that car? Can you convince me there was nobody in that car? What does it mean that these two cars are exactly the same? What does that mean? And where is that car now? That’s what I want to know.

So, think about what people would want. Give it to them. But in an interesting way. This is the big secret. Now you know.

**John:** Now we know. All right. Let’s move onto our next Three Page Challenge. Megana, tell us about The Little Death by Autumn Palen.

**Megana:** All right, so Brandy, a young woman in her 20s, stares blankly at the ceiling of her bedroom. Tony, male 20s, emerges from beneath the covers and asks if she “got there.” Brandy admits that she did not and that she has never “been there.” Brandy reveals that she’s been too scared to masturbate on her own. Tony asks why not and we see a series of quick cutaways of Brandy’s fears, i.e. that someone will walk in on her or that she’ll electrocute herself with a vibrator.

They banter about what Tony can try next.

**Craig:** You really can’t electrocute yourself with a vibrator. I mean, if it was plugged into a wall?

**John:** These are battery controlled. So back in the days of plug-in vibrators, which I’m sure was a thing at some point.

**Craig:** Was it?

**John:** Then you could have, but you can’t.

**Craig:** Not in my lifetime. I think there have been batteries for a long time.

**John:** It’s probably more like hair dryers in bathtubs was maybe a thing. I bet some people actually did die of that. Exposed wire.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. Early on, I think like in the 20s, a man would get on some sort of bicycle contraption and then an egg beater type electric vibrator would be attached to a woman. And this was all done under the heading of curing her hysteria. But, no, not since I would imagine the ‘40s has this been.

By the way, that actually counts. I have to say, people may think we’re just being picky, but it counts. Because people need to know that the characters are living in our world and thinking somewhat logically.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, it does make me think though I’ve seen so many examples of like shows from the ‘70s where a woman was murdered because someone threw a hair dryer into the bathtub. But how was it ever a believable death? What person is using a blow dryer while in a bathtub?

**Craig:** Well, you know, people are incredibly stupid.

**John:** Yeah, I guess they smoke in bed.

**Craig:** They do. The good news is that somewhere along the line the ground fault interrupter circuit was invented so in your bathroom all those things you would plug a hair dryer into now has its own little circuit breaker. So, you probably won’t die.

**John:** All right, Craig, so The Little Death, what is your take on The Little Death?

**Craig:** Well, there’s nothing wrong with it. OK. There’s nothing wrong with it. There’s just not a lot right with it. Because it is somewhat familiar. We have seen conversations a little bit like this in all sorts of sitcoms and things like that, and other movies. My biggest thing about it was it read, it flowed, the dialogue sounded perfectly fine, I just didn’t believe much of it.

So, Tony seems to have feelings. Tony is just totally cool with everything. And Brandy is in a very strange place because she’s never had an orgasm before, which is not horribly uncommon for women in their 20s. It’s a thing. OK, so I’m with it. But she neither seems to be open or closed about it. She just sort of tells it in between like let me just tell you a big secret of mine. And his reaction is like, oh, OK, let me just try a different thing. And, does that work?

It all feels a bit sort of shruggish. Like a shrug. Like I’m watching a fairly mild discussion between two perfectly nice people.

**John:** So, I enjoyed that it was overall sex positive. I enjoyed Tony’s sex positivity and that Tony was trying hard. And I really like that. I like the specific details of like “wipes his lips with a thumb and forefinger.” Great. Love that. I see the image. It’s terrific.

And while I like him being sex positive, I don’t have a sense of where are they at in their relationship. Like how long – who are they specifically individually and how long have they been kind of a couple. And I think we can get that information into this scene. Or we can get some sense of what their connection is in this scene.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Some of the problems are like, Brandy, 20s. 20s is anything from 20 to 29. That’s a huge range.

**Craig:** It’s a big spread. Yeah.

**John:** So I think you got to give us a very specific age on Brandy. Like is she still in college? Or is she killing it as a consultant at a top law firm? It’s just too general here. And that’s I think my biggest problem with all of this is that it didn’t feel like it was rooted in very specific characters encountering a specific situation.

**Craig:** I mean, look, Brandy has a problem. Right? It’s not like Brandy loves this situation. She doesn’t love this situation. She’s sort of trapped by a fear. I’d love to know a little bit more. I think this fear part is the part that I believe the least, not only for the aforementioned batteries can’t kill you reason, but also because that doesn’t actually seem like why women are too scared to masturbate. It’s not a fear of physical death as much as there’s shame, culture, family issues, religion, whatever it is. It seems like it’s probably a little more complicated than that. So it seems so readily and immediately psychologically accessible to her.

Also, she seems to not – at least in these pages – she doesn’t come off as aware that this is a problem. So it’s only a problem suddenly and then it’s a problem always. Meaning, she’s letting him do this. Now, if she has a problem and she’s allowing him to do this, either she’s saying, “Here’s the deal. It’s not going to work, but you try and let’s see if you can be the one.” Which I don’t get from this. Or, she’ll fake it.

But what she’s not going to do is think, oh, for some reason this time it will be different than all the other times and I’ll just sort of mention that it actually turned out to not be different from all the other times. It just feels like there’s not backstory built in. There’s not experience built in. We’re dealing with sex, so there’s shame around it and it’s tricky and it’s psychological. And both of them just seem too simple. They just seem like incredibly simple people.

**John:** I think my biggest issue with how the pages were flowing is I didn’t get a good sense of – I think the tension of the pages is that she’s telling the guy sort of what these different encounters were, because he’s reacting to them. And I think all those cutaways back to “I just told you that story, I just told you that story,” get rid of those. I think you have a stronger story.

I think it’s more interesting if we’re, as the audience, are being led into these things and she’s not telling him those things. Because then it becomes a source of tension between the two of them. Because someone who can be too nice and too supportive and it can drive you crazy, I think that could be the source of real good comedic tension within the scene. Where she’s like I don’t want you to even try. I don’t want to deal with this right now. I don’t want to try to fix this. And then we don’t need to sort of have the escalation and the rule of three in terms of like all the things that have gone wrong.

Just the one occurrence could be great. Right now on page two, “The sound of the door slamming open snaps her from her daze. Brandy jolts up, focus fixed on the door in a panic.” And right now she says, “I didn’t know you were home.” That’s kind of generic. If she says, “Grandpa!”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s funnier.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then we don’t even need to see grandpa. We just know like, oh god, I can’t even imagine how terrifying that would be.

**Craig:** Or we just see grandpa. We see him staring there dropping his little bag from Trader Joe’s on the floor in shock. No one says a full, complete sentence when they’ve been caught masturbating, I have been told.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Allegedly.

**John:** Allegedly.

**Craig:** It just seems way too, yeah, sort of rigged. By the way, I didn’t quite understand thumb and forefinger. Do you understand her to mean like wipes his lips, like wipes his mouth with the back of his hand?

**John:** No, so sort of pinching – using thumb and forefinger on each side to sort of clean off his mouth.

**Craig:** I dispute that that would be effective. [laughs] I dispute that.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Yeah. That seems odd.

**John:** I would also, getting back to sort of the basics here, it’s such a clichéd moment of like the guy comes up from the covers and asks like “how was that/did it?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I just feel like I’ve seen that so often. I could cut those first couple lines and – or even if he just says, “No?” And you could just get rid of the question, I guess.

**Craig:** I have a question for you. Why did Tony stop? What clue did he have that it had ended? Right off the bat I was so confused. Did he set an egg timer? What happened?

**John:** We won’t know.

**Craig:** And he was like, “How was that?” And she’s like, no. And he’s like, “No? Really? You mean that you didn’t have an orgasm right when I arbitrarily stopped going down on you?”

That’s what I mean. They just seem a bit dim as people. So, make them smarter.

**John:** Yeah. We like that. Let’s get to our final Three Page Challenge. This is Chula Vista by Kristen Delgado. Megana, talk us through it.

**Megana:** Enrique, 17, and his father, Ignacio, 34, are selling a wealthy homeowner, Mr. Lawson, 45, on their landscaping services. Mr. Lawson’s daughter, Stevie, 17, pokes out and tries to talk to Enrique who barely acknowledges her. Enrique secures the sale and as Enrique and his father are leaving Ignacio asks his son who the girl was. And Enrique pretends he doesn’t know her. As they leave the Chula Vista neighborhood Enrique tells his father that one day when he’s a doctor he’ll buy him a home there.

Then we see a tired-looking Enrique getting ready for school in the morning. He almost forgets to pack the burrito his mom packed and the dad makes a joke that Enrique is too good for it because he’s going to be a doctor.

**John:** Great. We’ll start on the title page. This includes an image. It looks like an image that’s maybe custom made for this script. You and I have talked about images in screenplays before. I felt like this set a nice tone and a picture of it. What did you feel about this image?

**Craig:** I liked it. I liked it. I thought that because the image was a bit soft and watercolor-y and defocused that it immediately said this is romance. And not just because a boy and a girl are sitting there on the ground by some lit candles at night and all the rest. Just the Chula Vista itself, the valley, the world, the sunset, the lights. Everything felt romantic.

So, even if this turns out to not be a romance, which I suspect it will turn out to be a romance, it put me in a nice place. I was happy. It felt sophisticated. You know? It was an interesting image.

**John:** Yeah. I liked it, too. One challenge with images in screenplays is that images want to be centered across the width of the page, but of course text in screenplays shift slightly to the right because historically we’ve had bindings, we’ve had three holes on the left hand side. So it bugs me a little bit that the image is off-center compared to the text. So it’s a thing you could figure out how to manipulate in whatever program you’re using. You could figure out how to do it in Highland. Being off-center bugged me more than the fact that there’s an image there. That’s me.

**Craig:** It looks on-center to the title and her name.

**John:** To me it’s on-center to the page but off-center compared to the title.

**Craig:** I printed it out, so there may be some funky printer stuff going on.

**John:** Ah, so it may look different to you.

**Craig:** But it’s a nice image. You know what? Actually, Kristen, this is by Kristen Delgado, the only thing I would think about is if you have a little Photoshop-y thing or Gimp is a free one that you can get that’s like Photoshop, to somehow just do something with the edges of this thing so it doesn’t seem like such a hard edged Internet grab. You know what I mean? Like something that’s a little softer and kind of blended somehow. Fading on the edges. That sort of.

**John:** Let’s get to the script itself. The writing of the script itself. And so I believe after these three pages that this is a story about Enrique and his probably coming of age story in 1979 Phoenix, Arizona. I’ve never seen that before. It does feel like probably about a rich girl from Chula Vista and his dad is going to be the gardener for this family. I got that off of these first three pages and I would be curious what the complications are in that relationship that go ahead. And obviously the image was helping send me to that place.

Craig, what was your overall take, your overall feeling of these three pages?

**Craig:** Nervousness. Because I think you’re right. And that is what they’re promising. And I feel like I’ve seen this. A lot. I mean, there have been a billion Romeos and Juliets, but more importantly it seems like we’re getting a little bit of a kind of already done quite a bit take on being the child of immigrants and the mixing of immigrants with people who aren’t immigrants and different races and different classes and looking down at people.

It feels like this is well trod upon territory. And I didn’t get anything different from these than I normally would. It feels like I’m getting set up for Enrique to start to turning his back on his parents and his family because he’s a little bit embarrassed about them because he kind of aspires to be more with the rich kids. And so there’s going to be conflict there. And the first page I was a little nervous because Mr. Lawson does not seem like, again, this doesn’t seem like the way people are. Someone says, “We’re doing landscaping. We noticed your grass is kind of high.” “Uh, yeah, I haven’t had a chance to get to it.”

But more importantly he goes, “How much?” “$30.” “Great. Go ahead. Do it.” That’s it? Did he not think of this before? It just seems so kind of like mild. And the other thing that was kind of odd is Ignacio in Spanish says, “What a fucking asshole.” And I’m all for the good old classic fucking asshole rich white guy, but I don’t see what Mr. Lawson did. He answered the door.

**John:** He didn’t shake his hand, but he did say yes. He got a job. So I was also thrown by that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I guess the part that he closes the door in his face. Also, that’s – that’s not even how racists work. Like they do shake your hand. Then they close the door and then they bad mouth you. It feels like there’s a slight kind of – there’s a bit of a corniness going on to something that I think as a culture we’re getting and more honest about. I mean, there’s just more honesty.

I’m nervous that this is not going to give me something new. That said, it might. I can’t tell from three pages.

**John:** Yeah. So, Mr. Lawson, 45, dressed for racquetball at the country club.” So, I don’t really quite know what dressed for racquetball at the country club means. Unless he’s carrying his racquetball racket, I just see a guy in shorts and a headband maybe. But I immediately stop and think like you don’t actually go to the club dressed that way. You change into that kind of stuff at the club.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It was a weird first image for me. I love, obviously, hair and makeup and clothing details to help us tell about the character, I just – it felt like we were trying to get to like you’re interrupting some other moment. And so figure out what that moment was.

I like the idea of Enrique, and we’re starting this story with Enrique trying to get the job to mow the lawn there. And I thought his first dialogue does make sense. But what Craig is saying is like Mr. Lawson is going to hear that and then immediately sort of know what’s going on. He’s going to check the Blakey’s home, OK, this really is a person. You know you’re not making this up. And he’s going to push a little bit more. And I just didn’t see that pushing.

And if this scene were a few lines longer there could be a little bit more back and forth in looks in terms of Stevie, the girl who is coming out, and sort of what that whole dynamic is. I just felt like it got a little rushed to get through this and I didn’t believe that he got this job.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, if this is a rich guy, if that’s the point, then nice house in nice neighborhood, he either has somebody mowing his lawn, or he’s like a little kooky and doesn’t give a shit. But he’s not going to be this kind of stuffy classic country club kind of white guy and be neither of those things, just be negligent about his lawn. It just seems odd.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There must be a reason why he’s been mowing his own lawn if he has been. Also, where did Stevie come from? She just like suddenly steps out from behind her father. That’s weird. Does she just follow him around and hang out behind him and then just slide into? You know what I mean? You have to think about, OK, on the day where is she? Can she just be coming around the other side of the house? Or coming down the stairs? Or something.

**John:** Yeah. You could mention her coming around the other side of the house and she’s using the hose to spray off her feet or something that are dirty. There’s got to be a more interesting way to sort of see her than just like behind her father.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Another opportunity here is while I do like the idea of getting the job for the first time, that is a lot of work to set up. If it works for the story, he could have been cutting the grass here for a time and he’s basically saying, “Oh hey, I need a check,” or “I need to get paid.” And that’s that moment. And then there’s actually money exchanging hands which could feel good and actually help set some stuff up a little bit better.

So, I think there’s just opportunities here.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like Mr. So-and-so who has been doing your lawn, he’s retired, he just retired last week. We’re doing your neighbor, Mr. Blakely’s, lawn. If you like we can just pick up yours now. There’s some kind of – it just makes sense, you know.

But Stevie, yeah, like if that’s the thing, if this is the Enrique and Stevie story, this is not – this is weird. It’s like a weird dud of a moment.

**John:** Yeah. So then we get to Ignacio and Enrique in the pickup truck and this could be a really good moment. It’s not working for us right now because I don’t get what the real vibe is between father and son here. I felt like the “when I’m doctor I’ll move here,” I didn’t buy – that just felt like an author talking. It didn’t feel like an actual kid talking.

**Craig:** Corny. It just feels corny. And similarly like a dad, generally speaking, if you think that maybe like your son likes this girl and you’re like, “Oh, who’s that?” “Oh, she’s this girl from school.” You’re like, “OK, cool.” You don’t say, “That’s what I said about your mother.” Eww.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Eww. That’s an eww. You just don’t do that with your boy.

**John:** Yeah. So, but I wonder what their vibe is. Is he ribbing him? What’s going on? I like the dad is drinking a beer, so there’s stuff you could do there. Also crucially, it’s in this pickup truck sequence that we’re establishing Chula Vista as a place and we’re seeing this sign. So think about, again, this is the inside/outside of the car. There’s a good argument to be made for being outside of the car, see the sign, the truck drives past, and then we’re inside the car with them.

Because if we’re inside the car with them it’s very hard to then pop out to see the sign and then be back in the car. If the sign is important, which I think it is, because I wouldn’t know that Chula Vista is necessarily a neighborhood, then tell us that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think this little spot here is one, Kristen, that I want you to think about really carefully. Because you have a point of view, you have a perspective, and you have a feeling about this place. I can tell. And I am not from there. So your job is to make me feel what you want me to feel. And in this moment you want me to feel some sort of connection and kinship to this place. But what you’ve done is you just have a guy that I just met just announcing something that frankly he wouldn’t normally announce. Because they’ve been living there a long time. So, how common is it for you to drive around the place where you’ve been living with somebody else who has been living there and then they suddenly announce, “Man, this view never gets old.” And then a fact. “You can see the whole valley.” No shit, dad. We drive here every day. I live here.

**John:** I can see, too. I have eyes.

**Craig:** So you need to figure out another way to make me feel this thing that maybe dad is upset that Enrique takes these things for granted or maybe that he doesn’t look closely enough and that he’s teaching him a lesson. But then the lesson has to be inspired by something that’s lacking that he sees in Enrique. So these are the things you’ve got to kind of figure out so that I feel what you want me to feel. Because I can tell you feel stuff. I just want it for me.

**John:** Absolutely. But if you’re trying to tell us that as the author, as the writer, then give us the wide shot and describe what it feels like and give us a sense of like this is the panorama and we get a sense of what the music is like. Oh, that’s really pretty. Rather than having the character comment on how pretty it is. Just show us how pretty it is. And that’s a thing you can do as the writer.

I felt the transition between this truck scene and then Enrique’s house, getting ready the next morning for school, was just a weird jump. And it didn’t feel like a natural handoff between this truck thing and then the next thing we’re getting ready for school. There needed to be some other moment between those two things.

**Craig:** Night.

**John:** Or maybe this wasn’t the next – night feels natural. Because as time progresses we’re used to – you know, a couple episodes back we talked about that we are time lords. And as an audience the next thing we want to see is night. We don’t want to see like the next morning getting ready for school. So, you could do the same kinds of things in the scene, but have it be a dinner thing. Like maybe he has to get all his homework off the table to set the table for dinner? Great.

**Craig:** Or maybe he’s just alone in his room thinking. You know, or he’s walking around thinking. We learn something about him or we learn something about Stevie. But if you go from day to morning you’ll just be so confused. Like, wait, why are they going to school suddenly in the afternoon. It won’t feel like morning.

**John:** It feels like a scene got dropped out in the edit and it’s just weird. Let me save you some grief in pages. The first time you have characters who are speaking in Spanish, do that “in Spanish” and then you never need to do it again. So if you’re going to use italics from that point forward you don’t ever need to do that again.

This is something I should have mentioned. The setup overall. If you have a parenthetical, that first letter inside a parenthetical is not uppercased unless it has to be uppercased. But that “in Spanish,” that should be a lowercase “in” for that parenthetical.

**Craig:** Correct. It’s just a strange convention, but that’s how it is.

**John:** Yeah. I want to thank these three writers here for sending in their pages, but also all the writers who sent in pages because it’s a tremendous amount of work for Megana to go through them but we get such a broad sampling of what our listeners are writing in with. So thank you very much for trusting us with these and for sharing your work with other people so others can learn.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** If you have three pages you want us to take a look at, don’t send them to the “ask” account. Instead, you need to go to johnaugust.com/threepage which is all spelled out, threepage. And there’s a little form there. You say who you are, that it’s OK for us to talk about on the air, and then you attach a PDF. So if you want to send in your pages that is where you send in those pages.

But thank you to everyone who submitted, especially these writers for these pages.

**Craig:** Thanks folks.

**John:** All right, it has come time for our One Cool Things. Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** Nope. [laughs]

**John:** All this time you’ve completely forgotten about the conceit of the show.

**Craig:** I whiffed.

**John:** Which is absolutely fine. So I will give two One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Oh great.

**John:** One of which I think you would especially enjoy. So the thing you would enjoy is GeoGuessr, which could have been a One Cool Thing many–

**Craig:** I’ve played that. Yeah.

**John:** It’s a great, great game.

**Craig:** I think it’s been one before. Yeah, it’s fun.

**John:** So, tell us about GeoGuessr. That can be your One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, sure. I’ll steal it. So in GeoGuessr you’re basically using the Google Earth function where you’re looking at a street view and what it does is it just generates a random street view somewhere in the world. And your job, and you can click around on the image like you an on regular Google Street View. You can move this way and that way and up and down. And your job is to figure out where it is, down to as close to the exact point as you can.

So what you’re doing is you’re looking for clues. Obviously any text on the side of a building or a truck or even license plates. You start to think, OK, am I on the left side of the road driving forward or the right side of the road? What are those trees? And then if you’re lucky enough to get a crazy phone number, you can really get close.

So, you know sometimes you do really well. Sometimes you’re like I honestly don’t know where this is. And sometimes you can get within – the best ones are when you’re within three meters of it or something, which is just a joy.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** But you get points and it’s for nothing other than just your amusement. It’s just fun. It’s a fun game.

**John:** Yeah. So my family has been playing that to pass random time. And it really is a good detective sort of game and you can work really hard to get yourself within three meters and then other times it will come up with one that you’re like I think I’m in Australia but I could also be somewhere in South America. You just have no idea because it plops you down in the middle of no place. But it’s always fun to find new places.

So, GeoGuessr. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that.

My One Cool Thing is a newsletter that comes out every week by Noah Kalina. I know him through a podcast I also listen to with Adam Lisagor, but his newsletter is terrific. I don’t think it has a name, it’s just his newsletter. He is a photographer in Upstate New York and he just goes on these sort of weird missions that he’s inspired by things and finds all the poppy seed bagels in his neighborhood in New York and figures out the poppy seed distribution on these bagels and photographs them beautifully. And it’s fun. Every week it’s sort of a weird little adventure.

It reminds me of, folks who are fans of Reply All, it feels like Reply All, or those episodes where they go off on these weird missions to figure out stuff. It feels like that. So, there will be a link in the show notes, but check out the back episodes and maybe subscribe to Noah Kalina’s newsletter.

**Craig:** I’m just looking at it right now and he actually did like a little MythBuster’s thing to see if it’s true that if you eat a bunch of poppy seeds that you will test positive for opiates. Because obviously that’s where heroin and morphine and all those things ultimately derive from the poppy plant. Not that poppy seeds get you high.

And he ate six poppy seed bagels in a week and then he did a drug test and he came back positive for narcotics, opiates specifically.

**John:** Yeah, opiates.

**Craig:** It worked.

**John:** So, lesson learned.

**Craig:** Lesson learned.

**John:** And so the podcast I was referring to is All Consuming. And so that’s where he and Adam, they look at all the products that show up on Instagram and they buy those products and see what they actually are like in real life. And they are delightful people and I also listen to their podcast.

**Craig:** Fun.

**John:** That is our show for this week. I want to thank Megana Rao for reading all those submissions. Thank you very much our producer.

**Craig:** Thank you, Megana.

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. 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 questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

You can sign up to become a Premium member where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on money and happiness.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right, Craig, the first of our Premium subscriber questions, or suggestions comes from Lianne in Burbank. And she writes, “In your own personal experiences has becoming wealthy actually made you happier? Has there been a certain threshold of your income where you noticed diminishing happiness returns? Is being truly wealthy all it’s cracked up to be, or are there difficulties beyond the glamour that you find often aren’t discussed?”

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

**John:** Craig, what’s it like being rich?

**Craig:** Well, let me tell you. [laughs] There are levels of wealthiness, but safe to say that John and I do pretty well. So, here’s my experience, Lianne. Being wealthy has not made me happier. Being wealthy has made me less unhappy, because when problems arise, as they often do in life, sometimes they’re mundane, something is leaking. Sometimes they’re very involved. Someone is sick. Money can solve problems. Money can’t make you happier, but money can definitely make some unhappy things go away faster or more efficiently. And I don’t kind of undersell that. That actually is a big deal.

The ability for money to diminish misery is impressive. That’s not everything. But it is impressive.

What it can’t do is keep you off the psychologist’s couch. The problems that you carry with you, your shames, your fears, all that stuff that was kind of in you and fomented within you by childhood, that’s still there. And sometimes being paid a lot exacerbates those things. It makes you feel guilty, undeserving. It makes you feel like you’re an imposter. You’re a liar. You’re somehow ripping people off.

There’s all sorts of crazy things that can bang around in your head if you are somebody that deals with some core shame issues…and some of us do not. But, you know what, making bad stuff go away, hooray money.

**John:** Yeah. And I think what Craig is describing is there really is a threshold beyond which it’s like, oh, some of the things which are not annoyances or aggravations or really anxiety I guess is probably the best way to put it diminish because I’m not going to be so worried about that thing. And so I do remember going from, after having been hired to do my first project, I’ve talked about on the show how I used to have just a spreadsheet and I knew what my monthly expenses were. And I knew I can afford to live for three months, or six months. I could just sort of count down and I could watch the money run out. And that was really stressful.

And once I started making enough money that I didn’t need to worry about that so much I was happier just because I didn’t have that source of constant dread and anxiety. Not really unlike having a president I couldn’t count on. A president I was convinced was actively trying to destroy the world. When you free yourself of that you’re like, oh, you have more space to be a little bit more happy.

But it plateaus and I think you’re sense, Lianne, is that there’s a plateau, there’s a zenith at which more money doesn’t make you any happier and I think that’s very, very true. And I don’t know the specific dollar figure, but when you – I think it’s when you don’t have to worry about every expense. When you can be just like, oh, I’ll just put that on a card and I know I’ll be able to pay for it. That is a nice feeling, knowing that I don’t have to worry about certain kinds of choices that just don’t really matter.

But I think Craig and I have both described how one of the ways you can stop that anxiety from coming back in is to just not live beyond your means. And we both know people who have made a lot of money and then have lived beyond their means and are on this terrible treadmill where they have to sort of keep making money or else everything falls apart.

**Craig:** Right. So those people never get the benefit of what we’re talking about, which is a sense of security, financial security. And it is, when you don’t have it, and I’ve certainly – I was definitely, you know, on the month-to-month living plan when I first came to Los Angeles, it is exhausting. You’re expending a lot of energy in fear and concern about how that functions. And if one thing goes wrong, there’s not a lot between you and real trouble.

So living beneath your means is incredibly important. It’s also, generally speaking, it’s a value. I don’t know how else to put it. It’s a value. I think that there’s a grace to it. And also one really nice thing about making a lot of money is that you can be charitable. And some people aren’t. And OK, fine. I’m not going to yell at them. But it is rare that I feel as effective and impactful on the world as I do when I’m making some kind of significant charitable donation. More so than writing television and movies and things, which I know people see and they may or may not care about. But actually making charitable contributions to either political causes or medical help or developing nations, whatever it is that you pursue, you know, curing diseases, it feels good. It does.

And I know that John you and Mike are pretty charitable folks as well.

**John:** For sure. A thing that I think people can intuitively sense and yet they can get tripped up on is buying the next thing will not make you happier. And buying that fancy car, you may enjoy driving it for a time, but that will fade. And buying a bigger house, you know, beyond a certain point just becomes an extra source of anxiety and stress and tension.

We have friends who have multiple houses and that fills me with dread. I would constantly be thinking about that house that I’m not at and sort of something going wrong with that property.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s just a choice I made to not invite that into my life. And people, obviously there’s many ways to do things, but I think not getting caught up in the expectation to really be happy, if I had this thing I would be happy, that’s not true. Happiness comes from having enough. Having plenty and not needing to have more.

**Craig:** Sharing is generally when I feel the best about spending. Sharing. That’s a great feeling. It’s a great feeling to have friends over and cook them dinner and know that you’ve bought lots of good food and you don’t have to freak out about it and you could put a good bottle of wine out. That, to me, the kind of quiet – here’s what I’m not, for instance, I’m not a collector. And I now a lot of people who are collectors. And most people are collecting things that don’t cost a lot of money, but there are people who make a lot of money and then they just begin collecting incredibly expensive things.

I’m sure Jay Leno is a great guy. This isn’t even a criticism of him. It’s really more just a difference of opinion. I don’t understand why he has 800 cars. I just don’t understand it. I don’t. Just drive one, and then, you know, rent it or something. I just don’t understand the idea of having them all. Or I think Seinfeld has like 80 Porsches or something. That gets weird for me. It just feels like a dragon sitting on its hoard.

So I think just sharing and that sort of thing is fun. But, you know, again, look, here’s the truth. The guys like Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld have so much more money than I do that they can hoard things like cars and such and then in their charity however they perform it donate vastly more money than I do. So I can’t really criticize them. It’s just a difference is how I would put it.

**John:** It’s a whole different conversation to have about that level of super wealth and sort of like what that does. When a person has the wealth of a nation, that is such an odd difference from the lives that you and I are leading. I’m still scrubbing the bathroom. We’re still doing our own laundry at our house. So it’s a different kind of life than some other people have. And that’s fine, too.

Craig, have you ever heard this explanation for why altruism exists? That sense of an evolutionary adaptation to recognize that the best place to store food is in your friends’ bellies. After a hunt there’s more meat than you can possibly eat and so you cannot store it. So, the best thing you can do with that meat is to give it to everybody else so that they will share their wealth the next time.

**Craig:** I wrote a paper about this in college. And I think the center of it was there’s a story. In the ‘80s there was a terrible plane crash. Plane went down in the Potomac. I don’t know if you remember this. Right there in DC. It was a frigid wintery day. A plane goes down. There are people alive but they’re in this icy water. And a man driving by stops and basically jumps into the water and saves some people. And the question was why. He doesn’t know them. And it’s quite clear that there is great danger connected to jumping in that frigid water. He himself might also die. So why/how evolutionarily does this make any sense at all?

And the answer, or at least an answer is this. That evolutionarily we are better off as members of a society, strength in numbers, right? So, we are selected for pro-social instincts. People who generally feel a connection to a group beyond just their own immediate family members will tend to do better overall because they stay inside of a group. But that tendency, that pro-social tendency is stupid. Meaning it can’t make choices in a moment about what would be advantageously pro-social. It just is pro-social.

And so that’s why you find people who just that instinct kicks in. And it’s the instinct of holding a society together which in its own way is a beautiful thought.

**John:** Yeah. We’ve talked about empathy on the show as well. In leaving Twitter you said it taught you empathy. And for me pulling over to the side of the road and jumping into the frigid water is like it’s because I could imagine myself as the person in the water and needing somebody to help save me. And so it’s easy to see that other side. And the folks who don’t have that are sometimes our elected president and that’s a bad thing.

**Craig:** Or run movie studios. [laughs]

**John:** True. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* [Irony](https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-irony-different-types-of-irony-in-literature-plus-tips-on-how-to-use-irony-in-writing#what-are-the-main-types-of-irony) and [cosmic irony](https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-cosmic-irony-definition-and-examples/)
* Three Page Challenge: [Echopraxia or an Interdimensional Coming of Age Ghost Story](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2020%2F12%2Fechopraxia-three-pages.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=3daf6520c3d18584e970f76e9b48965308dfbca379eb9e229603392f8b8c2ece) by J Vernon Reha
* Three Page Challenge: [The Little Death](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2021%2F01%2FTheLittleDeath_AutumnPalen.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=0abfaa550f0e35fa9e1fe7d11adc10079351101e68f0a6e46563289eb367bd82) by Autumn Palen
* Three Page Challenge: [Chula Vista](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2020%2F11%2FChula-Vista-pg-1-3-Kristen-Delgado.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=4d0c0d1249961917d27dcfa77679d4b7713ef86147a3a00e2860e4bfacd3d97e) by Kristen Delgado
* Thank you to all of our Three Page Challenge submissions! [Apply here](https://johnaugust.com/threepage) to be considered for our next round.
* [GeoGuessr](https://www.geoguessr.com/)
* [Noah Kalina Newsletter](https://mailchi.mp/6068da7c609b/noahkalina)
* [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 Nora Beyer ([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/486standard.mp3).

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

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Just in case your kids are in earshot and you don’t want them to hear swearing, this is the warning.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 482 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we’ll discuss America’s favorite crime fighter, but more importantly how we talk about him, and the bundle of IP surrounding Batman.

**Craig:** Who?

**John:** Then we’ll look at another unlikely but iconic hero, a Scandinavian king who is clever with words but also great with the sword. Bro, that’s Beowulf. And he was the Dark Knight way back when. Plus we’ll answer some listener questions and in our bonus segment for Premium members I will tell Craig about the Batman teaser trailer I wrote way back in 2001.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** And we’ll discuss what other heroes we would tackle if given the chance.

**Craig:** Well this is going to be fun.

**John:** A good episode. And a good episode for the New Year. Happy New Year, Craig.

**Craig:** Oh. Happy New Year. I mean–

**John:** Happy New Year. I’m optimistic.

**Craig:** Yeah, look, I understand that the calendar is not actually a thing. That we’ve just arbitrarily said this is the beginning and this is the end, because the sun, you could pick any point in the earth’s rotation around the sun and call it day one. But, oh man, this year. Oof.

**John:** Oof.

**Craig:** Oof.

**John:** Yeah. I’m optimistic about the New Year. I’m more optimistic about the back half of 2021 maybe, but still. I’ll happily turn the calendar to a new page. And get started with new stuff.

**Craig:** And I think in 2021 we’re going to hit 500 episodes.

**John:** We’re going to hit 500 episodes. We’ll hit like 10 years or something. It’s a lot.

**Craig:** Jesus Maria.

**John:** Many milestones. Plus I know you have a very busy year coming up. I have a busy year coming up. So, we know that 2021 is going to be eventful just personally.

**Craig:** It’s going to be fun. We’ll still find a way to play Dungeons & Dragons.

**John:** We somehow will. Priorities will be set straight.

**Craig:** Priorities.

**John:** Some follow up. Follow up on follow up actually. We’ve discussed the Rent a Family story. Maria from Argentina but now living in Tokyo writes, “Werner Herzog actually already made that movie released earlier this year called Family Romance, LLC. It’s not a documentary, but the protagonist is the actual owner of the family rental company and many of the actors are real employees as well, so it creates an even stranger dialogue on the meta level on the con within the con” as I was describing.

So there already is a movie, not just How Would This Be a Movie, there already is a movie by Werner Herzog about the Japanese Rent a Family situation.

**Craig:** No one needs to write it especially since Werner Herzog has already done it. You don’t want to follow in those footsteps.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** It’s Werner Herzog for god’s sakes.

**John:** It would be foolish. And Craig would be forced to break out his Werner Herzog accent which he’s well known for.

**Craig:** [as Herzog] It’s not very hard to do. Why are you making another Family Romance movie when I’ve already made one? Mine is better.

**John:** It feels like Werner Herzog should have been in a Batman movie, but he’s not been which his just crazy.

**Craig:** Weird.

**John:** But let’s talk about Batman, because I have DC Comics on the brain, partly because of the Wonder Woman 1984 movie that came out this past week. But also the announcement that HBO Max/Warners is planning to build a whole stable of movies around their DC characters, sort of how Disney has done with Marvel.

Mike Schur, a friend, he tweeted, “Hoping they finally get into the Batman’s backstory. Like, yes, he’s a vigilante for justice and has this sort of brooding presence, but why? What happened? We fans deserve that explanation.”

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s funny. That’s funny.

**John:** That’s funny. You can’t talk about Batman, it’s always his origin story again and again and again. We’ve seen that damn alley outside a theater so many times. And the pearls dropping from the necklace. It’s just like it’s constantly an origin story. But Batman is actually a fascinating character. He’s a really weird iconic character because he’s just different from all the other characters.

So I want to talk about his history, how he fits into IP, what’s interesting about him as a character to write. And, Craig, have you ever written any scenes with Batman in your career?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. I have written half of one, which you’ll see referenced in the bonus segment. But I have written in the DC universe before. So I wrote a Shazam movie which was not the Shazam movie that came out. I helped out on another big DC movie a while back. And while I’ve never written Batman himself, he’s sort of always kind of there. So many of the things I like – Harley Quinn earlier this year was a One Cool Thing. He’s always a background character in that. So he has this weird looming presence over a lot of stuff.

So I thought we’d start by talking about sort of history and then get into sort of what makes him weird and unique as a character.

**Craig:** Sure. I think up until, and I could be wrong, but I think up until the mid-‘80s when the Tim Burton Batman movie came out was just, you know, another superhero. It was a high level superhero that everybody knew. I don’t know about you, but in the ‘70s when we all dressed up for Halloween in those weird vinyl aprons with the mask with the little horizontal mouth hole–

**John:** I can still smell what those masks smell like.

**Craig:** You can smell it. Everyone would stick their tongues through the little mouth hole and cut their tongue. And Batman was definitely one of those. And just like Superman or Spider-Man, or Wonder Woman, or any of them, he was in the League of Justice, the cartoon. And he was fine.

And then the Burton Batman came out, I think it’s sort of alongside the Frank Miller re-imagination, and suddenly Batman just became an entirely different thing and it was fascinating to watch.

**John:** Yeah. So we should stress that we are not Batman historians and so you do not need to write in with any of your corrections to things we get wrong about this.

**Craig:** Do not write in.

**John:** [laughs] Yes. Megana is on this call and just for her sanity and safety please do not write in with your corrections. But let’s briefly sort of talk through the timelines here. Because it starts in 1939. Detective Comics, written by Bill Finger, illustrated by Bob Kane. We move forward to the 1960s. We have that campy Batman series with Adam West. In the ‘70s we start to see Batman as this darker version and obsessive compulsive. We get The Dark Knight Returns which is really probably the first graphic novel I actually remember reading.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It sort of anchored this idea of like an older Batman and a really dark Batman. And sort of Batman as a political force and sort of questioning his role in society.

But at the same time you referenced the Tim Burton Batman which was such a different feel and take. It was dark, but his Gotham was constructed so differently. And then it became this series of directors. So we had Tim Burton’s Batman. Joel Schumacher’s vision. Chris Nolan. Zack Snyder. We now have Matt Reeves making a version of Batman. It’s a character that’s been sort of continuously re-envisioned but not reinvented because his backstory has always stayed exactly the same.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. His backstory is fixed. And also his powers are fixed. There’s really no flexibility in terms of what he is and what he does. He is a boy who is incredibly rich, because his parents are incredibly rich. They live in a city that is modeled after decrepit New York. Not fun New York. But crappy New York. So they live in a beautiful part of New York, but then there’s this bad part of town. There’s a guy who I think officially is named Joe Chill who holds up the mom and the dad. Tries to take the mom’s necklace. And ends up shooting the mom and dad, who had been out to the opera with their young child, Bruce.

Bruce Wayne suffers two terrible things that night. First, his parents are killed in front of him. Second, he had to watch opera as a baby, as a kid. That’s just miserable. That’s always the same. And you know what else is always the same? He doesn’t have super powers. And that never changes. And maybe that’s why he’s kind of fascinating to us.

**John:** Yeah. So there’s a relatability to him in that he’s just really good at doing the stuff he’s good at. So he’s really good at fighting. He’s really smart. He can figure stuff out. And so it has that sort of proficiency porn aspect of it. He’s just so good at doing the thing he does.

And so he seems like a self-made man, although he’s a self-made person who starts with a tremendous amount of wealth.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** A quote that sort of tracks into this. This was DC Comics’ Jenette Kahn writing that “Batman is an ordinary mortal who made himself a superhero. Through discipline and determination and commitment he made himself into the best. I always thought that it meant that I could be anything that I wanted to be.” And so there’s a relatability to him that’s different than Superman or Wonder Woman or Aquaman who are born into their greatness. In this case he is just a normal mortal human being who is just really, really good at things.

**Craig:** Well he’s a bit of an Ayn Randian kind of hero in that he starts incredibly wealthy but because he’s so smart and so resourceful and so clever and careful he manages to preserve that wealth and grow that wealth. And he uses his wealth and persistence and hard work and determination and sweat and tears and his ability to withstand pain.

**John:** Yeah. Seems like a supernatural ability to withstand pain.

**Craig:** Right. And he uses all of that mustering American ideal independence, standalone masculine thing to become the ultimate cowboy. And he doesn’t need your unions. And he doesn’t need government. He definitely doesn’t need government. The one thing that’s also incredibly consistent throughout Batman stories is that government is bad. Because the police department is either corrupt or incompetent or both. The mental health industry is a total disaster as all they do is just churn out one damaged super villain after another. In short, the city can’t get it done. The people can’t get it done. Only this individual can get it done.

**John:** Yeah. And so in many ways it feels like a very American kind of story because we are the country of the frontier and the going out on your own. We have this sort of cowboy mentality. It’s like the cowboy mentality transferred back to an urban core.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And where you need to have some lone ranger of justice there to protect the innocent and beat up the bad guys. But we often talk about hero’s journey/hero’s quest kind of things. He doesn’t seem to have a lot of those, at least in the normal ways. It’s not like he’s born with some great flaw that he overcomes over this quest. He’s always in a state of anguish and pain and a determination to save his parents in ways he never could have saved them before.

He’s not a hero who has a concluding arc.

**Craig:** No. His basic job seems to be to defend and preserve the safety of the people, the good citizens of Gotham. In this regard he’s a very strange hero because presumably there are other cities which also have problems. And he doesn’t seem to give a sweet damn about any of the other ones. He’s a homer. He loves Gotham. That’s his hometown. He loves Gotham. And he is constantly serving as Gotham’s true father. Not their lame stepfather, the government. God forbid the mayor or the police or social services were at all relevant or competent. In Gotham, no. Only he is Gotham’s true father. The father who can come at night and punish the bad by inflicting fear upon them primarily. Fear.

**John:** Exactly. And so his relationship to the law is fascinating. Because he wants to be a force of law, the one who is cleaning up the corruption and the filth of the streets. But he doesn’t actually believe in the law enforcement officers. Or he has a special connection to the law enforcement officers. There’s like the good ones, you know, Chief Gordon as commissioner, but nothing else beyond that does he sort of seem to believe in.

And yet at times he does kill. At times he doesn’t kill. His decision to not use a gun or to use a gun has changed over the years. So the moral code he sets for himself is both specific but changes in a way that a lot of these things about his origin remain fixed.

**Craig:** Yeah. And in that regard he’s an extension of our American fantasy of power. He uses a vast expenditure of money and he harnesses an enormous wealth of technological advancement to shock and awe. All to protect the homeland of Gotham. And if it sounds like I’m down on Batman I’m not because he’s not real. [laughs] Just, you know, I think people lose sight of these things all the time. I should probably mention Batman is not real.

Mostly I’m interested in what our fascination with Batman says about us. I will say that I am a huge fan of the Arkham videogames, which I think are amazing. And as a Batman experience they’re incredibly both enjoyable and also they drive home another fascinating thing about Batman. Batman himself personality wise is boring. Batman does not have a family. Batman is constantly fighting the most amazing collection of villains. Period. The end.

Spider-Man has a lot of cool enemies, but nothing like Batman. No one comes close to the variety of lunatics and larger-than-life villains that Batman is constantly dealing with, all of whom are kitschy as hell and so much fun. And that is also part of the deliciousness of enjoying the Batman story.

**John:** He has a good ecosystem around him. I thought we would wrap up this segment by listening to the audience reaction to the very first teaser trailer for Batman. So this is 1988 at Mann’s Chinese Theater here in Los Angeles. And someone found video from this and so here’s the audio from a newscaster interviewing people and their reaction to the Batman teaser trailer. This is the Michael Keaton Batman directed by Tim Burton. Let’s take a listen.

**Female Voice:** Oh, I can’t wait. I love Michael Keaton. He’s one of my favorite funny people. And I love Jack Nicholson. And I love the trailer. I love the whole thing. I’m ready to go.

**Male Voice:** That’s going to be live man. It’s going to be live. I’m going to come to see it.

**Female Voice:** The trailer was better than the movie we just saw.

**Male Voice:** How do you think Michael Keaton is going to be as Batman?

**Female Voice:** Sexy. [laughs] Very sexy.

**Female Voice:** Oh, he’s just a gorgeous guy. He has great legs and everything. [laughs]

**Female Voice:** Michael Keaton is a great actor, so I’m really excited to see it.

**Male Voice:** What kind of Joker is Jack Nicholson going to be?

**Male Voice:** Nicholson, I can say he’s great all the time. He is a joker, so he’s probably just going to be play himself.

**Male Voice:** I mean, with Jack Nicholson in it, I mean how you can you go wrong? I mean, especially his makeup. That’s great man.

**Female Voice:** Jack Nicholson is casted as the perfect Joker. Michael Keaton is adorable. And my husband will just be counting the minutes to see Kim Basinger.

**Female Voice:** The only thing I could change about it was letting me play the babe.

**Male Voice:** Kim Basinger. Yeah, I can see either you or Kim Basinger.

**Female Voice:** What’s she got that I don’t have?

**Male Voice:** So intense with the eye. Come swooping in on all these scenes. And that car, man.

**Male Voice:** I like the Batmobile. Yeah.

**Male Voice:** Why?

**Male Voice:** I don’t know, it’s pretty cool.

**Male Voice:** Yeah?

**Female Voice:** I love the Batmobile. It looks so cool. I wish I could ride in it.

**Male Voice:** And what was your favorite part of the whole trailer?

**Male Voice:** When Michael Keaton comes in and says, “I’m Batman. I’m Batman.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh, we were so young and innocent. Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if we lived in that world again where no one had a goddamned idea of what was coming out. There weren’t 5,000 articles. There wasn’t a campaign just to unveil the tire of the new Batmobile. And people were like, “Oh yeah, Batmobile, it’s cool. That’s why I like it.” It’s so nice. Aw.

**John:** Aw. The time before there were Batman movies.

**Craig:** The time before there was Twitter and the sort of like cottage industry. And no hot takes. Did you notice?

**John:** Not a single hot take.

**Craig:** You do that now and someone is going to be like, “Um, you know, I don’t think that – it doesn’t, you know.” Ugh.

**John:** All right. So Batman is a character we’re all familiar with because we’ve seen him 1,000 different times. But I want to transition to talking about a character who is at least as foundational but sort of less well known. And that’s Beowulf. And to help us out with that let’s bring on Maria Dahvana Headley. She’s a New York Times bestselling author and playwright. She’s also an authority on Beowulf, having written The Mere Wife: A Modern Day Adaptation of Beowulf, and an acclaimed translation of the original this past year which was in fact my One Cool Thing a few weeks back. Welcome Maria.

**Craig:** Hey.

**Maria Dahvana Headley:** Thank you. Thank you for having me on.

**Craig:** So much fun.

**John:** It’s very exciting to talk with you. So I absolutely adored your translation, because I tried to read an earlier version of it that was also acclaimed in its time and I found your version to be just so sparkling and present and fresh. And it felt like someone was just sitting across the bar/table from me telling me this story.

So, I strongly recommend it everybody. That’s why it was a One Cool Thing. But I’m wondering if you could give us a little backstory on what was it that I actually read. Because I think I have this vision that Beowulf is sort of like The Iliad and the Odyssey that it was an oral tradition story passed down for generations, but I don’t really know what it was I read. So what is Beowulf?

**Maria:** Well, you have a pretty accurate possible guess. We don’t know. We don’t really know what it is.

**Craig:** That’s the best answer ever. [laughs]

**Maria:** One manuscript is about 1,000-ish years old, written by two scribes. We don’t know who the scribes were. But they are correcting each other throughout. And it is probably, and in my opinion almost definitely, a transcription of an oral performance. Because it had throughout the poem it’s 3,182 lines of battles and lineage basically. And throughout the poem there will be stopping points where the narrator will be like, “Let me tell you what happened last night,” because he’s clearly, in my opinion, performing for a drunk audience that is shouting and he’s unamplified standing on a table. That’s just how I feel the poem is.

But not everyone has felt that way. Lots of people have felt like this is a normal poem about the sort of glorious traditions and that it should be done in a somewhat fusty language or in a “noble” language. J.R.R. Tolkien really felt this way about it. It’s the thing that inspired everything he did. All of Lord of the Rings was inspired by Beowulf. He was a big Beowulf nerd and he did his own translation which is done – it feels like reading Lord of the Rings. It just doesn’t feel as good.

**Craig:** Because J.R.R. Tolkien, was he a philologist? Is that the word?

**Maria:** Yeah. He was someone who really, really, really cared deeply about Beowulf. And what he cared about most deeply was the attempts to fall into the old traditions, rhyme and meter wise. And so he was driven bonkers by it. He was trying to translate a language, Old English, which does not translate directly to contemporary English. So what you’re reading in my translation and in anyone’s translation is a wild guess.

It’s like – and it’s definitely unlike some languages, this is a language that if you’re translating from Old English it’s so much about the translator, what the translator is choosing out of many different possibilities for most of the words.

**John:** So, anybody who is doing a translation of Beowulf is really doing an adaptation of Beowulf. Because it’s taking what is the sort of foundational story and trying to apply not just modern words to it but kind of modern concepts. And that’s why – it got me thinking about Batman. If you go back to the original issue of Detective Comics that introducing Batman as a character and took that as a foundational text, any new version of it is going to necessarily change some things to have it make sense with sort of modern audiences. And it’s hard to imagine a character who has been more transformed more times than Batman.

In your case, in telling this story of Beowulf, you’re looking at sort of how we approach this character, but also what is even the format of the story it takes place in. Because yours very much feels like an oral tradition. It’s some guy telling you a story like right across the table. But that’s a choice. It’s a way of presenting this sort of foundational text and introducing this character.

**Maria:** Yeah. I decided to do it like a long monologue essentially. Because I thought, OK, well then you can have the POV of the poet as well, which is really part of the original. But lots of people don’t put that in. They feel like it’s needlessly confusing. So they just sort of relate the Beowulf story like it’s history, like here’s the true thing that happened to my boy. Whereas I wanted a sense of POV.

**Craig:** I’m just curious, what do you think – when you do this kind of translation, do you run into a resistance that somehow by making it accessible you are cheapening it? Do people still equate accessible with less than?

**Maria:** Yes. [laughs]

**Craig:** What’s the story with – like why do people do that? And how do you respond to that?

**Maria:** Well, it’s an interesting state of affairs. Like in the case of this translation a lot of the press surrounding it has been that I used a lot of slang. I use bro as the opening word of the Beowulf.

**Craig:** That’s so cool.

**Maria:** Which is a transgressive thing to do, but also a pretty accurate translation idiomatically of what that word means and what [unintelligible] means. But it’s transgressive because people feel like that’s a low word. And they feel like slang is low. Which is ridiculous because the entire English language is slang. It’s slang after slang after slang and all kinds of things have contributed to the language.

So, it’s an interesting thing. I think the tradition of believing that something that’s written in vernacular is low is a tradition that’s based on all kinds of hierarchy and prejudice and lack of accessibility to sort of ivory tower structures that have meant that diverse translators have not been able to get into the tower to do the translating and to give perspective on a lot of these ancient texts.

**Craig:** Right.

**Maria:** So it’s been an interesting experience. Other women have translated Beowulf and there have been maybe 15 other women have translated Beowulf into English. And their translations are really interesting but rarely get a lot of play. And often what has happened is that the old guard comes in and says, “Well, this is a minor translation and it’s not a real translation and it’s for children.”

Most of the women in the early part of the 20th Century who translated it ended up writing children’s translations of Beowulf, even though those are also the things that were taught in Tolkien’s primary school that got him into Beowulf.

**Craig:** Right. So in their own way their translations are more experienced than the other. That’s the kind of strange weird feedback loop is that the more accessible you make it, the more people read it, the more people learn, and that becomes Beowulf.

**Maria:** Yeah. And that becomes the cultural understanding of Beowulf is built completely on accessible translations rather than translations in the sort of Old English meter, for example, that are untranslatable.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Now, Maria, I want to talk to you about your character of Beowulf, and he’s so proficient and slays creatures with such aplomb. In your mind as you’re translating this is he supernatural or is he just a really good fighter with a sword? Because he seems to have at times sort of Hercules kind of powers. Other times he’s just really a good fighter. Where do you come down on the nature of him as a hero?

**Maria:** I think I come down all over the place. I’ve thought about it so much because it’s – one of the things that I think is really interesting when you first read Beowulf you think, wait, OK, this guy can sort of slay 30 at one blow, which means he’s not human. And the only other person who can do that is the major monster, Grendel. Grendel also can slay 30 in a blow. And they’re both mentioned with the same number of men.

So, you read that and you think, well, OK, if one of these is a monster the other one is also probably a monster. And so I kind of come down on the no one is really a monster end of the spectrum. The poem itself has a big talk makes you big kind of situation. So, if you talk – I want to say bigly so much – if you talk–

**Craig:** Do it.

**Maria:** If you talk with enough Trumpian volume about yourself, and indeed this is part of how I translated Beowulf’s speeches. If you talk that way about yourself you can sometimes pull it off. You can make other believe it. And even if it doesn’t really work in reality, the story they tell about you will be a story about somebody who swings it really hard.

So, I think it is as much a story about storytelling as it is a story about anything else. And the Beowulf character is a character that’s built on his own story about what he’s capable of doing.

**Craig:** I remember reading The Song of Roland in college and I was struck by how iterative it was a battle that there was this kind of almost hypnotic rhythm once the fight began of just like he killed this guy and then he killed this guy, then he killed this guy. Was this sort of like the action sequence way back when? Let me describe how – or like Sampson killed a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. I mean, was this the action sequence of the old days when you didn’t have moving pictures so you just had to describe violence over and over?

**Maria:** It’s an interesting thing. I mean, some of those ancient texts are almost like a ship’s manifest. You get the [unintelligible] and their lineage. And along with so I guess they’re the spoils of war itemized. And that’s often something that’s part of the poem, like remembering the names which is interesting when we think about the many ways in which we fail to remember the names of the dead throughout the 20th Century and 21st Century.

Yeah, the blow, blow, blow, blow, blow stuff is very much part of the Old English tradition as well. And in this story, I mean, it’s three big battles basically. But you also hear about a lot of other battles in which whole armies of men die and everybody is scattered and flattened on the ground and Beowulf swims away from one battle with 30 suits of armor in his arms somehow.

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**Maria:** You know, things like this are happening.

**Craig:** Cool guy.

**Maria:** And you really get a sense of the cost of the big ego. If you are the king you have to choose your time to fight. And sometimes your time to fight – or if you’re the hero, the right hand of the king, which is what Beowulf is for most of the story, sometimes there’s just a big cost. You just have piles of bodies.

**Craig:** Just like Batman.

**John:** Just like Batman. And also just like Batman we see Beowulf in sort of two forms. We see his young form where he kills Grendel and Grendel’s mother and he’s the hero who shows up at the foreign kingdom and is the giant hero. But we also see him much later in life sort of like in Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns where he is the aging king going back for one last battle.

To me it feels like there were two volumes or two different comic books that sort of got joined together at some point historically because they feel – they’re related but they’re very different stories. And there’s some sense of all the things he didn’t do in his life. It seems like he never had kids, never had a family, sort of never got to have the normal human life. As you’re translating this did it feel like two stories that got joined together or does it feel like it was always intended to be the arc of this one hero’s journey?

**Maria:** Well, again, there’s lots of debate about that in the Beowulf realm. Some people really feel that the last section of Beowulf which is a battle with a dragon. He’s a king for 50 years and we don’t get any information about that. We get Grendel’s mother. Than he gets home. He gets rewards. He tells his story. And then 50 years pass in a line. And he’s an old man. And we get this thing where he goes up against a dragon by himself and he has to fight the dragon. He’s sure he’s the only guy who can fight the dragon. And he goes in and he kills the dragon, but the dragon kills him, too.

And some people feel like that last third of the poem is just a meanness that was grafted onto it by someone. That it was just stuck on and this like mean situation involving darkness. But I think what it is is youthful sins get payback later. I think that the center of the poem, and this is something I’ve always thought about, when Beowulf kills Grendel’s mother she is acting according to the law of the time. She goes in, her son is killed, she goes in for a revenge killing, which is allowed. She kills one guy. And goes home.

She takes that guy home. She does a little bit of graphic display of his beheading and whatever.

**Craig:** That’s reasonable.

**Maria:** She only kills the one dude, an important guy who is equivalent to her son. And in sort of feudal laws that’s allowed. And what Beowulf does is he breaks into her house under the water. He goes in, like a mercenary, because he is a mercenary. And he comes in and attacks her in her own realm. And she’s an old woman. She’s been queen for 50 years just like Hrothgar, the king he’s serving has been king for 50 years. So she’s probably in her 70s. And Beowulf is maybe 20.

So he goes in, kills an old woman who is so ferocious and hardcore that she almost kills him. And that’s just against the law. Like it’s against the moral code of the poem. So my feeling that the dragon in the end, the last third of the poem, is the wages of sin. It’s sort of like, OK, you can do it, you’re strong enough, you’re big enough, you’re bold enough, your balls are big enough. And you do the thing and then 50 years pass and the whole time you’re having a bad feeling about it.

And I think that Batman has some things like that, too. He always has this sort of morosity. And the morosity is about am I – because he’s declared himself the arbiter of morality in Gotham. And then this difficulty of what if he got it wrong at some point. What if it was a fuck up? And I think the Beowulf story is about – the center battle is a fuck up that he shouldn’t have done.

**Craig:** It is interesting that Batman is constantly struggling with that and yet not really struggling with it, because in the end the dictates of the story are feed us justice. So, he will “wrestle” with it, but the people who generally pay are the people around him. So he gets off the hook. There is no dragon that eats Batman in the end. But a couple of Robins have died, I think.

**John:** And Beowulf ends with a handoff to a Robin kind of character as well. There’s a sense of a generational passing down finally at the end there.

**Craig:** Batman doesn’t pass on. So I think Batgirl at some point canonically is paralyzed. So, people are constantly dying around him. Commissioner Gordon gets killed a few times. And [unintelligible], I think he definitely gets killed. And Batman keeps going. And his anger fuels him to further on. And I kind of love the idea that the wages of – maybe not wages of sin, but truly if you’re living by the sword. Yeah, at some point you can’t be the best forever. And if you beat a 70-year-old woman, albeit a Grendel mom, a mom Grendel, when you’re a 70-year-old guy someone is coming for you. I like that.

**Maria:** Yeah. I mean, there’s always the sort of arc of what is coming for you. And throughout the Beowulf poem that’s discussed, as it is – I mean, it’s interesting thinking about Batman because Batman never becomes the king. He’s the Dark Knight the whole time. And being the Dark Knight means you have to serve. You don’t necessarily get to – I mean, he’s serving a larger moral god. But he still has to serve. He doesn’t get to be the king who is making all of the decisions in terms of his own well-being and in terms of the well-being of others around him. He’s often – I feel like he’s often in a tournament. It’s like more out of the Arthurian myths.

**John:** Yeah, for sure.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Maria, it is absolutely a delight getting to talk through Beowulf and Batman with you. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

**Maria:** Thank you for having me on. I could talk about this all year. I love it.

**Craig:** Thank you, Maria.

**John:** Thanks Maria.

**Maria:** Bye.

**John:** All right, bye. So, Craig, that was actually delightful. We did not pre-interview at all with Maria. I just assumed she would be great talking about Batman and Beowulf and I was correct.

**Craig:** You were right. Yeah. Pre-interviews, why would we ever do that? We live on the edge?

**John:** We live by the sword and we die by the sword.

**Craig:** That’s right. We don’t give a sweet damn.

**John:** All right. Now it’s the time on the program where we welcome on our producer, Megana Rao, who asks the questions that our listeners have asked. Megana hi.

**Craig:** Megana.

Megana Rao: Hi, Happy New Year.

**Craig:** Happy New Year.

**John:** Happy New Year to you. What have you got for us this week?

**Megana:** So, Patricia from Canada writes, “I recently started working in the nuclear industry and am easily Google-able. My question is whether producers or network executives like those from a very family-friendly network, which is my genre, might have an issue with my day job if I were to sell my script that has received a bunch of interest this year before I started in the nuclear industry. And if they do are there options for me like using a pen name?”

**Craig:** Huh.

**John:** All right, so Patricia basically is a Homer Simpson somewhere in Canada.

**Craig:** Right. I’m sure she’s a competent nuclear technician.

**John:** I’m sorry. She’s a competent Homer Simpson who has written a script that is now getting attention. She worried that if someone figures out that, oh, she’s actually a nuclear person that they won’t want to work with her. I don’t think so.

**Craig:** No. That’s not – I think people have this sense that Hollywood is incredibly, I don’t know, discriminatory against things that violate their tender snowflake sensibilities. Far from it in fact. I think people would be surprised how compromised people are. It’s a business, right? So billionaires with their billionaire companies are trying to make billionaire stuff.

No, I don’t think your employment in the nuclear industry is at all a problem. If you were, I don’t know, employed as a hacker for the Russian government, yeah, sure. But, no, people working in a nuclear power plant are doing a perfectly fine job. So, no, I don’t think so.

And as far as pen names go, just as a general note for – Patricia I think is from Canada so you have the WGC, I don’t know how they do it there. But in the United States the WGA, which administers credits, we do have a clause that says we can use a pen name but only if we’re paid under a certain amount. I think it’s $250,000. And if we’re over that amount then the studio has to agree to let us use the pen name which is obviously an awkward conversation. It’s an awkward thing to do regardless.

**John:** That said though, if she is just starting her career she can pick whatever name she wants to use as her professional name.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So a pen name in that situation is like I don’t want my name on this movie that I wrote but I don’t want my name associated with it, that is a different case than sort of like starting with a new name. Because I started my career as John August even though that wasn’t my born name just because it was an easier, better name.

**Craig:** Right. Like Diablo Cody is Brook Maurio and she wanted to go by Diablo Cody. And then at some point like Brook if you’re like, you know, I think people get it I’m just going to use my regular name now and everybody goes, “Cool. That’s good. That works.”

**John:** What next, Megana?

**Megana:** Great. So Jake in Dallas asks, “I agree with the principle that characters will carry your story to a more successful and satisfying conclusion than the plot alone. However, I have a story that has some solid plot and shaky characters. My question is one of time management and expectations. Is it worth it to dig in and try to build up these weaker characters to match the cool framework that is my plot, or am I kidding myself with a task like that? Meaning the fact that I don’t have strong characters in the beginning of my writing process might be an indication that the story itself is a weak and therefore not worth the effort to populate it with compelling people.

“I feel really good about the structure I built but I’m not sure about the occupants I plan on inviting into the building. The décor and furniture will be rad, so it’s just the pesky people I’m sweating.”

**John:** Oh Jake. What you’re experiencing is common. And I think a lot of writers are probably nodding a bit there. Because sometimes you think of a cool idea for a story and like, oh, you could sort of imagine the set pieces and how it all fits together and the plot and the twists, and then you realize like, oh, but who is actually in this story. And then you actually have to sort of unwind some stuff to figure out like who is the most interesting person to be in this story that you have plotted out in your head.

It’s worth the time. It’s worth the time to stop and figure out who are these characters, what is it that they are uniquely bringing to this cool plot that you have figured out. Because otherwise you’re going to have a cool mechanical clock that no one cares about.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s exactly it. The plot is not there for the audience. The plot is there for the character. It’s what the character is going through. So, if the character is weak it doesn’t really matter what the plot is. Then they might as well just be an observer or the plot is not designed to challenge the character and put the character in situations that are unique for him or her. So when you say maybe this is an indication that the story itself was weak, I would say that you probably want to take a moment to stop divorcing plot and character from each other the way you are and put them together. Because I don’t think when you think about how you’re day went today, Jake, that you’re going to think about yourself and then the things that happened separately. There’s the things that happened to you. And that’s what plot is. It’s something that is happening to a character, therefore one in the same.

**John:** Or because of the character ideally.

**Craig:** Exactly. Well, both, right? So something happens to you, you do a thing, now something new happens and then the da-da-da, and that’s how it works. So they’re actually part of the same thing. And you don’t want to get caught in this sort of scriptic Cartesian duality.

**John:** Yeah. I will say there are forms of writing that are less character-driven. Certainly spy novel books that are very sort of – they’re plot machines. And there are crime procedurals that are kind of plot machines. And if that’s the kind of thing you like writing that’s great, that’s awesome. And they can rely on sort of less characters doing things and just sort of the story doing things.

But it sounds like if you feel this tension right now the thing you’re working on probably should have a strong central character that’s driving it. So stop, think about who that character is, and rewrite it so that character can really be at the center of the story that you want to tell.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**Megana:** Mitch writes, “I work a manual labor job and I most often listen to you gentleman in headphones while my hands are preoccupied and I can’t pause and rewind to hear something clear. I’m pretty sure I heard you two quickly mention something about John earning his Arrow of Light in Boy Scouts, but I couldn’t find it when I tried to listen back. Is John August an Eagle Scout? If so, what was his Eagle project?”

**John:** All right, Mitch, I am in fact an Eagle Scout. I went all the way up through scouts and Arrow of Light refers to – although Arrow of Light could have actually been – is that the Webelos Bridge? I can’t remember which part Arrow of Light fits into, but I know I had it because I had all the patches. I had all of it.

Yes, I did scouts. Yes, I was in the Order of the Arrow which is problematic for Native American cultural appropriation. I didn’t get it at that point. I’m sure I would get it now.

My Eagle Scout project, so when you go up through the ranks in scouts one of the final things after you’ve earned all your merit badges is to do a project which involves 100 hours of planting and community service and getting people together to do stuff. I did an interpretive garden at my public library, so it was putting up signs for what the plants that were there so that people who visit the library could actually learn what plants were used in that garden. I also built a new sign in front of that library which was not good and was replaced about a year later.

But that was my Eagle Scout project. I actually have some ongoing shame about how not good that sign was and how I wish it were better.

**Craig:** That’s like your parents getting killed in the alley, you know, behind the opera.

**John:** That sign in front of the George Reynold’s Branch Public Library in Boulder, Colorado is my parents getting killed in the alley. You’re right. It’s foundational.

**Craig:** Yeah. You have these flashbacks about it. I like that they suffered through it for a year. That every day they came in and they all turned to Verna, who I assume was the senior librarian, and said, “Verna, come on.” And she’s like, “Uh, we can’t. He was an Eagle Scout.” “Oh, please Verna.” And then finally the big Christmas party they’re like, “Verna, it’s Christmas.” And she’s like, “You’re right. Let’s burn it.” [laughs]

**John:** I really think it probably was arson. I didn’t see it burn but I have a hunch that it just burned somehow magically and they replaced it with a much better sign.

**Craig:** I mean, if you put a couple of rum eggnogs in Verna she’s going to light something up. That’s how it goes.

**John:** She’s known for it. All right. Megana, thank you for these questions. They were fun.

**Craig:** Thanks Megana.

**Megana:** Thank you both.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a long article by Olivia Nuzzi writing The Fullest Possible Story on Four Seasons Total Landscaping situation.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** So as you recall one of the weird, wacky things that happened in 2020 was there was a press conference held at the Four Seasons about potential election fraud in Philadelphia or in Pennsylvania overall. But of course it wasn’t Four Season the hotel. It was this tiny little place called Four Seasons Total Landscaping. It was weird and how it all happened is crazy. And so she digs into sort of what actually happened and how they ended up at this weird landscaping company and try to pretend it was their plan all along.

So, just as a last read in 2021 or first read in 2021 to remember what happened in that crazy year. It was a nice full accounting of a really surreal moment that feels like a Coen Brothers movie. Just a bunch of people making hasty decisions that turned out poorly.

**Craig:** Unbelievable. Unbelievable. My One Cool Thing, well, so we have a new puppy in our house.

**John:** I’m so excited. I did not know this. Tell us all about this puppy.

**Craig:** Her name is Bonnie and she’s fantastic. And you will meet her tonight, John. I will hold her up to the camera. She will be an NPC somehow in our D&D game.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And so I’m a big believer in crate training. If you are not a believer do not write in, because I don’t want to hear from you. But crate training I think is the key to why my older dog is such a wonderful dog. Obviously she doesn’t need the crate anymore. But she’s just an incredibly well-behaved, lovely dog. And that was a big part of it. And it also keeps, I think it keeps the new puppy parents sane as well.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** But, you know, dogs – traditionally puppies – do struggle a little bit with the crate initially because they can feel a little bit lonely in there. And so there’s this thing called the Snuggle Puppy. Have you heard of this?

**John:** No, but I can imagine what it would be and I think it’s probably – my guess is that it’s the 2020 version of the alarm clock and hot water bottle wrapped in a blanket?

**Craig:** Bingo. So, well, just with a little extra twist. So it is, of course, a plush little puppy animal and it’s got a little Velcro pouch. And you can stick one of these little, they have like these heat warmer packs, like the hand warmers you get on set when it’s freezing. You put that in its little belly and then it also has its little heart-shaped thing with a battery in it. And you turn that on and it makes a heartbeat little thump-thump. So the puppy can snuggle up against another dog that is warm with a heartbeat which is exactly what they’re used to.

And my goodness. I mean, we put her in there and we didn’t hear anything. You know, for like three hours. Just silence. It was pretty remarkable. And then when we came to take her out, you know, because it was time to come out of the crate and go potty and all that, she was like I don’t want to go. I want to stay in here. I’m tired. I want to stay with my warm friend.

So, huge thumbs up to the Snuggle Puppy people. That was great. Big fan. Not that expensive.

**John:** I’m a fan of crate training as well. Lambert, my current dog, was already well past that, but still like having a crate, a place he can declare as his own, where he can be responsible for defending that and not the rest of the house, game changer.

**Craig:** Yeah. And also really helps house train them as well.

**John:** Oh yeah. For sure. All right. And that is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did our outro this week.

If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For shorter questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Maria is @mariadahvana. We’ll have links to all those things in the show notes.

You can find those at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. And you can sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of 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, including the one we’re about to record where I will go into the history of my Batman teaser trailer which was a different teaser trailer than the one we listened to earlier on.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Craig, I’m going to play a teaser trailer for you and you probably have seen this trailer, but you don’t remember that you saw this trailer. And then we’re going to talk about it.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** So, we’ll put a link in the show notes to YouTube, but we can just listen to the audio for now.

Male Voice: Throughout the ages there has been one hero standing watch over us all. One hero protecting mankind wherever he is needed. He moves in shadows. Cloaked in mystery. And now in the summer of 2002 he will be called upon yet again to save the world. [Scooby-Doo sound]

**Craig:** Classic. So much classic marketing in that spot.

**John:** Thank you. So, let me tell you about the origin of this. And obviously if you’re listening to this just as the podcast version what you might not appreciate is we’re going through this mansion, this sort of spooky mansion, and we come upon the silhouette of Batman standing there. And we see his iconic sort of cowl. And he turns and it’s Scooby Doo. Because it always struck me that Scooby-Doo in outline actually looks a lot like Batman because he’s got the pointy ears that are sticking up there. And so he turns and you see that it’s Scooby-Doo.

So I always had this in my head as like at some point I really want to do a teaser trailer for Scooby-Doo when you reveal it’s Batman. And then I ended up being employed for a week, two weeks, to help out a little bit on the very first Scooby-Doo movie. And I said like, “I’m so excited to be writing these scenes, but more importantly I’ve always had this teaser trailer.” So I sent it through and they ended up making that and that became the teaser trailer for the first Scooby-Doo movie. A parody of Batman.

**Craig:** It holds all of the traditional elements. I mean, they don’t really do stuff like this now. I mean, it’s 20 years old. And I was doing similar things for Disney a little bit earlier, maybe like five or six years before 2001 when I wasn’t yet a screenwriter. Obviously you were a screenwriter at that point. But first of all it has that voice. For the kids, that’s a guy named Don LaFontaine. He is no longer with us. But he was essentially the voice of movie trailers and teasers. He did, I don’t know, 70% of them or something. It was insane.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** You would go to the theater and there would be seven trailers in front of the movie and four of them would have his voice or something. It was nuts. So it was Don LaFontaine. A misdirection in teaser trailers is incredibly common to the point where nobody was misdirected anymore. They were already onto it from the jump by the time you got to, I don’t know, whatever, 2009 or something. They were like, no, you can’t do it anymore.

And, of course, the ubiquitous needle scratch which became this fascinating sonic signifier that didn’t even mean anything to kids at that point, but yet they somehow understood it meant stop everything.

**John:** This trailer, I just wrote it up in normal sort of screenplay format with that dialogue and sent it through, and I was delighted how it turned out. What was also weird about these teaser trailers is they were completely disconnected from actual footage from the movie. Even now like when Chris McQuarrie has been on the show he talks about every day trying to shoot one thing that could make it into the trailer or the teaser trailer for the Mission: Impossible movies. But in this case it was just a whole special shoot which was just for doing this teaser trailer. And you don’t see that as much anymore where there’s no footage from the actual movie in it. It’s just a premise teaser trailer. Like this is a thing that is going to exist.

**Craig:** Yeah. So when I was working in marketing at Disney, this was like back in 1994 and 1995, this would come up quite a bit where you would do a special shoot. And in fact I was dispatched as a 23-year-old or a 24-year-old to the set of a movie called Mr. Wrong. Do you remember that movie, John?

**John:** Oh, I do. With Ellen DeGeneres.

**Craig:** Exactly. With Ellen DeGeneres and Bill Pullman. It was a comedy. It was ill-fated. It did not do particularly well at the box office. Although I remember reading the script. It was one of the early movie scripts that I read and I really liked it. And I was sent to talk to Ellen and Bill about making a special shoot, some sort of scene that we could shoot to help tease the movie.

And, you know, you rapidly learn as a 24-year-old that no one – they’ve got their hands full making a movie. They don’t want you there. So it was an uphill battle. But we would make those things. I remember The Ref, like I think the marketing campaign for The Ref was entirely a special shoot, which did not help The Ref which is one of my favorite movies. Yeah, they used to do this stuff all the time. Now we have our own trailer and teaser conventions that we cannot seem to break. So the modern version of the misdirect, Don LaFontaine, and needle scratch is a fairly well-known pop song that is played at a much slower speed by a different kind of voice so that it’s this really weird dreamy take on some pop song that we know and love.

And then some wahs and some booge and stuff like that. In 20 years from now people will look back and those, OK, yeah, that’s what they did then.

**John:** That’s what they did. Now, this was the closest I ever got to writing Batman and I don’t know that I’ll ever write Batman in anything, which is fine. But the announcement that Warners and HBO Max are going to be doing a whole big expansion of their thing and of course with all the new stuff that Disney has announced with the Marvel universe, it got me thinking what characters might you or I at some point want to tackle. And so I have a short list here. I’m curious what characters would be on your list.

Obviously we’re differently placed because we could theoretically do one of these things. I don’t think we will do any of these things. But here’s the list of things I would love to tackle at some point.

I really like ATOM as a character. After Ant-Man I’m not sure there’s a space for another guy who can become really small, but I always liked ATOM. I still love Wonder Woman. I get why people didn’t love this last one as much, but I dig her as a character. Thinking sort of mythologically, I’ve always really dug Perseus. I especially love Perseus’s backstory where as a baby he got shoved into a trunk and sent off to sea because his father worried that he was going to usurp him. I love that.

I love Hermes/Mercury as a god who again is just a cool trickster character. And then in terms of the non-superhero characters, I think Indiana Jones/Nathan Drake are great guys who like Batman are super good at the things that they’re good at, but also having a fun attitude. They’d be fun characters to write in ways that I think Batman would not be a fun character to write.

Any iconic characters for you, Craig? Any ones that you’d want to tackle?

**Craig:** I don’t think so. I like comic books. I was mostly a Marvel fan when I was a kid. But I think if someone said to me, “Here’s a blank check. Write any comic book superhero movie you want,” I might say to Kevin Feige I want to do a kind of mumblecore Galactus movie. [laughs] Where it’s like he eats planets but mostly he’s lonely and he has no one to talk to expect his heralds. His heralds start to resist him. I think Galactus’s sister was deaf or [unintelligible] or something like that. So he’s having weird chats with her.

Look, the dream adaptation is happening with other people and that’s Neil Gaiman’s Sandman which in a sense I’m glad that other people are doing it because I would be terrified, absolutely terrified, to tackle that material for fear that I would do it any harm. Because I hold it in such high esteem. So, yeah, I’m going to go with sort of bummed out emo Galactus.

**John:** Yeah. I think one of the good things we’ve gotten better at in the ‘10s and the ‘20s is taking characters who would be villains in normal situations and looking at what is their actual motivation and you put them as the protagonist in the story, the central character in the story. And Harley Quinn is a good example of that. Joker, whether you liked it or not, is an example of sort of looking at that character from his point of view and what it feels like to be in his shoes.

And so, sure. A planet-eating villain, go for it.

**Craig:** A mopey planet-eating Galactus, just bummed out. I eat planets because I’m depressed. I’m depressed because I eat planets.

Links:

* Werner Herzog’s [Family Romance LLC](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10208194/)
* [Mike Schur’s Tweet](https://twitter.com/KenTremendous/status/1343712071037272066?s=20)
* [1988 Batman Teaser Reactions](https://twitter.com/i_zzzzzz/status/1339728162306011137?s=21)
* [Why Does Batman Matter](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/black-belt-brain/201203/why-does-batman-matter) by Paul Zehr
* [Beowulf: A New Translation](https://bookshop.org/books/beowulf-a-new-translation/9780374110031) by Maria Dahvana Headley
* [The Fullest Possible Story on Four Seasons Total Landscaping](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/four-seasons-total-landscaping-the-full-est-possible-story.html) by Olivia Nuzzi
* [Snuggle Puppy](https://snugglepuppy.com/)
* [Maria Dahvana Headley](https://www.mariadahvanaheadley.com/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/MARIADAHVANA)
* [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 Matthew Chilelli ([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/482standard.mp3).