Scriptnotes Transcript

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 501 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we look at what patterns we’ve noticed in successful writers and perhaps more importantly what things tend to derail careers. We will also have follow up on genres and typos, plus a listener question that I suspect will become a storyline in this, our 11th Season of Scriptnotes. 11 Seasons Craig. This is our season premiere.

**Craig:** I only found out from you yesterday that we have seasons.

**John:** Yeah. So seasons are 50 episodes a piece, so this is our 11th season we’re starting.

**Craig:** Oh, OK. I thought that maybe we were just midseason, mid-season one of a thousand episodes. Are we going to get to a thousand episodes?

**John:** I don’t know, Craig. That’s a long–

**Craig:** That just seems stupid, right?

**John:** That’s 10 years.

**Craig:** How could you possibly say something 1,000 times?

**John:** Yeah. You could though.

**Craig:** That said, 500 is a lot, yet here we are.

**John:** It is a lot. We started working on the book and we talked about the book last week. It’s really exciting, but gosh darn we have just a lot of text there. A lot of stuff to go through.

**Craig:** Yup. And, you know, I don’t want to pat ourselves on the back or anything, but I think we have a decent signal to noise ratio also. We don’t do a lot of empty patter like the kind that I’m engaging in right now.

**John:** We cut all the empty patter out of the book which is so much fun. So, this week we’ll be sending through sample chapters, or at least one sample chapter, to people who’ve signed up at Scriptnotes.net. That’s where you can sign up for the back episodes, but you can also sign up for the mailing list for the book. And the sample chapters look just great. So I was just working on one, a sample one with Greta Gerwig’s interview, and we also have a Craig Mazin special chapter that you can proof before we send out.

**Craig:** Excellent. Oh my.

**John:** Oh my.

**Craig:** Oh my.

**John:** And in our bonus segment for today’s episode we’re going to talk about books, but not the Scriptnotes book, but just what we like in books from physical books, to fonts, to bindings. What we look for in books, not as text but the actual objects themselves. Because I want the Scriptnotes book to be a good book, so let’s talk about what we like in books.

**Craig:** Oh, OK.

**John:** Yeah. Because you like a book. You like the Art & Arcana Book, that D&D book. That was great.

**Craig:** By Kyle Newman. Yes. I enjoy – it’s not the only kind of book I like. [laughs]

**John:** I know. But you like a well-made book.

**Craig:** Oh, sure. I mean in terms of just the quality of a book being put together, yes. Absolutely. No question.

**John:** So we will talk about that. But before we do any of this, Craig we have to start because apparently you have a big thing to apologize for.

**Craig:** Yeah, apparently. I didn’t realize I blew it. I totally blew it. A couple of episodes ago I was talking about how passionate Europeans are about their football and particularly folks in the UK. And I incorrectly assigned the singing of You’ll Never Walk Alone to Mancunians when in fact it is the folks of Liverpool, the Liverpoolians. I’m probably saying that wrong, too.

But it’s Liverpool. The folks of Liverpool are the ones that sing You’ll Never Walk Alone and so what I basically did was award their bitter rivals with their beloved song. This is just a tragic mistake, born out of utter ignorance. Sometimes you know just enough to be dangerous as my father used to say. And in this case I knew just enough to be dangerous. So I do apologize to all of the fans in Liverpool. I did not mean to besmirch your beloved song or your beloved football club.

And similarly I apologize to the folks of Manchester for suggesting that they were like Liverpool fans, since they all apparently hate each other’s teams. But we’re all friends.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So anyway I do apologize for that. That was just a blunder. It was just a huge blunder.

**John:** And a thing which we talked about before on the show is that one of the most important parts of an apology is accepting an apology, so the many people who have written into the show to point out this error hopefully will accept the apology and then we can move on and try to make another 500 episodes of the show.

**Craig:** Yeah. It would be kind of weird if they didn’t.

**John:** No. We’re going to continue to be angry.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, I mean, there are worst things in the world. But it was – if somebody, I don’t know, talked with some sense of authority about how the Yankees play at City Field I would have been incensed. So I get it. And I apologize. I am sorry.

**John:** Great. That same episode we talked about in How Would This Be a Movie these professional breakup artists. And so these are folks in Japan who do this for a living. I said that is a good idea for a movie and I would not be surprised if this movie exists somewhere out there in the world. And two of our listeners wrote in saying like, yes, those movies do exist.

Paul wrote in to say that there is a French film called Heartbreaker which is about this idea. And then Fred in Chicago said there’s already an Australian feature about professional breaker-uppers called appropriately The Breaker Upperers. He says it’s pretty good. They go the broad comedy route. It’s sort of like Bridesmaids. It’s produced by Taika Waititi. So I want to see this movie. The trailer is actually great.

**Craig:** I’m not going to do it.

**John:** You’re not going to watch that movie. You don’t watch movies.

**Craig:** Not really. [laughs] I don’t watch stuff anymore.

**John:** But you know the movie now exists out there in the world.

**Craig:** Totally. Breaker Upperers.

**John:** Yeah. But the fact that it was a French and an Australian version does not preclude an American version from being made.

**Craig:** Quite the opposite.

**John:** It’s going to get made.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Do you want to take Frank’s question here about typos?

**Craig:** Sure. Frank in London wrote in about typos and our decision to stop using Three Page Challenges with typos.

**John:** Now do you remember Frank’s situation here? So Frank had a life experience that made it very difficult for him to read and to write.

**Craig:** Yes. I remember. Frank wrote in and basically said, “Hey, it’s hard for me to write things without typos. You’re being unfair.” And let’s see, it looks like Steve had a comment back. Steve said, “While I also sympathize with Frank’s struggles, I agree that unfortunately in the end those are hurdles he has to overcome. I wanted to add that there are tools to help him that are free or inexpensive, Grammarly for one, that he can Google. There are a ton of them specifically for his particular hurdle, but I like Grammarly because it works with almost every program automatically. You don’t have to open it or copy and paste anything. For the most part it’s just there working.”

John, I want to like Grammarly, but I detest it because of those freaking ads.

**John:** Yeah. I detest it because of the ads, too. So, there are people who really like Grammarly and I think it’s maybe worth someone like Frank in London to consider a tool like that to help him out. But also there’s real people who can do this job, too. So, other listeners suggest that you could go on Fiver or one of these sort of hire a person for a quick little job thing and proofreading is a thing you can get through there. But even our listeners reached out to say like, “Hey, I’m happy to proofread if Frank needs help.”

**Craig:** That’s nice.

**John:** So I would say have faith that there are some humans who are out there to help you do your best writing.

**Craig:** Writing is hard, but it doesn’t have to be. Is that what that lady says?

**John:** I think that’s what it is.

**Craig:** Something like that. And then I just immediately – the red mist descends.

**John:** Now, a few episodes before that in Episode 497 we talked about the hierarchy of genres. So my friend and friend of the show, Matt Byrne, wrote in to say, “I wonder if we’re seeing the relationship between suffering and art/genius here. Van Gough. Sylvia Plath. There’s a trail of examples that goes back to Jesus and the Odyssey, up through De Niro fattening up for Raging Bull. We as a society love and celebrate those bits of suffering. They add value. We see the labor. In comedy the labor is mostly invisible. So while a comedy may delight us more, the artistry seems to come at less of a price. I don’t know if it’s specific to our puritanical roots, or if it’s more global and timeless, but that value on labor and suffering seems to be hardwired into our DNA and certainly ingrained into the awards PR narrative machinery.”

**Craig:** Well that’s a really interesting notion. I appreciate that, Matt. I think you might be onto something there. It is absolutely true that we associate self-torture, or a tortured personality, with great art. And I don’t think that’s good.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t think we should. I think it encourages a kind of romanticization of what is actually just, you know, unfortunate mental illness. But that’s a really interesting observation. Well done.

**John:** Do you want to take Spooky from Florida here?

**Craig:** Well, of course I do. OK, Spooky from Florida writes, “I often find that people look down on horror, or if it’s a good horror film they deny that it’s in the horror genre altogether. William Friedkin famously said that he didn’t consider The Exorcist to be horror, which seems ridiculous to me. Using Craig’s own criteria there is only one film that definitely fits in the horror genre that has won an Academy Award for Best Film, The Silence of the Lambs.

“Parasite and The Shape of Water each also recently received Best Film, but might take a Friedkin-esque stance and argue they aren’t horror.” Well, I have a suspicion were Jonathan Demme with us today he would also argue that Silence of the Lambs was not horror, either. So this is an interesting parallel. What do you think about Spooky’s point here?

**John:** I think it’s a really good point and it also reminds me of what Tess Morris told us about romantic comedies is that when a rom-com is incredibly successful suddenly it’s not a rom-com anymore. So like Silver Linings Playbook is not considered a rom-com, but of course it is a rom-com. It’s just that they sort of broke out of that bubble and it doesn’t count as that. Or when a man makes a rom-com it’s not considered a rom-com.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. So Let the Right One In is considered an arthouse film, an independent arthouse film, but it’s a horror movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a really good horror movie. Yeah, I agree. I think Spooky what happens is people have this feeling that genre is somehow a negative.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I would say drama is a genre. Weepy Oscar drama, right? Like, you know, Oscar Movie, that’s a thing. We all know what it is, right? If you say, OK, what do you think an Oscar movie is I’m immediately in my mind it’s Sophie’s Choice. That’s what’s happening. It’s a genre.

**John:** Or you look at a movie like The Artist. The Artist didn’t have all that sort of award season movie kind of stuff around it, like the period film and it’s about Hollywood.

**Craig:** It’s a comedy.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a comedy. It’s just a comedy. It’s a very light comedy. But we don’t think about it as just a comedy because it’s an Oscar movie.

**Craig:** Well perception is a fascinating thing. I’ve just been thinking about it a lot lately only because it’s a rare thing in one’s own life to notice a dramatic shift in perception. And perception is – just a source of injustice, sometimes against you and sometimes in your favor.

You know, I think about the way people talk about things that I do. I think they used to be way too hard on me, and now I think they’re way too easy on me.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Now they’re like, “This show is going to be great because Craig is doing it.” And I’m like, you know, listen man. I’m going to do my best, but I wouldn’t say that. I’m hoping. I’m putting all I can into it. But there is that strange handicapping that occurs, like odds. They minus five points or plus five points depending on how they see you. It’s a curious thing.

**John:** Well speaking of awards and perceptions, the big news out of this past week was that NBC has decided it’s not going to be broadcasting the next Golden Globe awards. So that’s a pretty big shift. That’s a big televised – like the second biggest televised awards show that just goes away. And not just for film but for TV as well. And, see ya. I’m not going to miss it.

You know, some good things about the Golden Globes. I think they’re fun to watch because it’s a bunch of celebrities in a room slightly drunk. And the monologues from the hosts were actually kind of funny in general, had a good mocking tone. But it wasn’t important. It wasn’t meaningful. And the folks who were voting on it had no real skin in the game. So, I’m not sad to see it go.

**Craig:** There are a lot of award shows where the people voting don’t have skin in the game. The critics’ awards and all that. But this is sort of fascinating. The Golden Globes have always had a strange, well, you know, I remember controversy when I was a kid. I didn’t watch award shows when I was a kid, but somehow I heard about Pia Zadora winning the Golden Globe and everybody being like, “The Golden Globes!” But then again the Golden Globes I think were always like you say viewed as a little bit of the kind of chaotic slightly boozy cousin, where things were a bit more fun and casual and I can say from my own experience being there that it is pretty booze and fun and casual.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We had a great time.

**John:** Absolutely. You and Tiffany Haddish up on stage. It was a good time.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Tiffany Haddish was great and we had our table and we were sitting next to the Succession table and we were cheering each other on while we were all drinking. And so it’s a very different vibe than an auditorium based show like the Emmys or the Oscars where you’re sitting in a seat and you are observing a stage.

So it’s like a big, huge Sweet Sixteen/Bar Mitzvah kind of event. But obviously they ran into real trouble here and I’m curious to see what happens because this doesn’t seem like the kind of thing where someone else is going to pick this football up and resume running with it.

**John:** Well here’s a suggestion from Twitter. So this is Noah Evslin who tweeted, “I’m going to pitch this again…this is the moment for all the Hollywood guilds to come together and create a new awards show called The Guild Awards and use the money to help stabilize their health and pension funds. In 2019, the Golden Globes brought in over $60 million.”

So, I hear you laughing, so therefore let’s take the pro and con on The Guild Awards.

**Craig:** Sure. Well, should I do pro?

**John:** I can do pro because I think you have more cons. Is that fair?

**Craig:** I really have one con. I only have one. But it’s a massive con. So go for your pros.

**John:** OK, my pros is I think the guilds should continue to do their own awards for their own stuff and hold back on Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Comedy Series, basically the things that are actually televisable you can hold off on those and let those be sort of the Guild Awards, but do your own local awards for all of the other awards.

But I think there’s an opportunity to create that kind of boozy, smaller, less auditorium-y feel of The Golden Globes but actually have to be voted on by people who do this for a living.

**Craig:** Well, that would pretty much solve the big con. I mean, the strike against this notion which on its surface seems kind of a no-brainer is that the award show would be endless the Writers Guild Awards took I would say most of my life. I think I spent most of my life at that one Writers Guild award show.

**John:** You couldn’t do – and you wouldn’t want to do all the awards. So you should just do the big marquee things.

**Craig:** So then I guess the con junior there is that if you are someone who is not in one of those categories you’re going to – so like for instance the Emmys, there is a craft awards Emmys that occurs–

**John:** The night before.

**Craig:** It’s a week before.

**John:** The week before, yeah.

**Craig:** And they call it the Shemmy’s because it’s not the real Emmys. I mean, it is, you get a real Emmy, but they don’t want to spend time giving Emmys for editing or costume, which they should. Everybody deserves their moment. But, yeah, so I think people might get a little grouchy, like I’m at the WGA, mumble WGA awards.

But if what you did is essentially approximate the kind of awards that the Golden Globes gave out, because they don’t give out a lot of awards, then I mean–

**John:** Yeah, so let directors vote on Best Director. Let writers vote on all the writing awards. Let the actors vote on the actors. It would be great. Do I think it’s going to happen? I think it’s unlikely to happen. I think what’s more likely to happen is that the SAG Awards become increasingly visible, just because they’re actors and they’re famous. But I think the Guild Awards would be lovely and I would watch them and support them.

**Craig:** Yeah. At some point it all comes down to just math and people watch this sort of thing because they like to see the actors. And fewer and fewer people are watching any of these things.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The trend is not encouraging. So NBC, I can’t quite award them with the bravery of the year medal because the ratings for these things have just been plummeting. What was the most recent–?

**John:** Well the Oscars was not a huge–

**Craig:** Oh, god, yeah, the Oscars. I mean, I looked at the bar graph of viewers, that’s pretty scary stuff.

**John:** Also they had all the challenges of doing the broadcast, like no one had seen those movies at all. And so I think it’s a weird year to compare sort of the down drop. We’ll see what it is next year. If it’s that same number next year then televised award shows are just over.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I was looking, I don’t follow along, so I saw here is what the progress was even prior to the pandemic and that is a steep slow downward.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Yeah. Not good.

**John:** Not good. All right, let’s get to our marquee topic. I want to talk about patterns of success. And by this I mean that over the years you and I have seen many, many writers. And we’ve seen writers who become really successful and writers who haven’t become especially successful. And I wanted to sort of talk about what patterns we’ve noticed in both of those groups of writers.

So this is just sort of an open-ended conversation, but I feel like it’s something we could come back and visit again in future episodes. The things that we see that are markers of like oh yeah that person has got it, that person has not got it. Because you and I have both said that about people, but what are we actually identifying when we say like, ah yeah, I think that’s going to work for that person.

**Craig:** Well this is a really interesting prompt for a discussion, because longevity in our business is rare. It is rare. There are not many people who are consistently successful. There are people who have moments and then fade away. There are people who feast off of big hits for a while but eventually run out of runway, so to speak. And then there are people who we might put them under the category of their worst enemy.

**John:** For sure.

**Craig:** Where they had almost all the tools required. There was just one problem. So this is a good topic of discussion because I think people think that success in Hollywood comes down to writing that great script or directing that great film, but that’s the beginning of your success.

**John:** Often it is. So let’s talk about what we even mean by success, and this is something we talk about a bit in my other podcast series Launch. We talk about what is success for a novelist. But what do we mean as success for a film or TV writer? Do we mean the ability to make a living at it? Or for people to say like, wow, that’s really good writing? Does it mean winning awards? Does it mean making blockbusters? Is it the ability to make anything you want to make? Is it autonomy? Are you a successful writer if you are a mid-level staffed TV writer?

And for some people, yes, and for some people no.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, everyone can define it in a different way. But given the context we’re discussing here I would probably say the ability to make a good living. A good living. I think if it’s a subsistence living, if it’s just barely keeping my head above water it’s hard to argue that that is success per se. Because the people who are living that probably wouldn’t define it that way.

But the ability to make a good living and earn more than you spend and be able to save money, own a home, and save money to send your kids to schools and all that seems like a decent definition here.

**John:** It is, but I also wonder about people who see themselves as artists, people who see themselves as like I need to change the cultural conversation. They may not be so focused on just making a living at it. They may actually have another job that pays the bills but they feel like they’re making art that really matters, that they’re writing movies that matter to them.

So I don’t want to be so narrow in having to achieve a certain economic success as being the only thing that we’re looking at here.

**Craig:** Yeah. I guess if we put the word career in front of success here then it would help narrow that conversation. Because of course if you write a script that you love that means a lot to you and that was your purpose, that’s what you were going for, you win. If your goal is to have a lasting and productive career, then that’s different. So I guess maybe what we should be talking about is, well, I guess we can talk about all of the kinds of successes.

**John:** Absolutely. Well let’s talk about sort of aspects of the professional life and what we see being especially important or not so important. So we’ll start with work habits, because I think that’s the thing that can often be visible. It’s like this is a person who gets up at 6am every day and at their keyboard and banging away. And in your experience does hard work correlate with success?

**Craig:** Yes. I don’t necessarily define hard work as getting up at 6am, because you’re not going to catch me doing that. But at some point sooner or later a quantity of work needs to be completed. And obviously there are two axes you’re operating with. There’s quality and speed and people who are able to maintain a high level of quality at a decent clip are far more likely to have longevity than people who can’t.

**John:** Yeah. I do think of the silent evidence of all the writers who worked much, much harder than me who didn’t make it, and who didn’t break out and sort of weren’t able to have careers. And I can’t know to what degree the problem was quality or some other aspect of their approach that kept them out of what we are trying to define as success. But I think too often there’s this assumption that if you just work harder it’s going to all work out and that’s not been my experience. There’s some correlation of hard work and success, but I don’t think it’s a perfect correlation because there’s people who worked much harder than me who didn’t succeed.

**Craig:** I agree. I think that you cannot hard work your way to success. But you can un-hard work your way out of success, if that makes sense.

**John:** Yes. I think you and I both know people who just could never get the work done. They were talented when they could actually finish a script, but they just couldn’t finish enough scripts.

**Craig:** And that is more tragic to me. If you don’t have the quality then all of the hard work isn’t necessarily going to get you anywhere. But if you do and any variety of reasons sort of is between you and the ability to apply it, that’s a bummer. Because, you know, we are all missing out at that point.

**John:** Let’s talk about social savvy. Do you have to be good in a room?

**Craig:** It helps a lot, but I don’t think it is necessary. There are plenty of writers who were notoriously and perhaps are notoriously not good in rooms.

**John:** Yeah. I think that’s true. I think as things have moved more towards television from features the ability to get along with others and actually sort of have some emotional intelligence in terms of being in a space with others and communicating with others face to face or over Zoom is more important than for the feature writer, but it’s some part of it. It’s different than it would be for a novelist. You have to have some ability to communicate with a human being in front of you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that social savvy is required if you’re going to be at the top of the game. If you want to be – now we’re moving past success into just the people who work at the upper level of this career. Almost all of them have some sort of social savvy.

**John:** At the upper tier, yes. There were definitely jobs you and I got because we were the only people who could stand being in a room with some of those people, who could actually navigate those really difficult personalities. That’s just being honest. The rooms were it was like there’s five 800-pound gorillas and it’s just like, OK, I’m in gorilla city and I just have to be able to wrestle all of these gorillas at once.

**Craig:** Somebody has to do an animated version of that.

**John:** Gorilla City.

**Craig:** Gorilla City. And you wrestling all of them at once.

**John:** But let’s remember that an early part of your career is going to be finding a rep, going into those general meetings. The ability to do that stuff is not an unimportant part of how screenwriters get started.

**Craig:** No. Like they always say a pool doesn’t increase the price of your home when you’re selling it, it just makes the home sell faster. And I think that’s the way social savvy works, too. It’s not going to get you a career that you wouldn’t have otherwise gotten, but you’ll get where you’re supposed to go faster.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because early on what happens is these people are meeting all these writers and all of those meetings are boring. They’re boring for everybody and they’re particularly boring when you meet somebody and you just don’t feel anything. But if you do feel a connection with another human being suddenly if that human being was you, you are way closer to getting hired than you would have been otherwise.

**John:** Absolutely. I’m thinking to one of my very first general meetings was with an executive by the name of Jan Finger. She was over at Imagine. And they’d gotten the rights to How to Eat Fried Worms, but my meeting wasn’t specifically about that. But it was sort of a “hey, she read my script” and it was just a general meeting. And I liked her and we got along and she got me. And that’s kind of all it took for me to get in that next meeting to get that project.

So, yeah, those connections are important.

**Craig:** They are. And that reality, that human reality, is another reason why it’s really important that on the hiring side of things that there are all sorts of people.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Because, you know.

**John:** Because it’s not going to be two white people in a room all the time. And, yes, 100 percent.

**Craig:** It’s kind of the deal. It’s just important. Because there are certain connections that people have because they’re from the same place, or from the same background. I mean, there were so many times where I would sit in a room and say, “Oh, I grew up on Staten Island,” and someone was like, “Oh yeah, I grew up in Queens.” And you’re like, huh, great, we’re off and running. You know? Because there’s some sort of thing.

So it’s just good to have all that variety there. But that said, people with social savvy should and do find connections with just about everyone. That’s one of their skills.

**John:** True. Now, getting back to general patterns, let’s talk about originality and voice. We talk about voice in the Three Page Challenges a lot. Craig, do you think it’s more important to have a striking singular voice or to be flexible, the ability to sort of write a lot of different kinds of voices?

**Craig:** I think that you will get more work if you’re flexible and you have an ability to move between genres and also an ability to continue some sort of established voice or expectation. However, that is not necessary. And also I would argue that even if you are the kind of person who can do that sort of thing you then have to be individual and fingerprinted within that. So, I mean I did god knows how many sequels I had to work on. Had to, like somebody had a gun in my mouth.

But I chose to. [laughs]

**John:** I like the other person has a gun in your mouth. Not a gun to your head.

**Craig:** No, in my mouth. So much worse. Because in your head you’re like, eh. Mouth? Oh boy.

**John:** I wouldn’t even see the bullet, but yeah.

**Craig:** Right. So what happens is you’re like I get the drill here. I know what the tone is. I understand what’s been put out. And I can work within those lines. Also, I can do my own thing inside of that that is particular.

**John:** I would say that the people I’ve noticed who have broken out, who have really broken out hard and fast have had original voices. They were just like, oh wow, that is really good. I’ve not seen anything like that before. It feels specific and unique and new. Those people have not always been able to sustain careers because they could kind of do that one thing, or they only did that one thing. Ideally you want to have an original voice and the ability to do a lot of other voices as well.

**Craig:** That’s very helpful.

**John:** How important is copying? So we talk about visual artists. One of the big debates is how much do you need to perfect doing every tree individually versus understanding when it’s the right time to copy and just fill in that background with things you’ve done before? To what degree do you need to be making brand new original stuff all the time or understand what the genre is and just be able to deliver that genre?

**Craig:** Well, there are times where you realize you’re being hired to do a thing. I have always tried to add some sort of value regardless. I know there are times where I’m complicating, or in the past at least. Now that I’m pretty much working on things that are mine, so it’s all my fault now. But when I was working on things for other people I was aware at times that I was making it harder on myself than I needed to, but I have to believe that in the long run you are rewarded for that. That they ask you sometimes for counterfeits, but when they get them they don’t like them as much as things that feel original.

**John:** Yeah. I fully get what you’re saying there. It’s like they’re asking you to make the cheap knockoff and you’re like but it’s actually going to be easier and better if I just make something original here. Like, no, no, we want the cheap knockoff. And I can think of writers who basically all they do is just cheap knockoffs and at a certain point they stopped getting hired because everything that they’ve actually gotten made has been cheap knockoffs and is just clearly cheap knockoffs. It’s not good for your long term career to be doing those.

**Craig:** It’s not. And the bigger problem is there’s no path ahead. If you are in that lane it’s going to pay you pretty well for a while, but at some point they’re going to wise up and go, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. We’re spending too much on the knockoff guy. The whole point of the knockoff guy was that we didn’t want to spend money on the original guy. Now we’re spending too much money on the knockoff guy. Find me a cheaper knockoff guy.” And they will.

**John:** Yup. How important is it to be able to embrace constraints? The phrasing I’m saying it actually is incredibly important. But I’ve noticed that the ones who succeed can kind of understand what the constraints are and thrive under those constraints. And the ones who tend to struggle, they struggle against the form of the constraints, or the budget, or whatever. They get paralyzed. They can’t do the thing they want to do the way they want to do it.

**Craig:** Well, this to me connects strangely to a necessary element of empathy. You are hired by people to do something. And what we’re asked to do is hard. It’s hard for us to do it. And we have all sorts of feelings when we’re doing it. And I think a lot of writers have tunnel vision where that’s all they see. And the other people, the people that hired them, aren’t really people or are far too comfortable, and their feelings don’t matter. Well they do. Part of that empathy is putting yourself in everybody else’s shoes and trying to see things from their point of view. So when they put these restraints down, or constraints I should say, and they have certain things they need, a little bit of empathy goes a long way. Even if you’re arguing against it. Because you’re arguing against it while acknowledging that it is a perfectly reasonable thing to want. That is helpful.

Maybe even more than just going along with things is taking the effort to see things from other people’s point of view. Then either accept the constraints as reasonable or talk about why maybe they should go a different way.

**John:** Yeah. I can think of an example of like, OK, I want to do a gritty crime show and they’re like, “We love your writing. Our mandate is now we want to do blue sky, happy, sunny. We want dark things in beautiful environments. So can you take your gritty crime show and set it in the Florida sunshine?” And you could say absolutely no, that’s not a thing I want to do at all, or you could say like sure, I get what that is, I get what your mandate is. I can make it work. And I can use the tension between those two things to step up to the next level. That is the kind of thing that tends to make people more successful and have longer careers is to say like, oh, yeah, OK, I get that, and this is a thing I can change that will let me make this thing happen.

**Craig:** And it’s important to have a realistic view of what it is you’re working on. Because if you’re working on a crime procedural for say a basic cable channel then certain things – you got to know where you are, right? You’re in a certain kind of restaurant, and so you’ve kind of got to go along there. I think that this discussion that we’re having will be viewed by some people as a justification for some kind of selling out.

I think if you want to talk about one of the things that separates successful writers from writers who burn out it’s that writers who burn out, or don’t get there at all, are obsessed with this whole selling out business.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** There is no selling out. Everybody is constantly making compromises. You don’t know how to make anything in this business without compromising. Directors know that, right? They know that. Every day is a war to limit the compromises. But they are constant because reality is reality. It intrudes.

Writers, because we have total control over what goes on the page, we have this delusion that there’s some pristine relationship between that and what comes out the other end. And any kind of compromise or negotiation is a failure of will and conviction, it is an indication of artistic failure, and it’s selling out. And that attitude gets your ass booted out of town faster than any other one.

**John:** Yeah. I feel like sometimes these writers they want to be both Charlie Kaufman and Greg Berlanti. They want the huge giant career, making thousands of shows, and to sort of be completely unyielding and singular in a vision at all times. And those aren’t compatible goals really.

**Craig:** I mean, I would argue, and maybe Charlie will come on our show. Because I suspect that Charlie as he’s making his films runs into moments most days when he’s shooting where he does have to kind of just adjust, or in the editing room he realizes he’s got to move a thing this way or that. Everybody is doing it.

**John:** Everyone is doing it. If you watched – you didn’t watch – I’m Thinking of Ending Things, we could watch that and like I don’t feel he compromised that much. I felt like he had a very singular vision and made that singular vision.

**Craig:** So here’s the thing. That’s because what he makes is unique.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It will always seem like it is the product of zero compromise, but it’s not.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** When you read stories about what Francis Ford Coppola was going through and dealing with when he was making Godfather, it’s like well surely he didn’t compromise ever. Oh my god, yes he did. Yes he did. Quite a bit. You know, it’s what you do.

**John:** Let’s talk about taste. I think an important thing is to be able to understand what is good writing and what is not good writing, especially when it applies to what transfers to the screen. The ability to have good taste on the page and seeing how that taste applies to the screen. And that match between your taste and what an audience’s taste is is crucial.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s kind of magic. I mean, there’s no way to quantify that. It is an essential part of what we call talent, I think. There’s talent in creating something. There’s also talent in predicting with some level of accuracy how it will be felt by other people. Because that is the job. Anybody who is creating any art with no concern or prediction or thought about the audience’s reaction is, well I just don’t believe it.

Because that means there’s no intention. And there’s always intention.

**John:** I want to play this clip from Ira Glass where he’s talking about taste and how he finds that there’s often this gap between you have taste, but you don’t have the craft yet. Let’s listen to what Ira Glass says.

**Ira Glass:** Somebody had told this to me, is that all of us who do creative work, you know, we get into it. And we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap. That for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good. It has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your taste is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. Do you know what I mean?

A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point they quit. And the thing I would just say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste, they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as what they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. It didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have. And the thing I would say to you is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase, you got to know it’s totally normal. And the most important possible thing you could do is do a lot of work.

Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you’re actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.

**John:** So I think back to when I was at USC for film school and one of the great resources that we had was a film library, so I could check out all of these screenplays and just go through and read these great scripts. And my writing was not as good as these scripts. And I recognized that it wasn’t as good as these scripts, but for whatever reason I wasn’t afraid of that. I aspired to hit that level and I kept working to get to that level.

People sometimes get crushed with self-doubt where they just don’t – they recognize that they’re not at that level and they don’t think they can actually get there. And so I like that Glass is pointing out that it’s often just to work to get yourself up to that level of polish.

**Craig:** If you had told me that that was an interview with Chris Keyser I would have believed you. They sound so similar.

**John:** They really do. That’s a good point.

**Craig:** So weird. So, yeah, this is a terrific observation and it’s something that somebody else had sent me a while ago, because it’s one of those things when you read it you’re like, or you listen to it and you go, oh of course, I mean, it’s so obvious and yet it had been kind of floating right there right under my consciousness.

I think that the reality of what he’s describing is one of the reasons I’m so angry all the time at critics. Because everyone who eventually gets to do something good is working through the gap. And while they’re working through the gap there are people who are brutalizing them in print and suggesting you’re never going to get there. Stop. Quit. You stink.

And I wish that would not happen. Because I do think there are probably people who left too soon who were one or two things away from kind of putting it all together. Scott Frank said something to me many years ago that seemed a bit dramatic at the time, but in hindsight was absolutely correct. And that was, he was reading something I’d written and he said, “The thing is you have yet to be really born as a writer.” And I was like well that’s very dramatic. [laughs] That’s a very, very dramatic statement. I’ve been working at this for 15 years Scott. I make a pretty good living.

But his point was that I hadn’t sort of become myself yet. And that maybe you could argue that that’s part of being in the gap. Not only is there a mismatch between your taste and your work, but also there is perhaps not enough of your own self in the work. Because the work that is available almost always has zero interest in who you are.

**John:** Absolutely. I hadn’t really thought about your career in terms of taste, but I would say that you’ve always had much better taste than the movies that we saw your name on.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, some of those movies I love. So my taste actually isn’t that great.

**John:** The breadth of your taste extended well beyond the movies, the kinds of movies that you were making.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you looked at the movies I was making it was easy enough and reasonable enough to conclude that I was a goof.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Some of those movies I really do hold close to my heart and some I definitely do not. And you know some were just work. But I at least for better or worse suffered through quite a lot of public humiliation, even as I was successful. And I really wish I could sit down one on one with each one of those people and explain to them why what they did was harm. And unnecessary, by the way. It’s totally unnecessary. You can absolutely not like a movie but the personal part of it is so anti-art is I guess how I would put it.

You don’t realize it, but you say you love film, you don’t if that’s what you’re doing.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s get back to the choices of what kinds of projects you’re working on and how many projects you’re sort of pursuing. Because a choice I’ve seen writers make is they have some success and they just take anything that comes their way. And there’s the temptation to never say no because you don’t know where your next job is, but I’ve also seen the opposite where people just say no to everything and then people stop asking them to the dance.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so it’s that balance between saying yes enough that you’re still engaged as a writer, but not pursuing too much, or pursuing junk, or just becoming overcommitted and then just failing because we both know writers who just collapsed under that.

**Craig:** I was talking with Todd Philips about this. It was after he did The Hangover and it was a massive success. And maybe he was talking to Martin Scorsese. And Martin Scorsese, I’m just going to say he was, because that makes the story way cooler, but I think it was him. And he was telling Martin Scorsese that his world had changed because he had made The Hangover and suddenly he was getting sent everything, all sorts of things. And people were offering him the biggest possible things and he was sort of paralyzed and thinking that maybe he was just going to take time.

And then Martin Scorsese said, “The best advice I can give you is after you have a huge hit of any kind, a big success, jump right back on the horse, as fast as you can. Because if you don’t then the weight of that success grows and becomes almost an unbearable load. Because you’re never going to be able to beat that.” You can’t do that again. And so sometimes you actually have to just do something.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And maybe it’s the wrong choice, but doing nothing for too long becomes its own kind of dangerous addiction. And you’re absolutely right. Sooner or later people are going to be like, huh, wait, we forgot about you. And no one wants that.

**John:** Yeah. We should revisit this topic in a few episodes and I want to look at what we’ve noticed never works and sort of what are the pattern of like please don’t do this thing. Because even what you’re describing in terms of like the writer who has a big hit and then just like becomes paralyzed or fearful of doing anything else, or over-celebrates that one thing, I think we’re going to find quite a few of those things that could actually be useful for our listeners.

**Craig:** All right. I agree.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to listener questions and now over the last few weeks we’ve all enjoyed hearing from Oops and the romantic adventures of Oops. And Megana has another question for us today that is not an Oops situation. I’ve got to preface this by saying this is about as opposite of Oops as we could imagine.

**Craig:** Anti-Oops.

**John:** It’s anti-Oops, but I also feel like it’s a good season opener because I feel like we’re going to revisit this topic down the road. Megana, come on and tell us the story of Shocked.

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**Megana Rao:** All right. Shocked in LA wrote in about his friend. “Like many aspiring writers a close and talented friend of mine, a lady in her late 20s started her career at an agency. She quickly left and found work in production while pursuing her ambition of writing. She has a few great scripts under her belt and a couple we even wrote together. One of her friends from the agency was promoted this past year and agreed to represent her.

“A few months ago she gets a call from her boss from that agency, a 70-year-old man. He’s upset that she hid her writing ambitions from him. He asks her out to dinner to discuss her career. She was thrilled. He has a ton of industry pull and can really help her. But, he was a very difficult boss who put her through all sorts of inappropriate behavior, from commenting on her looks, to sharing sexual imagery in the office.

“Surprise, surprise, the dinner turned out to not be about her writing. He wants to explore their sexual connection. It was a stereotypical #MeToo moment. He told her that she shouldn’t have a boyfriend if she’s serious about writing and should have a casual sexual relationship with him instead. It was extremely demoralizing and degrading for her. He continued harassing her, basically chasing her out of the parking lot, but she was able to safely make it home.

“But here’s the thing. She’s still a baby writer, no credits or awards, repped at the same agency this guy works at. He’s her agent’s boss and seems pretty powerful. She’s afraid to even tell her agent what happened because of all the implications. However, I’m scared that he will have access to her if she stays at that agency. What if he terrorizes and sexually harasses her this way? Or destroys her career?

“My friend knows how hard it is to get represented in Hollywood. Although she has a manager, she doesn’t want to let go of her rep. But I think this baby agent has very little power anyways. He’s never even sent her on a general. My friend is also afraid to take on her powerful ex-boss/sexual harasser and certainly doesn’t want to be branded by this before anyone has even seen her work.

“What can I do to help her and what can she do to help herself?”

**John:** Ugh. All right. So much here. First off, we’re going to talk about Shocked. We think Shocked is a man. We’re guessing Shocked is a man, so we’re going to refer to this friend – the person who is writing this letter as Shocked. And the woman as the person who is going through this horrible situation.

This sucks. And so my first instinct was I don’t know what to do this, and so what I do in this case is I ask really smart friends. So I reached out to six of my smart female writer friends to get their take on what the right steps were. But before we get into that, Craig, what’s your first read on the situation?

**Craig:** Oh man. Well, so this is an interesting situation where I think while I want to tell Shocked’s friend to draw her flaming sword and slay the dragon, it’s so easy for me to say that. And it’s not so easy to do it. I do believe that in today’s day and age everybody has quite a bit more power than they used to. I mean, they used to have zero and now they have quite a bit in the sense that all she has to do is pick up the phone and call Deadline and this guy is in massive trouble.

But, she’s right to understand that that comes at some sort of cost. Given that the agent she has at this agency is not a bigshot. So Shocked describes this agent as a baby agent who has very little power and has never set this woman up on a general meeting, I don’t think there would too much lost if she walked from that agency and went maybe to try at a different agency, clean break, and see if she could find somebody else. That is I would call it the path of least resistance, because it doesn’t seem like you’d be losing much.

The path of greater resistance is to bring this incident to the attention of the board of directors at that agency.

**John:** So in talking with the six women yesterday one of the points that came up again and again is that the big moves are great in theory, but they don’t necessarily help the woman. So going out with a flaming sword or going to Deadline or one of those things, that’s not necessarily going to help her.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so what we really want to do is help her. What is the thing that helps her in this moment? The thing that was universal across this was to write it down. And both Shocked needs to write down everything that he remembers about this conversation he had with her. He needs to encourage her to write this all down, so she has it on paper. So if she decides to do something she has it down on paper that this is what happened. And that she has evidence if she decides to use it at some point about what happened.

Almost everybody I spoke with said she should leave this agency, and that included an agent I spoke with saying that this agent is not getting you work, this agent is not powerful, this junior agent you’re dealing with. You should leave because if you don’t trust going to this agent necessarily with this issue, like how can you trust this rep? How can this person actually represent you if you can’t even tell them that their boss is doing this?

You have to leave that agency. And you already have a manager. Just leave. There’s no reason to stick around.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think so. And if there is a desire in a very pro-social way to prevent this man from doing this to other people by calling him out, that is something that Shocked’s friend should only do through a lawyer. This is also a moment where I think you want to lawyer up.

**John:** We have some resources on that as well. So you may want to lawyer up, but people I spoke with recommended Time’s Up is not the right place to go to. Women in Film may be the right hotline for your call. Because this is actually kind of what they do is people who had these situations to talk through, OK, let’s deal with the trauma that you’re actually encountering right now and let’s see if there’s other women who have had similar reports. Let’s see if there’s some grouping of action that could make sense here, so it’s not just you against this 60-year-old man.

You are at the start of your career, he’s at the end of his career, and just remember that through all of this is that he’s almost out the door and you’re just coming in.

**Craig:** Right. I think that even if Shocked’s friend doesn’t have an intention to launch missiles, it’s still good to talk to a lawyer, even if all you get out of that is an understanding of what you’re supposed to write down. What are the details that matter? What are you supposed to write down? What are you supposed to save? And what do you do if you turn a corner and here’s there? What do you do if he leaves a message or he texts you?

Having a lawyer advise you at least on some best principles there would be a good thing. But that is a good point. As a 60-plus-year-old man not only is he going to be out of the business while you’re still in the business, assuming that your career flourishes, you’ll be working and he’ll be dead.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So if you want revenge there is that one revenge which is you dance on their grave. But this really sad and infuriating. And it’s sad and infuriating that this guy still feels protected enough by the world that he’s pulling this crap.

**John:** That – I want to spend a moment here. Because this is a man, a 60-year-old man in 2021 who somehow has been able to – this person obviously opens Deadline. This person can see in the world like what has happened to a person like him again, and again, and again, and still thinks like, oh, I’m special, I’m different, this is not going to happen to me. The hubris. The arrogance of this guy.

I mean, in addition to the shitty behavior he’s doing to this woman, just that he believes the rules that have taken down all these other people do not apply to him drives me mad.

**Craig:** Not only that, but he believes that the rule that 20-year-old women generally aren’t attracted to 60-year-old men also doesn’t apply.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So like he’s in a deep deluded state. I’m 50. I can’t believe that my 51-year-old wife still finds me attractive. [laughs] So I don’t know what this dude is smoking. I guess he’s just smoking his own ego, and his own arrogance. And, also, let’s face it. This business has entitled him. He doesn’t pull this crap if it hasn’t worked before.

**John:** Yeah. And so obviously it’s important to acknowledge that you are not the first person he has done this to, obviously. And so it’s not your responsibility to take up the sword for all the other people, but remember that you are not the only person. So there’s nothing special about you. This is his pattern of doing this that has gotten us into this situation.

Some other advice I got from the women I spoke to is for Shocked make sure you don’t infantilize this woman. She is a grown woman who can make her own decisions. And she actually has more agency in this situation than she may realize. So you can encourage her, but don’t box her into a situation. Don’t tell her she has to do something, because she doesn’t have to do anything. She can choose what is the appropriate step for her to take.

This person also said useful advice might be you don’t want to be a side character in someone else’s story. And so if she thinks of herself as the protagonist in this story, like screw this guy. This guy did a bad thing. And it’s up to her to decide what she wants to do about this next step. But the important part is it’s up to her and she doesn’t have to let him drive the narrative from this point forward.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think Shocked is being a good friend. I think good friends want to help and they want to find out what they can do to help. And maybe this is help. I don’t know. Maybe this is hurt. You know? Because the other issue is if this woman is like, wait, you put my shit on Scriptnotes? That would be bad. So hopefully this was something that they discussed. Obviously we’ve anonymized everything quite extensively here.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I think at a minimum let’s get to super practical stuff. Super practical stuff makes absolute sense that she would leave the agency. And that when you leave the agency also, Shocked’s friend, lawyer. Don’t leave the agency by you calling and going through a weird, awkward conversation with your agent.

**John:** No. The manager can do this as well.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Many of the women said your manager just tells the agency, “You know what? She doesn’t want to be repped there anymore.” And that’s it. It’s done.

**Craig:** I would actually still advise lawyer. And here’s why.

**John:** OK.

**Craig:** Managers cannot be trusted completely in this regard. They have a deep conflict of interest.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Lawyers are governed by a higher authority. The State Bar. And their attorney/client privilege. And ethics. And all that stuff. And a lawyer, you can tell your lawyer anything. Anything. And it’s confidential.

You can’t say that about a manager. They can blab your crap anywhere they want. So, I would say lawyer. Clean break. Have the lawyer communicate that. Make it nice and simple and final. And then, yeah, moving on.

**John:** So, the Women in Film hotline 855-WIF-LINE. Or it’s womeninfilm.org is the organization. So we’ll have a link to that in the show notes.

Obviously, Shocked, if you want to keep us apprised to sort of what this person decides to do in the future we’d love to hear about it, and of course I’m sure we’ll get plenty of emails in from folks with their opinions what to do.

Megana, I’m curious to hear your opinion on this as a writer in her 20s. What was your first instinct on this and where do you see this shaking out?

**Megana:** Yeah, I mean, it was really upsetting to read. And I think last month when things started opening up after the pandemic we saw all of those horrible mass shootings. And this past week, or past couple of weeks I think as LA has opened up and people are returning to their offices I’ve just been reading so many horrible, and hearing these stories about women and assistants who are continuing to have these #MeToo type stories.

You know, it’s just like a very sad sobering reminder that these issues were not solved and they have not gone away. But we’re all just forced to be away from each other for a year. But now that the world is opening back up we have to figure out a way to fix them. The problems haven’t gone away and it’s just really disheartening to be reminded of these things that we were dealing with pre-pandemic and where we are now.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s such a good point. It pushed them aside because we were literally not in offices for them to happen. But now they’re back.

**Craig:** You kind of want to hope that it’s also not a case where there’s this weird pent up aggression that’s going to emerge and that we’re going to go through a period where it’s even worse. I hope that’s not the case. But one thing that we always have to keep in mind is we cannot applaud ourselves constantly for the progress that’s been made because the progress will never be perfection. And there is always going to be this stuff going on. Because we can’t pre-crime these things. We can’t get ahead of them.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re going to happen. And dealing with all of that and how we handle those situations, it is going to continue to put young women in particular in very difficult positions, put women of all ages in very difficult positions. That’s going to keep happening. We hope less and less. But no one should be surprised that this is continuing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Megana:** Yeah.

**John:** One last point I want to make, and someone brought up as I spoke to them yesterday, is that I think we still have this vision of agencies being super powerful and sort of like the Mike Ovitz model. And I think agents can help you. I really don’t think they can hurt you that much. And so I think her rejecting this guy is not going to hurt her. I don’t think agents actually have that power in 2021 the way we might have mythologized them before.

I don’t think her leaving the agency is going to hurt her career because it hasn’t helped her career.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, from a practical point of view the agent that just got promoted from off a desk, yeah, that’s not necessarily the best person in the world. I mean—

**John:** Megana, I cut you off. What were you going to say?

**Megana:** Oh, I think I was just going to say to answer your earlier question, the thing that also makes me so sad about this is like this woman has had something really horrible and discouraging happen to her, and following up on our conversation about patterns of success, like she now has all this self-doubt and anxiety about the value of her actual work. And then she has to be the one to advocate for herself. Oh my god. It’s such a difficult standard for us to keep and for us to expect people who have been abused to be able to do that. It just breaks my heart.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It is one of the more insidious aspects of this that we don’t talk about enough. And that is that people start to question whether or not they’re good at all.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s something that Megan Ganz spoke about, well, with her typical clarity and intelligence when she had her experience being harassed and abused by Dan Harmon. One of the things that hurt that most was being unsure of whether or not her position on that writing staff was because of her skill. And that is crushing. That is a stomach-churning thing to think. The face I have? I’ve never had to wonder. If somebody was going to give me something it was because of the work. It certainly wasn’t because of my appearance, or how they felt about me romantically.

And I’ve never had to ask myself that question. I’ve never had to contemplate whether or not I was being hoodwinked and gas lit.

**John:** Yeah. Two of the women I spoke with yesterday they related so strongly to this story because they had had very similar things happen and their response from 20 years ago was just like, OK, well I’ll just move on and I’ll just suppress it and I’ll move on. And I do think there’s an opportunity now to – if this woman chooses to – to address this and stop it if she wants to rather than just having to say like suppress it and pretend it didn’t happen.

**Craig:** Well, we are certainly hoping the best. And if you can, therapy, and talking to a professional about these things now I think is always advisable.

**John:** Agreed. All right. It is time for One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things this week. The first is an HGTV series called Home Town Takeover which sends a big HGTV crew to Wetumpka, Alabama to do a bunch of makeovers around the town. Wetumpka, Alabama is where we shot Big Fish. It’s where the house in Big Fish is. And one of the houses they remodel is the Big Fish house. And so it was so surreal and wonderful to see – our first day of shooting was at the Big Fish house. And to see them refurbishing and remodeling this house.

What they kind of say on the show, but they don’t make entirely clear, is that house is really kind of just one story and we stuck a fake second story on the top of it. But it was never really meant to stay. And we were supposed to take it all down and the owner said, “No, no, just leave it up.” But it was never meant to be livable.

And so the crew had to go through and jerry rig to sort of make it actually livable space. But it was so cool to see both that house but also that town and to realize if I hadn’t written the movie Big Fish that wouldn’t have happened. It was just a weird connection to like, oh, this series exists because I decided to adapt this book into this movie. So it was a really weird thing to see. But actually a really well done HGTV series. So I recommend you check that out if you like those kind of shows, or if you like Big Fish and you can see that.

My second One Cool Thing is Standard Ebooks. And so Project Gutenberg has the text of a zillion books that you can download for free which is great, but it’s not lovely formatted text. It’s not as good to read as a Kindle book might be or a printed book might be. What Standard Ebooks does is they produce a collection of these high quality really well-formatted, accessible, open source, free public domain ebooks. And they’re really good.

So, just go to their site, standardbooks.org/ebooks and you can download basically all the great classics, but really good versions of them. So if you’re looking for those try Standard Ebooks.

**Craig:** You know what? I don’t need a One Cool Thing. You had two.

**John:** I gave you two.

**Craig:** We’re good.

**John:** But, here’s a One Cool Thing you can do is on Episode 500 we said that we desperately need to go back to a segment called Change Craig’s Mind. But we need to figure out how we’re going to change – what’s a topic we can change Craig’s mind about? So if you have suggestions of things you’ve heard him say that you think, no, that’s wrong and we can get him to change his mind, we’ll see. And we can try over the course of this next season to change his mind about anything.

**Craig:** It’s possible. It’s possible.

**John:** Well, Craig, I know you hate mayonnaise. Could we change your mind about mayonnaise?

**Craig:** Oh my god, no. That would be just an utter waste of time. It would be a waste of a segment. That is disgusting.

**John:** Aversion therapy. But we need to find another mayonnaise, something Craig doesn’t really like–

**Craig:** It’s the word.

**John:** Maybe the sense that you don’t like it because you don’t kind of like get it. And then you get it and you’re like, oh yeah, it turns out I do like that.

**Craig:** I mean, it’s possible. Lately I have been watching more ventriloquism.

**John:** Yeah. Absolutely. Late at night he fires up the iPad by the side of the bed.

**Craig:** I make myself a mayonnaise sandwich and sit down and enjoy a fun evening of ventriloquism. Absolutely not.

**John:** My brother grew up on mayonnaise sandwiches. That was his go-to sandwich.

**Craig:** Oh god. Geez.

**John:** Wonder Bread and mayonnaise.

**Craig:** Ugh. Man, that is white.

**John:** Nothing else.

**Craig:** Good lord, that’s white.

**John:** So white.

**Craig:** White.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** White. That’s so white it’s white.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Brian Ramos. 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’m @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for the weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lot 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. That’s also where you can sign up to get updates on the Scriptnotes book. And we’ll be sending out an update this week about where we’re at with the book. Craig, Megana, thank you so much for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thanks guys.

**Megana:** Thank you guys.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right, Craig, so the Scriptnotes book, we think it’s going to be actually a pretty hefty book because there’s just a lot of material in there. And I’m curious what you look for in a physical printed book. What are things that excite you about books? What are printed books that you’ve especially liked over the course of your career?

**Craig:** Well, for most fiction I don’t care because I’m just reading. I just want to turn pages. So the quality of a paperback, or even a hard cover book is not particularly important to me. But when it’s a book about a topic, something real, or a book that’s meant to be educational, a few things stick out.

I like size. I like the book to be larger. Because I think it gives you more detail. I really like mixed media. I like the idea of images. There was a book I had as a kid that was more than just images of course. I think it might have been published by World Book. And it was about the universe. And there were plastic overlays and there were sort of grown up versions of popup book style stuff, where you’re moving tabs and turning wheels and things to actually accentuate whatever the value of the imagery was. And then photographs of real things.

I like to engage, feel like I’m kind of involved with the book. You know, play with it a little bit.

**John:** Yeah. I also really love books that I can sort of pick up and flip to any page. Like for nonfiction books, that I can just flip to any page and find something interesting. I think the reason why I loved my D&D books so much growing up is you could just flip to any page in there and it was interesting. And you didn’t have to read them from the start to the end at all. It’s just join at any point.

I also really loved – Peanuts had these great sort of encyclopedia things. They were these colorful things about space and the world. And I loved those too growing up because you just flipped to anything and you’d just find interesting articles. So you could join them at any point in the middle of the story.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, there’s a kind of a book fetishization where people are really into the binding and the edges. You know, there’s like the ruffled edges.

**John:** Oh yeah. I hate them.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t like the ruffled edges. It looks like your book got stuck in something.

**John:** I hate gilded edges as well. Because they were sharp on my fingers.

**Craig:** Ah, yeah, nothing says luxury like gold-tipped pages. Uh-huh. I just want the book to not fall apart. That’s really all I’ve ever asked for. I don’t really care about that other stuff. I’m not a book fetishist.

A similar problem with NFTs where I’m really struggling just to understand why people are doing it. And like similarly when people – I have a first edition of this thing and I’m like, yeah, but the value of that thing is not the object.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** It’s like saying I have first edition CD of this – who cares? It’s plastic. It doesn’t matter.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s the content that matters. So I don’t get too wrapped up in the whole booked-y thing.

**John:** Do you like book jackets or the ones where it is printed directly on the cover?

**Craig:** Interesting. Ever since I was a kid, first thing that I do is take that off.

**John:** Yeah, I don’t like book jackets either. I don’t take the jacket off, because I don’t want to lose it, but I also don’t like it. I like them for being able to use them as a bookmark. I will use those to sort of mark what page I’m at.

**Craig:** I was a dog-earer. Still am a dog-earer. I know I’m not supposed to. It’s like wrong.

**John:** It’s a crime.

**Craig:** Crime, whatever, against this inanimate object. But ever since I was a kid I would – my fingers would be the color of whatever the cover was because the cover was often some sort of red or blue.

**John:** Yeah, cloth.

**Craig:** Right. And so when you take the dust jacket off your fingers – Megana, cover on/cover off?

**Megana:** No, no, no. I always do cover off. Because I always tear it.

**Craig:** Oh that’s interesting. So you’re reading violently.

**John:** She’s a violent reader.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** There’s an increasing trend towards the jacketless books where the artwork is printed directly on the book itself. And I just like that. Sometimes it doesn’t look as neat on the shelf, but who cares what’s on the shelf? What actually looks good in your hands and sitting on a table is more useful to me. And it’s one less thing to lose. I don’t want to lose a thing. I don’t want to rip it. I don’t Megana ripping my book covers.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Megana housesits for me. I don’t want to come back and all the book covers are ripped.

**Megana:** I also borrow a lot of your books, with your permission.

**Craig:** Oh. I thought you were just admitting grand theft bookery.

**John:** So Craig two recent books – and the Scriptnotes book will not be anywhere near this size, or epicness, but the Art & Arcana book, we talked about it in the opening, was really sort of a remarkable feat of history and all the artwork throughout the ages. That was a book that you want to keep and you want to sort of, you know, again, you can flip through it. I think I did read it straight through, but you could also just go to any point in the middle of the story.

**Craig:** Those are wonderful books, especially for people who are already into a thing. And there are areas like that where, you know, sports in particular. And I should have mentioned Michael Witwer who also worked on – it wasn’t just Kyle. But if you are into something then – and you know that other people are into it you have an opportunity to do something different.

I’m a baseball fan and every Christmas – I say Christmas even though it was boring Chanukah – I would get oh we got you a book about the Yankees. And there’s like 4,000 books about the Yankees. And most of them are just bad. Because they’re just the same old crap. And they’re literally made for stupid Christmas presents. They weren’t actually made to be loved.

So, try and make something that – if you’re a bookmaker–

**John:** Yeah. We’re bookmakers now. So we’re going to try to make something that people will love. Hey, what is your opinion of the ribbon inside books? The bookmark ribbon?

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** You don’t like it?

**Craig:** I hate it.

**John:** You do? All right. Because I’m a big fan. In our sample artwork we have the ribbon, so I guess you’ll have to rip that out.

**Craig:** Megana, if you say that your problem with the ribbon is that it tears then we know you are reading these books in far too aggressive fashion. Are you a ribboner or a non-ribboner?

**Megana:** I like the ribbon, but I’ve been reading books on my Kindle through the pandemic and I recently got a book in paper, or like a physical book, and I have so many papercuts on my hands. I’m like what is wrong with me?

**Craig:** Yeah. What is wrong with you? [laughs]

**John:** She’s both too strong and too fragile.

**Craig:** Normally I’m really supportive of your position, but I’m concerned that you’re reading books incorrectly.

**Megana:** Yeah, I don’t know.

**Craig:** What’s happening?

**John:** What is happening? I will say that I love a big book, but sometimes the book is just so big it’s uncomfortable to read. And so I just got the Ultimate Sandman, because I’d never read Sandman. And I was like I’ve got to read Sandman. So I read Ultimate Sandman which collects the first run of Sandman. And it’s great and it’s oversized so it’s actually much easier to read and you can see the artwork better. It’s just terrifically well done. But man it is heavy. So it’s a thing you cannot read – you can kind of read it on your lap, but you certainly could not read it laying down. It’s awkward–

**Craig:** That’s the thing. I don’t know if you’ve seen these, as we get older I see more–

**John:** Large print books.

**Craig:** –ads targeted to me that I’m like, oh boy. And they have these contraptions where it’s like suspend the book over your face in bed. And you’re like oh boy. But it’s true. If I have a heavier book that I’m reading after about 15 or 20 minutes if I’m in bed my elbows start to ache.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because, god, can you believe that, Megana? I mean, how old are we? Do any of your friends ever say, “Ow, my elbows ache?”

**Megana:** Wait, because you’re holding the book up?

**Craig:** See, she literally doesn’t understand. She’s trying to comprehend how that could happen. Just you wait.

**John:** Just you wait. A thing I won’t put up with anymore that I used to not have a problem with is cheap paperbacks. I find it just really hard to read cheap paperbacks at this point.

**Craig:** The print is too small. I can’t read it.

**John:** The print is too small and you can sort of read through the next line. So I’m going to read my Kindle. I’ll buy a hardcover, but if I can’t get the hardcover I’ll probably read the Kindle.

**Craig:** I mean, I must admit that if there is a Kindle version to purchase I’m purchasing it. It’s just – or an Apple iBook version. The one thing that I miss and I wish they could solve is page numbers. If they could solve that.

**John:** It’s nice to be able to refer to a page number.

**Craig:** Yeah, if they could just solve page numbers.

**John:** They get better at it.

**Craig:** That would be nice.

**John:** So, Craig, now that you’re moving to my neighborhood you will have Chevaliers as your neighborhood bookstore. It is terrific, so hopefully you’ll get back in the habit of buying some books.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** In print.

**Craig:** Yes. I do love a bookstore. I love to browse a bookstore. And inevitably if I browse a bookstore I’m going to buy a book. And the place that we have near you per square foot I think has more bookshelf space than any place I’ve ever been other than a library. There’s bookshelves – so many opportunities for books.

**John:** Excellent. We love it.

**Craig:** So we will purchase those.

**John:** And one of those books will be the Scriptnotes book that you won’t read.

**Craig:** Complete with ribbon.

**John:** Love it. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thanks guys.

**John:** Thanks Megana.

**Craig:** Thanks Megana.

**Megana:** Bye.

Links:

* [Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana Book](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/562708/dungeons-and-dragons-art-and-arcana-by-michael-witwer-kyle-newman-jon-peterson-and-sam-witwer-foreword-by-joe-manganiello-official-dungeons-and-dragons-licensed/)
* [Heartbreaker](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1465487/) and [The Breaker Upperers](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6728096/)
* [Noah Evslin’s pitch for Guild Awards](https://twitter.com/nevslin/status/1391143482010390529)
* [Ira Glass on Taste](https://jamesclear.com/ira-glass-failure)
* Women in Film helpline for sexual harassment and misconduct in the entertainment industry:(855)WIF-LINE (855-943-5463) or reach out [online here](https://womeninfilm.org/)
* [Hometown Takeover](https://www.hgtv.com/shows/home-town-takeover)
* [Standard Ebooks](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks)
* [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 Brian Ramos ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/501standard.mp3).

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 497 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we will discuss what writers need—

[Doorbell chimes]

Hold on, there’s somebody at the door.

**Craig:** There’s more at the door.

**John:** Oh my gosh! It’s Aline!

**Craig:** What the–?

**John:** Aline Brosh McKenna is here.

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** Woohoo! Anyone home?

**John:** I see she has a basket full of delicious things to talk about. So she’s setting them out on the table.

**Craig:** She brought a basket?

**John:** I see a covered dish labeled “notes.” Well, what’s in notes Aline?

**Aline:** In notes I want to talk about how writers prefer to get notes. How we prefer to get notes. And how when we have to give notes we prefer to give them.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** That’s right, because Aline is a boss. And so she’s having to give writers lots of notes.

**Craig:** Like a boss.

**John:** Now, in that box, it looks like sprinkles/cupcakes, but the label says “hierarchy of genres.” What do you mean by hierarchy of genres?

**Aline:** I want to talk about how the business and the creative community has decided that certain genres are “better, fancier, more serious, more important” than others.

**Craig:** I have no thoughts on this at all.

**John:** Just a completely neutral discussion without any sort of–

**Aline:** I also have no agenda here.

**Craig:** Yes, exactly. [laughs]

**John:** Plus we have lots of follow up and we have questions to answer, so it’s so good that you’re here Aline. So pull up your chair and we’ll get into all of this. And I also heard that from the premium bonus subscribers you have some scientific discoveries you’ve made bout Craig Mazin. Is that correct?

**Aline:** I do. I have the lab results.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** All right. We will crack into those lab results, but only for our premium members. But let’s get into all these topics today. We’ll start with the sad news that ArcLight Cinemas and Pacific Theaters overall are not going to be reopening post-Covid.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aline, for folks who are not living in Los Angeles can you give us some sense of what the ArcLight means and why it is such a loss?

**Aline:** I mean, it’s the best place to see movies in LA. And you can get your ticket in advance. You can get an assigned seat. It’s got all the best movies when they come out. And it’s really a gathering place. For our family it’s a big deal because my older son, Charlie, is a big movie buff. In 2019 he saw over 100 movies. And most of them were at the ArcLight. Basically that’s his childhood was spent there. He went to the ArcLight instead of going to the prom.

**Craig:** Well, that’s sad?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** But happy. Did he go to see the movie Prom?

**Aline:** No. He went to see a double feature of Captain Underpants and he’s going to be mad because I can’t remember the other one. But, it’s not just a theater. It’s a gathering place. There’s a bar.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Aline:** And you’ll always run into people that you know. It’s a different experience and it’s very – it’s a movie theater that’s focused on giving you the best movie-going experience as opposed to a mall where it feels like the movie theater is an afterthought. So it had a feeling also of a temple to movie-going.

**John:** It was like church for movies. Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so the Cinerama Dome which is the historically important part of that theater complex is that [unintelligible] Dome that you see and it’s great, and that already existed. But then they built the ArcLight cinema sort of around it. And they were just better. So, so many innovations that are common in theaters now like really great seating and being able to pick your assigned seat were there, but the thing I appreciated probably most is that there were no ads. There were no ads at all before you saw a movie. There were three trailers and only three trailers. And then you got to see your movie.

Every movie was introduced by a person in a blue shirt who told you about the movie and told you where to find them if there were any problems with projection. You applauded for that person afterwards. It was great.

We did a couple live Scriptnotes shows there. I saw my last movie before the pandemic. I saw The Invisible Man there. I saw Crazy Rich Asians twice at the Cinerama Dome, and one time John Chu was there and I got to congratulate him on his movie. It was just a great place, so I’m hopeful that someone with a lot of money will come in and save ArcLight cinemas. But, wow, it’s really sad that as things are opening up that’s not one of the things that’s going to be opening up right away.

**Craig:** I suspect that you’re going to see Warner Bros’ Cinerama Dome or something like that. I feel like one of those places is going to buy it because they can now. And the thing that I also loved about the ArcLight was that they had an actual concern for cinematic integrity. Like you knew going there the projection bulb would be the exact proper amount of lumens or however they measure it, because most people don’t know when they go to a regular theater somewhere random in the US that bulb in the projector is probably half as bright as it should be. So you’re not seeing the movie the way you’re supposed to see it.

Everybody got real smart with sound, but then the projection itself, they really took care of it there. It was a great place. It’s a bummer. But I refuse to believe that it’s just going to be shuttered and empty. Somebody else will pick this up and roll with it.

**Aline:** Same.

**John:** Yeah. Something is going to happen. My understanding is that Pacific Theaters actually does own that property, because they owned not just ArcLight Cinemas and Cinerama Dome, but also all of those shops in there. So that is a source of assets and money that can hopefully be helping it through this period and they can find some way to reopen. But we’ll keep hoping.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now it was not all bad news this week because this week Final Draft announced that Final Draft 12 is now available for download.

**Craig:** Oh great! [laughs]

**John:** And Final Draft 12, Craig, it adds the ability to import PDFs.

**Craig:** Oh my god. They’ve somehow managed to leap frog ahead to 2006.

**John:** Yeah. So Highland 1.0, which was released eight years ago, that was its big marquee feature. It could do that. So now you can do that in the new Final Draft.

**Aline:** Did you read this tweet under your tweet, John? Somebody wrote, this Nick Rheinwald-Jones wrote, “Nice to literally every person, place, or thing except Final Draft is the personal brand I aspire to but will never reach.”

**John:** Yeah, I’m a pretty nice person but I did feel some shade when it came to Final Draft. And there was some snark as well. I’m sorry. But you cannot announce a big brand new bold feature when it has been eight years and–

**Craig:** No, it’s been done.

**Aline:** August Shade and Snark, by the way, is a podcast I would completely listen to.

**John:** 100%. Where it’s nasty.

**Aline:** Just shade and snark.

**Craig:** Sounds great. I would listen to that even.

**John:** So people can go back and listen to in the archives the Final Draft episode where the guy who owns Final Draft came in and talked with me and Craig. But he doesn’t own Final Draft anymore.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s this company that just keeps going, but it’s not the same people.

**Craig:** In fact, Final Draft is owned by an entertainment business payroll company.

**John:** It feels like it, too.

**Craig:** What else do you need to know? It is literally run by bean counters. There was an update to Fade In which is the program I use. A free update. Sweet. Lovely. Some more options for PDFs and watermarking and some additional scene numbering and revision functionality, which is very nice. And Highland 2.0, so you’re at Highland 2.0 or Highland 3.0 now?

**John:** We’re in Highland 2.0

**Craig:** You’re at 2.0.

**John:** But we’ve done, like all of our little .1 releases are more than sort of every annual Final Draft release.

**Craig:** If Final Draft works the way Fade In or Highland did Final Draft would be on Final Draft 3 right now. Because, I mean, what was it, it’s a brand new release – we support the retina screen. Oh, for the love of god.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, Final Draft. Dumb.

**Aline:** Well, because so many people use it and because a lot of production companies have it people are worried about the melting of the PDFs.

**John:** Let’s talk about that.

**Aline:** It is something you can do in Highland. And I think there are other programs you can do that in, no?

**Craig:** You can do it in Fade In.

**Aline:** So, it’s just that Final Draft is the one that the executives are most familiar with, so it’s probably the one they could figure out how to melt your PDF. But, you know, there’s a certain level of just, you know, trust you have to give. You know, since the days when we started when it was on a physical piece of paper and that’s the only place it was, the minute it became digital it became meltable.

**John:** Yeah, so the concern is – I saw people tweet about this – like, oh no, this is going to ruin everything because in theory I could turn in a PDF and then the executive could open it in Final Draft and make a change in it because they want to make a change in it. It’s like, yeah, that could already happen.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Like, you know, a file format is not going to protect you from malfeasance.

**Craig:** No. Like the guy who works at Universal Studios can certainly pay someone $100 to just type that PDF in Final Draft. This is not a bar to entry. So, no, any – look, if they really want to screw with your stuff they’re going to screw with it. They own it. It’s theirs.

**John:** Yeah. All right. Let’s get into some follow up. We’ve been talking about female characters who have ethical dilemmas and sort of why we don’t see enough of those on screen. Margaret wrote in to say, “Yes, we’re not seeing them on the big screen, but we do see a lot on television,” which I think is a good point. So the Ted Lasso example is a great one. But she also brings up The Honorable Woman, which I’ve not seem. Le Bureau, the French series. Did you watch that Aline?

**Aline:** That’s one of my favorites. And I just have to say Marie-Jeanne forever.

**Craig:** Toujours.

**Aline:** She was incredible. Marie-Jeanne Toujours. Exactly. This is a great – yeah, you mentioned some others here. Killing Eve. Homeland. The Crown.

**John:** The Crown, of course. There’s always choices about what she’s going to do which is mostly to do nothing. But, yeah, I would say that on the small screen we’re seeing more of these.

**Aline:** I have a question for you guys. Because I’ve never written a script where I didn’t have a woman with a moral dilemma. I mean, I feel like that’s what storytelling is in a way is at some point your character gets to a point where they have to choose their moral path. Like in Devil Wears Prada the person with the moral dilemma is not Miranda, because she sort of just is who she is. It’s Andy’s choice, moral choice, not whether she wants to work in fashion or not but whether she wants to be a person who is OK with screwing her friends over and putting career above all. That is her moral dilemma.

But even in 27 Dresses Katherine’s character at the end is deciding whether or not to out her sister as a hypocrite. I think all characters have moral dilemmas. Are you talking about like–?

**Craig:** Bigger kind of life and death sort of villainy ones. Like should I pursue this path of killing people to save people? We tend to assign these larger planet-changing or population-changing dilemmas to men in these movies, but women face them as well.

I think that Margaret is right that television does a better job of it, probably because television – most of these shows that she’s listed here are elevated soap operas. And in soap operas there must be escalating moral dilemmas all the time. So it’s natural that I think this would come up and touch on the female characters as well.

In movies when you’re dealing with these kind of big moral dilemmas as opposed to personal ones. I always talk about Nemo and I think Marlin has a moral dilemma of a sort of how to deal with this son and raise his son, but I don’t think that’s what we were talking about. We were talking more about those people—

**Aline:** I think of this as I’m a good person. I’m doing this. So sometimes you write stuff that is not necessarily hinging on right or wrong. Sometimes, you know, the climax of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, sorry, spoiler alert, is about not who she’s going to be with but what she’s going to do with her life. And that’s not a moral choice. What’s my path in life?

But a lot of the things I’ve written have to do with a woman deciding who she wants to be in the world morally. Sort of what the choices that she’s going to make to be useful in the world and to be a good person. So, it might be a genre, just the genres that are more populated by male lead characters the stakes are more like planets and death.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s like Lindsay Doran always says that women have figured out that what matters is the relationship. So they just get to the relationship. And men need planets exploding and then the relationship. [laughs] You can actually skip past the planets.

**Aline:** You definitely have less of women deciding whether or not they need to exterminate. I mean, I’m always – I have trouble with superhero movies with calibrating – so when they wipe out a whole planet, or a whole people in sci-fi, too, I’m so distracted by that that it’s really hard for me to move on to, you know, but they still have to smuggle the backpack out to this tiny planet. I’m like but they just killed a billion people on the purple planet?

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** How are you guys not standing around being bummed about that? I actually think there is a certain blitheness about killing that we’ve gotten to in these stories where there’s sort of mass killing and we just kind of walk past it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the see Alderaan, they’ve figured out that Alderaan has been exploded in Star Wars and they’re like wow, oh man, that’s terrible. And then about 20 minutes later they’re joking around. Like nobody towards the end of the movie is like, “Can we just have a moment of silence for the entire planet of people that got blown up?” No, no, it’s medal time. Everybody gets medals.

**John:** It’s like the say a million 9/11s happen all at once and they’re like, “All right, let’s trade some jokes.”

**Craig:** You know the Holocaust? A lot of us.

**Aline:** Spy stuff. Le Bureau, Americans, Homeland, those are all spy pieces where all of those female characters are really, really grappling with…

**Craig:** Definitely.

**John:** 100 percent.

**Aline:** Especially in Homeland where she’s dealing with kind of the morality of American foreign policy. And it’s sort of writ large in her own person stories.

**Craig:** Yup. And I would say the same thing for Zero Dark Thirty as well.

**John:** Agreed. All right. Last episode we talked about the burden of specificity. Rachel wrote in with a question about that. Lydia from London, England writes in, “I totally agree with Craig that BIPOC writers should not have to write more about race, but isn’t it preferable and better representation to give characters some cultural specificity, even if the story they’re in is not about race at all? I think To All the Boys I Loved Before does a great job of this. Lara Jean is a middleclass character whose story is not about race, but the small cultural touch tones of her home life make her home feel specific. And her identity as a Korean-American was thoughtfully baked in from the start by creators who understood it, and not as an afterthought by a majority white team suddenly realizing their movie isn’t diverse enough.

“For me this feels like a more trustworthy and satisfying representation.”

So, yes, and I’m also wondering though about the distinction between what you ought to do and what opportunities there are to do things. Because in answering the question last week, Craig, you were defending Rachel saying, no, you shouldn’t feel like you have to have representation – as a Black writer you shouldn’t have to be the person who is creating Black representation. But also there’s an opportunity, right?

**Craig:** Well, yeah. It comes down to the character, because I agree with Lydia that there is great value to be mined in characters with cultural specificity. However, there are certain types of shows and movies where that isn’t necessarily going to add what you want, or it may disrupt the tone of what you want. In fact, there was a bit of a kerfuffle this past week over the show Luther. It’s the English show from the BBC. Luther is sort of a cop show and Luther is played by Iris Elba.

And this week the BBC diversity chief named Miranda Wayland, who is a Black Britain, came under fire after she claimed the beloved detective chief inspector “doesn’t feel authentic because of his lack of Black culture.” She said “when it first came out everybody loved the fact that Idris Elba was in there, a really strong Black character lead. We all fell in love with him? Who didn’t, right? But after you got into about the second series,” meaning the second season for them, “you got kind of like, OK, he doesn’t have any Black friends. He doesn’t eat any Caribbean food. This doesn’t feel authentic.”

This did not go over well.

**John:** I can imagine.

**Craig:** Yeah. It did not go over well because, again, it’s putting a calculation on a creative thing. So I suppose the best advice I could give in general is to put your heart in a good place. Always consider how you can work cultural specificity in in a way that makes sense and serves the story and the tone, but don’t feel that as a writer of color that you have an additional burden that other writers don’t.

And similarly as a white writer don’t feel that you have less of a burden that other writers do. That’s the best I think I could do.

**John:** Now, Aline, you’re writing and you’re also developing TV shows. So, at what stage in the conversation do these questions come up?

**Aline:** It’s definitely something that comes up. One of the writers that I’ve worked with who I really admire, the way he thinks about these things, who is a writer of color and he once said to me, “It matters when I say it matters.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**Aline:** And I think that’s an excellent guide. I think that sometimes it’s very important in the details, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, a good example of like makes people feel seen as texture to the story but it’s not primarily an identity piece.

I think that if you’re a writer of color you probably have some sense of how you would like things to be represented in the world. And I would seize that. And I encourage writers that I work with to seize the opportunity to depict their community in the way tht they would like for it to be depicted. And it’s often not for me to say.

So, I think it matters when you say it matters. And if you feel like it really matters in the story specify it definitely. And if you feel like you want to leave it open to, you know, open up things that may look like the default, right, and the default as we’ve discussed is often white and male. If you can open up those people’s thinking by naming a character something, you know, opening it up in places where you see an opportunity to make the world look like the world. Because that’s what we’re trying to do.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Do your homework. Do your homework.

**John:** Last week on the episode we also talked about Scott Rudin. And this last week there was a Twitter thread by David Graham-Caso who was writing about his brother, Kevin, who died by suicide.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. I saw this.

**John:** And Kevin had worked for Scott Rudin as an executive assistant back in 2008 and 2009. Kevin actually had a Three Page Challenge on Scriptnotes in Episode 85.

**Craig:** Oh wow.

**John:** So we’re sorry for David’s loss. I would just point everybody to this Twitter thread where the brother talks through what Kevin experienced working for Scott Rudin and sort of the affect it had on his mental health overall. And how just that year or so working for him really did hurt him a lot. And sort of the ongoing effects of this. So, you know, as we talked about last week there was physical abuse that could actually be a crime and could be prosecuted, but I think this behavior that we saw from Rudin and from people in that kind of position really does have an impact that we need to be talking about.

**Craig:** This was just tragic to read. And it reminded me that sometimes we ask the wrong question. Did someone like Kevin end his life because of what Scott Rudin did? That’s not the question. The question is was someone like Kevin experiencing mental health problems or trauma that put him in a place where he was particularly vulnerable to people like Scott Rudin? Because I can certainly say that about myself and why I ended up working for the Weinsteins for so long. Because when you have a certain pattern in your head that’s been put there you oftentimes seek repetition of it.

And the great hope is that instead of finding the repetition of abusive behavior you meet people who treat you well and you learn that there is this other way. There are too many people out here who are the perfect negative fit for folks who are coming to Hollywood. Then it is even worse to contemplate that someone is arriving here has this little lock in their brain and someone like Scott Rudin is walking around with this very bad key. And he finds him and then that key goes into the lock and it starts turning it. That’s what upsets me so much.

People who come to this business are oftentimes very vulnerable. As our great Dennis Palumbo said in Episode 99 when people come to Hollywood they are often looking for the approval that they did not receive as children. This makes them very vulnerable. And it is our responsibility as adults and people in power and people of authority in this business to be aware of that and treat people kindly. Even if they seem willing to accept abuse.

**Aline:** Man, I just, threw him from a moving car, you know, sent people to the hospital. You know, I’m kind of surprised that there isn’t more blowback on this and I keep thinking about the fact that when Harvey was taken down his career was in a massive decline. And it felt like as he became less relevant to the business people felt more comfortable speaking out, which I suppose makes sense. Scott is still very powerful to a lot of different companies. He’s a huge Broadway producer in particular. And I think this is criminal behavior.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Aline:** And if this happened to my child I would, you know, pursue this. I would – I don’t know if people are suing him. I don’t know if the statute of limitations has run out on some of this. But this is absolutely appalling and unacceptable and people are going to still work with this guy.

**Craig:** I don’t know about that, Aline.

**John:** I don’t know that they will.

**Craig:** I think he’s done. I got to be honest, I think he’s done.

**Aline:** All right. Let’s see. Let’s do a check-in. Because, I don’t know that we can take people speaking out on Twitter as the marker. I think we have to see. I’m just very interested in the power and the employment and the money. I mean, I don’t think Scott has an overall deal with a studio right now, which means he’s drawing income from multiple companies, so that’s why there isn’t like a big firing as a friend of mine pointed out. There’s not a big where he’s deposed from a big company.

But–

**Craig:** There will be distancing I think.

**Aline:** There will be distancing. But this is not just “get me a new potato.” This is physical violence. Violence at a workplace. And you don’t have to be in any way vulnerable to be traumatized by physical violence in a place where there should be none.

**Craig:** Yeah. He sent a guy to the hospital. Broke a laptop over his hand. And I just think that the one thing Scott Rudin has done that is correct in the aftermath of this story coming out is he’s said nothing. That is indeed the best possible thing to do if you have that light on you, because everything you say just becomes more rope.

But I just don’t think people are going to want to have their selves blown up. The next person who announces that they are starting a new venture with Scott Rudin is going to hear about it from everyone.

**Aline:** I’d like to follow the money. I think we should follow the money.

**Craig:** Let’s follow the money.

**Aline:** I mean, sure, there are going to be actors who – if Scott is making movies and they’re good parts. But those are not the economically most powerful folks. I’m curious about who is investing in these shows and these movies. And they are ultimately responsible. And someone was saying to me today, “Aren’t you liable now if you know that this is how this person behaves and you go into business with them?”

**Craig:** Yes.

**Aline:** Is there a liability there?

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. That’s why I think they’re not going to do it.

**John:** These are all possible problems. So, we will flag this for follow up. And so a year from now let’s take a look and see where we’re at. My hunch is that the stuff that is in production or is sitting in the can will come out and there will be talk about it but it won’t kill those things. But I think the next author is not going to sell his book to Scott Rudin. I think the next thing he’s shopping around people will just step back away from it and won’t want to touch it. And I think that is what’s going to happen. Because as you said he’s no one’s employee, so you can’t just fire him. But you can simply not take his projects.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think he’s radioactive.

**John:** All right. One of my favorite things we’ve discussed on this show has been the crush from last episode.

**Craig:** The best.

**John:** And so Megana read the original crush letter, so I want to make sure that she comes back for this follow up that we have, because I also want to hear Aline’s take on this. So, Megana, can you come on and give us a follow up from Oops who has a crush on her producer?

**Megana Rao:** Hello. OK. So I cut this first part down for time to protect Oops’s identity. But to get you guys up to speed her production is currently in quarantine and the producer has gone ahead and asked her to get a drink after the quarantine ends, which should be this weekend.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** Wow.

**Megana:** And so Oops wrote in and she said, “As it stands we have eight weeks of prep and a ten-week shoot. As much as I love it I don’t think I can sit in this giddy Victorian fan-waving space for that long without being sick on myself. I’m just going to go have a couple of drinks, be chill, see what the vibe is, and maybe pull the Mazin rip cord a la what are we doing, there’s something here right, and just see how it goes.

“If I fall flat on my face that’s fine. At least I got it out there and can just get up and move forward. I’ll take a little minor embarrassment over another four months of will they/won’t they. Because as much as I love a good rom-com I don’t want it to be my life. I promise to come through with any further updates. You guys are amazing. Thank you so much for the sagest of advice. And for what it’s worth, we always need more Sexy Craig.”

**Craig:** You will always have more Sexy Craig. Sexy Craig doesn’t run out. You know what I’m saying? He doesn’t get tired. Ever.

**Aline:** So, you know what?

**Craig:** No one pays attention to Sexy Craig. [laughs]

**John:** That’s how we get rid of him.

**Aline:** I listened to this question. This landed so completely differently on me. As I was listening to the podcast with my headphones on under my weighted blanket I really wanted to like sit up and call you guys. And I ran this by a couple female executives and another female writer. This is really tricky.

Now, I’m not going to – I think Oops, the specific of Oops’s situation are hard to tell without knowing the specifics. But I will say that this is something that I specifically did not do when I was a young writer. I specifically did not date anyone in the business. That may have been a more extreme stance than I needed to take, but the reason I did that was because especially executives and agents I was very aware of how they spoke about the women they had dated.

And to this day there are female writers who will come up and men will say some version of “she slept to the top.” And, again, I’m not saying that’s what Oops is doing. And I’m not saying this is right. I’m not saying this is the way things should be. But when you’re dealing with a patriarchy there’s a way things should be and the way things are.

And so even though this gentleman is not the person she reports to directly, he is part of the other company, right? And she doesn’t work for them. So Hollywood is one big workplace. Because we’re freelance and they’re not, but we are one big workplace where people talk. If it goes south and I hope it doesn’t, but if it goes south you have no recourse and now you’re inside your project with what might be attention. You break up with them, that’s going to be awkward. They break up with you, there’s an awkwardness there.

You got to be so, so, so careful. I wish there wasn’t a double standard, but in a business which is so male-dominated. When men flirted with me at work, especially when they did it in front of other people, I never took it as sincere interest. I always took it as an assertion of power. Like the director who looked at my ring and said, “Oh, you’re engaged. What a bummer.” Never thought he was interested in me. Only thought he was trying to diminish me frankly.

So, listen, I haven’t been on a date since 1996. So, I’m not as current. But I will say be super, super careful, especially about – I mean, the thing that Craig said which is like if you say I know we’re feeling this way and somebody says, “I’m sorry, we feel what way,” that’s not at a bar. That’s in your workplace. That is very hard to walk away from.

And so I thought that John said, you know, at first your instinct was to say wait and then to say no to your feelings, and I thought no to your feelings was a really good thought, not just as a writer, but also just note it. I feel like I have some chemistry with this person. And if it’s real chemistry that is going to be a real relationship it will wait.

If it’s hop into bed chemistry I think you should be really careful about introducing that into your workplace. Because Oops may have found her happy ever after, and I understand the temptation there, but I would just be very careful. I mean, I think whatever the streak is in my personality, I was always vaguely offended when that came up. Because I felt like well now you’re looking at me not as a peer. You’re looking at me as a girl to date. And I suppose that’s an antiquated way of looking at things. But I would just say be careful.

And I think John and Craig you have probably been in fewer rooms where sex has been introduced.

**Craig:** Every room I’m in, Aline. Every room I’m in.

**Aline:** Well, it feels pretty bad. And I will tell you just a funny – I mean, I guess this is funny – it’s a little dark P.S. to this. So I never went out with any executives or agents. I think writer to writer is a different story, because you’re not – there’s a different power imbalance. But one of the gentleman who was an agent-executive back in the day, so I had lunch with him not long ago, maybe a year and a half ago. And he’s my age. And he said, and again, as I made clear this was never on the table. This was never on the table. And he very magnanimously said to me, and it was clear that he thought he was saying something really flattering and he said it in front of his female executive. He said, “You know Aline back in the day when we were in our 20s I totally would have slept with you, which is like a weird thing for me because I usually don’t want to have sex with the smart girls.”

That’s a thing that was said to me recently as if I was supposed to be like super flattered. And what I said was, “It was never on the table.” And everybody laughs. But like what?

**John:** So, Aline, here’s where I want to find the balance here, because I think so much of how you framed that is important to understand. And the recognition that in a patriarchy and in a double standard that she is risking more by going out on a date with this guy than he is risking. And that’s not right, but that is a reality.

And at the same time be open to the reality that people fall in love and meet their spouses at work situations.

**Aline:** 100 percent.

**John:** And you and I were both sort of starting in the business at the same time and I did date in the industry a lot. And slept with people I was working with. And that’s also OK. I guess there’s a double standard there as well, sort of women versus men there. But I want Oops to have a great personal life and a great work life. And for her to understand that she’s going to make some choices that are going to tip the balance there a little bit in these next couple weeks. So, that’s why I want to know what happens this weekend.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that’s good. I mean, everything that Aline said is mission critical for Oops to have in her head. And the good thing is I do recall that when she was describing the situation she did say that this guy has been an absolute gentleman. And I think that there’s value to that, because there are guys out there – there’s a spectrum of piggish behavior. No one is perfect, of course, but there are certain guys that it’s very red-flaggy. Some guys are sort of like in between. And then some guys, OK, gentlemen. So I want to give her the credit of her own ability to evaluate. But I think trust but verify is a really great way of moving forward.

You are allowed to go into something in good faith. You just have to keep your eyes open and watch it carefully. When she says she doesn’t think she can sit in this giddy Victorian fan-waving space for that long, I get it. And there is—

**Aline:** Well, OK, I’m going to say two more things. Sets, they’re the most gossipy places. And if that becomes, and she mentioned in her last letter that people were aware that there was some chemistry. So if they start having a sexual relationship everyone will know about it in pretty short order.

**John:** Yup.

**Aline:** And, again, if that is enough of a priority for her to – I was going to use the word “risk.” Maybe it’s a risk. Then to have a strategy for what happens when for example his boss finds out about it, or other people on set find out about it. Everything she said last week led me to believe that this is a nice guy, where they’re having a real connection, in which case, man, movies you’re working so hard. You know, four months – again, this is an older lady talking. But in four months it feels like if you guys have had some nice dinners and hangs while you’re working and then when you’re done if it’s something that is a real thing – I have no problem with people meeting the person that they are romantically interested in at work. But this is a specific circumstance where her fate is tied to his fate and she does not have the same access to the levers of power that he does.

And the thing I just want people to remember is there is no one to go to. He has an HR department. You do not have an HR department.

**Craig:** Oops, she’s got us. She’s got a whole podcast.

**Aline:** [laughs] But, I mean, as a woman. So, when this has happened to me, when someone says – I’m nine months pregnant and I walk into a meeting and the executive says, “I guess this would be a bad day to punch you in the stomach,” I don’t have anyone to tell. I can either just laugh and move on, as I sort of did, and then cry in my car, as I did. And then go and hang out with Craig and John and my buddies and tell the story. But it sucks. And you have no one to tell. And I think, you know, relationships can go south in a billion different ways and can only go right in one way.

So, I don’t want to be the prim old lady, but I want her to be careful. And I’m sorry that there’s a double standard, but this is still an extremely male system.

**Craig:** I think we’ve given Oops a lot of really good boundaries, right? So, you can look around all of our various advices and see where kind of, you know, the optimism and the pessimism and the wariness and the trust are. And then I think move through it as the smart person that you are and remind yourself that you are an adult.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you can do this.

**John:** You’re also the writer who got this movie into production.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So congratulations on that. Celebrate that, also.

**Craig:** Exactly. This is one of the things about being human that we cannot avoid. We cannot avoid the infatuations. We cannot avoid love. We cannot avoid relationships with the people we’re attracted to. We can temper them. We can delay them. We can moderate them. How you approach this ultimately of course, Oops, you have all the agency here. It is up to you.

I think you’ve gotten the broadest possible spectrum of maybes, red flags, encouragement. What else can we give you?

**Aline:** I mean, she’s certainly gotten a lot of advice.

**Craig:** Yes. You’re drowning in advice now.

**Aline:** And I’m curious if this has ever happened to you guys, but it’s pretty incredible the amount of times, especially because I started working when I was 23. And I got married when I was 30. And in those years it was kind of incredible how much – and by the way, still after that. I mean, just telling you other stories where people feel like they need to call attention to your boobs or your butt or your marital status. It’s pretty shocking.

And I actually think that because I am older I learned to walk past it. And I hope that younger women have an ability to say, “Hey, that’s not cool.” But the problem is you don’t have anyone to tell. And that’s the issue.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know exactly – I mean, I think we’re all presuming that Oops is younger than we are. She might not be. But I know that what you’re saying is deeply, deeply true because even I have said some moments in my career, even I, where as a married guy and not exactly a Chippendales dancer, have had some moments where weird shit was said.

**Aline:** Yeah. Well, the funny thing is that I was always – because I was always aware not to bring that into the room it was always – it is always a shock to me. And the thing is one of the reasons it can get confusing is because we work on personal stuff. Right? These are personal stories. And you end up telling personal stories. And you have to. I don’t know what kind of movie this is, but generally we’re writing about human relationships. And so one of the things that distinguishes Hollywood from other workplaces is you’re going to tell a story about when you lost your virginity if that’s the show you’re working on. So by virtue of the kind of work we do you’re going to share more vulnerable, probably more vulnerable, parts of yourselves.

But that to me makes it even more important that we are careful and safe. And that as women in particular in a lot of ways you have to set up your own protective zone. And as you said that’s one of the things you learn to do not just as a writer, but as an adult.

**Craig:** Right. Because this is all messy everywhere. And, boy, if you were surprised when people said stuff to you, imagine how surprised I was when someone said something to me.

**Aline:** Yeah, but you know, Sexy Craig.

**John:** Sexy Craig.

**Craig:** Well, that’s the thing. Sometimes I forget how sexy Sexy Craig is.

**John:** Now, if a writer like Oops is very, very lucky she might have a boss like Aline or someone she’s working for like Aline. And so Aline—

**Aline:** Those segues.

**Craig:** Segue Man!

**Aline:** So good.

**John:** Aline, you are now a boss. And so you are working with writers who are working through pitches and you’re hopefully setting up shows at various places. Talk to us about your notes process with writers and sort of what you’ve learned now that you’ve been doing this for a while?

**Aline:** Yeah. And I wanted to ask you guys how you do this. So one of the things that I – we have a bunch of writers who are working for us. We have about six to eight writers who are working on various projects. And one of the things that I try to do as a producer is to approach things the way I would have enjoyed things being approached when I’m a writer, or when I was and am a writer.

What I found is that I don’t – and this was true in the writer’s room, too – I don’t have my system and everyone has to go with my system. I don’t say this is how we give notes, and you must get these notes in this format. When we start working with a writer I will ask them do you like spoken notes, do you like written notes, do you like written notes with suggestions or written notes with no suggestions? Because the thing you guys point out which is that you don’t want to activate the lizard brain. Right?

Once you’ve activated the fear-shame complex it’s very hard for writers to respond. So, for me I like spoken notes. I would rather get on the phone and have people walk me verbally through their notes, because I like to discuss, and because I like to hear the problem and respond to the problem in the moment. That’s probably when I’m going to have my best idea, because I’m a talker.

But some people when you try to do that they’re so activated by the thought that they have to be articulate that they would prefer to have written notes. And then among the people who like written notes some people really want to hear like hey this takes a little time getting started, why don’t you cut this scene, or move this. And some people just want to hear seems like we could get started a little more quickly.

So, I think one of the things I would love is for the business to be more flexible to the artist, because the artist is the one who has to write. And it always makes me laugh when you get notes which is like we should do blah-blah-blah, and I’m like we? Who is we? It’s me.

So, I think, you know, one of the things I try and do is I try and take all of the necessary kind of distancing that comes with a critique or comes with feedback and pose it more like is it possible, could we, could we think about, would this work, as opposed to dictates. Because you’re trying to keep people’s brains sort of limber.

Now, do you guys have a preference about whether you like spoken, written, what type of written?

**John:** I think like you I tend to prefer spoken, unless it’s just like down the page notes and then it’s fine for that. And Craig I remember you talking on our Notes on Notes episode about that lizard brain thing and keeping you from blocking up. What works for you?

**Craig:** I prefer to have a discussion about all of it. I don’t want to look at any notes on a page. I find that they are codified in a way that makes me feel vaguely nauseated. And the thing about a discussion is that you can go through methodically the way you write. Even if we’re going through, like, you know, I just went through an episode I just finished with Neil Druckmann. So I’m writing the episode. I send it to him. He reads it. And then we have a discussion. And at this point it was just some page notes. And what was nice is we get to a page. He can say, OK, here’s my question, or this line, and we have a discussion, and then I kind of like fix it. There. And then we move on.

And so now we’re not having this notes session which is like going to the dentist, lying back, and having them put needles in your mouth. Now you’re just working, which is what you want.

**Aline:** But, Craig, the three of us are talkers. And I, like you, I prefer that. But I always ask writers. And most of the ones that I’ve worked with like a document.

**Craig:** Great.

**Aline:** Because they like to tick it off. And, you know, there is a difference between the two-page document and the eight-page document. And trying to undo any kind of snarkiness in notes. When I get a set of notes, me personally that I like, I give them to Heather, our VP, Emily, our director of development, Jeff, our development coordinator. I will show them written notes that I like, that made me feel encouraged and happy.

But I have found like executives really want to give you written notes. And I will try and couple that for myself personally. I will try and couple that with a conversation because I so prefer it. But a lot of writers are really internal. And they don’t want to be – if you do it verbally they will feel called on the carpet, so they prefer–

**Craig:** That’s good to know. I think the point is you’re asking them what it is they’d like. You’re right, the executives literally have to write the notes down because that’s work product for them that they’re judged on. They have to be distributed internally and someone has to say, oh look, John did his job this week and wrote notes up. So whatever works for you as the writer I think it’s important. Even if there are written notes, write your written notes as an executive. And then if you know that that writer likes the conversation then call them with your written notes right there and walk through it.

I have no problem with that at all. I tend to like that. I also am particularly fond of questions. I think questions are inherently more respectful and therefore will be more productive than blanket statements.

**Aline:** Did you consider? Would it be possible?

**Craig:** I actually hate “did you consider.”

**Aline:** Oh, interesting.

**Craig:** Because did you consider is one of the more insulting ones. Like did you consider? Yeah, I considered that. Now let me tell why I didn’t do it. But what I do like is when I get to a place and it says something like “what were you going for here because what we got was this, but what were you intending?” Or, “is there a way that it could be more like this or this? If not, this is what we’re kind of missing from this. But how would you do it differently to get this or this? So that it is not just…”

Because my least favorite notes are the ones that are like “we feel that we’re missing an opportunity for more fun here.” Well, I feel that that doesn’t mean anything. Everything is an opportunity for everything. We could be missing an opportunity for a killing. Or a joke. Or something exploding. Or sex. Or anything. It’s all opportunities. Everything is building in choices. So why?

Everything is about why to me, and that’s why I kind of like the questioning aspect as opposed to the “this didn’t work, take out.” Oh, OK. No. Because I thought about it and you didn’t. I know why it’s there and you don’t. That kind of thing.

Although I have to say I always feel very self-conscious now. HBO gives excellent notes. I’ve got to tip my hat to those guys. They are really good at them. And I’m not kissing their asses. I was nervous like I’m doing this and then they’re like, “Oh, he’s talking about us.” I’m actually definitely not talking about HBO. But pick every other place I’ve worked at.

**John:** Yeah. I’m about to turn in something at a brand new place and I’m really curious what the notes are going to be like from that.

**Craig:** Brace yourself.

**John:** Yeah. I just don’t know.

**Aline:** Our company is a writer-driven company. Our sort of mission is to support writers. And I’ve just learned that part of that is being flexible to whatever – you know, some people want to come in and do cards with me and put them up. And some people want to do it on their own and come back with an outline. Some people don’t want an outline. I just try and let the writer enjoy their process. Because one of the problems with notes is that they can squeeze the joy.

So I’m trying to find notes that are – they’re never going to be fun, but that feel like a great conversation with someone who really respects you and the work. And is not clipping your wings, which they can often feel like.

**John:** All right, now I’m looking at the layout on the table here and so we have all these great dishes. And I need to break open this box that I thought was sprinkles cupcakes is actually about the hierarchy of genres. So, you and I have talked, I remember I think we talked about this on our walk a couple weeks ago. But talk me through what you perceive Hollywood tends to look at the hierarchy of genres. Which movies are important and meaningful versus which ones are trivial and not important? Is that the spectrum?

**Aline:** There’s just this dramas are better. You know, that’s how you’re made to feel. And the funny this is it’s not just awards or critics or whatever. And again so I work with a lot of female leads. My movies, even if We Bought a Zoo has a male lead, but that’s a female audience. I feel often still at the age of 53 head-padded by people. The most stunning example I think I told on this podcast was when somebody was talking about some really pretentious story thing and then turned to me and said, “Aline, do you have to worry about that in your movies?”

And I was like, no, no, I just write a makeover montage and then a meet-cute and then I call it a day. And what’s so interesting to me, I think we’ve got to all live in the moment of realizing that It Happened One Night won Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** And that was a romantic comedy. And somehow this primacy on darkness, seriousness, violence, bleakness, I get it, and taste is taste, but why is that considered fancier or cooler? Anybody who has written funny stuff and serious stuff knows that funny stuff is way harder.

**John:** Well also we’ve talked about this before on the show that if a man makes a movie it’s a serious thing, but if a woman makes a movie it’s a rom-com. Even if they’re exactly the same movie. But I do want to talk about the hierarchy of genres here, because I would say that Hollywood values most, or at least when it especially comes to awards time, is the sort of historical courtroom drama is sort of like there up at the top, or some important moment in history as a drama is at the very top. And near the bottom would be, you know, the light, fluffy romantic comedy. The thing that looks like it’s effortless but it’s actually really difficult to do.

And somewhere stretched in the middle of those are like the Marvel movies.

**Craig:** Oh, I think the spoof movie is underneath that one. I would argue the spoof movie is in the basement.

**Aline:** Yeah, when you get into the super broad comedies. But it’s kind of the thing about how like people will review stuff and be like these people were lazy. They weren’t lazy. You work as hard on the crappy ones as the good ones. You probably work more on the ones that don’t work than the ones that do work. Because the ones that do work just kind of have a special “they’re working” thing to them. When something is not working it’s a lot of work. And I don’t know why people think it’s more or less work to write a dark historical piece where somebody ends up dead in a well at the end. Why is that better or harder, given more credence than writing a legit funny movie or silly movie?

**Craig:** Well, I think one of the things about that process, and obviously I agree with the premise of your position here wildly. Violently at that. I have written a lot of comedies and writing Chernobyl was far, far easier than writing Scary Movie 4. It’s not even close. Not even close. Also, rarer. It’s just rarer to be able to write Scary Movie 4 and have that movie come out and people go see it than it is to write something like Chernobyl.

I do think that comedies are wildly undervalued. And part of it is because critics generally aren’t funny people. And as you get older you get less interested in comedy. It just seems like that’s sort of the way the world goes. And generally speaking critics are older. And their tastes harden. And their lives also begin to turn around things that are sadder. The older the get the more your life is about infirmity, sickness, approaching mortality, the collapsing of marriages, and all these things, right? And so they like it.

**Aline:** I never thought of that. I really never thought of that.

**Craig:** I mean, like my dad, somewhere around 50, so I just turned 50, somewhere around when he turned my age just started watching documentaries about World War II and never stopped. Like it just happens. And it’s happened to me. Because here I am, like the things that I’m interested in have gotten darker because it’s sort of where my mind has gone. So there is a natural built-in demographic over-celebration of drama.

Here’s a statistic for you. You mentioned It Happened One Night. There have been seven comedies that have won Best Picture since the beginning of the Academy Awards. Seven. One of them, the last one, was ten years ago, and it was The Artist, which was in French and silent. So I don’t count that one.

**John:** Important facts.

**Craig:** In fact you have to go back to Annie Hall. We’ll sidestep the problematic aspects for this discussion. Annie Hall, 1977.

**John:** Broadcast News didn’t win?

**Aline:** No.

**Craig:** Broadcast News did not win.

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** So Annie Hall in 1977. 44 years ago.

**Aline:** I’m going to argue also that Annie Hall also rode in under the auteur exemption. Comedies by auteurs are considered—

**John:** A David O. Russell comedy. Yeah.

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** Yeah. Not accidentally a male auteur are considered more phi-phi-foo-foo.

**Craig:** Prior to Annie Hall in 1977, The Sting won in 1973. And there was Tom Jones from England in ’63. Going My Way, 1944. A musical comedy. And then You Can’t Take It With You which was a proper comedy-comedy, classic adapted one-act or one-set play, and then It Happened One Night in 1934. That’s it. All of the incredible comedies that have come out over time, none of those, none have gotten Best Picture.

But Crash has Best Picture.

**Aline:** Well, I was going to say, so a lot of the movies that you think of as the definitive movies for a year are the comedies.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Aline:** There’s the ones that you’ve watched a million, billion times, and then you go back and look at what won Best Picture and you’re like, oh god, I forgot that even existed. And so it’s just a funny – but I think some of it is connected to sexism as I would. I think I’ve been that person through this whole podcast. But also what Craig said I didn’t think of which is also you know when they do those studies of who the Rotten Tomatoes critics are I wonder if you do an age breakdown that there is sort of a grumpiness. And also like a not understanding of what is funny, you know, or what people are finding funny.

**Craig:** They don’t know.

**John:** So the same discussion we’re having about movies though you could have about books. In the sense that the great American novel has to be written by a white man of a certain age. The same thing happens in literature. The same thing probably happens in music.

**Aline:** Oh, Broadway for sure.

**John:** Broadway for sure. And so I think why it matters is because when you decide that certain genres or certain kinds of writing are more valuable you pay those people more, you give them more respects. Even if it’s independent of the commercial success of these projects. And that’s challenging.

**Aline:** That’s why when I went to see Identity Thief I know how hard it is to write that movie. That’s a really hard movie to write.

**Craig:** It was hard. It was hard.

**Aline:** It is really hard. First of all, you’re walking in the shoes of a billion opposite buddy comedies with a road component. I mean, I look at the more slender comedies and think, wow, what a tiny target you had to make somebody laugh. You know, Game Night to me is like what an incredible thing to do to take something that could have been that minor. And we’ve watched that movie in our house – the movie that we’ve watched the most in our house is Rawson’s movie, Dodgeball.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. It’s great.

**Aline:** But then it’s just funny how people will then migrate to, I mean, somebody I know once who generally directs comedies is just always really searching for his awards movie.

**Craig:** Serious.

**Aline:** Yeah. Because it’s like you want to be able to get that. I understand. But I think that creative – that’s why I always think that the Writers Guild Awards will recognize comedy more frequently because writers understand how hard it is to do.

**Craig:** We get it. I mean, if you look back at 2005 in movies. That was the year that Crash came out and won Best Picture. But that same year Wedding Crashers came out. And so did 40-Year-Old Virgin. In no possible world is anybody thinking more about or watching Crash more than they have 40-Year-Old Virgin and Wedding Crashers. Those movies were massive and they were brilliant. And they were also movies that kind of changed comedy a bit as well. And no one cares about Crash.

And I’m sorry I’m beating up on Crash, it’s just it’s sort of a notorious underserving Best Picture.

**Aline:** The scene in Wedding Crashers where they sit on the steps of the building in Washington and Owen says, “You know, I think we’re getting a little old for this,” I think about and cite that scene all the time. Because that is one of the things that elevates that movie from an ordinary comedy to a truly great comedy which is the sadness of those guys kind of knowing how pathetic this is and how their friendship is based on something that’s kind of necrotic.

And it’s hard to do. Now obviously I am biased, but when I have written more serious pieces with fewer jokes in them I also find I get fewer notes. But structurally—

**Craig:** People respect you more somehow. Like they think that what is moving and dramatic to you is more sacrosanct than what is funny to you. And I always want to say it’s the same. It’s the same. You’re hiring me not for my personal feelings. What you’re hiring me for is the hope that what I think is good is also something that a lot of other people will think is good. That’s what you’re hiring me for. Taste.

**Aline:** Well, one of the funny things is that when we started in the business, now this is just like old people sitting around a table, but John was by far the grooviest of the three of us. I mean—

**Craig:** Sure. He was on IMDb.

**Aline:** Oh, but also John was like cool and had written cool movies that were more like awards-y.

**Craig:** He’s still cool.

**Aline:** No, what I’m saying we kind of caught up here and there. But I was really intimidated by John because I read Go early on and was like, wow, that script is so great. And he seemed to me like this really super cool bald guy with a leather jacket who was really kick ass.

**John:** I’ve never had a leather jacket.

**Aline:** I know. In my mind you did. The leather jacket you had in my mind was pretty cool. But, you know, John you’ve moved through a lot of different genres I would say not strictly speaking comedy. So even the ones that are a little bit lighter or a little bit more in the entertainment zone still keep you adjacent to the sanctioned things.

**John:** Our clock is quickly ticking down, so I think we need to get to our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Let’s do it.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is a post by Jacob Kaplan-Moss called Embrace the Grind. And so it starts with a description of like how this one magic trick is done which is important because it’s just like, yeah, there’s a little magic, but it’s mostly a lot of incredibly hard work and just like thousands of hours of time to set up all these props. And you think like well no one would actually do those things. And it reminded me of – I got a chance to work with Steven Spielberg when he was going to do Big Fish and I got to help out on some other projects with him. And I saw him on set and I realized like, oh, he’s just working really hard.

And it’s a thing I think we often forget about talented visionaries. In many cases it’s not that they’re actually better, they’re just actually willing to do a lot of really hard tedious work. And both Spielberg and Tim Burton, like they just plan really, really well and carefully. And a lot of what you’re seeing that looks just like mastery is just because they’ve mastered the ability to actually just do the work.

So I urge people to take a look at this post.

**Craig:** That’s so true.

**John:** And think about just sort of like grinding through things.

**Craig:** It reminds me, you know, we just bought a new home near you guys. So we are now moving – slowly moving – it’s going to take well over a year for us to transition because our daughter is still going to school where we are in La Cañada. So we have a new home near where you guys are. And I told David Kwong and he immediately said, “Are you doing any work in it?” And I said you know what? One of the reasons we bought this house is because it doesn’t really need much of anything. Maybe little bits here and there.

He goes, “Please tell me whatever it is, because if you open a wall or do something we can set something up.” And he said like two years from now you have a party and we do something that blows everyone’s mind because it’s impossible unless you had set it up two years earlier while the walls were open. I just thought like that’s so great. I love that.

**John:** That’s David Kwong.

**Craig:** That is David Kwong.

**John:** That’s doing the work. Craig, what have you got?

**Craig:** Well in keeping with my puzzle fetish, so you know I love bringing these – there’s a new phenomenon of these puzzle packs that come out specifically to support charities. And Nate Cardin, who is I believe a chemistry teacher perhaps at Harvard Westlake, and also an outstanding puzzle constructor and of course goes without saying solver, flagged me to – he is one of the guys that runs the Queer Qrosswords. So, he flagged me to this new similar crossword pack called These Puzzles Fund Abortion.

And these puzzles are brought together by lots of folks, although Rachel Fabi is the person that is sort of spearheading the promotion of this on Twitter. These Puzzles Fund Abortion. Crossword Puzzles for Reproduction Justice. It’s a good packet. And it all goes to the Baltimore Abortion Fund.

And I have a link here. By the way, I’m just super happy as somebody that has been supporting what I guess we traditionally call pro-choice efforts for a long time, I like that we’re saying abortion now because that’s what it is. I mean, granted, Planned Parenthood as we know does a ton more than just abortion. But it is good to normalize abortion. It is a thing that a lot of people do and need for all sorts of reasons.

And so if you like crossword puzzles and you like femaductive, female reproductive rights and the access to safe and affordable abortion then please do take a look at this link in the show notes. Donate and solve.

**Aline:** That’s fantastic. Puzzles and femaductive rights.

**Craig:** Femaductive rights.

**Aline:** These are two of my favorite things.

**Craig:** Can we make femaductive a thing?

**Aline:** Yeah, femaductive. That’s good.

**Craig:** Femaductive. I mean, it’s just saving time.

**Aline:** All right, I like to have my One Cool Things on this show be things that generally you probably aren’t talking about. I have, and I’ve discussed it on the show before, I have wavy but not really curly hair. Wavy-ish, curly-ish hair. And there’s a whole area of TikTok which is just about women generally showing how to curl their hair. Sometimes men. But what are the best products, ways, towels, methods, plopping your hair, forgetting your curls to be their full curliness.

So I’m just going to make a couple suggestions. I’m hoping that somebody will then let us know if that helped them find their curl. I can’t take credit for these. These come from my hair stylist, James Carameta from Harper Salon. I’m just going to tell you two things.

After you wash your hair, put in your curling cream, and there’s many good curling creams on the market. Comb it through. Do not scrunch. Finger coil.

**John:** OK.

**Craig:** John and I already knew this. We’ve been doing this.

**Aline:** They tell you to scrunch. Don’t scrunch.

**John:** No, don’t scrunch.

**Craig:** Don’t scrunch.

**Aline:** Just finger coil the curls where you want them and then don’t touch it. Don’t touch it.

**Craig:** Don’t touch…

**Aline:** Watch TV. Make dinner. Do not keep scrunching, curling. Just put the finger curls in, go about your business. It has changed my life.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** I’m going to have to get on this.

**John:** It sounds like less work and better outcomes. So, I’m glad to hear it.

**Aline:** 100 percent. And less heat damage.

**John:** Good. All right. Maybe Megana who is on this podcast will be able to use that. We certainly cannot. But that’s awesome. That’s great.

**Megana:** Yeah, I have a ton of follow up questions that I’ll ask Aline later.

**Craig:** You guys need your own podcast on that.

**Aline:** I use the [Arun Co] Curling Cream. And the shampoo that I plugged last time I was on the show.

**Megana:** Yes, I remember that. OK, perfect.

**Craig:** I use shampoo.

**John:** Yeah. Honestly I don’t even use shampoo because I don’t have enough hair to use shampoo. I just wash.

**Craig:** I use a shampoo brand called For What’s Left. [laughs]

**John:** Good stuff. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Congrats to Matthew Chilelli and his husband Tao on their green card.

**Craig:** Yay.

**Aline:** Yay.

**John:** That’s very good news. Our outro this weeks is by Peter Hoopes. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter I am @johnaugust. Craig is not on Twitter anymore. Aline, are you on Twitter? Are you using the Twitter these days?

**Aline:** I am @alinebmckenna. I’m not there very much, but I pop in.

**John:** Tag her. 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 interesting things about writing.

**Craig:** Inneresting.

**John:** 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 of scientific discovery that Aline is about to drop on us.

**Aline:** Mmmm.

**John:** Aline, thank you for stopping by.

**Craig:** Thanks Aline.

**Aline:** Yes, I will pick up my cupcake box and go.

**John:** Yay.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right, Aline, break the news. What have you learned? Tell us.

**Aline:** I wanted to talk about, have you guys talked about your 23andMe? Have you guys both done 23andMe?

**John:** We have because I learned that I am even more German than I thought I was. And Craig is related to–

**Craig:** Megan Amram.

**John:** Another one of our previous guests. Megan Amram.

**Craig:** She’s my cousin.

**Aline:** Well, one of the last times I saw Craig we compared our 23andMe. And we are distant cousins.

**Craig:** That makes sense.

**Aline:** We are not close. But we are distant cousins. But, you know, I was very interested in this because – so Craig you’re Ashkenazi. What percent are you?

**Craig:** I am 99.6 percent Ashkenazi Jewish.

**John:** That’s a lot.

**Aline:** So most of my Jewish friends are indeed like that. But my mother is Sephardic. Her mother was Algerian. Her father was Moroccan. She’s French. And so fascinatingly I knew that Sephardic Jews have more diverse influences, but–

**Craig:** Spanish. African.

**Aline:** I found out, yes, so my largest pieces are Ashkenazi Jew is 51%.

**Craig:** Oh my god, you’re a half a Jew.

**Aline:** I am half a Jew because my father is – no, sorry, yes, no it’s 51%. And the other bigger components are North African, of which I am 15.2 percent. And then delightfully Italian, of which I am 11.4 percent.

**Craig:** Nice.

**Aline:** What a delight. So when I found that out I was so excited I took my entire family to E Baldi. But it’s really fun to see, so Ashkenazi Jews, really I have five percent Arab, Egyptian and Levantine, West Asian and – so that’s basically like–

**Craig:** Moorish.

**Aline:** And Ottoman Empire stuff. And so it was really interesting, so you were saying as you get older you become the person who watches Holocaust documentaries, your dad, or war documentaries. And I am in the phase of middle age where I read books about Jews.

**Craig:** Oh dear lord. It’s begun.

**Aline:** So, I’m reading books about Sephardic Jews, Jews in Muslim lands, and it’s really fascinating to see how the Sephardic people peeled off from what is now the Middle East and wandered around Europe and North Africa. And so my background reflects that. And I know that some of this a little bit like astrology, right, because they’re just guessing here and there. But it’s really interesting.

And then, you know, the Ashkenazi Jew thing coexists with this other type of Jew which I think a lot of American Jews, or a lot of American people don’t really know that there is another type of Jew.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. No, we certainly – and when you meet the other – and I mentioned Neil Druckmann before who I’m working The Last of Us. He created the game and the story. And he is Israeli. Obviously he’s not like – I don’t think his lineage goes and stays within that area. But he is Israeli. He’s definitely more of a Sephardic kind of guy. And it’s a different sort of – they’re very different. Ashkenazi Jews and Sephardic Jews have a real difference to them. Believe me, I am distressed by the level of inbreeding that has resulted in me. This is not correct. You don’t want this. You don’t want to be 99.6 anything.

I’m glad my kids are not. Although I have also noticed in my kids that even though they are both 50% Jewish my daughter is definitely way more Jewish than my son. Like as far as Jewishness goes, it’s hard to describe it, but she’s more Jewish.

**Aline:** My brother’s results were less Italian and more Middle Eastern. And he definitely has different appearance things. Of course, you know, these are all–

**John:** I do want to talk about, there’s a little bit of hand-waving happening here.

**Aline:** Yes, there is.

**John:** Because it’s not like they can say like, oh, this spot of the gene on your DNA shows that you are from this thing. What they do is they take a bunch of samples from all over the world and they say like, OK, well these patterns seem to match these different places. But that Italian thing could just be because there was a community of people who were in Italy for whatever reason but they weren’t actually part of the larger Italian group.

**Aline:** That’s right.

**John:** So it gets all a little bit murky when you start to try to drill down into individual things because people will show up as like, oh, it turns out that I must be part Filipino. And then they’ll check about six months later it’s like oh no it turns out that’s completely wrong and I’m not Filipino at all.

**Aline:** Well, the 0.1 percent of my heritage which is Finnish I have questions about.

**Craig:** I also have a tiny bit of Fin.

**Aline:** Maybe that’s how we’re cousins.

**Craig:** The Fin cousins.

**Aline:** We have cousins from Finland. There’s just like two kind of very talkative, complaining Finnish people sitting somewhere.

**John:** Craig that’s where you got your teeth that don’t have cavities, as you talked about.

**Aline:** Oh my god.

**John:** Your teeth came from Fins and so therefore…

**Craig:** I have god given teeth. It is the weirdest thing. I mean, I just, you know, 50 years of living you think you’d get one cavity.

**Aline:** Well it’s funny how you get the problem that you have that other people, like I have extremely hairy – well I had very hairy legs before I lasered them. But hairy legs. Hairy arms. Like three hairs under my arms. I don’t know that everyone needed to know that.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But that’s why they pay for the extra.

**Aline:** The bonus content.

**John:** Thanks Aline.

**Aline:** Bye guys.

**Craig:** Thanks Aline. Good talking to you.

**Aline:** Thank you. All right, bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Arclight Cinemas and Pacific Theatres Announce Won’t be Reopening](https://deadline.com/2021/04/arclight-cinemas-and-pacific-theatres-wont-be-reopening-1234732936/)
* Final Draft 12 adds the ability to import PDFs! Download [Highland 2 here for free](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/screenwriters.php)
* Check out the Highland 2 Student License [here for professors and students](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/students.php)
* David Graham-Caso [Thread](https://twitter.com/dgrahamcaso/status/1380000780053139457) on his brother’s experience working for Scott Rudin
* [“These Puzzles Fund Abortion”](https://fund.nnaf.org/fundraiser/3196850) via Rachel Fabi
* [Embrace the Grind](https://jacobian.org/2021/apr/7/embrace-the-grind/) post by Jacob Kaplan-Moss
* [Writer Emergency Pack kickstarter — 8,000 decks to send out](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSYTA4bLo24)
* [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 Peter Hoopes ([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/497standard.mp3).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Weird.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah. Lovely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Well…

**John:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Easy.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Improving.

**Craig:** OK.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

**John:** You love WGA surveys.

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

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

**Craig:** OK.

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

Do you accept this thesis?

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

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

**John:** Uh-huh.

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

**John:** The Father.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, have you ever heard of Captain Beefheart?

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yup.

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s weird.

**John:** It is weird.

**Craig:** It’s weird.

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

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

**John:** Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yay.

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

**Craig:** No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** It’s Chernobyl but it’s–

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

**John:** Billy Elliot.

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

**John:** The Full Monty.

**Craig:** Sorry.

**John:** It doesn’t really matter.

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

**John:** I don’t know.

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

**John:** No.

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

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

**Craig:** We’re keeping this, too.

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

**Craig:** Oh the Mandela.

**John:** It’s the Mandela Effect.

**Craig:** Mandela Effect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Spectacular.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Oh my gosh.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** Yeah. Jonni Remmler’s dad.

**John:** Jonni Remmler’s Da.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Who?

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

**John:** Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then he has to actually get good or something.

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** There must be love.

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

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

**John:** Yes.

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

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

**Craig:** Your body shuts down.

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

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

**John:** The flight path.

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

**John:** Don’t do this.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No.

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

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

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

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** That’s crazy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Anyway.

**John:** Will We Crash scratcher?

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right. Fake families.

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** So weird.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** You wouldn’t believe it.

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

**John:** Turkey.

**Craig:** Turkey.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yup.

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

**Craig:** Thanks folks.

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

**Megana Rao:** Hello.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

**Megana:** I loved it.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yassss.

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

**Craig:** Oh sure. Sure.

**Megana:** But “yassss” is the–

**Craig:** Yassss is obviously.

**Megana:** I welcome that whenever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Or take a shower.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Please.

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

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

It’s not great.

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**John:** Agreed.

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

**John:** 100 percent.

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

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

**Craig:** Of course.

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

**John:** He’s a crab.

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

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

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

**John:** All right.

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

**John:** No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Change for your man.

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

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

**John:** I don’t know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** It’s a fun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Thanks Megana.

**Megana:** Thank you.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** How to save that.

**Craig:** I like that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Absolutely.

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

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

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

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** I love it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Craig needs that.

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

**John:** Hopefully a fair number.

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

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

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

**John:** I’m very excited for it.

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

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

**Craig:** I’m getting fired?

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record. Craig, thank you for being here live in person.

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

[Bonus segment]

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

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

**John:** No.

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

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** It does.

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

**John:** This is Hollywood.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**John:** That would be amazing.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s the only way.

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

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

**John:** A Tony is good.

**Craig:** I want the Tony.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Oh wow.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

**John:** Bleak but witty.

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

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

**Craig:** Bleak but witty.

**John:** Bleak, but witty.

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

**John:** No, we’ve not.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Thanks John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Rachel Syme Twitter](https://twitter.com/rachsyme/status/1387803897276870656?s=21)
* [Russian Man ‘Trapped’ on Chinese Reality TV show Finally Voted out After Three Months](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/27/russian-man-trapped-chinese-reality-tv-show-voted-out-lelush-vladislav-ivanov-produce-camp) by Helen Davidson and Andrew Roth
* [European Super Soccer League](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/sports/soccer/super-league-soccer.html) by Tariq Panja and Rory Smith
* [The Saboteurs You can Hire to End your Relationship](https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200731-the-saboteurs-you-can-hire-to-end-your-relationship) by Christine Ro
* [Haunting Photos Reveal a Massive Abandoned Town of Disneyesque Castles](https://www.architecturaldigest.com/gallery/haunting-photos-reveal-massive-abandoned-town-disneyesque-castles) by Jessica Cherner
* [Dawn of the Necromancer](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dawnofthenecromancer/dawn-of-the-necromancer-5th-edition-adventure) on Kickstarter
* [How the Internet Archive Digitizes Old LPs](https://twitter.com/internetarchive/status/1386423512810721284?s=20)
* [Dr. Fill and AI](https://slate.com/technology/2021/04/american-crossword-puzzle-tournament-dr-fill-artificial-intelligence.html)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
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* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Andrew Smith ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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