Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/creating-a-visual-language).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So today’s episode was recorded way back in January, pre-pandemic. I sat down with writer-director Lorene Scafaria and costume designer Mitchell Travers to talk about their collaboration on Hustlers and how to think visually about story. In this conversation we discuss locations, production design, cinematography, choreography, and some major focus on preproduction and the role of the writer.

We had a great audience with great questions. And I am suddenly so nostalgic for being in a room with strangers. So, listen to this conversation. I think you’ll really enjoy it and you’ll get a lot out of it. Craig would get a lot out of it because he’s always such a big fan of visual description of characters and really thinking visually about what you’re writing.

Now, Premium members stick around after the credits because I Skype with Mitchell seven months after the fact to answer a few more question that didn’t get answered that night, really about how screenwriters should be thinking about what their characters are wearing and the things he notices in scripts as a costume designer that drive him crazy. Just what research you need to do, what stuff you should not include. So I thought it’s a really good addendum to the conversation we had with Mitchell and Lorene.

So, that’s our show. I hope you enjoy it. It was a great conversation. Lorene is fantastic. Mitchell was a great find. And we’ll be back next week with a normal episode. Enjoy.

Hi everyone and welcome. It’s so exciting to be here. Lorene, I saw you right before the holidays because we talked about your amazing movie Hustlers on Scriptnotes, the holiday show. So we talked about the origin of the movie. We talked about how you got it all made. Let’s do the quickest recap for folks who didn’t listen to that episode. The quick recap of how Hustlers came to be as a movie.

**Lorene Scafaria:** It was a writing assignment. So I was sent the article the summer of 2016. Went in and gave my spiel for how I would adapt it to the screen. I was told to stop talking about wanting to direct it so I could get the writing job, so I tried. And then worked on a few drafts of the script. Then kind of waited patiently while they sent the script to a lot of other people. And I think it took 10 months to just get the meeting to put myself out there to direct it.

Got that. Then worked to get Jennifer Lopez on board. The movie kind of fell apart a number of times. We had a home, we lost a home. We brought it around town the week of the Kavanaugh hearings. And that was hard. And then STX, they were kind of the only place that got it, and stepped up and kind of saved the day. And then I still worked on a few more drafts of the script, kind of page one rewrites.

And then they green lit in mid-January 2019. And I had to move to New York and that was it.

**John:** You’re off to the races. So, you are a phenomenal screenwriter and people can read the screenplay that you wrote and they should read the screenplay you wrote because you wrote a phenomenal screenplay. We’re not going to talk anymore about that really tonight. This is not a night about talking about you as a screenwriter. This is a night about talking about you as a director. Because in our previous conversations we’ve talked about sort of origin and story and character and these points – and these are all things that a director would care about. But I really want to talk about the visual language of this movie and sort of how you marshalled all these talents together to create the movie that we’re watching, the movie that we’re seeing.

And I want to start with Mitchell and sort of how you came on board in this process. How did you find him? What was the connection here?

**Lorene:** Eighth Grade. Mitchell was working on that. I know the guy who made it. And so I sort of just told Mitchell I’m so sorry you’re doing this movie that I’m going to someday actually see made, Hustlers, so you had no choice. I’m so sorry.

**Mitchell Travers:** I never did.

**Lorene:** And that was it. I just loved his work. I thought he made these pieces in that film so iconic, that green bathing suit, and so many little moments of like girl culture. And, yeah, that was the origin really.

**Mitchell:** I remember we were on the set of Eighth Grade and I had had a wonderful conversation with Lorene. And moments later Bo came up and he was like, “So you’re doing Lorene’s movie?” And I was like, what? No one had ever talked to me about a movie and he was like, “Oh, it’s a stripper movie. She said you’re doing it.” And I just went along with it and I figured why not. I’ve never seen a stripper movie like this, so yeah, let’s go.

**John:** So what are the initial conversations? Did you send him the script? How do you start a conversation with a costume designer about sort of what the wardrobe look of a movie is going to be?

**Lorene:** Yeah, I sent him the script. And I mean it really is a movie told through wardrobe. It really is kind of the essential partner in storytelling honestly with this film. So, there were a lot of lines in the script about Destiny’s jewelry making noise in order to show her anxiety or nervousness or how uncomfortable she is during a scene. So, there were things in there that I think Mitchell picked up on right away. And, yeah, the sort of fun of this very recent period piece. I think that was a lot of what we talked about.

**Mitchell:** We share a love for or a nostalgia for this time and it can be looked down upon and it can be sort of trashy and unglamorous. But there was something about it that we just kept loving. And I would send her pictures of like Kim Kardashian with the ugliest handbag in the world, with just like heart emojis. And she would get it instantly.

And we sort of always had that shared joy about these amazing mistakes that we all made as a culture. You all did it. So, it was just a love letter to that time in our lives and these women’s lives.

**John:** So, both of you had to do a tremendous amount of research obviously to figure out time wise, because your memory fails you. You have to be able to do the research to figure out what was the look, what was happening in culture at this time. Lorene, what was your research process for figuring out what those specific time periods were like? Because there’s really two time frames we’re looking at. There’s a forward in time from when Destiny starts working at the club, but then we’re jumping forward to when she’s talking to the journalist. So, how do you approach those timelines?

**Lorene:** Well, my eyebrows never grew back from this era. So it started with making sure that Constance Wu was comfortable with tweezing her eyebrows into oblivion. Yeah, I mean, the research is certainly looking at old photographs. I think we forget what we were wearing in that time period. I think the style icons who were around during that time period. That’s part of the fun of having Jennifer Lopez even in this movie is taking like that–

**John:** She was probably taking cues – that character was taking cues from what Jennifer Lopez was wearing in the real world.

**Lorene:** That was her style icon for sure was Jennifer Lopez. But we had others in the mix. Miley Cyrus.

**Mitchell:** Miley Cyrus. Nicole Richie is like a goddess to me. And there were just really embarrassing things that happened between Paris and Nicole that I found a kinship to that relationship pretty early on. And then once you start it’s like a black hole that you can’t get out of because there’s Tila Tequila. There’s Flavor of Love. There’s early Beyoncé. And it’s just like this wealth of imagery.

**John:** So you have this imagery. What is the process of sharing this imagery? We’re trying to be really concrete in these things. Is it a Dropbox folder that you’re sharing? How are you getting this information back and forth between the two of you?

**Mitchell:** I use a website and it’s password protected and I have it for anybody that I’m collaborating with. And I also use it for my team as well, so that if you can’t get me or if somebody remembers an image that I showed them they can access it. I find that the idea of having boards is lovely, but the way we make movies, and especially the way we made this movie it was happening at such a pace that it had to be in your pocket at all times.

So I would put different boards together for each character. And update them – I would start to include the fitting photos in the research so that they sort of meld and you keep the ideas consistent.

**John:** Make sure we all know what fitting photos are of the actual actor in that wardrobe?

**Mitchell:** Correct. I outfitted out fitting room with Girls Girls Girls signs and these neon lights to try to create an atmosphere, to get the girls comfortable. So all of our fitting photos were done in that romantic light that we ended up using. But all of the fitting photos are just no hair, no makeup, just costumes, and trying to get people into the bones of these characters.

**Lorene:** And that’s a lot of it is making sure that obviously they feel comfortable in what they’re wearing, but also I mean these outfits are anything but comfortable. So much of the costume is the skin itself. But he’s right about the pace. It really was crazy. You certainly had some people there to fit them ahead of time and others not necessarily. A lot of lead up to it.

But it was one of those things where in order to control the color palette even a little bit, I said to Mitchell early on it might be good to have an obstruction, like what if there’s no green in this movie other than money. And I think we stuck to that.

**Mitchell:** We did.

**Lorene:** There’s some jade in there. I don’t know how you got it in there.

**Mitchell:** It’s the one dress. It’s the one dress.

**John:** So talk to me about obstructions. Because this is a conversation – this is a thing you’ll see in many movies, now that we’ve put this in your head you’re going to watch them and you realize a color is missing, or there’s this specific color palette for this past time period or this present time period. How early did you make some of those decisions? And was it just you? Is there a production designer who is involved? Who else is involved in those decisions?

**Lorene:** Yeah, it’s all of us. It’s the production designer, DP, Mitchell, costume designer, certainly that’s the main group who is deciding the look of it. I think early on I kind of had said to everybody it felt like the production design needed to be as grounded as possible. And the wardrobe felt like an opportunity to be a little more heightened. And that the camera felt like depending on a moment could dip between the two.

So we kind of started there. Color palette, again it’s kind of difficult. The truth is the richer you get the more color drains from your body.

**John:** Tell me more about that. What do you mean by that?

**Lorene:** I mean, I think if you go into those spaces, I mean, there’s certainly a contrast with Wall Street and the men and what they’re wearing. You got your blues and, you know. And I think that we have a progression of wealth for the women as well.

**John:** When we see Constance Wu in the future timeline she’s drained and she’s white and she’s in a white suit.

**Lorene:** She’s presenting herself as good as she can in this very clean environment.

**Mitchell:** That actually comes from Lindsay Lohan at court.

**John:** Nice.

**Mitchell:** And it’s true. And another day we fell down the rabbit hole and we started looking at what these women were wearing to their court appearances, because they were frequent at this time. And it was, you know, we found that there was this projection of innocence all the time where it was the days of Just Jared and Perez Hilton. So you could track the timestamps. The night before you would see a mesh top with the bra sticking out and the next morning you would see an all-white ensemble. And we just loved this idea that you can project the idea that you’ve done absolutely nothing wrong, even though those photos of the night before.

**Lorene:** The sobering reality of it, too. I mean, the contrast obviously throughout the film, but then it kind of catches up to itself. And by the end of the film I think the women, too, are in much more subdued colors.

**John:** You have Mitchell on board. How are you assembling the rest of your team? So I’m talking sort of your DP, your production designer, your art director. How are you putting these people together and what are the conversations you’re having with them and are they having with each other? How do you foster that teamwork?

**Lorene:** I met with so many DPs and talent and this position just kind of didn’t necessarily line up. And I remember I was about to pull the trigger on hiring someone, the nicest, most talented person that I had come across. Because the shorthand is so important and the relationship is so important. And it’s often contentious. And it doesn’t have to be.

And so I remember I was on the phone with Mitchell. It was actually our first like official conversation. So we probably should have been diving into a lot of things. I think we did a little bit. But that day after I had thought I was going to pull the trigger on someone I saw that Janelle Monáe video Make Me Feel and I was like who the hell shot this. And who is she? And her name was Todd Banhazl. But I was–

**John:** Why did you assume she was a woman?

**Lorene:** I don’t know. Just the aesthetic of it. The way that he shot women and their relationships and their bodies. I don’t know. I mean, that’s limited of me. Men can make great things. So sorry.

So I was on the phone with Mitchell and he said who is going to shoot this and I was like, ehhh, and then you said you have to meet Todd. He just happened to say it.

**Mitchell:** I had done a film with Todd. It was a very small film. But it was shot so romantically, even though the subject didn’t ask that of it. And frankly I hadn’t even really seen him since, but his work stayed with me from that film. And as I read Hustlers I just kept thinking like this is Todd. This is Todd’s movie. We were trying to figure out what was going to happen with this and I just felt that she didn’t feel like she had it yet. I was like this is my shot. It’s got to be Todd. Maybe he’s working. Maybe he doesn’t remember me. But this is his movie.

**Lorene:** You don’t understand. I had already called to say tell blah-blah-blah, you know, he’s hired. And so Mitchell said Todd and then I realized it was the same person whose music video I was like fawning over earlier that day. And I was like I’ve got to go. I have to hang up the phone—

**Mitchell:** She literally did.

**Lorene:** Stop the presses.

**Mitchell:** I was like she did Janelle Monáe’s video. And she was like, “I’ll call you back.”

**John:** So we’re going to talk first off about the DP relationship and what shooting and camera and all that stuff. So Todd couldn’t come tonight, but we’re going to talk through as if Todd were here and really look at that. But this idea of this being a romance is something I want to get into tonight and talk about. Because in many ways this does feel like a romance. It feels like Destiny and Ramona and their complicated relationship and yearning for approval and affection. In the writing and in how you were shooting it was that informing your choices?

**Lorene:** Yeah. It’s a love story. I think it informed so many drafts along the way. It was something that I think was discovered. I think the article paints the relationship between the women much more of like a business type relationship, more like partners. The minute I met Constance I thought there was going to be a really interesting dynamic between her and Jennifer, this sort of mentor/mentee relationship, but also mother/daughter, but also falling in love.

Yeah. I think as the process went along there was a point where I sort of felt like I needed to smash the script on the ground and so I opened up the title page and wrote Destiny and Ramona in its place. And kind of went from there. And that draft wasn’t what we ended up with, but so many scenes, the training sequences, little things that happen between them, how much of their relationship unfolded in that love story came from that.

So, yeah, and through the editing process it just became more and more clear that everything – certainly if it wasn’t about money and all the other things, the capitalism, everything else that it’s about, it really was grounded so much by this relationship and that longing and that want and that thing, that intimacy that women have. And how you lose one of those relationships it’s kind of worse than a divorce.

**John:** All right. We’re going to take our first clip and we’re actually going to go out of order. We’re going to look at clip two. This is where Destiny first sees Ramona at the club and sort of first sparks – this is how they begin. This is about page eight I think on your screenplay. But before we actually play it, let me read you what you actually wrote in the screenplay.

So if you were to read her screenplay–

**Lorene:** Yikes. What draft is this?

**John:** “Destiny turns to see Ramona, ten years older than Destiny, take the main stage like a boxer entering the ring. Ramona dances, commanding the room. The crowd is wild, throwing money until the stage is covered. Destiny is mesmerized.

“Ramona finishes her routine with one final flourish, smacks an armful of money to her chest, then steps offstage. Destiny watches in awe as Ramona crosses the room. All different guys reaching out. Ramona looks them in the eyes, whispers in their ears, and glides away with cash in hand.

“Destiny can’t look away as Ramona walks by and turns to her. ‘Doesn’t money make you horny?’ Destiny goes to respond, but Ramona is already gone. Off Destiny’s face we cut to the rooftop.

“Ramona sits against a skylight in her fur coat smoking. The club noise is drowned out by the silence of the city.”

Film is a visual medium. And I love doing a podcast, but I can’t talk about – that scene is not a podcast scene. That is a visual scene. Just remarkable. And that was the moment where I watched this movie and I was so happy and excited that I was watching this movie. Because it’s so terrific. And then we cut to the rooftop and she’s wearing the fur coat and it’s just amazing. An iconic moment.

But talk to me about the decisions that lead up to what we just watched. And so I want to start with just the design of the club. Because she’s backlit by the lights. How do you design that club? Is it a set? Is it a practical? What are we watching there when we’re inside the club?

**Lorene:** It’s a real strip club. It’s a real strip club in Long Island City. We could never have gotten the scope of that. We could never have afforded to build anything even close to that.

So we found a real place that had a layout that helped for an earlier scene, the first scene in the film where we’re following Destiny from the locker room out onto the floor.

**John:** That long Steadicam-ish shot.

**Lorene:** Yes. A one-take. Much like 1917, if you’ve seen that.

**John:** [laughs] It is basically 1917.

**Lorene:** It’s basically that. Very similar. War like. We actually did talk about it as a war film. I’m not kidding. So that’s how we chose this club. It had that incredible wall of that panel of LED lights behind it.

**John:** Oh, so you didn’t build that?

**Lorene:** No, no. That we didn’t build. But we did extend the stage. We turned that into that sort of big round. It was kind of just a little square at the end there. I’m trying to remember.

**John:** When is the conversation about you doing this? Is it a production designer?

**Lorene:** Mm-hmm. It’s all of us.

**John:** It’s everyone together.

**Lorene:** It’s mostly production design and our DP. I’m trying to figure out what we need. How can we best light her body to highlight the athleticism of it, to show the fantasy of it? For me there’s a theme of control that runs through the movie. So we just supplied that to the camera as well. And so a scene like that was one where Ramona is in control of where the camera is.

**John:** So you’re not watching Ramona. She is making you see her.

**Lorene:** Yes. That’s right.

**John:** It’s very much an active control of this. And so what is your conversation with Todd about lenses on her and sort of what it’s all like? Because the coverage of Destiny is pretty straightforward. We’re doing the push-ins and we’re seeing her point of view. But what is the conversation about how you’re focusing on Ramona?

**Lorene:** Well, so I have to back up. The thing that you read was probably even a later draft, like our shooting script once we knew that we were stepping out that scene. Because I really did write it like she sees Ramona up on stage doing one final flourish, and then it was more about watching her walk across the room like Goodfellas when Henry Hill is watching De Niro’s character for the first time, sort of tipping everybody out as he’s walking through the room. And instead Ramona is taking money as she walks through.

And so I thought it was much more about Destiny seeing those interactions. And I wasn’t relying on oh god the actor we get is going to be a dancer for three decades and she’s going to pole train for six weeks and do this incredible routine. So that was not the plan. This was not the plan at all. And then Jennifer said, you know, “I want to do it. I think it’s a really important thing to see this moment.” And she was not wrong.

And so Todd and I didn’t see that dance until two weeks before we had to shoot it, which was like the last week of our shoot. So we were at midpoint, right when you’re just sweating and like are we going to finish this on time. And so we saw that routine. She had worked with our pole choreographer, Johanna Sapakie. The song was one of those things that was–

**John:** I’ve actually watched the YouTube video where they talk through the training of it all and it’s remarkable. So she starts from kind of not being able to do the movements and puts it together, but she is an athlete. And so she’s able to do it.

**Lorene:** Well, she’s Jennifer Lopez. So, I don’t know, she’s in better shape than any human person. And she throws herself fully into this and really felt committed to what this scene was. But, still, you know, you don’t know how important is this? Are we really going to watch a two-minute dance? I was actually a little bit worried about the narrative and are we losing the narrative at this point.

And so that was one of those things that then once we saw it and we got our jaws off the ground we were like oh my god how we do pull this off and shoot it like the stunt that it is, but also like the live even that it was. Because that’s Jennifer Lopez stripping in front of 300 extras who we had to vet and make sure they’re good guys and everyone has got their phones in their pockets and stuff.

But no one even spoke about it. It was actually the most respectful group of people ever.

**John:** So we say strip, but she’s wearing an outfit. She’s wearing the outfit that you designed for her. So this is the first time that we’re going to see her do this thing. What is the conversation you have with Lorene, with the actor about what this moment is going to look like?

**Mitchell:** It was always like the costume that we’re all like what is that going to be. You know, how do we match what she’s doing with a costume? The beginning of the film sets up the locker room to be this place that is sort of a cacophony of costumes and the answer as it usually is is just less. And so when we got to the Ramona of it all it was like what can be no color, very few straps. How can I take this thing to be almost nonexistent?

There is an amazing photo of Jennifer in 2007 and she has about 1,500 silver bangles on her body and earrings the size of her face and I love it. And I found that one image as we were looking for Ramona influences and I was like it’s silver. It has to be this silver. And I tried a million different shapes on her, different things. Where are we going to cut the body? Where is it most appealing? What makes you feel best? What makes you feel safe? All things like that you have to ask of this costume.

And I couldn’t find it. It didn’t really exist. I had ideas of other costumes, where I would take the fringe of something or the neckline of something else and I was like, OK, we’re going to build this thing. And so I drew on a piece of people on my tailor’s table. We got it together. It fits in my hand. I showed it to Jennifer at the one fitting. We had sort of saved the club wear fitting until the end until we were really good with one another. And so she walked in and I’m holding this string. And I said I really believe in this. I really think that this is the answer.

And so she said, “OK, baby, let’s see.” And she put it on, she turned to me, and she just kind of looked at me like “let’s go.” And there was a boldness to it. There was a confidence to it. There was a movement to it. And it kind of just answered a lot of the questions I had been asking myself for weeks. I had this amazing fitting photo that I mentioned. And I just sent it to Lorene and I was like I just have to let her know. Because she’s either going to be obsessed with it or hate it instantly. And I got a pretty quick reaction out of Lorene, so I was like, OK, it works. That’s it.

**Lorene:** Yeah, I died. I don’t know. I couldn’t believe it. And I thought the coat and the hat, it was a really great little throwback to—

**Mitchell:** The Pussycat Dolls.

**Lorene:** Yes, exactly.

**John:** So a choice in a movie that is about stripping, a natural instinct would be sort of like take clothes off as the movie goes along, and you sort of do the opposite. She appears onscreen in sort of the least we’re ever going to see her in, and that is the height of her power. And the rest of the movie more things are being added as the relationship becomes deeper. Did you know that from the start or how do you get to those?

**Lorene:** Yeah, I mean, we certainly had so many approaches to it. It was the kind of thing where I thought we should see the most – I mean, this is a topless club in theory. We should see the most nudity back in the locker room where it’s really mundane frankly. I feel like we don’t see that kind of regular old nudity very often and so I was really interested in that and seeing how the girls interact with each other and their comfort levels with their bodies. And then the show of it and then the spectacle of it. What amount of it is out on the floor? What amount of it is out on the stage? What amount of it is back in the champagne rooms?

And so, yeah, again the theme of control. How much is someone in their bodies and the interaction – there’s other scenes where Ramona and Destiny are working in a champagne room together and–

**John:** That’s the most sexualized moment between the two of them.

**Lorene:** Yeah. And you see that they’re using it against him, really. So, a lot of that, we talked about the weaponization of it. What you wear for other people. What you wear for yourself. What you wear for each other. And how you influence each other.

**Mitchell:** We actively worked at something which I hope registers for some audience members, but sometimes when you see women wearing the least is when they’re putting on their clothes to go home. So we would work at someone putting on a pair of sweatpants, and then their bra, their jacket, their coat. And then living. So it wasn’t about revealing for somebody else. It was about finishing your job and going home.

**John:** So let’s take a look at another clip. And in this one I want to talk about the relationship between the two of them, as it goes from this initial sort of flush of the love story to a second level. We talk about weaponizing what they’re doing. This is literally creating a weapon, creating a drug, and a whole new plan for how they’re going to make money off of this. The hustle takes a new turn.

So, first, let’s take a look at this, and then I really want to dive deep into what we’re seeing onscreen. I want to start with the scene in the bar, the restaurant there. And your conversations with your DP, Todd, about this moment and sort of what you’re looking for. And I want to get really concrete and detail in terms of your setups.

So you’re in this place. It’s a practical location. It’s not a set.

**Lorene:** Yeah.

**John:** And so why did you choose to cover it the way you did and let’s talk through what the actual shots and angles are that you used to get that scene.

**Lorene:** I talked to Todd how I felt like this is actually the tightest we are on them, at least up until this point in the film. This sounds very strange. We referenced First Man. I would talk about being inside the ship. And this is one of those inside the ship moments where I felt like it was very important that we were inside the table with them. We were on kind of long lenses.

**John:** So there’s very shallow backgrounds there. You’re shooting into glass so you have to make sure that you’re not getting reflections and other weird stuff that you could see the outside and see the inside.

**Lorene:** We’re controlling the foot traffic outside but nothing else really. It was tough in a way because I just think this was the acting – this was the way to showcase their–

**John:** There’s nothing to hide there.

**Lorene:** That’s it.

**John:** A question for you, Mitchell. We’re so tight here. Do you save a great outfit because you know you’re not going to see all of it in a shot like this?

**Mitchell:** I actually had something completely different planned for this. And I will always go and just check the shot before as I start to get people dressed. And when I realized this is really a jewelry shot and it’s a shoulder shot. And Todd, like most DPs, loves wet pavement. Loves it. There was a conversation once where we were going to be able to see that out the window and Todd was really excited about that and just getting in there that day it was not going to happen. And so I was like I have that coat which does that which Todd wants in the scene, and I love it.

And if I can just get even the glint of that. The imagery that he was trying to use, I can do that for him with just a coat.

**Lorene:** Costume wet down.

**John:** So earrings are you. So you are responsible for earrings. I always get confused sort of the breakdown of hair and makeup.

**Lorene:** So did we.

**John:** So Jennifer Lopez’s stud here is makeup.

**Mitchell:** Correct.

**John:** So it’s complicated. Where the piercing is depends on whose department it is.

**Mitchell:** Correct.

**John:** So you know you’re in tight. And are you telling the actors at the start of the day how you’re planning to shoot it? What is your approach?

**Lorene:** I would always for the most part text if there’s not time for me to go to a trailer and talk to anybody in person. I would often text and say what the plan was for the day and what the sequence of events would be. So there were no surprises.

The truth is we shot this whole movie in 29 days so there just really wasn’t any time. Todd and I shot-listed everything, but still wanted to be spontaneous and leave room for things. And we certainly would adjust things. So that is what this scene really is. There’s something very human about how we’re seeing them. We’re seeing them close up. We’re seeing the makeup from earlier.

**John:** Yeah. The goal is really to see makeup. Because so often in films you’re not supposed to be able to notice the makeup. You’re so close here that you can’t help but see–

**Lorene:** You want to. I mean, I was desperate to see that. And, I mean, Jennifer looks 30 years old so it’s really hard to even make her look her age. And this was that kind of gritty moment for her. A very real moment for this character. But sort of wild-eyed. She needs to make a lot of sense even when she’s not making a lot of sense. So, yeah, we tried to keep it really grounded like that moment with the waitress coming in. Obviously there’s no reason to see this waitress–

**John:** So you’re dirty singles so that people can move into shots so you get a sense that they really are across from each other.

**Lorene:** That’s right.

**John:** Now, the contrast between that and we’re suddenly in the bar and it’s all happy and kind of a fantasy thing and you’re going for sort of the joke of the whip pan to reveal the other women that is such a contrast of tone deliberately. You know that you’re starting a whole kind of heist adventure when you move there.

**Lorene:** That bar, that was a big fight with Todd and Jane Muskey, the production designer. I think they fell in love with this other bar for other reasons and this place for me was just all of it. It was all about the blocking. It was all about that runway, that sort of tarmac for the women to land in from the front door. This corner of this bar where this man can sit in the corner and be surrounded by them. Then we used a dance floor instead of a track. You know, we’re on a dolly but we were able to kind of float around and kind of – even though we’re not going all the way around them it was still giving that kind of boozy quality and letting Gary kind of feel surrounded by these women and distracted enough while Ramona is doing her thing.

So, yeah.

**John:** Great. So without sound we’re able to follow what this conversation kind of is. We see that this woman is bullying and trying to convince her into something. The other woman is – if I were watching this on a plane and didn’t have my headphones in I could figure out kind of what was happening here and what the pressure was. And that’s because of the shots you picked and you how you shot this.

**Lorene:** Yeah. And I think moments like that, the waitress breaking it up, allowing for this intimacy, to see two characters interacting with someone differently. It’s all about their proximity. At this point, again, earlier in the movie we saw the diner itself. So we knew the lay of the land. And at this point it just doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but being in there with them, with this private conversation.

**John:** Mitchell, great work on the earrings and on the jacket shoulder. We’re noticing the wet pavement aspect.

**Mitchell:** One is formed under intense pressure and the other wants to take off.

**John:** Mitchell, you talked before about wardrobe having a heightened sort of fantasy quality. So, the clothes that they’re wearing is a little beyond what they might be able to afford. And so we’re seeing the women walk into the bar, is that an example of that? Where they’re dressed up a little bit more than they might be able to afford? What was your decision there?

**Mitchell:** In conversations with Lorene it was important to remember that this is the way that someone is telling a story versus the way that things happened. So, in moment like this where we knew that any man that they’re taking on would kind of be looking all over and trying to suss up what’s happening to them. I tried to use dresses that had metal hardware all over them and odd straps and things that would just catch your eye so you’re distracted. You’re a little disoriented. It feels gorgeous, but you’re not really sure of what you’re seeing.

And the same thing works with the nails on the face. All of the trappings of feminine dress that can be distracting and can also be used as tools in this scene.

**Lorene:** I feel like her snake earrings at the beginning is very Garden of Eden. I don’t know. Maybe.

**Mitchell:** Yes.

**John:** Yes. Deliberate choice. I’ll always say like, yes, that was the exact thinking behind those earrings.

**Lorene:** [laughs] That was exactly it.

**Mitchell:** Honestly the snake earrings came from a photo of Ashanti that I just always treasure.

**Lorene:** Garden of Eden.

**Mitchell:** And, again, that’s one of those moments, I always wear a coat on set. It’s like my lab coat basically. And I’ll have rings, earrings, clear bra straps, things like that on this movie. And so I’ll go in and I’ll dress to the shot because I know that that’s the way that Lorene makes a movie.

**John:** Can you talk to me about your team. Because this movie is shot in New York. You work in New York and Los Angeles. You work wherever. How do you assemble the team who is going to be able to help you do this? Because you may have a vision but you have to have a lot of people there to help you do things. What does your team look like?

**Mitchell:** Definitely. No costume designer can do what they do on their own. And a lot of times we get the credit for a group of like 35 people’s work, so it’s important to say things like this. On this movie I had three assistant designers who worked with me. I had a wardrobe supervisor who handles the continuity and the maintenance of the clothes. We don’t see everything, but you feel everything. And Lorene and I really fought to dress every single person in the club so that you felt – just you caught little pops of Ed Hardy. You caught little pops of terrible jeans with rhinestones on the back pockets and things like that.

So while you may not remember every part of it, you’ll feel like you were there and you remember all of those bad things. So, on this movie one of my assistants was completely in charge of background. You know, dress shoes had square toes. All those little things that add up. And the way that Lorene and Todd shoot a movie you then have shoes the size of a billboard, which we’re all dissecting here at this conversation.

So it all matters and I need to rely heavily on my team to make sure that if I can’t look at every toe on every dress shoe somebody is, because it all counts.

**John:** How much of this movie are you shopping and how much of the movie are you sewing?

**Mitchell:** I always start with what’s out there. And the weird thing about this movie is you can’t go to a rental house in LA. There’s no 2007 aisle. It’s not in a thrift store because it’s at this weird moment that no one really cared about at the time that I was making it. Now Zara is doing this. But at the time that we were doing it it was really difficult to find. And so I found it in the extremes. I found things at Burlington Coat Factory. I found things in people’s closets. Or I found things from vintage dealers who were prepping their stock for a few years from now.

And so I was going to them like I need the multi-color Louis Vuitton speedy that’s this size. And they were like, “Why? Who has that?” And I’m like please ask. I need it. I really do need it. So it came from all over the place, all of the shop stuff.

And there are only so many clothes in the world. There is a different costume in every scene of this movie. I did my first breakdown on a plane and I texted Lorene when I landed and I was like, Jesus, Lorene, there’s like thousands of costumes in this movie. And she was like, I know, it’s part of it. And at some point I ran out of clothes and I would have to say, OK, then we’re going to dye this dress. We’re going to add straps to this. We’re going to add hardware. This is now a skirt. You know, you just have to make enough clothing to dress Lorene’s women.

**John:** So let’s talk about Lorene’s women in the locker room. So this club you picked had a locker room which you could actually do a continuous shot from. Early on and later on in the show we’re seeing the women backstage. And so it’s the moment where we have the most sort of casual nudity, but also just so many women together. And as I watched it you’re shooting into mirrors. There’s a bunch of women, there’s a lot of stuff happening.

Lorene, how many women are in that locker room?

**Lorene:** I don’t know. I feel like it’s 15 speaking roles, but maybe I’m exaggerating.

**John:** It’s a lot of people in a small space. And no one is wearing green. So you kept the green out of there. Thank you very much for that.

**Lorene:** Thank you.

**John:** Talk to me about your motivation going into that and also the blocking and the planning for that because you have so many moving bodies. You want it to feel natural. But you’re also shooting into mirrors. There’s a lot happening there. So talk to me about–

**Lorene:** Yeah, it was chaos. And, I mean, we were four days in the club. So this was I think our last day in the club. Our Cardi day. Our Lizzo day.

**Mitchell:** This was the most insane day of my life to this date. We shot – like the biggest chunk of the movie. The Usher sequence. We shot this that day. We shot that long shot where she goes from the locker room all the way through the club. So we had like a few hundred extras. We had all of this talent on set. And the call sheet was like terrifying. And we all just took it one step at a time.

**Lorene:** This was one of those scenes, too, where we knew we wanted to capture something alive and real and let the women talk over each other. When I watch it it’s miraculous how much of that is scripted to be totally honest. I mean, I want to give them full credit for lines they made their own and there’s certainly some improvisations in there. But actually to their credit, to people’s credit, like Cardi and Lizzo, they’re also really delivering scripted lines.

But, yes, making it their own. We had two cameras going. It was sheer chaos. When I say that part of – like some of the things are the only time we got that line on camera. Some of those moments are like that was it. And I’m glad that it feels the way that it does and I was certainly checking things off as I was going and knowing, OK, we got that, we got that.

But in a way it was like how do we capture this thing. So we had the cameras rolling before anyone started to deliver the lines, before Jennifer entered. And we had two boom guys, because we didn’t have lavs on anyone.

**John:** Well, where are you going to hide a lav?

**Mitchell:** Exactly. I met the sound guy once.

**Lorene:** They were running around like crazy trying to hide. Everyone is trying to hide themselves.

**John:** And you must have blocked some – like some people are standing in front of mirrors deliberately so we can’t see the camera.

**Lorene:** There’s a rack or two that are used because they sell the clothes, the house moms often sell clothes backstage. So we were able to use some racks and there’s some piled up clothes and different things like that. Bodies positioned in certain places. But also we painted out our camera guys.

**John:** In post?

**Lorene:** Yeah.

**John:** After you went through the cut you realized like, OK, this is the shot I need and we have to get rid of–

**Lorene:** Yeah. We had to get rid of some bodies. Well, you know, some guys in black clothes. [laughs] Yeah. And there would be like a mic on the counter that now it looks like a makeup brush. So, visual effects, it’s wonderful. I learned a lot. I learned that you can do that. I mean, we couldn’t afford much of that obviously, so had to be careful, but it was the kind of thing where, oh, if we just – I just wish we got even more of it and weren’t trying to jump out of our own way.

And so, yeah, the chaos of wrangling all that. The blocking that I did was sort of the position of where everybody is and how she enters and who says hello and who they pass and where Diamond is in the room and where Ramona ends up and who sits and who stands. And so we wanted to keep that fluorescent vibe. That really like almost ugly mist of it. Again, a real strip club.

They had painted in there. It was Tiffany Blue. The manager said so that the girls felt expensive. So there was a big written thing on there that said, “Smile and look expensive.” But we painted that, you know, we got rid of that. And still added a lot of, I mean, there’s a lot of markings and writing on the mirror and everything.

**John:** On a day like that which was so busy and so technical and so challenging, how did you remind yourself about what was important in a scene? Because in that scene what is actually crucially important, much more so than even the jokes, is the role of the house mother and Jennifer Lopez telling them like “No, you have to eat some cake” because she made the cake. How do you remind yourself of what’s important?

**Lorene:** By the way, that cake was like 50 pounds.

**Mitchell:** It was crazy.

**Lorene:** It was one of the hardest things to do. I was like I’m so sorry Mercedes Ruehl to make you carry this gigantic cake. I don’t know. I mean, I think we just knew that it was an opportunity to capture the most camaraderie, the most – at this point in the movie we’ve seen Destiny be alone and stripping life can be a solo sport or a team sport. And so Destiny was living the solo sport version of it. And this is the locker room and this is the team and this is that sports movie.

So, we talked about it that way and talked about it League of their Own to The Wrestler. Various movies that kind of capture that spirit between people. And it’s also about girls getting ready. It reminds of my friends and I hanging out in the bathroom, putting on makeup, trying to psyche each other up to go out for the night. I haven’t done that in 20 years, but someday, at some point I remember that.

**John:** But are those conversations you’re having with your principal actors and the other actresses before the cameras start shooting to sort of get that vibe in there? How are you talking through that?

**Lorene:** Yeah. I mean, every time I met an actor to cast them we spoke about all the themes of the movie and why it felt important and what these scenes were trying to represent. So, yes, I’d speak to them about that.

But it was also about capturing that electricity and a lot of it is casting. A lot of it is Jennifer Lopez is Ramona and is like the sun just walked into the room. And how people interact and meet with her. And how sweet Trace Lysette is. And there are real strippers in that scene. Not just background, you know, principals. And standup comedians. And obviously singers, musicians who I think just have that natural timing.

And, you know, Cardi was nervous, obviously. And so it was just about warming everybody up and making sure everybody felt like let’s keep it loose. And so there’s plenty that didn’t make it in there obviously. I wish I could have made an 18-minute version of that scene. But, yeah, there’s plenty that didn’t make it in there.

**John:** This is the time of the evening where we open it up to questions. So, repeating the question, Lorene, do you feel that being a female director changed your ability to get the amazing performances you got out of these women? And did they ever bring that up to you?

**Lorene:** I mean, we had a really balanced set. It was a really wonderful mix of women and men who made this film. We have men and women department heads and lots of men and women on set creating this vibe. Incredibly respectful, wonderful New York crew.

We had things that maybe were added as a result of just me being aware of certain things. Things like a comfort consultant. She was our stripper consultant and also our comfort consultant. She played Jackie. So, I mean, she was invaluable. She was always there for the women to call on to say, you know, what would I do, how would I react to some bad behavior in a club. How would I react if Usher came in the club?

And so Jack was just an incredible source for what to do with your body, what to say, how to slink away from someone maybe or how to use something against someone.

And so things like that maybe were different as a result. I was just highly aware of everyone’s comfort level. But so was our first AD, Colin, who we had so many strippers as background and he was always telling them to put their clothes back and because they were fine and completely comfortable and he was just such a lovely, just respectful person who really like led this incredible team.

To be honest, there’s some fear going into it in a way. An all-female cast. You have so much hair and makeup and wardrobe to contend with. I think people maybe heard bad things about what that environment could be like. And we ended up having just such a lovely group of people.

**John:** You’re also a very experienced director. You probably would have had a very different experience had this been your first movie to direct. You have movies under your belt and you sort of know – you can go into it sort of anticipating what some of the challenges were. This is also a much bigger movie than the other ones you made. We were talking backstage just the size of the cast, the size of all the departments was bigger. What were your conversations with department heads and producers about how to wrangle? Did you get advice from folks who had done bigger movies as well?

**Lorene:** No. No. Honestly, I don’t know, that part of it wasn’t that daunting. It wasn’t as daunting as the hours in the day. As big a budget as it was, it still felt like we were scraping the floor for what was possible in New York City and for a movie that covers this much time and just needs this much stuff. So it was really nice to have toys. I mean, my last movie I was told what day would you like Steadicam. So, you know, this was different than that.

So, you know, toys are nice. And, yeah, and getting to capture New York City the way that we did and getting into these incredible locations and this wardrobe. But my first film was I think maybe $9 million. My second one was like two point something. And this one was like $20 million. So it was different but, you know, all the same.

**John:** You’re still scraping to make that thing happen.

**Lorene:** Yeah. I mean, in a way the whole movie is just an out of control train, you know, and it’s moving, it’s been moving for thousands of years before this one girl’s story begins. And so in a way it was the entire movie was a sequence to us. And so as much as we were able to break it up and think about each scene and, again, that theme of control like you said which we could apply to Ramona in one moment and Destiny’s lack of control in another moment.

So, yeah, it was sort of like a bullet. And we wanted to treat it like that. So we shot-listed everything from beginning to end.

**John:** Well in advance of production you and Todd went through these are our dream shots that we would try to get on the day to tell the story.

**Lorene:** Yes.

**John:** What percentage of those shots did you actually end up making most days?

**Lorene:** Almost all of them.

**John:** All of them, great.

**Lorene:** We just knew we didn’t want to hose down TV coverage constantly. We knew there wasn’t any reason to see it in a way that wasn’t what our protagonists were feeling. So, you know, a scene like that diner scene it wasn’t like we had so many different sizes of those shots. It wasn’t like we had a million different, you know, yes we had a wide that is in the earlier scene in the diner. But then like a nice 50/50 with them. But that was it. We just knew we needed to be precise. We knew that there’s a driving scene where Ramona is driving and it doesn’t feel comfortable. Ramona has her hands on the wheel and it does feel out of control.

And so it was a scene where we had minutes to shoot it before the sun came up. And it was like all that really matters is Destiny’s POV of Ramona really not looking at her in the passenger seat. And us in the back of the car looking at Destiny in the passenger seat. And so we did like two runs, one where the camera is where Destiny is and one where we have a stunt driver driving and so they weren’t even in that scene together.

So there were so many moments where it was like we just have to get exactly what we need. And other moments like the locker room where we were like let’s be a little more loose. We’re handheld. We’ve got two cameras. We’re just trying to capture what we can and move off of people and really feel the fluidity of it. And other moments where the rigidity of it is what we want to express.

**John:** You had a question. So the question is the amazing J-Lo scene that we saw. So what was the coverage on J-Lo’s major dance number?

**Lorene:** We had three cameras. We had a wide right in front of the stage. And then two cameras that were kind of like roving on either side. That was just for the perspective of really looking at her up on the stage. Then we did let’s say two or three takes of that. And I would say two and change basically. If she missed a move we would get it again. You know, if the heel clack was something we’d do it again.

But otherwise then it was about jumping up on stage and being with her. And, again, two cameras I think at that point dancing around each other in order to capture her movement and the spirit of the club. And then setups on Constance.

Yeah, maybe five times? Maybe five times? I did a really cool walkthrough of it to show the guys when they were going to be throwing their money, because it really – I mean, when I say like live event, it really was about when she gets there this room is ready because obviously it was an incredibly vulnerable thing that she was doing. And she also needed to feel the energy coming back to her. I mean, she’s obviously a performer and she needed that. So it wasn’t about just keeping everything quiet so she could do her moves. It was very different from that.

So I did a walkthrough and then was like you’re throwing money, now you’re throwing money. And then our pole choreographer ran through it a couple of times so that our cameras were set up and ready. I think on that first run, was that when that outfit almost snapped off?

**Mitchell:** Sure was.

**Lorene:** I was looking across the room and I was like this is time of death. [laughs]

**Mitchell:** I left my body. I had my team ready with needles and thread because there was a possibility of that happening. There’s only so many points that you can anchor. But, yeah, the first time two strings went flying across the stage and she had to hold on.

**Lorene:** It was a trip. It was my birthday.

**Mitchell:** Sure was.

**John:** Happy Birthday, Lorene.

**Lorene:** Thank you. And the movie fell apart a year earlier on my birthday, so that was nice.

**John:** I saw you shortly after that, yeah.

**Lorene:** You saw me then. Not pretty.

**John:** Back right there. Yes, you. So the question is about obstructions and do you look for obstructions? Are they a helpful thing that you’re seeking out?

**Lorene:** I think for something like this that we knew, I mean, control is the theme of my life as well. So I think for something like this where there was only so much control we could have an actor could try on something and absolutely hate it in that moment and reach for the next thing. And maybe the color palette could have been thrown in that moment. So, and I’m taking it from that movie Five Obstructions, you know, so I’m just using words. Hopefully that means what I think it means.

But, yeah, I think for this it was a way to try to control something that felt almost like it could be out of our control if, again, so many characters in very tiny clothing, you know, wanting to look good but it’s a period piece but it’s all of the above. So, yeah.

**John:** Mitchell, is that a thing you commonly encounter with other directors where they will have a specific mandate of like we’re not going to see this thing, or it has to be this or there’s a structure to how they want things to happen?

**Mitchell:** I feel like every director that I work with is just so different and their process comes from such a different place. The thing I can say about Lorene is that there is a trust with the people that she surrounds herself with, both cast and crew. And so there’s a security in that when you have a director who says like, “We have it,” and all of us feel like then we have it. No one feels like they have one more take or we don’t want to change anything because we believe in her because she believes in us.

**John:** Did you have any rules with Todd in terms of lenses or things the camera was going to be able to do or not be able to do? Did you put any boundaries on what was permissible with the camera or how you were shooting it?

**Lorene:** I don’t think we did. I think, you know, when you’re picking the color palette of a club like this it’s easy to think that pinks and blues are so cliché, but they’re just there. And so there were things like well let’s make that pink like cotton candy pink. And let’s make that blue like aquarium blue. So there are scenes in the private area which are so well designed by Jane Muskey, I can’t even take it. Because we shot in that real club but the champagne room and the private area we built on a stage. So we had a lot of control there and they just frankly didn’t have that at that club.

Yeah, the private area we said this space, I want to see men like fish in an aquarium. And that’s what we did to the lights and what we did to the color in the space. There were obviously moments that are more about realism and more about walking in someone’s shoes. And then there are other moments where it’s about we’re soldiers and we’re dialed in.

So it was always different. It was always different. When we picked these lenses and how we manipulated them, I think that did a lot to establishing that look. And then, yeah, then we just tried to lean into what was Scores [unintelligible]. What was Scores like in that era and without actually taking cues from Scores, you know, what’s the vibe of this scope like.

And so, yeah, there were those kinds of rules where it’s like we’re going to do a lot of things that are true to the environment but we want to shoot them differently. We want to cover them differently. I never wanted a scene to be about an actor’s body unless the character wanted it to be. I felt like it was very easy to just tell a story from this person’s point of view and automatically see this space in a way that we hadn’t seen in other movies, just by focusing on the people who are usually in the periphery.

**John:** There, you right there. Yes, you. Two hands up. So the question is how did each of you talk with your actors about making themselves feel safe as they were not wearing a lot of clothes? What were the conversations like? You talked about Jennifer Lopez, you waited – or actually all your actors you waited late for the club wear. But what was your conversation with actors about what they’d be wearing and their bodies?

**Lorene:** I certainly asked everyone and so did you what anyone is comfortable revealing. I mean, the truth is some girls would be like the left one but not the right. And I get it. And others would say under is cool. Or I like my butt and I’m fine with that. It really was as crass as that where it’s just asking people what they’re OK showing and moving in a lot of them.

What we did with background actors as well as everyone else was we said the women were in charge. And as they are. But in our club the girls picked out the guys and then we kind of did some musical chairs. So all the women were comfortable with who they were having physical contact with and we certainly vetted all of these guys that our actors had physical contact with. So I know on set, again, our comfort consultant did a lot of that, too.

But, yeah, how’d you do it?

**Mitchell:** For me, something that I do with all projects, this one most significantly, is I start to understand what somebody is seeing in a mirror that I’m not. Because everybody sees something in the mirror that – I always track someone’s eye movement, right? Because the first thing that they’re going to look for in a mirror is what they don’t like. Because they’re either going to tell me about that or they’re going to feel like it’s solved.

So I always try to watch that and watch body language. And I’m just really into that. I kind of treat my fittings a little bit like therapy. I’ll get to know somebody’s history, what they’re excited about that’s not this movie, and just try to understand them as an human being so that I can dress that human being who is playing a part. Because if that human being is not comfortable that character is not comfortable and this movie certainly demanded that.

**Lorene:** But it’s also not about revealing clothing either, because someone like G-Eazy who is in the movie was surprised at how much we were going to lean into the 2007 fashion and then came fully onboard, thank you Mitchell.

**Mitchell:** I would have to warn them. There is a celebration going on with this movie about this time period. Because it is in such recent memory it feels horrible. But you need to eliminate that and recognize that everyone here is playing the same game. So your earrings couldn’t be big enough. This is the game. Let’s win.

**John:** Let’s all win. Another question, there in the middle. Yes, I see you. So the question is about the casting process and how much pressure did you feel to cast star names. What was the casting process like? I don’t know who cast your film, so talk to me about this.

**Lorene:** Oh, Gail Keller was our casting director who had her hands full. I can’t believe what she pulled off with this with so many speaking roles. I began with chasing Jennifer. I mean, I didn’t write the script with her in mind, but as soon as I reopened the script to try to think of who it was it was so obvious that it was Jennifer Lopez. So I bee-lined toward her and sent the script to her producing partner who fortunately loved it and sent it to her, fortunately loved it, and then we met at her house. And, you know, it’s Jennifer Lopez and I thought of what to wear for 72 hours. But, yeah, we were really excited about all the same themes and what the movie was speaking to and capitalism and this time in very recent history.

And so once she was onboard it certainly made it a lot easier to get other people. I had been chasing Lizzo for a year, Cardi for two years on Instagram. And I would DM Cardi and then get like a cellphone number back and then text that number and then get another number. So I have two numbers in my phone that are Cardi that I don’t think either are Cardi. And Lizzo, same, I just thought they were so exciting for this, so I wrote those roles for them.

There’s an opera singing burlesque dancer who I wrote that part for. Jack the stripper, I wrote that part for Trace Lysette. She reached out to me on Twitter because she had worked at this club in 2006 and we met maybe a year before the movie and just hit it off, so I wrote her the role. And it was a lot like that. You know, Keke Palmer was someone I was just obsessed with. Just her whole personality, her whole way. I want to see that onscreen so bad. And I think Mercedes is the character who makes Ramona laugh, so who is that person. Lili Reinhart was someone who I watched some indie movies that she was in and thought my god this girl is so good. And I thought about the four of them. I thought about the locker room.

I made so many collages of sort of my dream team and then they happened. It was crazy. Constance was someone who it was so hard to figure out who Destiny was. That was really the toughest journey, but the second thing we needed to do was find our Destiny once we found Ramona. So I met with over 100 actors and met with Constance and just thought she was so deep and was equally interested in a story about loneliness. That’s something I talk about a lot in my work and I was really excited about her bringing that into this character, that vulnerability, the sensitivity, that intelligence, and that dynamic that the two of them might have.

So I didn’t get to see them together until the camera test when Jennifer was in the fur coat for the first time and they were in full hair and makeup. And she put her arm around Constance and I was like, yeah.

**John:** Done.

**Lorene:** That’s it. That was what we were hoping for. So, yeah.

**John:** Lorene, what was the audition scenes you used for Destiny? Were they things that are in the movie or were they different things you wrote just for auditions?

**Lorene:** Oh, well definitely scenes from the movie. But they’re probably like things that aren’t in the movie anymore if I think about it. There was a lot of voiceover in the movie, more so than there is. And so I think they had a very awkward scene to audition with to be honest.

For the most part I met with girls. Gail had so many girls come in and audition. So, I had great tapes to watch. But then–

**John:** You were also in the room in many cases?

**Lorene:** Then I could be there. Yeah.

**John:** That’s where you discovered.

**Lorene:** Exactly.

**John:** We have time for two more questions. Let’s try, yes, you. So the question is how did you get the job of directing this movie? What was the process to get there?

**Lorene:** I wanted it from the beginning. But I really did feel like I had to tell the story, even if I didn’t get to direct it. So once I handed in two drafts of the script and it became that time for them to decide who was going to direct it, they sent it to Scorsese first. He passed. I don’t think he read it. You know, I don’t think it reached him. So, they sent it to him first. And then sent it to everyone, people I knew.

I just had my hand raised that whole time. It was a very weird timeline in America also, you know, from the Summer of 2016, in which I thought I was making like a subversive Spring Breakers type movie that it kind of became a little bit more real as time went on. So, I would say how I got the job during that ten month stretch where it was being sent to kind of everyone in town I was editing a lot of footage of strippers and stripteases to Chopin which is sort of the score of the film. And different sequences in the movie. There’s a car crash. Different things as a proof of concept really.

And then my editor, Kayla Emter, who had edited my last film, we/she put together this sizzle reel that really became the piece that I was able to show as sort of, you know, it makes sense from the director of The Meddler. Maybe people wouldn’t necessarily understand the leap that it might take. So I was OK trying to really audition for it, obviously.

But that sizzle reel I think was really what got me the job, got Kayla the job ultimately. I put up collages of different movies of kind of female friendship type movies. Mean Girls and Bridesmaids and then pictures of strippers in locker rooms just to say like, you know, what’s the difference and why can’t there be a movie about that dynamic but in this space.

**John:** Our last question. So the question is she loves the ending, but were there ever choices to do a different ending or a reconciliation or some other – what were the other thoughts about the ending of the film as you were writing it or working on it?

**Lorene:** Not for me. You know, I mean, I never saw it that way. I’m sure I had to do a draft or two in which I delivered some kind of happy ending that I probably tried to make bad on paper on purpose. Yeah. I think I always saw it as this bittersweet ending.

But even when we were testing the movie and trying to figure it out it really was – it’s hard. It’s one of those things where you want that hope that maybe they will call each other without seeing it really happen. So, I think that that was always the hope.

How it ends, though, there were so many different versions of that speech that Ramona gives in the office. I was never sure about that. I really wasn’t. I really was like I don’t know, this feels on the nose and stuff. So there were like things that kind of got massaged into place. I realized like, oh, we had this incredible B-roll from our club where all those images at the end of the movie where you’re sort of seeing the men and women interacting with each other. That felt very real because they just were interacting with each other. And our camera was just catching them.

And so I think once Kayla and I landed on that, that that imagery was really important to bring back. That life goes on. That everything is up and running and maybe some stuff has changed but not a lot. And so we discovered how important that was. And then, you know, Ramona and all of that. But the friendship, yeah, no, you know, love doesn’t, I don’t know. [laughs]

I’ll end on love doesn’t, I don’t know.

**John:** Love doesn’t…Lorene Scafaria. Lorene, congratulations on your film. Mitchell, congratulations on what you were able to bring to the film. Thank you all very much. Thank you guys for coming.

**Lorene:** Thank you. Thank you so much.

**John:** Have a great night.

And that’s our show. Thanks to Paul Cowling and everybody at Film Independent for putting on the panel and letting us use the audio from it. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Caden Brown. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions.

Short questions on Twitter, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

Premium members, stick around after the credits because I Skype with Mitchell to see what he’s doing now and answer some more questions about screenwriting and costume design. You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net. Thanks and we’ll see you next week.

[Bonus segment]

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

**Mitchell:** Good. It’s nice to hear from you.

**John:** It’s good to hear from you. I’ve wanted to talk with more because I just felt like we got through so much in that panel but I was curious what’s happened since that time and also I had follow up questions. So thanks for getting on the blur with me.

**Mitchell:** Absolutely.

**John:** So question, a lot of what we talked about in that discussion was how you work with the director to figure out the visual language for the movie, how you work with the actors to figure out what clothes make sense for the character. But I wanted to wind back and ask what should screenwriters be thinking about in terms of the clothes that characters are wearing. What’s useful for screenwriters to come into a script with? As you’re flipping through pages what are signs that are like, oh, this writer knows what he or she is talking about when it comes to characters and clothes? What are you looking for?

**Mitchell:** You know, I’ve never been asked that question and I think it’s such an interesting topic because it’s funny there are certain scripts that you read that you can the person who is writing is very much thinking about the character from a visual point. They’ll mention the color or that it’s a sweater or they’ll put in even brands. I’ve read some scripts where it’s like brands are listed by the screenwriter. And I’m always so fascinated by that because I feel like it is so premature because, you know, a costume designer hasn’t weighed in, and actor hasn’t weighed in. And of course those are going to be the loudest voices when it comes to the clothes.

But I don’t mind it because I think it’s a really nice way of getting into the headspace of the character from the writer’s point of view. When it gets really frequent and you feel like almost every outfit is described it can be a little bit – it’s kind of a little bit of a turnoff because it feels like some of the work is being done for you. And then of course the rebel in both the actor and the costume designer wants to do like, well, you wrote sweater so we’re not doing a sweater.

You know, like we all want to put our own spin on everything. But ultimately I do find it helps me know where we’re starting from. And of course we’re going to take it further and we’re going to find different meaning in things in the fitting room that wouldn’t really come up in the writing process. But I do enjoy it. And I think for me it’s like as soon as I can meet the writer I feel like I have a kindred spirit in that person because they’ve obviously done the work to think about the clothes. So then I think it fleshes out the conversation.

But for me it’s just a jumping point. It’s definitely not, you know, the truth.

**John:** I’m trying to think back about the times I’ve used specific clothing descriptions in scripts, and it’s mostly just to give a sense of the general direction of a character and not sort of what they’re wearing in that moment. Or try to prescribe what they have to be wearing. I was thinking back to my script for Go we meet Melissa McCarthy about two-thirds of the way through the movie and she only has one scene. And they’ve knocked on the door, she opens the door, she has a big bowl of popcorn, and she’s described as wearing sweats.

And ultimately she was not wearing sweats. She was wearing stuff that was more comfortable for her. But she was wearing her version of what sweats would be. And it started a whole conversation. But I only described her outfit because it was important for us to understand that she was not expecting to be going out that night. She was sort of dressed down for the evening. She was in her retiring clothes.

Or in Aladdin, you know, the only kind of dress that I mention in Aladdin are the stunning first reveal of Jasmine when she’s coming down the steps to meet the suitor. I’m not going to describe every dress along the way.

**Mitchell:** I designed In the Heights. There was in that script, which was written by Quiara, she wrote one description of clothing which I actually loved and I was like this totally helps. For one of the characters she talked about how the shoes had been worn down in the back heel like they’re so beloved that they have that permanent crease in the heel. That was one of those little details where I was like that helps me so much, because I understand – you know, I can see this person’s apartment. I bet there are other shoes that look like that piled on top of each other. And I can sort of understand how this person gets dressed.

So I do enjoy when it’s a description that helps me understand the totality of a person, rather than just “she walks in in Armani.” It’s like why? You know, is there a promo deal? What is the reason behind that?

**John:** So it sounds like what you’re describing is that over specificity can be a problem if it sort of feels like it’s locking you in to something. But something like that metaphorical description of how her shoes were being worn down, that gives you a pathway for figuring out like, OK, if her shoes are that way then I can think about the rest of her outfit in ways that is going to speak to the same character. So trying to–

**Mitchell:** Exactly.

**John:** Put everybody on the right path rather than sort of say it has to be exactly this one thing that I’m describing.

**Mitchell:** There’s something funny with some actors, too. They treat the script like the bible. So if something is written they want to adhere to that. And I find there are certain, like the Julliard actor, like they are really text-based and they really adhere to the script and it’s part of their process. I’ve worked with some before where it’s like, “Well in the script it says that I’m wearing a turtleneck.” And it’s like would the character wear a turtleneck? Let’s start there and then we might not have to use the turtleneck. But for some people it can really lock them into this idea which, you know, it depends. Sometimes that’s limiting and sometimes that’s where you start.

**John:** Yeah. And so that’s an example of like “he’s the kind of guy who seems like he’s in a turtleneck even when he’s not.” I mean, in that description you describe the type of outfit that he’s wearing, not necessarily limiting to exactly the thing he has to be wearing unless there’s a reason why the turtleneck becomes a big joke point. There’s a reason why it has to be a turtleneck. Instead just give a sense of the class of outfit that you’re looking for.

**Mitchell:** Yes. Do you know I truly hope I never read a script again where it is written that the girl takes off her shoes, breaks off the heel, and is running in flats. I have read that in a script like nine times. And it is such an impossibility for any shoe ever. But it seems to be this thing that is in every script. Oh, she’s running, she breaks off her heels and now she’s in flats. I’m like, no, now she’s running on a metal spike on the bottom of her foot. It’s incredibly dangerous and painful.

**John:** Yeah. And I’m sure that is one of the situations where that came up because somebody saw it in a movie and they assumed it must be real and so therefore they just put it in other scripts. And no one has actually tried to do it in real life. Because I don’t know anyone who has ever done that in actual life. I know people who have broken heels, but not like that.

**Mitchell:** Right. And then you limp home with dirty feet. That’s how that happens.

**John:** Great. Any other red flags? Things you see in scripts about clothing that maybe we should be more mindful of?

**Mitchell:** There are certain times where I will go to the writer and if they are mentioning specific changes and things like that where, you know, my job is to break this down into reasonable costumes. And I’m personally as a designer I find that you can reach a fatigue point with too many costume changes in a movie where you kind of stop remembering what the person is wearing because they’re wearing them so frequently.

So sometimes I’ll have to say to a writer or director, sometimes it’s the same person, OK, in this scene it’s written that she’s in a dress, but then in this scene it’s written that she’s now in a pair of skinny jeans, or whatever. And from a storytelling perspective it would just all make sense in one day. So, is the change motivated because this character wants to be perceived differently? Is the change motivated by something else? And oftentimes it’s that scripts go through so many drafts that that’s one of those things that’s just kind of layers.

But that’s another thing that can sometimes happen when clothing gets described in a script is you’re like, OK, you know she’s now changed four times before lunch. Let’s think about this a little bit.

**John:** Now, Mitchell, I don’t know how much you’ve worked on periods, so obviously Hustlers was period, but it wasn’t super deep period. If we’re working on something that is a costume drama from turn of the century or you’re working on Hulu’s show The Great, how important is it for the writer to know what all those pieces of clothing are called and how much is it helpful to call that stuff out versus just giving a general description of the type of clothing or sort of what time of day clothing this is? How helpful is it for period stories like that?

**Mitchell:** I think it’s very important. And it should be part of the research process for a writer in the same way you would make sure that a character wasn’t using something that hadn’t been invented. I think the same should be true for clothes. It can be in a script where she removes her bra and it’s like, well, no one was wearing those yet. So she doesn’t.

I think it should be as important to the process as every other part that’s researched.

**John:** I think you make a very good case for that. So yes. Mitchell, thank you so much for this follow up. This is really helpful.

**Mitchell:** Absolutely.

**John:** It was a great conversation before and you’ve gotten me thinking more about sort of how I’m describing clothes in my scripts and how I’ll be talking about them as a director. So, thank you for that. Congratulations on the move.

**Mitchell:** Thanks.

**John:** Thanks Mitchell.

**Mitchell:** Be well.

**John:** All right. Bye.

Links:

* [Directors Close-Up: Tacky Fashion and the Visual Language of ‘Hustlers’ – Film Independent](https://www.filmindependent.org/blog/directors-close-up-tacky-fashion-and-the-visual-language-of-hustlers/)
* [Hustlers](https://www.hustlers.movie/)
* [Lorene Scafaria](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1032521/) and on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/lorenescafaria?lang=en)
* [Mitchell Travers](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4095618/) and on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/_mitchelltravers_/?hl=en)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [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 Caden Brown ([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/464standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/the-lackeys-know-what-theyre-doing).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 465 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we’re going to talk about not the heroes, not the villains, but the villains’ accomplices and how to write them more believably.

We’ll also answer some listener questions and give an update on what’s happening between the agencies and the WGA.

Plus, in our bonus segment for Premium members we will talk about travel tips during the pandemic.

**Craig:** That’ll be fun. Don’t do it. Is that it? It’s a short bonus episode. Stay home.

**John:** Yes. Stay home. Stay home everyone.

**Craig:** Stay home.

**John:** We’re going to start with some follow up. And you know my favorite kind of follow up is deep, deep follow up. So we’re going to reach all the way back to Episode 101.

**Craig:** Good lord.

**John:** Which as Craig will remember is the questions from Episode 100 which was our 100th Anniversary Episode, it was our first sort of big live show in Hollywood.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So in that Episode 101 we took a listener question and this is me and Aline talking in Episode 101. Important context that Aline and I had this conversation. Let’s take a listen.

Aline, do you want to do Winds of War for ABC?

Aline Brosh McKenna: I love Winds of War.

**John:** We should do that.

Aline: Who was the one – there was a blonde that was in it.

**John:** I don’t know.

Aline: Victoria something.

**Craig:** Herman Wouk wrote the novel.

Aline: Herman Wouk. Oh, that was so good.

**John:** So thank you for a great idea.

Audience Member: You’re welcome.

**John:** We’ll name a character for you. It’s going to be great.

So, Craig, that was so many years ago. That was 350 episodes ago.

**Craig:** We were children.

**John:** That we had this great idea. So some follow up on that is Aline and I actually did send each other the Kindle versions of The Winds of War and we talked about maybe twice again. So, you can understand my outrage, my absolute outrage this last week when it was announced that Seth MacFarlane is doing a redo of The Winds of War.

**Craig:** What? What? Dude. He stole your idea from 20 years ago. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, so how dare he? After all, Aline and I did basically nothing to advance the project. For him to just swoop in and do it is just absolutely outrageous.

**Craig:** You said something that happened out loud and when you say a thing that happened it’s yours.

**John:** Yes. I mean, I basically called shotgun on the idea.

**Craig:** Right. It’s yours. I mean, that’s just a fact. Everybody knows that. What’s something happening right now? Oh, there’s this, in Belarus there’s these protests. I just said it. So, only I can write a show about it now. Because I said it. It’s mine.

**John:** I mean, he absolutely declared – just basic rules that once you see a thing, put your hand on it, and then it’s yours.

**Craig:** It’s like in cartoons when you would land on some weird planet and stick a flag in it. That’s it. The flag is there, so it’s our planet.

**John:** Marvin the Martian.

**Craig:** I claim this planet.

**John:** Mm-hmm. That actually ties very well into our first listener question. This is from Sadness Jackson. So he wrote a long email. I compressed it a little bit here. But let me read to you what Sadness Jackson writes.

“I’ve listened to you guys since day one and I knew this day would come. I spent the last few months researching and writing a story revolving around the Battle of Blair Mountain. And now you’ve shed a light on it and announced it on your podcast. Now, I like the segment of How Would This Be a Movie, but you had to use real instances and moments, we are all writers, it would be fun for us to toss imaginary scenarios at you and see what you would do with them. But I know you won’t do that because you hope some studio will listen to your show and this could be the movie suggested that gets you working on this project and you can gloat about how you were right.

“However, there are so many writers like me that are looking for that one great idea. I felt I had it. And now I might as well give that one up. I know what Craig will say. He will say that I’m a fool and that every idea and moment in the history of the world is already thought about by the studios.”

**Craig:** Pretty close.

**John:** “Which is wrong. If that were so, they would have no need to do constant research for good stories. But let me ask you something, Craig, why did you never use the moment of Chernobyl as a topic for the show? When you were first thinking about writing it and you were putting in the research why not shine the light on that in a How Would This Be a Movie segment? I know the answer because you thought it was a great idea and you didn’t want anyone else doing it.

“Please just know that there are struggling writers out there working on these stories that you do. And it’s hard enough out there without getting the rug pulled out from under you. I love your show. I think you guys are great and do a lot of wonderful things for writers in the community as a whole.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Does that work? Does that even work? Where you say stuff and then at the end you go, “By the way, I think you’re wonderful and I love you.”

**John:** So, Craig, so much to unpack here. And I hadn’t really meant to lead in with The Winds of War thing, but of course that’s exactly the same kind of scenario is that I had this great idea, like you know what, we should do Winds of War. And then someone else had a similarly great idea that they should do Winds of War. Separated by many, many years.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** You had the idea to do Chernobyl and as I understand you were not the only Chernobyl project out there.

**Craig:** Not at all. When I was working on Chernobyl there was another project in active development I think with Scott Rudin who is a producer of great note. So the question, or at least your premise here, Sadness Jackson, is just not true. I was not at all concerned about somebody else doing it, that I didn’t want anybody else doing it. Somebody else already was doing it. And that was just that version. There were also other things that had already been done.

So, how can I be worried when there had already been a number of things that had been done about Chernobyl? That makes no sense at all. And also I’m sorry but Blair Mountain has been done, because that’s Matewan. Right? It’s already out there. What are you talking about, dude?

**John:** So, going back to this general idea of How Would This Be a Movie as a segment that we’ve been doing not since the beginning, but we’ve done it for quite a long time here. The reason why we pick real life events is because we can all be looking at the same set of facts and say like out of this set of facts, out of this true story that’s out there, what are the interesting movie stories to be telling. It’s useful for us to be taking a look at actual real things that happened in history or that are happening in the news because there are some objective facts behind there.

If we just said a movie about a tiny dragon and a shoe fall in love, well, we could talk about that but there’s no common set of things for us to discuss.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** This last week the trailer came out for the Zola movie. Remember way back when you and I talked–

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**John:** So way back at the Austin live show we were sitting down with Steve Zissis and Jane Espenson and we did a How Would This Be a Movie segment. We talked about Zola who had this amazing Twitter thread about how she was hustling and it was great and we watched sort of how much was real and how much was invented, but it was cool. So like this could be a movie. It would be challenging to make. That movie got made. And if we didn’t have that common set of things for all to be looking at we couldn’t be having a meaningful conversation.

**Craig:** Yeah. I literally don’t understand this. I don’t think you get it that you’ve spent the past few months – OK, so this is hardly years of your life – but regardless the past few months researching and writing a story revolving on the Battle of Blair Mountain. If it’s good then people are going to love it. No one is going to say, “No, sorry, we’re all full up on Battle of Blair Mountain stuff.” That’s not how it works, at all by the way. Unless, I mean, it seems to me, I mean you do say that you are struggling writer and I guess like an up and comer, so if you write a great script the good news is now all these people will know how good of a writer you are and they will want to both talk to you about the making of that script and also the making of other stories, all of which is part of history.

You cannot put your arm around a piece of history and say, “Mine.” It doesn’t work that way. Nor does it need to work that way. The most remarkable stories about history, the ones about things I already knew but just from some beautiful interesting angle and done splendidly. You know? The premise here is so confusing. I think you thought that just putting the words Battle of Blair Mountain on a cover page was going to be the deal. It’s zero percent of the deal.

The quality of the script is 100 percent of the deal.

**John:** To be fully transparent here, when we were putting together that last episode we did of How Would This Be a Movie one of the other stories in it was the nuclear sub that had gone down and sort of the whole CIA plot to make it seem like there’s a whole different thing happening, the Manganese. And so in the staff meeting I was describing it to everybody else and Nima who works for me said, “Oh man, you shouldn’t put that on the show. You should do that yourself.”

And I had this moment of hesitation of like, wait, should I just do this movie? Should I just pitch this movie? And then I was like, no, we’ll just leave it in the segment. And you know what? I’m really glad I did because the first emails we got back saying like, “Oh, by the way, there’s three of those movies in development right now.”

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Am I not so much happier that I didn’t try to take out and shop this movie because other people were trying to do it, because you know what, it’s a good idea. It’s an actual thing that happened. The cinematic possibilities are really clear. So, I am sort of in the same situation where it’s like I’m a tiny bit bummed that I wouldn’t be working on this movie, but also relieved that I know now that this thing is out there.

Sadness Jackson, I would also stress I think because you’re living in this cocoon where you thought you were the only person who knew about the Battle of Blair Mountain you would naturally assume that you are the only person to have the idea of making a movie about it. But I guarantee you there were at least five other people out there working on Battle of Blair Mountain movies at the moment. So someone will probably write in listening to this segment saying like, “Oh, you should know there’s one in development at this studio right now.”

So, it’s not the first time this has happened.

**Craig:** No. And by the way if you had wanted to do the story of the Glomar Expedition then you could have done How Would This Be a Movie and then just turned around and called your agent and said, you know what, I’ve got a pitch on how I think this could be a movie. And if nobody else is working on it, or maybe one other place was but another place was looking for their Glomar movie, then you could go in and pitch it, or you could write one yourself.

Because here’s the other thing. They can develop 20 Glomar movies.

**John:** 100 percent.

**Craig:** And maybe none of them go. And then you write one script where everybody goes, “Oh my god, John August cracked it. This is how you do this.”

There were two animated films about ants in movie theaters months apart. And they both were hits.

**John:** Remarkable that.

**Craig:** Sadness, if you love your story and you are writing and I hope to god you love it for some reason other than the fact that you thought it was some unique, undiscovered thing. It’s not. And if the story is terrific the story will be terrific nonetheless.

**John:** All right. Now onto a marquee topic here. This actually was going to be my One Cool Thing, but as I thought about it more I realized like, oh, it’s actually kind of a segment for the show itself. So, the inspiration behind this is this book I’m reading based on a blog by Keith Ammann called The Monsters Know What They’re Doing. So I’ll put a link in the show notes to that.

It is a book that is really intended for people playing the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. So it’s not a general interest book for everyone out there. It’s just to me and to Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah. Great blog. I love that blog.

**John:** So, why I thought that this could be generalized into a topic for discussion overall is one of the things I liked so much about Keith’s book is that he talks about the monsters that you’re fighting and how they would actually think and how they would strategize in combat. And one of the points he really makes very clearly is that they have a self-preservation instinct. They’re going to do things, they will fight, but then they will run away and they will flee when it makes sense for them to run away and flee, because they exist in this world and they’ve evolved to survive. And so that survival instinct is very, very important.

It got me thinking about movies I’ve seen. I rewatched Inception recently which is great. It holds up really well. The third section of Inception, or the fourth or the fifth, however many levels deep we are in Inception, there’s a sequence which very much feels like a James Bond movie where this mountain alpine sequence. And in there there are a bunch of just faceless lackeys who just sort of keep getting killed and offed. And it struck me that, wait, no one is acting – like why are they doing what they’re doing? And you can see this in a lot of movies. A lot of action movies but also I think a lot of comedies you see them in where the people who are not the hero, not the villain, but are working for the villain do things that don’t actually make any sense. And they will fight to the death for no good reason. They don’t seem to exist in any sort of normal universe or world.

And so I want to talk through this. I don’t necessarily have great suggestions for this, but I think we need to sort of point it out and maybe nudge people to be thinking more fully about the choices they’re making with these henchmen characters.

**Craig:** That’s probably the best we can do is just be aware of it. Because it’s more than a trope. It is bizarre. All right, so here’s a movie that did it fairly well, and for a reason. In Die Hard there are all sorts of lackeys.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** There are some lackeys that are front and forward, and then there are some lackeys that are in the back. But one of the things you understand from this whole thing is that this organization is a worker-owned business. So, they’re all going to split the money. Sure, maybe Hans Gruber gets a little bit extra because he master-minded it, but they’re all splitting it. So, they’re all the heroes of this job. If John McClane gets away with his shenanigans they’re not going to get their money. So I understand why they fight. And then if someone’s brother happens to be killed, now it’s personal.

But when it is not a worker-owned collective but rather a standard boss and employees it is odd that they seemingly fight as if they were trying to protect their own dad or something.

**John:** Yeah. And so they will fight and fight and they will get thrown over the edge and get the Wilhelm scream as they fall and it will move in. They’re basically just cannon fodder there to be shot at, to be taken down.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So you see this most obviously in Bond movies. The Spy Who Loved Me has the whole crew of that tanker at the end, the Liparus. Moonraker, Drax Industries has all these people who are doing these space shuttles and like who are they? Why are they doing this? Are they zealots? Are they science zealots? You just don’t know. And this is really very well parodied of course in The Simpsons. There’s a whole episode with Hank Scorpio where he recruits Homer and he sees sort of like why these people are working there because he’s a really good boss and he’s really caring and considerate.

So, I would just say pay special attention to those minor characters, those guards, those watchmen, and really be thinking about why are they doing what they’re doing. And you don’t necessarily – you may not be able to give dialogue or even a lot more time to those characters, but do think about what their motivations are.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And sometimes if you do that you can come upon some surprising choices. Like Iron Man 3, one of the henchmen just says like, “Oh, no, I’m not being paid enough,” and just walks away. Or just runs. And those can be surprises that let the audience and the reader know that you’re really being paid attention and that can be great.

**Craig:** There is a really funny parody of the henchmen syndrome in Austin Powers, I want to say is it in the first one? Yeah, I think it’s the first one. So, everybody remembers – I think most people remember the scene where Austin Powers is driving a steamroller very slowly at a henchman who doesn’t seem to be able to get out of the way. And then he rolls him over. There’s a deleted scene, I think you can watch it on YouTube, where they actually go to that henchmen’s home and you see his wife and child mourning the loss of the henchmen. And it’s like he was a person.

It’s true. One of the things that that stuff does is both limit our interest and also in and the capacity – or the impact of death in a movie, or a TV show. And it also I think makes the world seem less real and therefore the stakes less important.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** Because, look, if everybody is dying that easily, it’s the Storm Trooper problem, right? Who is afraid of Storm Troopers anymore? If you make a Star Wars movie now, I think just your hero being actually killed by a rando Storm Trooper like in scene one would be amazing. That’s it. We’ve got to find a new hero because one of those randos – they can’t all miss all the time.

**John:** No. And I think one of the good choices The Force Awakens made was to have one of the heroes be a Storm Trooper. And he takes off his helmet and you realize like, oh, there’s an actual person there. John Boyega is an actual person.

**Craig:** He’s the only one. [laughs]

**John:** Yup. And he’s special but I think the point is that he’s not special. That actually all of those people that you’ve seen die in all of these movies were actually people as well.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** In the Mandalorian in a later episode there’s a long conversation happening between two Storm Troopers and they’re just talking. And it’s recognizing like, oh, they are there for not just the plot reasons. They actually were doing something before the camera turned on them.

**Craig:** So it’s the red versus blue, you know, the Halo. Generally speaking when we do see henchmen talking to each other they’re talking about henchmen stuff. So it’s like purposefully pointless and banal. And then they die. They die every time. They don’t go on. They do not live on. So, yeah, just be aware of it I guess, right?

**John:** Yeah. And so the henchmen problem is a variety of the Redshirt problem which we’ll also link to there. John Scalzi’s book, Redshirts, talks about sort of in the Star Trek series notoriously the people with the red uniforms who beam down to the alien planet are the first ones to die. There’s actually statistics about how often they die versus people in other color uniforms. I think we’re all a lot more mindful of that now with sort of the good guys. And I think we see lot less Redshirting happening. You still see some of it.

I just rewatched Aliens and there’s a little bit of Redshirting there, but not as bad as the classic.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** I would just urge us to be thinking the same way on the villain side and always ask ourselves is there a smarter choice we can make about those people who would otherwise just be faceless deaths.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s why the Bill Paxton character was so great in Aliens because it was an acknowledgment that not everybody is brave in a psychotic way. I mean, some of those characters are nuts for engaging the way they do with this incredibly scary thing. They don’t seem to have fear. They don’t seem to be thinking ahead like, “I had plans for my life. I have investments. I have a girlfriend, a boyfriend. I’ve got things I want to do.” They’re just like, screw it, if I die, I die.

Well that’s crazy. That’s just a dangerous way of thinking. Bill Paxton was like, “No way, man.” He was the only person that was sane and he was correct. They should have gotten the hell out of there.

**John:** And nuked her from space.

**Craig:** Yeah. “Nuke her from orbit, man.” There’s nothing wrong with being afraid and rational. Because that is in fact how people are. And as we – it’s not that every – look, a lot of it is tonal. So some things are going to have henchmen. That’s just the way it is because the show or the movie is pushed a little bit. For instance, Snowpiercer, which I love, they’re henchmen. They don’t have faces. I don’t know what the arrangement is exactly. I assume they get a slightly better car maybe. But they’re going in there and people are getting shot and they’re like, “Oh, OK. Well I guess it’s our turn to go in there and get into a shooting—“

I would be terrified. They never look scared. But that’s also a movie about everybody on the planet living on a train that’s going around a frozen earth. And they’re eating bugs. It’s sci-fi. It’s different. But if you’re talking about Breaking Bad, you’re not going to see a ton of henchmen there because people live in the world where they can get scared.

**John:** Yeah. And so in TV obviously you have more time to sort of build out universes and scenarios, so it would be more likely you’d be able to understand the supporting characters. On The Sopranos you have a good sense of who they are. And so that’s all built out. In feature films it’s tough because you cannot divide focus so much. In a Robert Altman movie you really could see everyone’s point of view, but you’re not going to encounter that in a more traditional feature. That’s just not sort of how it works.

So I guess I’m just asking you to be mindful of it. If you’re writing in a pushed universe in science fiction or fantasy or an action movie, yes, some stuff is going to be a little bit more common. But I also see this in comedies, especially high concept comedies, where everyone just seems to be there to service this plot, this sort of high concept plot. And I don’t see a lot of attention being paid to, wait, how would a real person in the real world respond to this? And is there anything useful to be taken from that? Because people just accept the premise a little too easily.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, it’s kind of amusing that they’re like “this job is so good, I need to die.” [laughs] Well it’s not that great if you’re dead.

**John:** No. No. Defend your own interests first.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Everyone is selfish enough and wants to survive enough that they’re going to pull back and defend themselves when they need to. So just be thinking about that for your characters.

**Craig:** Yeah. Probably if you’re writing Guard 3 and Next Guard and Tall Guard, then yeah, there’s trouble.

**John:** There’s trouble. All right, shifting gears completely, let’s talk about the agency situation. So it’s two or three episodes ago we talked about how UTA had signed a deal with the WGA which was largely like the deals before it. In that was a sunset provision on packaging that required that one of the other agencies had signed. That agency has signed. So ICM signed. That sunset provision is now in effect. Starting in 2022 there will not be packaging from any of the agencies that have signed, which basically means all of the agencies except for the two that are left, which is CAA and WME. So that’s sort of the first big thing that happened since we last spoke.

There’s also news on the lawsuit front, and this is confusing even for me who is sort of being subpoenaed by one of the lawsuits. There are sort of two things happening simultaneously. One is that the WGA has sued CAA and WME and then CAA has sued the WGA. And so they’re kind of the same lawsuit but they’re sort of different lawsuits and they work on different time tables. And there were developments on both of those fronts this past week as well.

**Craig:** OK. Well, I’m all ears because I don’t know.

**John:** OK. So the first is that the trial in the agency lawsuit, so the agency is suing the WGA, that got pushed back to next summer. So the actual trial dates are like August of 2021.

**Craig:** Are they pushing trials because of COVID?

**John:** Yup. Basically it’s impossible to sort of get people in person.

**Craig:** Makes sense.

**John:** And everything has just really slowed down because of all of this. So, if the trial ends up happening it would be next summer that that would happen.

**Craig:** There is not going to be a trial.

**John:** I think it seems unlikely that we would get to all that space, but then again unlikely things happen on a daily basis.

**Craig:** True. But there won’t be a trial is sort of my version of the “it’s not Lupus” line from House. There won’t be a trial.

**John:** The second development was that the Writers Guild prevailed. They can seek an injunction over packaging fees. And so this is confusing, but so back in April the judge ruled that the WGA did not have standing to pursue anti-trust and fiduciary duty claims. The complaint was amended. The agencies moved to just dismiss the whole thing. And the judge said no. So basically the guild has standing to bring their part of the lawsuit against the two remaining agencies, so CAA and WME saying that the practices of packaging negatively impact the WGA because they negatively impact the money that members get.

So, that’s what has happened there.

**Craig:** Which is a fact. That is true. Legally whether it’s true or not is one thing, obviously. But effectively whether it’s true, I believe it is true. Just trying to get a little clarity here. Was it that the judge said, OK, you don’t have standing to pursue anti-trust or fiduciary duty claims, but you do have standing to pursue this new claim? Or, is it that the WGA amended the way they were pursuing the anti-trust and fiduciary duty claims and the judge said, OK, now you have standing?

**John:** I could not tell you the exact precise things. I do know that the thing that is proceeding forward relies more on some state law stuff versus federal RICO. But I don’t know at what point that amendment had happened to the complaint. So I’m not sure whether this latest wrinkle was because of that. But I know that basically new paperwork came in, the motion to dismiss came and was denied. So that will proceed along that track.

**Craig:** I mean, just from what you said it sounds like it’s probably the former of what I said. That there’s a, OK, those two things the WGA said, fine, we’ll let those go. But we want to do this one. The agencies said we don’t want them to do that. And then the judge said, no, that one they can do.

By the way, RICO, another thing. It’s not RICO. It’s not Lupus and it’s not RICO. It’s almost never RICO. Ken White, former federal prosecutor and criminal defense attorney, who tweets as Popehat on Twitter is basically anytime somebody uses the word RICO it’s like a bat signal to him. He’s drawn to it the way I’m drawn to managers telling you what you can and can’t do. It’s like, uhhhh.

So not surprising there. But all of this, of course, practically speaking was always about trying to pressure a result, which did occur. So the good news here is that the result that we had with UTA was a dependent result. It needed one other company, one other of three companies to sign on for it to be real. And one of them did. At this point it is now real. At this point effectively I think packaging is done.

Well, it’s going to take some time. Packaging, by the way, was going to be done anyway, just because of the way the world is changing. But we have accelerated that time table happily. What happens between now and when CAA and WME figure out how to settle with the guild I don’t know. I don’t know what’s required. I don’t know what they’re looking for. I don’t know what they’re waiting for. I don’t know what else there is to do.

In my mind it’s kind of over. It’s all over except for the shouting, as they say.

**John:** Yeah. We’ll see. We’ll link to a story where CAA’s Bryan Lourd said that obviously we want to get this resolved, so we’ll see if that comes to pass. CAA counsel Richard Kendall wrote, “This is simply the court saying the guild has the right to try to prove their false allegations. We remain confident we will prevail at that time.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So they’re still talking as if the lawsuit is going to happen.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Realistically the next steps in the lawsuit is going to be discovery which is where people turn over a bunch of documents. I get to turn over a bunch of Scriptnotes transcripts, so that’s kind of fun.

**Craig:** They’re already there, out there for people to read.

**John:** They’re already there and they’re emailed. So that will continue.

**Craig:** Well, I’ll tell you, man, lawyers are real good at keeping on billing. Keep on billing. They have to keep playing chicken, obviously, until such day it is all dropped. The Writers Guild must insist that its case is winnable and CAA must insist that its case is winnable. And, again, I will eat my Lupus-covered hat if either of those end up in a trial.

**John:** Yeah. We’ll see. We will mark this podcast. We will check back in a year from now to see whether Craig needs to eat his Lupus hat.

**Craig:** [laughs] I probably will.

**John:** Here’s a really simple question. Andy wrote in to ask, “Can a project from a collaboration be used in my own portfolio? For example, can I use a project with a cowriter to get an agent for myself? My collaborator already has his own agent. I come from the musical theater world where writers can be polyamorous when it comes to collaborations. Does this make sense in screenwriting?”

**Craig:** Sure. This comes up quite a bit. Yes, you can. I have some guidelines to suggest. I think the most important of them is get permission from your cowriter. You want to at least let them know so that they don’t find out that you’re doing that. I mean, you can say do you mind if I include this in my portfolio, obviously fairly crediting you as the cowriter, because that’s only fair. At that point I don’t see a problem with it. Just be aware, Andy, that people are going to look at that differently than they would look at a singular credit. And they will adjudicate accordingly because, you know, who can say who did what. That’s the problem there.

**John:** Yeah. So, Andy, probably don’t say the word portfolio because that’s actually not a term we use for screenplays a lot. So just like samples is really what you’re saying. Can I use that as a sample? And the answer is yes you can use it as a sample, but it does get dinged a bit just because they don’t know what it is that you’re writing versus another person’s writing. I know writing teams, and obviously there are many writing teams in Hollywood, but when writing teams split apart one of the first things both those members have to do is write their own scripts so that people can say, “Oh, it turns out that she really was the writer and he was not the writer.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So you can use that as one of your samples, but you’re going to have to have some stuff that shows you writing by yourself because that’s the only way they know that you, Andy, can write the thing they want to hire you to write.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a bit of conventional wisdom in Hollywood which I don’t think is always true, of course, but the idea is in every partnership one is the real one. I think there are plenty of partnerships where that’s not true at all. Neither of them are real. [laughs] And some where both are. I wonder, this is just a usage term, do we have any sense if Andy is from the US or from overseas? Because now I’m curious about portfolio.

**John:** Yeah. I think he’s British. That’s my guess.

**Craig:** So maybe in the UK portfolio is what they call it. I don’t know.

**John:** Entirely possible.

**Craig:** Yeah. Or maybe he’s just wrong.

**John:** Yeah. You never know.

**Craig:** Andy, let us know.

**John:** Lastly, someone on Twitter asked this past week, “Hey, how do you and Craig record Scriptnotes? What software do you use? How is your setup?” And I was like, oh, I have a blog post about it, but the blog post was from 12 years ago. And enough stuff had changed that I updated the blog post. So if you’re curious about how Craig and I actually record this show there’s an updated blog post. We’ll put the link in the show notes.

The very short version is Craig and I are almost never in the same room together. As we’re recording this he is in his office in Pasadena. I am here at my office in Los Angeles. We are talking over Skype. And that’s how we’ve done it since the very start. And so even when I was living in Paris we would just Skype and we each record our own separate sides of the conversation. Matthew, our editor, puts the two sides together. And it makes it seem like we are together.

It’s more challenging than you’d think to actually keep the conversation going a little bit. Like that takes some practice. But it’s a really good way to record a podcast in that by having separate audio for both of us Matthew can edit out all of my fumbles much more easily.

**Craig:** So we have been socially distancing for 10 years now.

**John:** We are experts.

**Craig:** We are so good at this. So nothing new there. I think that the way we do it, although yes takes a little bit of time and effort to master, does lead to more interesting podcast conversation. Because the way we do it forces one person to wait and be patient and listen. I’ve noticed when we’ve done some other things together or with other people when everybody is in a room together it can get a little overlapped, which is fun. Overlappy and conversational and everything. But week after week that can be exhausting because it’s audio only. And audio only in general is harder to follow when you can’t see all the people jumping all over each other. So, every now and then it’s fun, but for a week after week after week thing I like the way we do it.

**John:** I do, too. And so I think it would be natural to assume that we’re doing this on Zoom or on FaceTime so we can see each other. We’re not. So we don’t look at each other. And I think that also helps with the flow of the audio because there’s no visual cue. So we really do have to listen to each other and figure out when is it an appropriate time for the other person to speak.

**Craig:** Yes. And so we also miss out on those nonverbal things that make no sense to the people at home. You will never hear us say, OK, for those of you at home listening who can’t see what we’re seeing. We don’t do that because we don’t see a goddamn thing.

**John:** No, we certainly don’t. All right. Now it is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is something that we’re bringing back which I did a long time ago. It’s called Inneresting. So this is all based on Aline Brosh McKenna making fun of how I leave the T out of interesting.

**Craig:** Gently noting is all she did.

**John:** Gently noting. That’s really just a feather top of gently noting. Oh, it’s so interesting that you don’t say the T there. So I had this newsletter called Inneresting which it was about a year ago I was doing. And I enjoyed doing it. It was sort of like a bunch of One Cool Things and other links. And I was enjoying it and then it just got to be way too much work. And so I sort of put it on hold.

Chris Sond who works for us now is now taking over Inneresting, so it is sort of a newsletter about writing and things that are interesting to writers. It comes out once a week, usually on Fridays. It’s just a bunch of links to interesting stuff and also like blog posts and articles that writers will find enjoyable, interesting. So if you’re curious about that there’s a link in the show notes. It’s a very low commitment thing. You just sign up and you get a newsletter once a week.

**Craig:** Inneresting.

**John:** Interesting.

**Craig:** That is interesting. My One Cool Thing this week, short and simple, Leonard Mazin, my dad, passed away last week. So, adieu. Adieu to Len.

**John:** Yeah. I’m so sorry for you, Craig.

**Craig:** It happens. It happened to you. It’s happened to me. And it will happen to us all.

**John:** Hard to bring us up joyfully out of that.

**Craig:** No, no, I want you to. Now do it. [laughs] I want you to come right out of that into Scriptnotes. In fact, I’m going to do it. Scriptnotes is produced – I’m saving you. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week by Michael Karman. As always, if you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For shorter questions on Twitter, I am @clmazin and John is @johnaugust.

John, we have t-shirts and they’re great. Did you know this?

**John:** I did. I wear almost nothing but our own t-shirts.

**Craig:** I’ve got to tell you, I do too now. Cotton Bureau which makes the t-shirts. All of those t-shirts are as Stuart Friedel once said, “The softest shirts in the world.” They really are. I love them. And this is not an ad. I’m not doing an ad for them. I should get money, but as we all know I won’t. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you will find the transcripts. We try to get them up about four days after the episode airs.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you can get all the back episodes and bonus segments. And, John, we do have some Scriptnotes membership gifts.

**John:** We do. So if you want to give Scriptnotes to somebody, like let’s say there’s somebody in your life you can say like I really want you to have the Premium version of Scriptnotes. Go to Scriptnotes.net and you can actually buy it for somebody else. So people asked us to be able to do that and you can now do that.

**Craig:** And if you are one of those Premium members you will hear our upcoming bonus segment about travel during a pandemic.

**John:** Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Craig, so since the pandemic struck have you taken any trips, any vacations? Have you gone anywhere outside of your home turf?

**Craig:** No. I had one trip at the very beginning right before everything shutdown. This would be early March I want to say. Like maybe the first week of March. I was visiting my son and when I got back to LA maybe a few days later the wall came down. But, no, I have not been in a plane, in a bus. I haven’t even been in an Uber.

**John:** I would not want to be in an Uber. So when the lockdown happened we took it really seriously and we still take all of it really seriously. And I do remember there was a point where you just got so stir crazy that we just got in the car and drove to Angeles Forest and just looked at nature and drove right back. So we interacted with nobody, but just literally getting out of the city for two hours was terrific. And I took Matthew Chilelli’s suggestion. He found us a great hike and so my family and I took a great hike in Angeles Forest a few weeks after that. And small, safe escapes felt really good and reasonable.

I also needed to see my mom who lives in Boulder, Colorado, and whose health is – knock wood – good, but there was no guarantee that it was going to stay good. And so we decided to take a trip to Colorado and normally we would fly there. Flying felt like not a smart choice to be making. So we’ve taken two car trips this summer, both of which we drove from Los Angeles to the place and back.

And so I have some suggestions for people who might be considering a car trip. All under the umbrella of like also consider not taking a car trip. Also consider just staying put. But if you do need to go someplace here is what I would suggest.

Drive if you can drive. Driving is good. If you’re going to book hotels we looked for brands whose reputation we sort of trusted. We looked for low floors. We looked for maybe not the highest end, but an advantage to the thing that’s the kind of hotel that is above a motel but not super fancy is that they tend to have their own air-conditioning unit which is actually part of the room. And so therefore you’re not getting the whole–

**Craig:** The centrally circulated. The Legionnaire’s Disease problem. And now it’s the COVID problem.

**John:** Avoiding the cruise ship problem. Obviously we were not eating in restaurants. We were ordering takeout. We were off and using whatever that restaurant’s app was to have it curbside so we were interacting with as few people as possible.

My job in this was to be the wiper down of rooms. And so when we get a room before anybody unloads anything spray bottle and rags and wipe everything down.

I think we’re going to ultimately learn that surfaces are less of a big deal with COVID-19 than we might have thought at the beginning.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But it also felt like a smart choice to be doing. And then we followed protocols and really thought about our own safety at all moments. So, that means using a mask, all the time. Keeping distance from people. And in situations where you say like in the back of your mind thinking, hey, is this safe for me to be in this place, if it doesn’t feel safe to be in this place don’t be in that place.

There were situations where I said, oh you know what, we made this reservation thinking we would be outside. And you say we can be inside. And we are not going to be inside. This does not feel safe or good. And just leaving. And recognizing that momentary awkwardness and inconvenience is much better than putting yourself at risk.

**Craig:** We do struggle with that. We don’t want to come off as, you know, unreasonable people. The problem is sometimes situations are such that you do – it’s reasonable to do something that is borderline impolite, like not staying somewhere. I mean, it is awkward. Most of us are programmed to avoid it. Then there’s the world of Karens and what’s the male Karen?

**John:** It’s not Ken. I forget what it is. Is it Todd?

**Craig:** OK. I like it. Karens and Todds are constantly demanding the manager. But for most of us we don’t want to be that guy, that woman. And it is important to say, oh yeah, you know what, I’m just not comfortable with that right now. And if there were ever a time where you could say that phrase and have people say I understand, it’s right now. If somebody says, “Really? Really” Yeah, then you definitely don’t want to be there because that culture is pervasive from top to bottom.

So, I mean, it sounds like you did everything right. The tricky part is that you’re traveling and you’re still – but the family is still together. So it’s like Conestoga Wagon. You’re in it. And you can’t get out of it.

**John:** Our pod is our pod and our pod has moved from being at this house to being in this hotel room, but we are still this pod.

**Craig:** You’re still the pod.

**John:** And I will say the second trip was a year ago we booked reservations at Yosemite for my birthday. And so this was a trip there. Yosemite closed. It reopened at half-capacity. It ended up being sort of a weirdly perfect time to be at Yosemite because Yosemite gets really crowded. It was not crowded. And so it was lovely to be there at a time when most nobody was there.

Was it a hassle? Yes. A lot of things you would like to be able to do were not possible. And that’s just the reality. So you can’t both have safety and perfect convenience. Those just aren’t reasonable choices. And so you just had to accept that lots of things were closed. Some things were more difficult. You couldn’t get to some things you wanted to get to.

The choices that are better for everyone’s safety I am 100 percent for. And if there were a new lockdown order saying like, “Oh, no, no, everyone literally has to stay home all the time now,” that’s also fine by me.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re all adapting. I’ve noticed that everyone is starting to make presumptions about what next year will look like in terms of COVID. Talking to everybody in our business. Production and all the rest of it. It just seems like there’s a presumption that a vaccine is around the corner. And COVID will be a thing of the past. I don’t know if that’s correct. I mean, I think there are vaccines around the corner. I don’t know if it’s going to be as soon as January. And I don’t know how fast it’s going to take for them to work. And we don’t know how effective. We got to wait this one out. And I’m trying to make peace with the uncertainty of it.

But a huge part of it is avoiding high risk activities. What I will say that I have loosened up on is if I know people and know them to be generally responsible people. For instance, you and Mike, generally responsible. That’s not to say that you couldn’t get COVID through some mishap, because you could.

**John:** Totally. 100 percent.

**Craig:** Generally you’re responsible. Generally Melissa and I are responsible. So people who we feel that way about we can have a backyard – we can be in their backyard. We stay 10 feet apart. Use a mask when you’re moving through inside and through close spaces. But otherwise if you’re 10 feet over there and I’m 10 feet over here in the backyard and we want to have a drink, I don’t see a problem with that.

And so you do need to loosen the pressure valve a little bit, especially with kids. Because you do have to balance the kind of need for other people. I don’t have it, but I’ve been told it’s a thing. That’s what I’ve been told at least.

**John:** Yeah. So we do the same with our family in Colorado. We wear masks outdoors the entire time we were around them. It was nice to be able to see them in person, but I didn’t have the expectation that I was going to be able to hug them.

**Craig:** Right. Hugs are out.

**John:** Yeah. It’s not where we’re at. And that’s sad but it’s also the reality of what we’re at. To the point about this assumption that we’ll have a vaccine and it will all get better, I think it’s important that we sort of step away from that idea a little bit. That it’s going to be a simple thing. As quickly as we shut down we can just reopen and everything is going to magically be OK. It’s going to be a ramp out of this. And it won’t be as quick. It will be frustrating. We won’t kind of know how to deal with it.

We won’t know how to handle people who have had vaccinations and who haven’t had a vaccination. When we stop requiring masks for people, I don’t know. So, that’s all going to be a struggle. I just hope that it’s a struggle that we have under a different administration and sort of consistent – in which scientific decisions are being made by scientists rather than just sort of popular opinion.

**Craig:** Well, why would that ever happen?

**John:** Who knows? So my travel tip is if you need to travel just be smart about it. Be outside. And avoid situations you can avoid.

**Craig:** What else can we do?

**John:** That’s all you can do. Craig, thanks.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Episode 101 Transcript](https://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-ep-101-qa-from-the-live-show-transcript)
* [Seth MacFarlane to do Winds of War](https://www.slashfilm.com/the-winds-of-war-limited-series-seth-macfarlane/)
* [Redshirt](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/REDSHIRT)
* [John Scalzi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Scalzi)
* [WGA Agency Trial Pushed to 2021](https://variety.com/2020/biz/news/wga-agency-packaging-trial-date-1234733042/)
* [How We Record Scriptnotes](https://johnaugust.com/2020/how-we-record-scriptnotes-2020)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [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 Michael Karman ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Gift a Premium Subscription at Scriptnotes.net
* 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/465standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can now be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/development-heck).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So Craig uses a few bad words in this episode. Not really very strong bad words. We almost didn’t put a language warning on it, but just in case your kids are in earshot and you don’t want them to hear mild swearing, this is the warning.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 462 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we’re going to talk about development heck, that weird space that’s not quite heaven but not quite development hell. We’ll also discuss some strategies for breaking down writing projects into more manageable chunks. And look at how many writers are actually working in Hollywood.

**Craig:** 12.

**John:** 12. At least 12.

**Craig:** 12.

**John:** Somewhere between 12 and a million.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. And in our bonus segment for Premium members we are going to talk about wine.

**Craig:** Ooh. I do like wine.

**John:** You do like wine. So I thought we’d talk about some wine.

**Craig:** Yum.

**John:** But first we have some follow up. So, Craig, on this podcast for the better part of a year we’ve been talking about assistant pay. This last week there was some development on assistant pay at a big agency.

**Craig:** Yes. So WME and their associated Endeavor Content put out this proposal that’s kind of like a combo improvement in general for the way they pay their assistants and the way they’re going to pay their assistants. And also some relief for assistants that I guess have been kind of laid off or aren’t getting overtime because the offices are closed here and there. And it’s worth mentioning that most of these big agencies like WME or CAA have offices all over the place. They have offices in LA. They have offices in New York. WME has an office in Nashville. I think CAA may have one in London. I don’t know. So, there are many offices, many agents, many, many, many assistants.

So, John, walk us through the numbers here.

**John:** So they’re going to start the minimum hourly rate for LA, New York, and Nashville they’re raising from $15 an hour to $18 an hour with additional $2 an hour increase, up to $20 an hour rate at the first anniversary of the hire date. So basically you’ve been working there for a year you get that $2/hour bump. And so current assistants get their hourly rate raised from $18/hour, the additional $2/hour increase to $20/hour. That happens in August 2021.

So, this is kind of in line with what we saw happening at Verve which was the first agency that sort of announced some changes. I think CAA also announced some changes before the lockdown.

**Craig:** Yup. These aren’t as good. Look, it’s a weird thing. You don’t want to necessarily greet someone’s improvement with an eye roll or even worse anger. But this feels insufficient. First of all, the fact that WME was paying people $15 an hour to begin with is shocking and wrong given what the assistants do and how hard they work. Frankly they ought to do some sort of retroactive pay for a number of their assistants. OK, they’re not, so be it.

I have no idea why the starting minimum hourly rate in New York would be the same as Nashville. That’s bananas. Nashville is a great town. It’s a real city. But it’s not–

**John:** It’s not as expensive. No.

**Craig:** Are you kidding me? The cost of living difference between Nashville and New York is, well, it’s rather severe. So I don’t understand that at all. New York and LA should be getting more. I think $18 for Nashville – I still think it should be $20, but OK. But to have $18/hour your starting salary in New York, come on.

I just don’t get it. I really don’t understand. It feel like nickel and diming. You’re going to make them wait a year to give them $20 which is what you should have been giving them anyway per hour. Eh. I’m sorry. These guys are incredibly rich. The people who run this company, they’re incredibly rich. I don’t like it.

**John:** So, I want to both acknowledge that progress is good and that better is better, but this is probably not getting us to where we need to get to. So as we talked about before on the show when we actually talk with people who are working in these jobs the numbers that come back to us most regularly is that to really have a sustainable job in Los Angeles it’s $20/hour if you’re working a 60-hour guaranteed week. It’s $25/hour if you’re working a 40-hour guaranteed week.

Now, in the case of WME they’re saying there’s 10 hours of overtime pay per week without supervisor pre-approval. So, OK, let’s figure that you’re actually working 50 hours at this $18 or the $20. It’s better than it was, but it’s probably not where you need to be.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Now, we should also acknowledge that they announced medical benefits, to cover monthly medical premiums for the first two years of employment at the company. That’s good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That helps because that is a big expense for a lot of these assistants.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** And one of those things that makes it easier for kids of wealthy parents who can still stay on their parent’s insurance for a while. It helps with equity in addition to this being the right thing to do.

**Craig:** So right. So if you are paying that monthly medical premium they’re going to pick that up for you. But I don’t know what that is. So that’s the other thing. I just don’t know what their plan is. If the plan is kind of bare-bone – a lot of times people who are 22 years old are getting these bare bones medical plans because honestly the odds of you soaking up a whole lot of money and getting treated for chronic arthritis is fairly low. So your monthly medical premiums are not particularly high because your plan is not particularly good.

And so I don’t know exactly how much they’re actually picking up there. And also I don’t understand why it only covers the full monthly medical premium for the first two years of their employment. So what happens in year three? They just don’t deserve it anymore?

**John:** Or maybe they’re actually on the corporate plan at that point. There may be something we don’t understand about why on year three that you’d be moving up.

**Craig:** Well, I assume that they’re on the plan because I don’t know how they’d be able to pay third party medical premiums. I’m not quite sure how that’s working. There is a student loan relief that they’re offering. A student loan relief of $1,000 after the first anniversary of hire. And an additional $2,000 after the second anniversary of hire, which is not insignificant. But it seems like in a weird way reading through this the thing that felt the nicest was that they get – I got an illustrative of what it’s like being an assistant at these places. Assistants at WME and Endeavor Content, their email said, “Assistant.” That’s what it said.

So if you were working for Jane Doe than your email would be Jane.Doe.Assistant@wme.whatever the hell they are. Now you get to have a name. Aw.

**John:** Aw. That’s sweet. Yeah.

**Craig:** So I mean it’s not really – I mean, all of this is really standing to illustrate how bad it has been. I don’t necessarily think I can look at these things and say, “It’s solved.” It’s not. But like you say better is better.

**John:** Better is better. And I want to give Liz Alper credit because she’s actually been the one who has been talking to WME for the last six months about this stuff.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** So, she needs credit for the progress that’s been made. All credit to Liz on this. But, looking as I prepped this segment, looking back at where things were at, I went on Deadline and did a search for “WME assistant” and I found this article from 2009 that Nikki Finke wrote.

**Craig:** Oh, remember here?

**John:** So Nikki Finke who was the creator of Deadline Hollywood. So we’ll put a link in the show notes for that. But she writes, “So here’s what begins August 1. And so under one year you got $11/hour. One to two years is $12/hour. Two to three years, $13/hour. Over three years, $14/hour.” And so she was writing about this back in 2009 and how there was talk of people walking off the job because the pay was just too low at WME back in 2009. So not exactly a new problem.

**Craig:** Yeah. So what happened, and again, it just sort of shows you how these guys work. This was back when William Morris merged with Endeavor to become WME. And when they did William Morris assistants were getting about $13.50/hour. And the Endeavor assistants were getting about $9.50/hour, which is like McDonald’s money.

And what happened when they merged? The William Morris people were like, oh good, a chance to reduce, get closer to that $9.50. So they basically just split the difference. They were like, yeah, $11. $11/hour. It’s embarrassing. The whole thing is cultural, by the way. The whole thing. Anyone who tells you it’s economic is full of shit. It’s not economic, it’s cultural. And the culture is similar to that culture of medical interns having to sleep two hours a night in hospitals when they’re starting out. It’s like you–

**John:** It’s hazing.

**Craig:** Yeah. You should just be happy you’re here. Basically it’s Hunger Games, and then if you win you get to be an agent and get all this money and stuff. It’s just no good.

**John:** No good.

**Craig:** No good.

**John:** And obviously we don’t even know what things are going to be like six months from now in sort of what degree people are going to be back in the offices, to what degree these people are going to have jobs. So obviously there’s a whole bunch of unknowns.

But what is also unknown is when movie theaters will actually start showing movies again. That was another development this past week. Basically all the movies said like, oh, you know what, we’re actually not coming out. So Tenet which is a Christopher Nolan movie that kept getting pushed back and pushed back and pushed back is now off the schedule, at least in the US.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Mulan is pushed back. All the Avatar sequels are pushed back. I just think we should have done this a long time ago. It was unrealistic to think we were going to be able to put these things in theaters and that anyone would see them.

**Craig:** Well, it didn’t cost the studios anything to be hopeful. It wasn’t like they were spending money. But, yeah, I mean, there is no – even if tomorrow for whatever reason all the governors lost their collective minds and said the movie theaters are now open, the movie theaters won’t open anyway. Because not enough people are going to show up. It won’t cover their costs of running the place. And they won’t get movies, because even if movie theaters were open tomorrow they’re not putting Tenet in movie theaters now. That movie cost a lot of money to make. And they need to pack theaters or they’re not making their money back.

**John:** I mean, I felt like we need to just call a mulligan on 2020 for theatrical movies and just let 2021 be when we start doing this stuff again.

**Craig:** Yeah. Pretty much. And maybe, by the way. I mean–

**John:** I mean, it won’t be right at the start of it, but I think by next Christmas, not this Christmas, the next Christmas I suspect we’ll be back to a more normal situation.

**Craig:** That would be good.

**John:** It’s not going to be a lot before then.

**Craig:** Well, you know, in the normal theatrical release calendar was always kind of jammed up. Even though there are fewer movies than there were when you and I were growing up, the movies that come out are all big movies, so every weekend is like this big movie versus that big movie. And I have a feeling that when vaccines make their way through and COVID moves away from life-threatening to nuisance every weekend is going to be the “Holy Shit.” There’s 15 huge movies. Because they can’t hold them off forever.

**John:** No. What I find so fascinating is that there’s already all this press that’s been done for some of these releases. So you think of like Black Widow. I’m sure they already did their junket for Black Widow and it’ll be like two years later that you’re looking at this junket footage you did–

**Craig:** They’ll do it again.

**John:** They’ll all do it again.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’ll re-junket it.

**John:** Yup. Last week on the show we asked listeners what is the first movie that is genuinely good if you watch it today. Basically back in cinematic history, looking back to like the silent era, what is the first movie you can watch and say like, oh, that’s a genuinely good movie. And so our listeners are great and a lot of them are film historians. Some sent in these really long lists.

Christopher Tyler wrote in with one that was on a lot of the lists. He says, “It has to be Buster Keaton’s The General from 1926. It’s still legitimately amazing to this very day.”

**Craig:** Well, I buy that.

**John:** I buy that.

**Craig:** Yeah, I buy it.

**John:** I have a really hard time watching silent films. And so I’m not going to race out and see The General tomorrow, but sure, I bet it’s both impressive and entertaining.

**Craig:** Well, the thing about Buster Keaton was that he was so physical, so there wasn’t like a need for dialogue. It’s a little bit like when you’re on a plane and you’re reading a book or something and you glance over and someone else is watching a movie. You can’t hear it. But if you see it and you’re like, oh, they’re watching some action movie. You’re going to kind of start watching because it’s just – the visuals is what matter.

He’s fun to watch, Buster Keaton. Well, you know what? He was fun to watch. He’s dead.

**John:** He is dead now.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, we have some follow up about our How Would This Be a Movie topics as well.

**Craig:** So we had been talking about K129, this is the CIA project to use the Global Marine Expedition or Glomar Expedition to cover up the fact that they were not really trying to mine the sea floor for minerals. In fact, they were trying to recover a lost Russian nuclear submarine. Anonymous writes, “I’m happy to say that there are two competing K129 projects out there, both at big name production companies.” In fact, Anonymous had a chance to pitch on one of them last summer. And then parenthetically she or he says, “They went with an A-lister.” It wasn’t me or John, so.

**John:** It was not one of us.

**Craig:** Nobody even called me. “As I dug in deeper I found the real life events wonderfully cinematic and the key to me is that it’s also a deep character study. I do think the price point would likely be north of $75 million which makes it tough given the subject matter.” And that alone, John, is kind of a sign of the times. Because there was a time when $75 million for a big kind of international spy thriller-y kind of thing wouldn’t be a big deal. And, yeah, I think $75 million for a theatrical project about Glomar.

**John:** Feels like a lot.

**Craig:** It feels like a lot. I mean, Netflix seemingly spends that every day on things that are less cinematic, so it feels like it probably would end up being more of a Netflix kind of thing.

**John:** Yeah, it could happen. But you had said that the expense was going to be a factor from the beginning, and yeah, I agree. Because it’s one of those sort of between-er things where it has to be big and entertaining at $75 million but also probably has to be award-worthy at $75 million. And getting both of those things to line up just right is tough. And basically all the studios make one or maybe two of those a year because it’s what is going to be their Oscar slot. So, yeah, it’s tough.

**Craig:** It is. It’s a tough one. I don’t think we’re going to see the big, huge version of it. I think maybe there is a more narrow kind of medium budget version that we might see. I wouldn’t be surprised. As Anonymous writes they’re trying.

**John:** They’re trying.

**Craig:** We know that.

**John:** We also talked about the UNO movie as an example of pitching on a board game IP. Frank from LA wrote, “I, too, was approached to write the UNO movie. And the log line given to me by the studio is a gem that I thought would be helpful for young screenwriters to hear, so they can better understand the ‘jumping off’ point that potentially paid gigs really get at.” So this is the quote.

**Craig:** Oh man.

**John:** “The UNO movie series lives in a world of diverse character relationships, high stakes, and unexpected turn of events.” Should be turns of event, but OK. “Where anyone could be a wild card.” Really have to underline that. “Where anyone could be a wild card.”

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** “It’s a fun four-quadrant PG-13 film that races from beginning to end with themes that are social and culturally relevant and totally like Ocean’s 11 or Now You See Me.”

**Craig:** That is a dumpster fire of nonsense.

**John:** Yes. But, I mean, Frank, thank you for writing in with this, because it’s such a great example of exactly what this movie looks like at this stage. Also, four-quadrant PG-13 film is exactly what they would describe this as. Because it’s fun for the whole family, like everyone gets to go see this movie.

**Craig:** It is the definition – literally everything they said is something that you cannot do for an UNO movie. Let’s review. Diverse character relationships. There are no character. They’re cards.

**John:** Well there are four colors.

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh, the blue people are getting along with the greens. So there are no characters, much less diverse character relationships. High stakes? It is a card game for children. Unexpected turn of events? It’s a random deck of cards. Where anyone could be a wild card. Shut up. It is a four quadrant, no it’s not, it’s a zero quadrant film.

Just to be clear, in case you don’t know, the quadrants are 0-25, and 25 and up.

**John:** And male and female.

**Craig:** And men and women. So men under and over 25, women under and over 25. A four quadrant movie is the kind of movie that people of all ages and all genders want to see. I am sorry, 48-year-old men aren’t going to see the UNO movie. You’re on crack. Neither is a 35-year-old woman. No one–

**John:** There’s actually very few kind of four quadrant movies. Like the Marvel movies are genuinely four quadrant.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Jurassic Park is genuinely four quadrant.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But a lot of times what they really mean is the Trolls Movie, or Angry Birds which is that–

**Craig:** Two quadrant.

**John:** It’s a two quadrant and parents.

**Craig:** And parents.

**John:** Basically you’re willing to go see it.

**Craig:** The parents are just chauffeurs. Everybody knows that. You know, moms and dads don’t want to be sitting there in a movie for eight year olds. Pixar movies are four quadrant films. Because Pixar movies are good enough, their quality enough. Or like Lord and Miller animation is four quadrant.

**John:** The Lego Movie became genuinely four quadrant, even though it really would be a children’s film at the start.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it wasn’t like they all sat around going, “It’s going to be a fun four quadrant.” I mean, I’m sure somebody said that, but Chris and Phil wouldn’t. “That races from beginning to end. With themes” – there are not themes – “that are socially and culturally relevant.” There are none. “And tonally like Ocean’s 11 or Now You See Me,” two films that did not have social or culturally relevant themes.

**John:** No, they did not.

**Craig:** They were heists.

**John:** They were heist films.

**Craig:** They were fun heist movies.

**John:** So if you get sent this description you’re like, OK, well they’re looking for a heist film that somehow ties into UNO. That’s really all I can sort of take from this. And it has to be a fun four quadrant thing.

Now, I mentioned Angry Birds. I mentioned Trolls. Not to disparage them. I think they were actually very successful at what they were doing. But look at that IP. At least those characters had faces.

**Craig:** Yeah. There were eyeballs.

**John:** They had eyeballs. Nothing here has a face.

**Craig:** Nothing. Even the Emoji had eyeballs, right?

**John:** Monopoly, you have the dude in Monopoly.

**Craig:** There’s a man. There’s a dog. There’s a jail. Right? UNO is numbers.

**John:** There are places.

**Craig:** It’s literally numbers and colors.

**John:** Making Chess the Movie.

**Craig:** No, Chess the Movie there are people. [laughs]

**John:** There are people. There’s a king and a queen. There’s armies.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** I mean, UNO, it’s insane. And what happens when you get this as a writer and you look at this and you need money, and so your heart sinks, and you’re like, “Well, here we go.” And you read this as basically code.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And the code is, OK, it’s going to be a heist movie. There’s going to be set pieces and action. The game will probably have to have some sort of – the game will be magic. The cards will be magically. Diverse character relationships, there’s going to have to be four groups, like there are four colors in UNO. And each group is after some magical UNO card, like whatever the UNO card is. The fun one. But one girl from green team is going to fall in love with a boy from the blue team, and so we’ll just grab some old boring Shakespeare stuff and throw it in there. And then COMEDY. Because there’s going to be a wacky character. It’s a dog with feathers. Blech. [laughs]

And all for naught. Literally all for naught.

**John:** It won’t get made.

**Craig:** You know it will never, ever, ever, ever, ever happen. Ever. Ever.

**John:** Now, so on the topic of never getting made is our sort of marquee thing we’re talking about today which is development heck. And so this is a project that would end up in really development hell, but development heck we’ll say for right now. And this is being kicked off by a letter we got in from Mark from LA. Do you want to read what Mark writes?

**Craig:** Mark writes, “My writing partner and I sold our first screenplay just over a year ago. Since then executives take us a lot more seriously. And we’ve had the opportunity to development several projects with different production companies in both the feature and TV space. As far as we have been able to tell thus far it seems like all this development is always for free, even at very successful production companies. With one of our projects in particular we are now entering the seventh month of developing a pitch to go out with. And we’re nearing the end of our rope. We have put more time and energy into this pitch than we even did the completed script we sold.

“Is this the reality of development? Or are we doing something wrong?”

**John:** It is both. And so let us talk about the reality of where you are in the development process. So let’s talk about development as a very general term is going from an idea to a finished property. And really from a script into something that’s in production. So a project will be described as being in development which is any part of that state from here’s an idea to we have begun rolling cameras to film this thing. That’s all described as development. And as screenwriters you will spend a tremendous amount of your time stuck in some purgatory of development. You are trying to push this rock up this hill and you’re doing rewrites, you’re doing all this work. You are pitching this project. You are trying to get elements attached. That’s all what is considered development in Hollywood.

**Craig:** Yeah. There are two kinds of ways of approaching making money with developed material. One way is you are entrepreneurial and so your job is to develop something, eventually gets made, and you get a big windfall from that. And the other way is to be employed. You don’t get a huge windfall at the end. You get paid up front. So it’s the difference between like real estate development speculation as opposed to the people who build the homes. Right?

We’re the people who build the homes. The producers are the people who are real estate speculating. And somehow in our business they’ve got us to share their risk without sharing their reward.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Fascinating.

**John:** So let’s talk about the projects that Mark and his writing partner may be going out for. So it might be the UNO movie. So the UNO movie is a case of there’s IP and Mark and his writing partner get the call saying like, “Hey, there’s an UNO movie, do you want to pitch on it.” And so they go in, they take a meeting with the executives on the UNO project, along with 30 other writers and they figure out their take. And so they go in for another meeting, and another meeting, and eventually they get to pitch at high levels and hopefully land the job writing the UNO movie. That is one kind of development.

What Mark and his writing partner might also be doing is they go in and they sort of pitch an idea of their own to these producers. And the producers say like, “That’s pretty good. Let’s work on this a little bit more. Then we’ll take it out on the town and we’ll pitch to a bunch of places.” And it’s really Mark and his writing partner’s idea, but then they’re going out to places to set it up somewhere. Both are valid. Both can take forever.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I do remember early in my career, and this wasn’t even producers, this was meeting with studio people. The studio people will say, “Listen, we have a script. We want to just start over. We like the idea of it, so we own that. Pitch your take on how you would rewrite it.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You end up kind of doing the work of planning out a movie. And then coming back in and sort of pitching out a movie and you may not get that job. That work is hard to do and it’s entirely speculative to try and get work. You’re not handing them written stuff, although, you know, then they started asking for that, too. Against the rules.

But you’re doing a ton of work. And it is frustrating. And, Mark, the thing is it is the reality of development a lot of the time. Your competition is not the best way of doing things. Your competition is the way other writers are going about doing it. And when everybody at a certain rung is fighting for these small few jobs people are going to work really, really hard and take on a lot of risk.

**John:** So this morning I was going through my Dropbox folder and I have a subfolder called Older Projects. And it’s basically everything I’ve ever sort of pitched on, worked on, you know, the things that never happened basically. And so like Cat Woman was one of those situations. And there’s one called Black Monday and I’m like what is Black Monday? And so I had to pull it up and read through it to even know what it was. And I remembered like, oh wow, I spent months on this.

So it was a project over at Paramount. I met with the producer who had a vague idea about this situation where – it was actually not a bad scenario. Equivalent of like a virus, but a thing gets released that basically destroys gasoline, and it destroys oil. And so essentially what happens when all the oil goes away. And this was right at the time of peak oil. And there really was a genuine concern that we’re going to run out of oil.

And so it was how to do that as a catastrophe thriller kind of situation. So, vague idea. So I’m like, OK, this is what would be interesting for me. I went back and pitched on that. Pitched again to him with actual characters and beats. We pitched to the junior executive.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We pitched to the senior executive. And then just nothing happened. There was just no traction for it and it goes away. And it really became clear that the studio never wanted to do it. And that is by far the rule rather than the exception. A lot of these projects they just kind of go away even if there was ten writers pitching on it. There was never really interest in making that movie. Or even hiring someone to write a script for that movie.

**Craig:** That’s the part that’s the scariest. When we are doing this stuff in concert with producers a lot of times what’s happening is the producers are desperate to get projects in development and then projects onscreen or on the television. Because that’s how they really make their money. And sometimes they say to a studio, “Look, this is a great idea. You’re going to love it.” And the studio is like, “Meh, I don’t think so.” And they’re like, “We’ll prove it to you.”

Well how are we going to prove it to them? I know, let’s go tell 500 screenwriters that the studio is desperate for this. They won’t know. The studio is not going to stop us from doing it because, why? And everybody is going to come in and pitch on this thing that the studio absolutely wants to make and then we’re going to get a great idea and someone is going to come up with this amazing pitch. We’ll walk it in and the studio will finally get it. They’ll get how great this is. But sometimes the studio is like, “No, like we said before. We don’t want to do that. We have no interest in that whatsoever.”

And all that’s happened here is the producers have leveraged your time, your energy, your labor–

**John:** And really your hunger. Your ambition.

**Craig:** That’s right. Your hunger and ambition on something that costs them $0 to do and costs you a lot to do in time and energy. Why not? Great system for them. I mean, truly great system. Terrible system for us.

**John:** Now, let’s keep in mind the other people who are involved in the situation would be the executives at the studio, the executives at the producer’s company, but also the studio. They all need to look busy. They all need to justify their having their jobs. So taking these meetings, it shows that they’re working because they can point to this is the work that I am doing.

Your representatives, your agents and your managers, well, they are getting you into meetings. That’s sort of their job. And they can’t know which things are going to become real and which things are not going to become real. They should have some sense, but they don’t necessarily know what things are going to be real. They don’t know who you’re going to click with, what things are going to lead to other stuff.

And if they deny, you know, every producer or every studio executive access to their clients they’re going to stop getting calls. And they’re going to stop getting incoming calls for their clients. So they need you to go out there and be available or at least take these meetings. So there’s a whole ecosystem that’s built up on sending Mark and his writing partner out for these jobs.

**Craig:** Right. And when you talk about this hierarchy there are multiple opportunities for people to play this game with you. So, development heck is around the corner everywhere you go. Studio executives trying to convince their boss. A producer is trying to convince that studio executive. The producer’s junior, like the junior partner, is trying to convince the producer that they’ve got something going. Your agent is trying to convince the junior producer that the client has something going. Everybody is snow-jobbing everybody in a huge Ponzi scheme of interest that eventually comes due when you, the writer, finally face off with the studio executive who is going to make a decision. And that studio executive says, “Um, yeah, no, there was never anything here. In fact, this entire meeting I did to just be politically appropriate with the producer I have a deal with. And that producer I don’t even like. And that producer in fact only has a deal here because they made an agreement with the person whose job I just took.

“That guy is gone. I’m here. I don’t even like this producer.” The things that we don’t know are infinite. We are told one thing and it is almost never the truth. There’s a thousand other facts behind it that are hidden from us.

**John:** Now, so we’re talking about the development heck that happens before you’ve ever been hired to do a job. But we should also keep in mind that sometimes development heck can be you’ve been hired to write a draft and it just never sort of stops. Basically nothing ever proceeds to production and you’re like what is even happening here.

And some of the things that are the common factors I’ve noticed with that is there’s a change in leadership at the studio. So, the person who brought you on that thing is no longer there and the new person has really no interest in that project at all. That happens frequently.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If there was a director who was involved, but then that director goes off and does another project, a lot of the momentum has dissipated from that project. I would say of the projects in active development at studios, 75%/80% of those had a director onboard at some point and that director is doing other stuff. And so it’s neither alive nor dead. They’re sort of hoping maybe that director will come back, but that director is never going to come back. Because that director is going to go at the next thing.

That’s a commonplace for writers to find their scripts sort of stuck there.

**Craig:** Yup. Sometimes actors get interest because they’ve been in a hit. And then while you’re working on your pitch with them. You know, the actor is doing this with you. The actor doesn’t know, often, how to development something. What they know is how to act. And so certain actors become hot, they get the ability to development material. They have writers running in circles for a year and a half. Meanwhile the actor’s newest movie comes out, bombs, and no one cares about what they think anymore. [laughs] This happens all the time.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s awful. It’s really, really hard to deal with. And it’s why now more than ever controlling your own material is kind of your best bet early on. Because, I mean, and I don’t mean this to sound cruel. If you’re new and they’re coming to you and saying we’d love to hear what you think about this, that means they’re in trouble. Because that means A-listers aren’t interested. B-listers aren’t interested. C-listers aren’t interested. Now they’re looking for rookies they can work. They can work to the bone for nothing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s not great.

**John:** That’s not good. So let’s talk some strategies for Mark and his writing partner and other folks who find themselves in this situation.

My first baseline strategy is to try to decide up front how much you actually want this and what it’s worth to you. And so some of the things that may play into that decision is are a bunch of other writers going for it. And if a bunch of writers are going for it that’s a sign that you probably are less likely to get it and this could be a situation where it’s a bakeoff where a bunch of people are competing for the same thing and they really are going to hire somebody. Or it could be really what my agent used to call a “fishing trip” where they’re just seeing if anybody has a take for this. They’re not actually serious about it. They’re just seeing like does anyone have a way to do this.

If it’s that and you’re not passionate about it, take the meeting. Maybe you go in and you spend the day sort of working up one pitch on it, just to show that you actually can develop a story. And that intellectual exercise is actually really good and gets you a little bit more experience pitching. But don’t set your heart on it. Don’t take 19 follow up meetings about it because it’s clearly not a thing that’s actually going to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. Part of what representatives can do is just suss out like what’s real here. You know, a producer comes and represents certain things to you and then they kind of need to look around and go, “Yeah, but is this real?” They can drop a line to somebody they know at the studio and that person can be like, “It’s not something that we think we’re interested in. But they’ll always waffle. I mean, if they come up with an amazing pitch, blah-blah-blah, of course.” Well, duh.

**John:** But that’s why you’re paying your agent and your manager is to do that stuff and to make those uncomfortable phone calls.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So it’s fine. And they can always play that you’re too busy doing another thing. And that’s a general strategy I would urge people to consider here, both on this pitching to get a project, and on being strung along deep in development. Like, oh, if we could just think through this thing a little bit more. Is to always have something else that you need to be going off to do so that you can set some time limits around stuff.

It’s like, oh, you know, I would love to sort of keep talking through this, but I got to go off and do this next thing. Or I’m being hired onto this thing and it’s going to be exclusive. Those excuses are helpful at every stage in your career because it just gets people to actually make some decisions. Because so much I think of what ends up becoming development heck is just people postponing and making hard decisions about whether a thing is real or not real.

**Craig:** Yup. And being busy is an indication to those people that you’re wanted. And unfortunately that’s how humans function. I’m the same person that I’ve always been. But there are people now that I think assign a meaning to me that is 180 degrees from the meaning they assigned to me 10 years ago. I can assure them I was me 10 years ago. I’m the same person. But it’s not how it works.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** That’s the deal.

**John:** Let’s talk just one second about mini-rooms. Because as you and I were coming up in the industry this idea of we’re just going to meet with writers one at a time and sort of just see if there’s anything out there, increasingly what someone like the UNO movie would do is they might put together a room of writers to try to figure out an UNO movie.

And there’s huge downsides to this mini-rooms, especially in terms of figuring out credit if you’re actually going to make a thing. What I will say is good about the idea of a mini-room is that at least they’re spending some money. At least they’re serious enough that they’re actually going to spend some money on this project. And some people are going to get some payment for their time and energy. So, I’m not a huge fan of mini-rooms overall. I think they’re problematic in so many ways, but I do like that it’s forcing people to say like is this a thing that we actually are at all serious about trying to make into a feature film.

**Craig:** Yeah. That actually weirdly I also find indicative of a problem. Because if they’re willing to spend money that means they’re willing – that is what development is. It’s almost like they’re trying to develop development now. So, if they’re willing to spend money should hire somebody to figure out how to tell the story and let’s see how that person does.

I will not do these roundtables for features where the point is let’s figure out a movie together. Absolutely not. I get paid a lot of money to do that. In fact, all writers get paid a lot of money to do that. Relative to the wages that are pulled down in the United States our minimums are quite solid for writing a treatment and a first draft of a feature film.

So, they should be doing that. And it’s a different story – if they hired somebody and they’re just looking for advice, well honestly if a writer just called me I would just sit down with them over lunch and just talk about it. That’s what we do with each other. But an official kind of room to team come up with a solution for something that will ultimately earn a corporation potentially hundreds of millions of dollars for $2,500 and some snacks? Nah. Nah, I ain’t going to do it.

**John:** I’m not going to do it either. But what I’m saying is that they’ve essentially done that for the last 30 years, except they’ve not paid anybody anything.

**Craig:** Well I don’t think they’ve done that. I mean, we’ve had roundtables where the movie has been made.

**John:** Oh no, I’m not saying they weren’t doing roundtables, but they were just doing the one-on-one meetings and then they were sort of cherry-picking the best ideas out of some of those people who were pitching their thing. So essentially Mark and his writing partner were going in and pitching their take on the UNO movie and they’re like, “Yeah, no,” but in the back of their heads they’re remembering like, oh, that was a pretty good way of doing this one thing. So they were getting a lot of just completely free involvement rather than really cheap development.

**Craig:** Yeah. I can see that point. There’s an argument to be made that if people are going to come in and pitch on open writing assignments they should be paid.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That I would be like, great, everybody that comes in and pitches their take gets $2,000, or whatever. You know? Because it’s a thing and you just shouldn’t be able to do this to people over and over and over and over and over, especially when you know it’s not real. By the way, that’s how you figure out if it’s real. It takes as little as $50 to find out if something is real. I kid you not. You say, OK, you want me to come in and pitch, it’s $50. “No, actually, we don’t.” OK, well then this was never going to happen.

**John:** Yeah, there’s been an ongoing idea of a meeting log. Essentially when actors go in to audition for things they have to sign in a log and that way SAG can keep track of who is going in on things. It’s tougher to do with writers but it’s not impossible to do with writers for keeping track of who is going in on projects and just getting a sense of is there exploitation happening here.

**Craig:** It’s way harder for us because the near appearance of the actor indicates that they are discussing a part or perhaps auditioning for a part. But they can’t – the work that an actor does is not usable until it’s done in front of the actual camera. You can’t take an audition tape and stick it in a film. Not so with us. So, who knows what we’re saying in those meetings.

I remember there was one nut job, we’ve had a few in the Writers Guild, and there was one cuckoo bird who his solution to the problem of free rewrites or this sort of thing with endless fishing expeditions and development was to require through negotiation that every conversation a writer had with a producer or a studio executive, be it in person or on the phone, be recorded and then transcripts made and studied by the guild.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t think that’s a workable solution. No.

**Craig:** It doesn’t seem workable.

**John:** Even in the age of computer-assisted transcription that’s just not going to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like I almost want the companies to be like, “You know what? Yes. Yes. Do it.” [laughs]

**John:** Do it. Do it. All right. On the subject of the WGA this last week the WGA put out its 2020 Annual Report. We’ve talked about this on every year of the podcast. We’ll put a link in the show notes so you can download it. It has the financials but what we always find most interesting is how many writers are actually working in a given year and how much they’re earning.

This past year more than 6,300 writers reported employment in all work areas. Total writer earnings for the dues period rosé 3.1% to $1.68 billion, which is a big number.

**Craig:** It’s a lot. That’s a lot of money earned by writers. In the aggregate.

**John:** In the aggregate. Yes. And so those writers, there were 5,118 working in TV or digital, so streamers. And 2,188 in screen or features. So if you add those together that totals 7,300. But people work in both, so about 1,000 people worked in both TV and features, including Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** That is true. And I wish there were different statistics. Part of the issue with the annual report is that when it comes out it’s coming out per the constitution. So it has to come out at a certain time. But that time is too soon to collect all of the information for the past year. So, for instance, it’s hard to tell how screenwriters are doing. The number of screenwriters employed went up. It looks like it did not go up commensurate or rather the earnings didn’t go up commensurate with the amount. Meaning that screenwriters are earning less per screenwriter than before. That’s bad.

But, we’re not quite sure because the final numbers aren’t really in yet. So, it’s hard to say. I also would love median averages as opposed to average-averages.

**John:** 100% agree. So, when you just divide it out you don’t know if you’re actually looking at a real number. Especially because we’re the only union that has writing partners and so you’re counting of those as two separate writers for the purposes of this count, but they’re splitting a salary. You just don’t know what the numbers really are. So I think median would be so much more helpful to understand how people are really doing rather than average.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, in features for instance, I mean obviously in television the enormous numbers are earned under the heading of producing. So they don’t go into this report. They’re not counted by this report. But if you look at features for instance the highest paid feature writer is doing like production rewrites or being paid about $300,000 a week. OK. And they probably do let’s say four weeks like that a year.

**John:** That skews things a lot.

**Craig:** That skews things dramatically. That’s on top of the fact that probably that writer who makes $300,000 a week is probably also making about $2 million to write a script or a script and a revision. So, those writers and there’s probably at this point about 30 of them are skewing the average dramatically.

So, median averages would be really, really helpful, I think, to get a better sense of what, you know, the rank and file is earning. Because honestly that’s the only value this report has is to figure out how your rank and file is doing and not the slim edge on the right side of the bell curve.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, I think the number of writers working in features is higher than I would have guessed. It’s the highest it’s ever been which doesn’t comport with my expectation about sort of the shrinking nature of the theatrical business, it’s remembering that features that are written for streaming count.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so that’s what is making up some of the gap. But those people who may not be paying paid especially well. So, yeah, I agree that a push towards better reporting that actually shows what people are earing is going to be really helpful.

**Craig:** I mean, we live in a time where statistics are manipulated in four billion ways, right? There’s no reason for us to continually get this blunt report. It’s a blunt instrument.

**John:** It’s constitutionally-required.

**Craig:** We should actually be doing better. If they don’t want to issue that to the membership as a whole, totally fine, because a lot of those kind of trend analyses maybe they might think could be used against us in negotiations. But at least internally there should be a very complicated data analysis going on.

**John:** Yeah. So I will say as a person who has been in those committees, it’s there. So they do have some of those things that actually show where the lines are and where things are headed. And so some decision-making is based on that. But I can see your point that you may not want to put some of that stuff out because it could skew things in ways you don’t want to know. But I do think there’s a value to publically reporting.

I think trying to not talk about money only leads to wages getting pushed down. That’s my belief.

**Craig:** I agree with you. And I think it would be helpful for us if we trended towards more transparency and more information. Especially because it’s important for writers to know going out there what is real. So, a writer who is starting out and looks to this report to figure out well what does a writer actually make doing feature work has no clue. This report tells them literally nothing.

**John:** Absolutely nothing. And even on the TV level it’s only showing the scale that they’re being paid for writing TV scripts. It’s not showing their producer money at all. So, not especially useful.

What is real numbers is residuals. And so this report also shows that the residuals collected by the WGA in 2019 grew to an all-time high of $471 million. That’s 1.9% up over 2018. Residuals increased 1.4% in TV, 2.7% in screen. And this is a case where screen residuals are bigger than TV residuals. So screen residuals were $471 million, which were mostly the category of new media reuse, which is basically streaming, and that’s the only area that’s growing. It grew from $15 million in 2014 to $54 million in 2019. So that’s where the money is.

**Craig:** Yeah. Also not super useful. Like it’s useful from the guild’s point of view as an aggregate, but here’s what I want to know – and I’ve always wanted to know. What is the trend between, for instance, box office performance and residuals collected? That would be good to know. It would be good to know what the trend is between ratings and TV residuals collected. It would be good to know what the average amount of residuals are, the median – again – the median residual collection by individual members. Because if you are David Koepp, for instance, who has been on our show and has written many enormous films–

**John:** Jurassic Park.

**Craig:** Yeah. Among other. Like there’s an Indiana Jones in there. He’s collecting a very large – J.J. Abrams is collecting a very large chunk of the feature residuals because they’re based on credits.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, again, not hugely useful to figure out our real standing. And the factor that we’ve always kind of – there was an old rule of thumb. If your movie made $100 million domestically at the box office you would get $1 million lifetime in residuals. But nobody knows what that – that was always a guess. And we could figure it out once movies come back. But we don’t have those numbers. So it would be good if we did.

**John:** I agree.

Lastly, the report also talks about contract enforcement which is basically the guild has people whose whole job it is is to shake trees and make money fall out for things that are owed to members. So, this last year they collected $52 million in owed residuals to people and $5 million in legal collections, which is basically late fees, interest, contract stuff that wasn’t getting paid. They’ve already collected $8 million in 2020. That is a way that the guild should be spending its money is to get money in for members.

**Craig:** Spending money to make money. That’s a fascinating trend line in as much as there is no trend line. I look at the way we collect on a year against year basis for legal actions and it’s sometimes really high, and then it’s really low, and then it’s really high, and then it’s really low. I don’t know what–

**John:** Big decisions come down that are sort of a windfall in certain years, and in other years it’s not.

**Craig:** Exactly. So I can’t necessarily tell if – well, the data does not indicate a trend reflecting legal aggression or restraint.

**John:** Yeah. So with contracts coming in now with the agency campaign it will be interesting to see whether enforcement is up. It theoretically should be up because we’ll actually know when invoices were sent out. But it will also be really fascinating to see next year’s report what impact the pandemic and the shutdown has had on writers’ employment and writers’ salaries. Because we were the only group in Hollywood who was still working during all of this. TV shows were still getting written. Features were still getting written. All that happened.

But, if production doesn’t start up pretty soon there could be just this backlog where there’s too much written and they sort of stop writing for a while so they can actually shoot this stuff. And I’ll be curious whether our numbers fall. I feel like they have to, but I’ll curious how much they fall.

**Craig:** It seems like they would. I mean, you can’t really cheat this kind of shutdown. You can defer it. So, in a sense we have deferred our shutdown while the actors and directors are taking their shutdown now. But then once the backlog of scripts is in place and the actors and directors are back at work their shutdown ends and ours will kind of start. It’s sort of inevitable.

I mean, a lot of things will still keep going. Don’t get us wrong. We’re not saying that it’s suddenly like tumbleweeds. But it’s going to slow down because they’re going to have to mulch through the backlog of work before they’re going to need you to create more.

**John:** Yeah. I have no idea what the actual percentages will be, but if DGA is down 50% because of the pandemic are we down 30%? Are we down 20%? I don’t know. So, check in next year on this podcast and we’ll see where we’re at.

**Craig:** I mean, it will be very hard to know because so much of the money that we make in the television business is not as writers. And so–

**John:** Yeah. But in terms of total numbers employed – well, yeah, but people were employed for part of the year, then they still count as employed. It will be interesting to try to suss that out.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because what will happen is you’ll be like, OK, well we have enough scripts. We don’t need any more scripts. But we definitely need you on set. Right? It’s your show and we need your second-in-command on the other set. And then you’re going to be in editing. So, you’re working as a producer. And those overall deals are paying out, you know. But, yeah, I don’t know, we’ll see. But I agree with you that there’s – it’s inevitable. There’s going to be some slow down.

**John:** Yeah. There couldn’t not be. All right. This topic I had planned for a bigger thing, but we don’t have a lot of time. But my question for you, Craig, is you’re working on plotting out a TV show. How are you breaking that down into manageable chunks? Because you could be thinking about, OK, this is the whole season we’re going to do. How are you working through breaking that down into actionable chunks of stuff you can write in a day?

**Craig:** It’s all kind of the same process. The only thing that changes from day to day is how far back you are in terms of your point of view. Step one is, OK, there’s probably a story of this season, because I don’t write procedurals for instance. And even in procedurals like on Chicago Fire they have, I think, three stories that are multi-episode arcs. So you start with that. OK, what’s the story of the season and how would we imagine dividing that up into chunks that will become episodes?

What feels like the right sort of inflection point to end and then re-begin? And you do that and then once that feels right then you reposition your map and you zoom in and now you’re looking at the episode. Great. Same process. We have a beginning and an end. But there are going to be inflection points. Those are scenes. What roughly are the scenes? How is it going to break out? Great. Zoom in.

New point. Scenes or sequences. And it’s just that.

**John:** There’s a fractal quality.

**Craig:** It’s a fractal quality.

**John:** Yeah. So I’m finding that same thing, too. There’s a TV thing that I’m working on but there’s also a feature I’m working on. And it’s one of the few things that I’ve needed to write with a partner. And so we talk about it in the biggest, broadest strokes, but then as we sort of zoom on it or we sequence it really is finding what is the shape of this and then what are the scenes within this and trying to get it down to the point where we know the individual scenes well enough that in this outline we can actually number them and say like, OK, you work on 36 and I’ll work on 24 and then be able to sort of swap pages and make sure we’re hopefully writing characters who have existed in the same movie.

But it is that process of always as you’re zooming in tighter remembering what the overall goal is and what the feeling of the overall piece is so that it’s all going to tie back into this thing at the end.

**Craig:** That’s kind of the mastermind part of the television process. And it’s a different job than just writing a movie. There is this other aspect to it that is – when we’re writing movies we do have to kind of move between our pure writerly brain and our planning brain and sometimes our business brain a little bit. But with television there is way more of a demand on that kind of mastermind battle plan aspect of it. Because there are just more levels of analysis you have to do.

**John:** Yeah. As a family over this quarantine we watched Game of Thrones. So I had seen it all, but my husband and my daughter had not seen it, so we watched the whole thing together. And it’s been great to watch it, but it’s such a different experience watching it all as one thing, like watching an episode a day versus over the course of eight years or whatever that was.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** With gaps in between. And I was much more appreciative of the hard work Dan and Dave and everyone was doing in terms of setting up little things that are going to be paying off so much later. And when I’m watching an episode a night it feels like, oh, well that’s a clear line and a clear trajectory, but in their case that was three years ago that you did that thing. And that kind of master planning is something that is kind of new as a writing art form. It’s a thing that hasn’t existed – there hasn’t been a need to have that kind of giant out planning because Shakespeare’s plays don’t need to do that.

Even novels, you know, like the books these are based on, yes, the novelist is thinking about those things and setups and payoffs, but they’re all within his or her own brain. And it doesn’t have to be communicated as a team of like let’s remember to do this here because we’re going to need that moment to pay off two seasons later.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is why Neil Gaiman’s Sandman is still mind-blowing to me. Because it felt like he had plans that he sort of went, ooh, I think in four years I’m going to do something with that, so let’s plant that little slow-growing seed here. It is mind-blowing when those things circulate back around.

There’s I think an additional aspect of complexity that has been introduced into this system by the enormous flexibility that we now have. There is no guard rail of there will be 22 episodes, or there will be 10 episodes, or even whatever number of episodes each one will be 59:30 long. There’s nothing, right? You can talk – I mean, I talk about this with HBO all the time now. How many episodes? There isn’t a season number, right?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Watchmen had nine. We had five. Westworld I think would do eight. Game of Thrones sometimes did 12, sometimes did six. Right? And as the years went on some of the episodes are an hour and 30 minutes, and some of the episodes are 48 minutes. And because of that the flexibility means you have way more complexity. You just – you don’t have limitations of form the way you used to.

In movies time will always be a limitation. It’s just set there. You can only go so long before they say, “Yeah, we’re not paying for that,” and the theater won’t run it.

**John:** And classic television, of course, with its five-act structure or six-act structure as it moved into, you knew you were writing towards a specific formula and therefore while it was sometimes challenging to fit that weird structure you knew what your job was. And when you don’t know what the bigger pieces are it can be tougher.

But in terms of breaking it into little chunks, classic television had its act breaks to make those chunks really obvious.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s harder now with the things that you’re writing to figure out, OK, what is the chunk that feels meaningful. How do I make sure that this is a meaningful episode and enjoyable episode of this series that’s actually going to tie in and become a meaningful and enjoyable episode of the whole project?

**Craig:** And it’s happily also why I think you’re seeing more creativity and more satisfying creativity in television than you are in features these days, in general, not always, because that kind of freedom does unleash creators to do things that are unexpected. No matter what, if you know that your hour is going to be in four chunks with commercials in between there’s a regularity to that you will not be able to escape. It’s just form does dictate content at times.

**John:** Yeah. For sure. All right, it’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is D&D related. It is the Mythic Odysseys of Theros which is a new supplement for D&D. We had Alison Luhrs on the program a bunch of episodes ago. She was a designer at Wizards of the Coast who makes D&D.

This is a new sort of source book. It looks like the Player’s Handbook but it’s just about reframing the game in terms of the myths of ancient Greece. And it’s really, really well done. I think they’ve just done an outstanding job with this book and the other sort of expansion things they’ve made. In this version of D&D there’s no elves, there’s no gnomes or dwarves. You have humans. You have centaurs, minotaurs, satyrs, these lion creatures, little leonins, who are great. You have the gods meddling in sort of mortal affairs a lot. And this new concept of piety which is sort of these boons and blessings you get for acting as a champion of your gods.

It’s just really, really well done. And such a smart way of using existing sort of cultural IP in the sense of like we all know what the Greek gods are, but not using any of the names of those Greek gods and really sort of reframing them in this sort of made up world. Just very smartly done.

So if you like D&D and you’re curious about ancient Greek mythology, which you probably are, I suggest you check it out.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s like a reskinning. You know?

**John:** Yeah. That’s what it is.

**Craig:** So now I’m going to have to buy this thing, obviously. Because when you’re a DM and somebody comes to you and says, “Yeah, so I’ve got this idea for somebody and it’s going to be a paladin with the new oath of heroism that’s in the Mythic Odysseys of Theros I’m like I’ve got to buy the Mythic Odysseys of Theros.

**John:** And so become our game has become completely online with the pandemic, we’re not using our physical books so much. What’s so fascinating about these books is they’re just kind of fun to read and not just sort of like the stats in them. There’s cool stuff you can do when you actually see the mythology fit in together.

**Craig:** And obviously Wizards has become very good at thinking of these probably primarily as digital content and then secondarily books. So they’re getting really good at creating these things so that they’re already to go for online platforms like Beyond D&D or Roll 20 and so on and so forth.

John, what is the font that D&D uses for all their titles? It reminds me so much of the font in Zelda, like when you face off against a boss.

**John:** I do not know, but maybe as you’re giving your One Cool Thing I’ll look it up.

**Craig:** OK. Because I know you love fonts.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing ties a little bit back to our discussion about UNO. It’s an article in Sports Illustrated and it is Caddyshack 2: The Inside Story of one of the Worst Sequels Ever.

Now, I, as you know, am a big fan of comedy. And I’m a big fan of broad comedy. And I have written plenty of broad comedy sequels myself. So, why would I recommend this? Because it is a great window into how things can go wrong. And it is easy for people I think to just imagine like, “Oh, it was a cash grab and everything went wrong, because they didn’t care.” Some of them didn’t care, like Chevy Chase apparently. And it was definitely a cash grab for Rodney Dangerfield who was unhappy with the way things were going and in fact he was unhappy creatively so he actually abandoned the cash grab.

And Harold Ramis was doing it mostly out of a sense of obligation and trying to help Dangerfield. So it wasn’t a cash grab for him. And the director, it wasn’t a cash grab for him. He was like, “I love Caddyshack. Let’s see if we can make this work. It seems like a good idea.” Everybody’s heart was probably in the right place. And then so many things went wrong. And then bad choices were made.

And it wasn’t like Dan Aykroyd made his performance choices because he was cynical or doing a cash grab. He made a choice that people didn’t like, which happens sometimes. And so I thought it was a really good window into how things go wrong, and also how hard it is to do sequels to these movies. And all of it predicated on this very interesting fact that a lot of people don’t know which is that when Caddyshack first came out it was not a hit initially. And critics hated it.

So, we remember Caddyshack as a comedy classic that much have just descended from the heavens and pleased us all. But it wasn’t. And then Caddyshack 2 really went off the rails. So, a fascinating article for you to understand how things actually function. Studying the way things go wrong. It’s an interesting investigation. It certainly provides good context so you understand how somebody like Harold Ramis for instance, who was a brilliant guy and who was nowhere near done being brilliant at the time of Caddyshack2, wrote Caddyshack 2. It happens. You know?

**John:** Cool. I will look forward to that. While you were talking I was looking up what the fonts are for the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. And there is a list of what the basic fonts are. Because the books are very, very consistent in terms of how they work.

**Craig:** Yeah. I want that title font. Like where it says Mythic Odysseys of Theros. What’s that one?

**John:** I cannot find that.

**Craig:** Oh?

**John:** Oftentimes title fonts are actually really art work. So they can be based on existing fonts, but they’re really done as individual glyphs. And so they’re put together sort of a character at a time. So I have not found that. But I have found a list of things like Scala Sans, Scala Sans Caps, Modesto Bold Condensed, Mrs. Eaves Small Caps, Bookmania, and [Delvernan] are the main text faces that you see inside a fifth edition book.

**Craig:** What about Modesto Bold Condensed? Oh, no, it is.

**John:** Is it?

**Craig:** Modesto Bold Condensed is the font that is used in the title.

**John:** Oh, yeah. So here’s what I’ll say. You see those on the interior headlines within. But I suspect what you’re actually seeing on the cover is based around that but had a lot of sort of artistic flair being applied to it.

**Craig:** That may be true.

**John:** But that’s the basic [crosstalk].

**Craig:** If I had to fake a Dungeons & Dragons title I would use that font. Which you can purchase I believe for the low, low price of–

**John:** $25.

**Craig:** $25.

**John:** On My Fonts.

**Craig:** Yeah. Worth it.

**John:** Worth it. That is our show for this week. So if you are a Premium member stick around because we’re going to talk about wine. But otherwise Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Our outro is by Brendan Bergan. Brendan, I am sorry for sleeping on this outro because it is fantastic, so listen to that.

If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we talked about today. But for short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts. They’re lovely. So you can go to Cotton Bureau or follow the link in the show notes to get there.

Show notes are at johnaugust.com. You’ll find show notes for this episode and all the back episodes. You’ll also find the transcripts.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments.

Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, let’s talk about wine. So, sometimes as we’re playing D&D you will open a bottle of wine. Increasingly you’ve not been opening a bottle of wine but you’ve been injecting a mechanism into a bottle of wine to push out a single glass of wine. Talk to me about your experience with wine and when did you first start drinking it and what do you look for in a wine?

**Craig:** Well, I wasn’t a wine drinker for a long, long time. You know, it wasn’t – I guess if I was going to have a drink it would be a beer, maybe, or a cocktail. When you’re young you drink beer. That’s basically what’s available, or god forbid those disgusting wine coolers. And then at some point you feel the need to be grown up and so you copy someone and their choice of cocktail, so it ends up being something boring like a vodka and soda or a gin and tonic or something like that.

But, you know, and then you try wine. You know, I think my first encounters were probably with white wine which I still do not like at all. I just don’t like it. But red wine, big fan.

**John:** Yeah, so I’m a fan of all wines. As a family, like my husband Mike does not like red wines, and so it’s only whites and rosés for him.

**Craig:** Same over here with Melissa.

**John:** So I like whites and rosés just fine. But I do – the complexity of a good red wine is terrific. But I will say that as I’ve grown up I’ve had the opportunity to drink expensive wines and fancy wines and go to wine tastings and do stuff. And I’ve not found it worthwhile to get deeply, deeply into wine. And so I think there’s a – you can sort of pick a level which you enjoy wine and just buy those wines and you’ll be very, very happy.

**Craig:** Agreed. I’m like you. I have a little wine fridge that holds maybe 30 bottles of wine or something like that. Where I live there happen to be just a lot of wine people, like I have one friend who has a full walk-in wine storage refrigerator room, I’m sure there’s a name for it.

**John:** Like a wine cellar, but not in the basement.

**Craig:** A cellar, there you go. It’s a cellar. And it’s extraordinary. And he has an enormous amount of wine in there and a lot of it is incredibly expensive. I’m not that guy. But I definitely appreciate good ones, which aren’t always the most expensive ones. I’ve learned enough – I find Cellar Tracker is very helpful, at the very least so that I know which ones I should be drinking before other ones. And I know enough to let them open up if they’re a certain kind.

So I’ve learned some things. But I’m never going to be – I mean, I know the kind of wine I like. If anyone is buying me a bottle of wine they know what to buy me.

**John:** Craig, my take is that Craig likes a big wine that has a strong character to it. Nothing subtle about a wine for Craig. Is that correct?

**Craig:** I like to be hit in the face with a big cabernet. That’s my deal. That’s what I’ve liked. I’ve always liked that. And so, like a Caymus is sort of like a great example. Like a Caymus Cabernet, or PlumpJack. These are good wines. They’re not like stupid. But I’m not like necessarily a pinot noir guy as much. It’s just I like things that are bit bolder. So, you know, that’s my stupid taste. But, yeah.

**John:** Yeah. So 2016 and 2017 I was living in Paris and living in Paris you think like, oh, you must have found great wines all the time. And the truth is that the wine you get at the supermarket in Paris is delightful and super cheap and as good as a $15 or $20 bottle that you’d here. But it was like $3 there. Everything is just really, really cheap.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m not going to drink $3 wine. I don’t care. It’s not going to happen.

**John:** Well, you’d be hard-pressed to know the difference. You’d be hard-pressed to tell.

**Craig:** Three Euro wine maybe. I would drink Three Euro wine, but not $3 wine.

**John:** Fine. And so that year was actually helpful for me in terms of being able to understand what I was looking for even though I couldn’t look for a certain name, or sort of a certain grape because things are just identified differently there. So I got a sense of what that all feels like.

It also gave me a little bit more appreciation for buying local wine. And so I would say overall I try to purchase things that are from the LA region, or Santa Ynez Valley, or someplace kind of close because that way I’m not trucking wine from the other side of the world to drink when I kind of don’t really care or would notice the difference.

**Craig:** And happily I’m probably a bigger fan just in terms of my natural taste of California cabs than Bordeaux and stuff like that. I’m great with a California wine. And here we are.

If you ever get a chance to – if you like wine and you can visit Napa it’s beautiful. So is Sonoma. But I’m more fond of Napa for whatever reason. And a wine buddy is always a good thing. Like Chris Morgan who we play Dungeons & Dragons with and who does all the Fast & Furious movies is a neighbor of mine and I think a more educated wine guy than I am. And every now and then we’ll go out to dinner and get something that’s well, just, silly. We’ll spend some of the money. We’ll get like a bottle of Scarecrow or something like that. And it’s awesome. It’s great. And it’s great to drink with somebody that kind of appreciates it as well and can teach you a little bit about it, too.

So, that stuff is always fun to do. But like anything else I’m always wary of passions turning into like second jobs. You know?

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And I think for a lot of people wine becomes a second job. It’s never going to be that for me.

**John:** So, some advice for people who don’t know much about wine or sort of scared to even get started. First off, don’t worry about your palate. Don’t worry about having the appropriate adjective to describe a little bit of things on all the notes. It doesn’t matter. Do you enjoy it? That’s phenomenal.

If you’re looking for a white wine that is actually kind of interesting and is not just a big, dumb chardonnay, Albariños are a really good varietal that are often really interesting. So I would say go for that.

People often sneer at rosés because I think they are thinking of white zinfandel. They are thinking of a really cheap kind of wine cooler wine that they had way back in the day. But rosés are actually delightful on a hot summer day in lieu of a cocktail. So try a classical rosé on a hot summer day. Delightful. And a lovely thing to drink.

**Craig:** Yeah. Melissa, she likes all the white. She likes the rosés. Then there’s a whole world of sparkling stuff. There’s sparkling wines, and then if they’re from Champagne then they’re champagnes. And then there’s also Lambrusco which is a sparkling red wine which became super popular a couple years ago.

Yeah, you know, you don’t have to spend a lot of money. And Cellar Tracker is a really cool app. I think it’s been a One Cool Thing before. Where you can take a picture of the label and it will give you all sorts of information that’s useful like what’s the average price of this bottle of wine, so are you getting ripped off or not. And what do people think of it? And when would it drink best? There’s certain phrases you pick up like pop and pour. If you ever see P&P that’s a great wine that’s like open it, pour it, drink it. Other wines need an hour or two. And other wines are not ready yet at all and just lay them down.

**John:** I use a similar app called Vivino which is helpful for like when someone brings you a bottle of wine if you don’t know if it’s a fancy bottle of wine or not a fancy bottle of wine, or if you really like a bottle of wine and you want to remember it, you snap a photo of it and that’s great.

The other thing I would encourage people to do is if you find a winemaker that you like a lot, just go to your local neighborhood liquor store and have them order a case for you just so you have all one bottle. Because there’s something really reassuring about not having to wonder will I like this bottle of wine I’m going to open. I know I’m going to like it because I have 12 of them and that’s going to be useful.

For our wedding we got a white and a red. And so we ended up with 50 bottles of each of them. And it was really lovely to have a year later, two years later, to be able to open up one of those bottles and remember what our wedding felt like because like, oh, this is the same bottle of wine.

**Craig:** Aw. You guys.

**John:** Yeah. And then of course one of them will be corked. And you’ve lost it.

**Craig:** Oh that’s right. I hate you. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. What in life is like being corked? It’s one of those weird things. You just don’t know? Every time you open up a bottle it’s like there’s a chance that it’s actually going to be disastrously wrong.

**Craig:** There is. Sometimes you get that weird cork rot. So there’s corked which is a nasty cork rot flavor that gets in there. And then sometimes oxygen gets in and it turns it all to vinegar. Then there’s also a fungus that gives a weird like flavor that some people actually like.

**John:** Like a dirty sock flavor?

**Craig:** Could be. If that’s happened to you. I don’t recall. But generally speaking if I taste dirty sock or something–

**John:** You’re not going to enjoy that wine.

**Craig:** No, if I taste something – and I think we popped a bottle at one point or another where we were like, oh no, wrong. No. Into the sink it goes.

**John:** So here’s the closest equivalent to corked I can think of is every time you cut open an avocado there’s a chance it’s going to be disastrously wrong inside.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You just don’t know. You don’t know.

**Craig:** Yeah. That sounds about right. It just could be – or like you bite into an apple. Is it mealy inside? Or is it crisp? You’ll find out.

**John:** You’ll find out soon. All right. Thanks for talking wine.

**Craig:** You got it man.

Links:

* [WME, Endeavor Content Increase Assistant Pay](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/wme-endeavor-content-increase-assistant-pay-1303933)
* [Nikki Finke in 2009 on WME Wages](https://deadline.com/2009/07/more-news-about-wme-assistant-pay-10760/)
* [The General, with Buster Keaton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_(1926_film))
* [WGA 2020 Annual Report](https://www.wga.org/the-guild/about-us/annual-report)
* [Mythic Odysseys of Theros](https://bookshop.org/books/dungeons-dragons-mythic-odysseys-of-theros-d-d-campaign-setting-and-adventure-book/9780786967018)
* [Caddyshack 2](https://www.si.com/media/2020/07/24/caddyshack-2-worst-sequel-ever-inside-story)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [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 Brendan Bergan ([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/462standard.mp3).