Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/loglines-are-for-other-people).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 469 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show when two screenwriters uncover provocative research on loglines they must confront an industry determined to keep them silent.

**Craig:** I’d buy that.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a good logline. Plus, we’ll have questions and answers about lawyers, options, and ASL.

**Craig:** And in our bonus segment for Premium members, all of whose money goes to you, we will discuss gaming consoles. Oh, I’m so excited about that bonus segment.

**John:** Yeah. Because I know nothing and you’re going to teach me everything I need to know about gaming consoles and the next generation of gaming consoles.

**Craig:** Joy.

**John:** But there’s even more. So, since Craig missed out on last week’s pitch versus spec episode we’re going to do a bonus episode of extra listener dilemmas that were sent in because we got like 50 of these in and so this is a backlog here. So, if you’re a premium subscriber look for a bonus episode that’s going to drop in your feed that has more of those pitch versus spec dilemmas.

**Craig:** That’s great. We will sort through all of them.

**John:** Yup. Craig, what a week. So 10:42am on Monday morning I got a text from our friend Aline Brosh McKenna. And she asked, “Is CAA a done deal or does WGA still have to agree? I am confused?” And I was really confused because I had no idea what Aline was talking about.

**Craig:** And then you saw it. Yes.

**John:** Get us up to speed, Craig.

**Craig:** You know how it goes. The way I got engaged was I called all of my friends and I said I’m getting married to Melissa. And then later that day I told her. [laughs] No, that’s not how it works. At all.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No. Now, there was some good news sort of baked into this.

**John:** 100 percent. But let’s go through how it actually sort of broke and then we can talk about what the good news is. Because I think there is good news underneath this overall. So, CAA sent a letter to its staff that also went out to the trades and we can figure out what the order of that was, but in the letter it said, “Today we signed the same deal the WGA made with ICM several weeks ago. We delivered the signed agreement to the WGA and we assume it will be circulated to the appropriate members of the negotiating committee as well as the membership shortly.”

So it sounds like, oh, so they signed the ICM deal. And what it turned out is that they literally just changed ICM to CAA and sent that through, but they also put other stuff in there, too. So it says there, “There’s one change we have provided that we think the WGA will be able to agree to. With regard to our investment in the affiliated production company, Wiip, we are providing for a commercially practical time to come into compliance with the 20 percent ownership limitation contained in the agreement. We are unequivocally committed to achieving compliance.”

So basically they added one thing to that deal they signed.

**Craig:** Yes. That’s right. And they did so unilaterally. Now, in looking at it, I mean, the good news of course is that the stuff that we were generally arguing about and have been arguing about for well over a year they’ve agreed to. They are going to I think once ICM and UTA signed on and essentially said we’re out of the packaging business CAA understood that the packaging business was over. It was going to end anyway. That was the conventional wisdom. My guess is that, you know, maybe in five years there wasn’t going to be much in the way of packaging. But, OK, we get it done quicker and that’s fine. This is a good thing. Because going all the way back to our very first episode on this topic with Chris Keyser it’s pretty clear that you and I and Chris Keyser were in violent agreement that packaging is terrible.

So, it’s good that that is over. And also they are agreeing to reduce their ownership of their affiliated production company down to this 20 percent ceiling. Now, this may have been somewhat surprising even to people inside the Writers Guild, I don’t know, because what CAA didn’t do is say we’re will to get down but we want to see if we can make that ceiling go a little higher. Because that percentage of ownership had kind of crept up from zero to five to ten to 20. But they said, no, 20 is good.

What they are asking for also I’ve got to be honest seems a bit reasonable which is to say we can’t just do that tomorrow because it involves divestment of a corporation. So, can we come up with a timeframe for that that seems reasonable? Now, whatever they’ve proposed, I don’t know what their timeframe is. There’s a – what is it, a year and a half timeframe for–?

**John:** The sunset on packaging, yeah.

**Craig:** So perhaps it’s a similar kind of thing. I don’t know. But some sort of timeframe makes sense. So what they’re saying is good. And what they asked for, at least as far as I could tell, seemed fairly reasonable. The way in which they did it – why did they do it this way? I have theories.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I have theories.

**John:** So there really are two things to talk through. Why did they do it this way? Let’s have that as one topic. And then we’ll talk about the getting down to 20% and sort of like what is actually reasonable and what the concerns are about getting down to 20%. So let’s first talk about why they did it this way. I don’t genuinely know why they did it this way. And I’ve asked a bunch of people and there’s a lot of different theories. I don’t know that we can know. Craig, what’s your hunch on why they sent out this letter/press release without actually engaging the WGA?

**Craig:** I think that after ICM and UTA signed the deal the problem for CAA and WME was that it was a problem of face-saving. I mean, if you’re one of those organizations you can see where this is all going. You know how it has to end. What you don’t want to be is the person who then just says, “Well, OK, I will l just eat the sandwich everybody else made. You want to feel like you are somehow in control of it, driving it, in charge of it. And I suspect that whatever the communication was between the union and CAA it was not at a level that could have precluded something like this. So I think CAA decided we are going to announce this as if we had full choice in this matter. It’s actually quite savvy in that regard I think. Because otherwise you just kind of get stuck with it. And then one day you just passively agree to it.

So it seems like a very face-saving kind of thing. It sort of seems like, no, no, no, you’re not cutting my finger off. I’ve cut my own finger off. I didn’t want this finger.

Now, I’m happy about it. I think that this is the right thing to do. I’m so frustrated with the length of the process, obviously. But it’s not over yet. So, we do have to follow through now and get this done. I don’t see anything structurally based on what has happened here that would stand in the way unless this was somehow down in bad faith. I don’t think it was, but that’s just a hunch.

**John:** Yeah. So, the WGA did respond after this thing went out. And I think the WGA sort came forward saying we were surprised as anybody that they did this thing, because CAA sent a statement to the press and communicated with former clients saying they signed this franchise deal. This is not accurate. CAA has proposed changes as we’ve talked through. The WGA will assess CAA’s offer but not through the press. And basically CAA is unfranchised. Working Rule 23 is still in effect basically saying you can’t sign with CAA and so don’t think that you can magically today sign with CAA.

Also within that email the WGA sent out saying like, yeah, it is good news that they basically just agreed to the ICM deal, which is fantastic. The remaining issue, though, which is a good segue to this is how do you get down to 20% and do you let CAA sign writers again with this promise that they’ll get down to the 20%? Because how do you actually hold them to that promise? And who determines what is a commercially practical time to do that? What are the safeguards? Because one of the things, you know, you and I both encountered as the guild negotiates things is you have to get things in writing that are enforceable. Because as contracts have been negotiated if things are just verbal agreements or things are sort of vague, vague always hurts us.

And so I’m going to be really curious to see how do we get to a place where it’s clearly codified what this timeline would be because if it’s not clearly codified I also have the alternative perspective of just like, OK, well sell down the 20% and then you can sign your clients again. So, what do you think? What makes you feel confident that they will really get down to 20%?

**Craig:** I have the same confidence in that that I have that UTA will cease packaging when the packaging sunset period is over. I don’t see anything in the agreement that is particularly ironclad about that other than trust. You know, so if UTA and ICM have said that they will stop packaging on this date, I presume they will stop packaging on that date. And if they don’t then you have to, you know, pull the cord again and everybody at UTA has to fire their agent there again. Or at ICM. And it’s the same thing with CAA. Pick a date and if it’s not done by then per some sort of – you know, obviously you want some kind of independent what do they call those people, accountants or something? Forensic? I don’t know. Whoever decides how much a company owns–

**John:** An auditor.

**Craig:** Yeah. An auditor. Right. So some auditor will at that date look at it and go, yeah, they did it, or no, they didn’t. And then the WGA – but I don’t see the difference. I mean, is there a reason that the guild is more nervous about faith in that as opposed to faith in the sunset of the packaging?

**John:** That’s a good question. I think – let’s take a look at it. Sort of where is the information and how do we find out the information about ownership of the company versus involvement in a packaging deal. Yeah, I guess you do need some outside way to assess both situations. And so they’re similar in that way.

**Craig:** Yeah. I would be infuriated – so my normal position is just anger. But that’s I wake up angry. That’s no big deal. But I would be infuriated if CAA agreed to all of these things and said that they would reduce down to 20% and would be willing to do so in some reasonable amount of time a la the packaging sunset. Because, I mean, changing the ownership of a company is a fairly complicated thing to do.

**John:** No, TikTok, simple.

**Craig:** You just need the president to write a thing. If the guild said, yeah, well come back in two years when it’s done and then you can have your clients back I would be infuriated. And that would seem unfair and punitive. Like a singling out. I don’t think we want to be in that business personally.

**John:** And you need a date and you also need really clearly defined terms of what ownership means. And so there can’t be hanky-panky in terms of, oh, it’s a shell company that does all this crazy stuff. That’s why I do feel like you need some sort of outside auditor who is looking at this thing and really setting–

**Craig:** Well can I ask you – I’m going to flip the question around a little bit. We at the union have had a year and a half to be thinking about this. This is a term that we’ve asked for since the beginning. Do we not have already a kind of written up definition of how that would work since it’s a term that we’ve been asking for all this time?

**John:** We do have very specific language in terms of what we’re looking for.

**Craig:** Great. Terrific. Well, hopefully that works.

**John:** But also I think in the guild communications it has been very clear that it’s not sort of the guild’s responsibility to tell you how to wind down this thing. So the actual process of how you’re going from where you are is kind of [unintelligible] to the state you need to be at. That’s not our job to sort of solve your problems.

**Craig:** Seems pretty simple to me. But I’m merely a caveman.

**John:** So it feels like it’s up to the people sitting around tables figuring all that stuff out now.

**Craig:** And this would be – I think people are desperate for some reclamation of normalcy in their lives. A lot of us, I include myself, were CAA clients who would like to return. It’s not so much that we have this great fondness for the building or the corporation, but rather we have individual longstanding year-long, decades-long relationships with our individual agents that we want to return to. So, this is something that a lot of people would just like to have back, or at least would love the choice to have their agent back. And the same goes for all of the people represented by WME. I have no idea what the deal is with WME at this point. I assume that they are on the same track. I don’t know how they couldn’t be because this is the track. There’s one track.

**John:** One track.

**Craig:** There’s one track.

**John:** Let’s do some follow up. So last week in the episode you missed we have a listener named Niko. He pitched an idea for a series and then the day the episode dropped we got some follow up from another listener. So, let me play Niko’s follow up.

**Niko:** Hi John and Craig. It’s Niko Jacques, the Weezer guy from last week. Thanks for having me back on the show to follow up. Shortly after Episode 468 aired screenwriter Ian Sobel linked a Deadline article from August 2014 with the then Breaking News that Rivers and Psych creator Steve Franks sold a pilot to Fox called Detour. It set up a fictionalized account of Rivers’ return to college via character insert with a different name. It was completely shot but was never picked up by Fox.

It’s an unfortunate but common occurrence in the TV world. This actually bodes well for my idea because it shows Rivers’ interest and openness to a depiction of that part of his life. And the description of the pilot is so different from what I’m getting out of the real life story.

Detour’s punny title alone indicates a tone closer to Community, while I’m going for something like The Social Network meets 8 ½. Key differences are that my spec isn’t serialized like Detour. I’m writing to feature the character, Rivers Cuomo, himself. And I want to portray his creative process that led to the abandoning of his ambitious but ill-fated rock opera written on dining hall napkins. You can say it’s a bit different.

I’ve concluded that I’m going to finish it on spec and keep it as a writing sample. Although the rights ultimately belong to Rivers and Fox you guys have made it abundantly clear that I have a right to tell this story and I will. Odds are slim to none that my idea’s fate is any better than Detour’s, but I’m going to write a series that I’d like to see. That is why we write after all. Hashtag Weeze Writing. Thank you.

**John:** All right. So, Craig, I don’t know that you actually listened to last week’s episode.

**Craig:** You know I didn’t.

**John:** So, Niko’s pitch was for something that both Ryan and I really, really loved. So this is the front man for Weezer. He goes back to college to finish college. And so he’s already a rock star but he’s living in dorms again and sort of what that life is like. And so Niko was asking is this a thing that he should write as a spec or is this a thing that he should try to pitch. And so we said spec the hell out of this unless you actually have Rivers Cuomo there with you to go out and do that pitch.

So, what I love about this is he got some real time follow up that like, oh, that is a good idea. They actually already pitched that idea. It was actually already shot as a pilot. And what I like about Niko’s reaction is like, OK, yeah, that’s great. Even if this thing can’t sell I think it’s something that is going to show my writing well and can be a really good sample.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, this is a song that we’ve been singing for god knows – how long have we been doing this, like in years?

**John:** A zillion years.

**Craig:** A zillion years. So somewhere around year 50 of a zillion we started saying this and I think it is still true, you are writing to be noticed. You are writing to attract interest in you as a writer. It is not necessarily going to work the way it used to back in the day where it is the writing itself that will be bought and made. It sometimes is. And I would also say that if it’s so good, if it’s so undeniably brilliant, then they’ll be like, “We’ve got to go figure out how to get the rights and work this out.” But really it is about the writing and you. And a great calling card for yourself. So it makes total sense.

And certainly it helps that you know going in that this is something I’m not confused about. I know how this functions.

**John:** Absolutely. And another thing we brought up is that this feels like the thing that if the good version of this script ends up on the Black List at the end of the year because people like it a lot, there’s a long tradition of biopics where you don’t have the underlying rights showing up on the Black List and getting passed around. So there was a Matt Drudge script. There’s a Madonna script. There’s a history of this. So this feels like it’s part of that trend. I say go for it Niko.

**Craig:** I mean, you can write a biopic about anybody without any rights as long as you stick to what is public knowledge, public information. You want to go a little further than that then, yeah, you could run into trouble. And of course the other issue is you just got to watch out for defamation and so on and so forth.

But as we have also said somewhere around year 70 of a zillion if there’s any kind of legal ambiguity and a studio or network or streamer wants to make it, they will assume that risk. As long as you’ve disclosed it to them clearly they’ll make a legal judgment and then it will be their issue because they will be the writer of record. They will be the author.

**John:** Speaking of biopics and Madonna, this last week it was also announced that Diablo Cody is writing a Madonna biopic that Madonna herself will direct. I’m absolutely fascinated. Diablo Cody is–

**Craig:** I just want to chart my reaction to this. If there were a little line chart as you spoke, so on the bottom axis is time and the top axis is interest level, my interest level with Diablo Cody it went up, is writing a biopic, up, of Madonna, way up, that Madonna is directing, straight down.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a challenging combination of things. And Amy Pascal is producing it. So, a very talented producer. A lot of complicated things all together and we’ll see how it goes. I am absolutely fascinated to see what’s going to become of this because Madonna’s life and her rise is so fascinating and spectacular and we were kids during it, so we got to sort of see the whole thing happen. And it does feel very resonant to a social media star of today. I think it could be fantastic.

So, the difference though between the Black List script of Madonna where she didn’t sign on to it and this one is that the person can get all the music rights. Access to things in Madonna’s life that would not be public knowledge and you could just do things you couldn’t otherwise do.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so it’s going to be great to see. And I mean Diablo Cody is such a great writer. We just watched Juno – my daughter wanted to watch Juno this last week and we watched it again. And it’s just so smartly done. And so smartly written. I’m fascinated to see what Diablo can do to a biopic story like this.

**Craig:** Yeah, you’ve got a big plus and a big minus. The big plus is that like you say you have access to all of this stuff of Madonna’s life that you wouldn’t otherwise get from public record. The downside is it will all be filtered through Madonna. So, A, who knows if she’s going to be – I don’t know what a version of her own life. We are all somewhat fabulous when it comes to ourselves. But also it can, you know, the trick is how do you keep somebody from making their own hagiography and just essentially making a movie about how they’re great.

So I’ve never seen, I don’t think, a good – anything like this that’s good that is directed by and controlled by the actual subject of it. That is fascinating.

**John:** Yeah. The closest is probably the Queen, the Freddie Mercury biopic this last year, because Queen actually had a lot of control over it. But they weren’t directing it.

**Craig:** OK. That’s right. But they weren’t directing it. That’s fascinating.

**John:** And also Elton John had a lot of control over Rocket Man. And that–

**Craig:** Yup. But wasn’t directing it.

**John:** Was not directing it. And so that definitely is a thing. So, you’ve got to balance out the Amy Pascal/Diablo Cody factors and Madonna directing it. Challenging. Really challenging.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, well, we’ll see how it goes.

**John:** I want to see the documentary behind the scenes. That would be just as fascinating.

**Craig:** That would be good. And if Diablo would direct that, please kindly. Thank you. That would be amazing.

**John:** That would be so, so good. All right, big topic for this week is loglines. And so loglines are a thing we’ve kind of avoided talking about on the show for 468 episodes because they’re just not that interesting to us and they’re not a thing that screenwriters actually write. So, I did a blog post this last week about loglines and basically defined them. So loglines are the one or two sentence description of a story or a screenplay. And the very classic form is when inciting incident occurs the hero must face a challenge against this antagonistic force for the stakes. That’s a really classic sort of like pattern to what loglines are.

They’re a thing that I wrote a ton when I was a reader. So that first page of coverage there’s just a logline there that just describes what it is. It’s like a TV guide sort of description of things. Once I became a professional screenwriter I never wrote them again.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But aspiring screenwriters often write in saying like, hey, talk about loglines or what’s a good logline.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** And it’s like I don’t know. I don’t write those things.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** But aspiring screenwriters are writing them I think because they are applying for competitions or they are emailing producers or potential managers and they’re supposed to put in these one sentence loglines for things. So I thought we’d actually talk through what loglines are and what they aren’t.

**Craig:** Yeah. I had to sort of write one recently. When we were putting the press release for The Last of Us HBO said can you – we’ll take a stab at it, but what’s your version of how we actually describe this. Without saying logline they were basically saying what’s the logline of this thing. I mean, the nice thing is when you’re doing it for a press release you don’t have to structure it in this very formal way. Because you’re right. There’s something so weirdly concrete about how loglines have functioned. When blank…or blah-blah-blah-blah. That’s kind of the weird – it’s like the way newscasters speak in that strange cadence. Loglines have their own cadence. They are artificial. And they’re essentially nonsense.

For some bizarre reason the kind of thumbnail sketch summary that people probably filled into a log as if to say we have received–

**John:** Oh it really was a log.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was just like we have received this about this. People now think that that somehow is going to determine whether somebody reads something or not. I think we probably are beyond that at this point. Loglines are stupid. In fact, the better the logline the worse I suspect the script will be.

**John:** So, getting back to this idea that loglines were literally written down into a thing, as I was going back through my stuff to figure out what loglines did I write I have these spreadsheets of the coverage I did. And so it was a database that would print the title page but also can just show it as a spreadsheet. And so I just have lists of these loglines for different things.

And so this was the first one I think I ever wrote. Which is when a prize-winning journalist makes up a source she pays an ex-con to be her supposed poet laureate. That was for a script called Pulitzer Prize by Sam Hamm who wrote Batman.

**Craig:** Sam Hamm.

**John:** So that was a piece of coverage I wrote for Laura Ziskin way back in the day when she was teaching one of my first screenwriting classes. That logline which is a very classically structured logline, when hero and antagonist situation. I don’t want to completely dismiss it because it gives you some sense of what it’s about. But it’s not story. It’s not a pitch. It’s basically just like an arrow pointing towards there’s a story here somewhere without any details, without any specifics really. It’s pointing towards a general story area. And that’s really all a logline can do.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m not sure why everybody gets so worked up over it. Well, the same reason I think they get worked up over query letters. It’s all very out of date.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We live in a time where the way we transmit media information to each other is faster, it is plastic, meaning it changes constantly. And somehow people who are aspiring to be screenwriters insist on obsessing over these methods that date back to mimeographs. And it makes no sense. And I can only presume it is because a lot of the people that are doing this have learned to do it from people who did it that way once or who just keep passing this along as received wisdom when it’s no longer really a thing. If I were writing a spec script today I would not write a logline at all. I would make a trailer. And it wouldn’t even have to be a trailer of like I’m going out with my phone and I’m showing fake explosions. Maybe it’s just text. Maybe it’s a single scene with somebody reading it. I would just try and be creative. And then make people be interested.

And then just say, here, read the first ten pages now. If I can get you to read ten pages that’s so much better than you reading a logline I can’t even explain.

**John:** Absolutely. Because it’s the thing itself.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You’re able to tell does this person actually have writing talent. Can this person tell a story on the page?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Visual communication ability. All those things which are so crucial a logline doesn’t do. And so I would say like as you are trying to get staffed on a TV show the producers aren’t looking through your loglines. They’re looking through can this person write.

And so while – and people are going to write in saying like, oh, the logline was super important for me signing my manager, all that stuff. So I do want to talk about loglines in the sense that they may be a necessary evil for some people in certain circumstances. But they’re not the real thing. Professional writers aren’t writing query letters.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** They’re not writing loglines. It’s just not a thing you’re going to do after this first stage, so maybe don’t stress out so much about it because it’s not – just because it’s a thing you’re doing right now doesn’t mean it’s actually the thing itself.

**Craig:** That’s right. And don’t be afraid to be brash, to be ambitious, to be meta, to be sneaky about it. Because your logline if you are writing a traditional longline, well, it is competing against every other molecule of logline water in the ocean. And I don’t know how it could possibly stand up. I legitimately don’t understand how any of these loglines rise above any other since they are essentially empty advertisements for some reductive version of a story.

So maybe there’s – what’s the anti-logline? What’s a weird logline? I’m going to give you three words and you’re going to have to read for the rest. Be creative. I mean, that’s what people are looking for. Are they not? I assume so.

**John:** So I’m thinking back to last week’s episode, let’s talk about Niko’s pitch for – it wasn’t even really a pitch, but Weezer front man goes back to college. And that could be a logline. There’s a logline version of that. That’s a good idea. And so there is something about some ideas synthesize down to say like oh that is intriguing, I see what that is, I’d be curious to read that. I don’t want to go so far to say if you cannot summarize your story down to one or two sentences that you have a problem. I don’t think that’s actually true. Many of the things I’ve written don’t summarize down to one or two sentences especially well.

But there are certain, especially high concept ideas, that are hooky in one sentence because – where the premise is essentially why you would read this thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, this is the Sushi Nozawa method. So here in Los Angeles there’s a group of restaurants, Chef Nozawa. If you like it it’s delicious. And he popularized a kind of Omakase where it’s just called Trust Me. That’s what it’s called. Trust me.

Now, at the time that Trust Me came along menus in Los Angeles were turning into small novels. Novellas. With paragraphs describing every freaking ingredient. And it was so refreshing to not only not have that, but to not even have a choice. Hey, trust me. Sit down and trust me. You’ll get food and then you’ll go home and you’ll be happy. And that may be your best move on certain loglines. You can just say this is a story of Coal Country. Trust me, you’re going to want to read this. That’s a better logline to me than when a down on his luck union laborer finds that the mine has closed he needs to raise money to save his blah-blah-blah before such-and-such and the blah-de-dah.

Ugh. God. Get me my noose. I need to end it. I do not want to read anymore.

**John:** Let’s talk about the other use of loglines which is really the situation you’re describing which is you have to announce something in the trades. You have to basically publically sort of say this is a movie about this. And Keith Calder and other previous guests on Twitter were talking about, oh yeah, it’s totally the thing the producer is doing at 10pm the night before the press release goes out is trying to hammer out some logline for what the thing is. And I’ve definitely encountered that myself.

So it’s a tough thing because you’re trying to describe a future movie in a way that is interesting and exciting and makes it clear why you’re doing this thing without giving away crucial points, crucial details. It’s tough. And you’re trying to finesse things. And everyone has opinions. It’s hard to find what that is.

What was your process in terms of figuring out the essentially logline for Last of Us when that announcement went out?

**Craig:** First of all, it’s a good thing for the writers to be involved in this. I always tense up a little bit when I hear that it’s the producer, the non-writing producer doing this late at night. I just want to go just let the writer do the words. You certainly can have input. That’s the nice thing about in television you are the producer. So I’m looking online at the Hollywood Reporter. This is the paragraph that includes – I think what they did is they rolled the logline-ish that I wrote along with HBO into this paragraph. So it says, “Sony and Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us which bowed in 2013 garnered critical praise for its engrossing tale of the post-apocalypse centering on the relationship between Joel, a smuggler in this new world, and Ellie, a teenager who may be key to a cure for a deadly pandemic.” Then I think they switch over to what we did, “Joel, a hardened survivor, is hired to smuggle the 14-year-old girl out of an oppressive quarantine zone. What starts as a small job soon becomes a brutal, heartbreaking journey as they traverse the United States and depend on each other for survival.” And mostly I think what I was concerned about was making sure the word heartbreaking was in there. Because I don’t care about the rest of it. The rest of it sounds awful. I’m going to be honest with you. Like if I’m reading this and I’m like, oh, it’s a pandemic and it’s post-apocalypse, and he’s a survivor, and they have to struggle? Who cares? Legitimately who cares?

The word heartbreaking signals that none of that is actually the point. That there is something else going on that is far more interesting. And it’s the reason why people care about that story. Otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it. No offense to post-apocalyptic hardened survivor stories, but that’s ultimately I’m not necessarily into survivalist porn. It’s not my thing. What’s my thing is character and relationship. And that’s what I needed to kind of be there to let somebody out there know it’s not just like – this is not what you think.

So, in that regard I probably should have done the logline I described. Trust me. It’s not that. Trust me.

**John:** But what you’re talking about though, that logline is for somebody who is not you. And so the point I’m trying to make is loglines are for other people. And they are just there to provide a handle for other people to grab onto this idea, this story, so they have just some sense in their mind about what this thing is. Because without that it’s just a title. They really can’t do anything with it.

So, you’re trying to give just enough that they can hold onto, but it’s not – I don’t want to conflate or confuse them with a pitch. Because a pitch is really, like when you’ve done the pitch competitions at Austin, you can really tell the people who can sell you a story and really get you engaged into a movie and really make you feel like who those characters are and what their situation is. A logline is just not going to do that. A logline is only, again, just an arrow pointing towards what that pitch might be.

**Craig:** Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely.

**John:** So we got a question from Kate. She writes, “After reading your article on loglines and listening to the pitch or spec episode of your podcast I wanted to ask your opinion on one of my projects please. There are two options for the logline. Option one, for most winning the lottery is a dream come true, but for one shy retiring social worker money can’t buy her true desire. In fact, the win brings death and despair to her door. That’s option one. Option two, after spending millions, Charlotte Eames discovers her husband’s big lottery win was a lie. And now her husband has disappeared.”

**Craig:** OK. I have a strong preference.

**John:** I have a very strong preference. My strong preference is for number two.

**Craig:** Is it really?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** My strong preference is for number one.

**John:** That’s so amazing. That’s so great. So tell me about why your strong preference is for number one?

**Craig:** I liked the fact that I don’t know this person’s name, weirdly. I get this weird thing about names as like somehow it’s like fake information. The name Charlotte Eames means absolutely nothing to me. But I do like that I know that she’s a shy retiring social worker. But I like that it brings death and despair to her door. I have no idea what comes next and I don’t know necessarily what she’s going to do or why. But death and despair to her door, that could be – is this a supernatural story? There’s so many possibilities of what this thing could be that I’m intrigued beyond what I hope it’s not, which is another kind of – I mean, we’ve seen a thousand monkey paw stories about how the lottery backfires on you.

**John:** The things you like about the first one are the things that drive me crazy about the first one.

**Craig:** See, this is why loglines suck.

**John:** So it’s so vague and hand-wavy. It’s like death and despair. I don’t know. So, things I do like about the first one, a shy social worker, I think that’s more helpful to me than Charlotte Eames. Because Charlotte Eames, that’s not information that’s actually useful to me in the second one. But after reading the second one I have a sense of what the story is. And that is helpful to me. That I know like, OK, I can see the ways that this story can go. Versus the first one is just so vague. It could be anything.

**Craig:** It occurs to me that maybe I like the first one because I don’t like the story of the second one.

**John:** That’s fair.

**Craig:** The second one when I read through it I think so this is a story basically about filling out bankruptcy paperwork. Because that’s what would happen. Just like, OK, so it turns out I overspent money, I’m maxed out my credit cards, I need to go ahead–

**John:** No, no, it’s about a shy retiring social worker tracking down that ex-husband and making him pay.

**Craig:** But how? He doesn’t have it either. It’s going to be bankruptcy. [laughs]

**John:** Maybe it’s not really about the money.

**Craig:** H&R Block Presents the Charlotte Eames Story. What happens when one woman–

**John:** So unfortunately for Kate–

**Craig:** We have no answer.

**John:** We have no answer. We have no firm answer.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Other than the fact that perhaps loglines are not the panacea that you might think in terms of being able to lockdown one clear vision of what you’re trying to say.

**Craig:** I will say this much at least Kate. It’s not like if my job were to pick these things that either one of these loglines would move me one way or the other. I would just sort of go, OK, lottery story. Let’s read and see what it actually is.

**John:** Yeah. Trust me.

**Craig:** Trust me.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to some more questions. So this was a question from Nicole. Do you want to read this?

**Craig:** Sure. Nicole says, “I’m teaching undergrad screenwriting this semester and a student has a formatting question on researching. The student’s first language is ASL. He is hearing but his parents are both deaf. And he is writing a short with one deaf character that he will shoot at some point.” I think Nicole points that the film will be shot, and not the deaf character. So we got to talk about sentence structure here. [laughs] This is really important. I’m going to rewrite your sentence. The student’s first language is ASL. He is hearing but his parents are both deaf. And he is writing a short that he will shoot at some point with a deaf character. “He will also be writing a feature horror with deaf leads later in the semester. He would like to write versions of his scripts with the deaf character’s dialogue written in ASL Gloss. Meaning the dialogue would be written the way the actors would sign it for auditions and/or for going out to talent.

“Here’s a quick breakdown of what ASL Gloss looks like and how it works.” And we’ll have a link in the show notes for that. “I gave him the standard advice for when some of the dialogue will be performed in a non-English language to use in the all-English written version but now we’re wondering if there’s precedent for ASL Gloss in written dialogue. Since you have such a wide reach I thought maybe you could boost the signal and help me find somebody to connect with about it.”

**John:** Indeed we can. So first off I would recommend everybody do click through this link in the show notes. It’s what ASL Gloss looks like. Because it’s really cool. It’s a little slide show that describes what ASL Gloss looks like. And so there’s lines over certain words to indicate eyebrows going up. Because that changes the meaning of certain things in ASL. Also word order is different in ASL. So, I mean, ASL is its own thing. And it’s super cool language that doesn’t track one to one to English which is great. It’s designed for a very specific purpose.

But, yes, we do actually have the resource to go to, Shoshannah Stern, who was on our Christmas episode is a deaf writer and actor. So I emailed her and she says, “Sure. I wouldn’t encourage it for writers who aren’t fluent in ASL themselves. Or if there isn’t a clear rationale behind the inclusion. Most people wouldn’t know what it is, so the Gloss would probably need to be addresses/explained in the script at some point, which is why most of the time I just italicize signed dialogue and have the ASL master handle the translation with the actor.” So the ASL master is the person who is working with the actor to decide how the ASL is going to be handled.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** She says, “If the writer decides to include it they also probably need to make sure that it’s accessible to the non-ASL using reader. For example, on the couple of occasions I have used Gloss in my scripts I have made sure it’s accompanied by an English version for the purposes of an easier read.” So, a thing you can do if it’s helpful, great. But it seems like Shoshannah’s advice is because everyone else is going to be reading this script, too, maybe just do the English version and maybe do a special version with Gloss if there’s really specific ways you want that Gloss to be handled.

**Craig:** Yes. I completely agree with Shoshannah. And it seems like the most practical method. There are times when I will include a foreign language in a script meaning in the dialogue itself italicized. I will have words that are not English. And the reason I have those there is very specifically because I don’t want the audience to have the translation. That’s why. Meaning your experience watching this will be that somebody is speaking English and then they’re going to turn to their friend and say something in for instance Arabic. And you unless you happen to speak Arabic won’t know what it is and that’s OK. Not required for you. That’s why I do that.

If the point is that this will be translated through subtitle or by somebody who is translating ASL into verbal speech. I don’t see the point of doing it this way other than to kind of flex and say, look, I know this other thing. But that’s not really – I mean, always remember that the purpose of a screenplay is to be as functional as possible while being as artistic as possible. So I think Shoshannah’s method makes the most sense. I would use ASL Gloss only in situations where the point was that somebody who was not an ASL speaker was trying to follow along an ASL conversation between two deaf ASL speakers and failing completely and that we are in their perspective and we don’t know what’s being said. Then I would use it.

**John:** Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And again that’s the same thing you would do for a foreign language. If the point was the character who doesn’t speak the language is trying to keep up with it.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** All right. Questions about lawyers. So two of them sort of came back to back. Anonymous in LA writes, “Recently I’ve optioned two of my projects back to back and found it difficult to get a good lawyer. I first turned to Reddit. Was recommended a young LA attorney who offered a flat rate of $540 for a red line and review. Let’s just say he took a poorly written copy—“

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** “Let’s just say he took a poorly written copy and paste agreement and made it worse.”

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**John:** “In between I spoke to a few lawyers who claimed they could do it but had not film industry experience. After that I went through my limited network and found a ‘good’ LA lawyer at a reputable firm. A solid $600+ an hour.”

**Craig:** Wait, what?

**John:** “With someone who understood where I was coming from when we spoke once on the phone. It worked out, but I question whether someone else would be better in the future. Being a non-WGA, not represented or managed writer, trying to turn in scripts into films, what advice do you have for first time writers looking to find good legal representation?”

**Craig:** Don’t turn to Reddit.

**John:** Yeah. Reddit feels like a bad place to start for me.

**Craig:** Yeah, like what? Why? And nothing against Reddit. I don’t want Reddit to turn against me and destroy me. I really don’t. There’s all sorts of good purposes for Reddit. I’m just not sure that this is one of them. So, with all things you get what you pay for. I don’t have any particularly good advice other than to look around at some of the better known entertainment law firms in Los Angeles and call around and see who might be willing to take on a prospective client. You would certainly get an associate. You wouldn’t need more than an associate it sounds like to me. Options are generally speaking not complicated agreements. There’s a billion examples. And the nice thing about going to a place that’s a large entertainment law film is that that associate can always check through the files of all their other deals to make sure that something obvious is not going wrong or has been left out.

And, yeah, presume that you’re going to spend maybe a thousand bucks or something like that. The purpose is to protect yourself, of course. But, yeah, I don’t understand why you would go to Reddit, because who is recommending this young LA attorney to you? Do you know the person or are they just a rando on Reddit saying oh I love this person. It could be them saying that. You know how it is. That just seems a little nuts. Like I don’t go looking for doctors on Reddit.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Maybe I should.

**John:** I wish I had fantastic advice for Anonymous, but I really don’t. But I feel like we may have some listeners who do have some good advice. Who may have gone through this more recently and actually have a sense of how they found a lawyer who was right.

So I don’t need specific names of people, but I really would like to hear what was your process. Because I signed my lawyer more than 20 years ago, and you’ve had your lawyer for forever I’m sure, too.

**Craig:** Since the beginning.

**John:** It’s not the same process. But I would have had the exact same questions. And I got my lawyer through my agents. It was a recommendation there. So, there’s got to be other ways that people are finding lawyers right now, especially folks who don’t have other reps. So, write in. Tell us how you got your lawyer and if you’ve been happy and any other tips or advice you might have for anonymous and our other listeners.

**Craig:** That sounds great.

**John:** Cool. The question about options. We may have opinions on this.

**Craig:** OK. Matt writes, “I’m a budding screenwriter and I have an option agreement from my producer in my inbox. Some of the wording seems off to me and I was hoping you could shed some light on it. Just to start off on the right foot the spoken agreement we have is the gold old James Cameron Terminator style option. I give them the script with the provision that I direct it, give it to them for a dollar. My worries are they want the right to ‘use any part of the film or sequel in future works or promotionals.’ Shouldn’t that wait for the purchase agreement? Especially the part about the sequels? There’s an article that says ‘should preproduction be halted or interrupted by epidemic fire, action of the elements, public enemy, strikes, labor disputes, governmental action, or court order, act of god, wars, riots, or civil commotion.’” So in other words 2020. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. Indeed. Should 2020 happen…

**Craig:** “’Then the time lost during those actions will be added to the end of the option thus extending it.’ Is that normal? They want to be able to set up copyright in their production company’s name. Shouldn’t it stay with the writer unless it’s purchased? They have a provision that reads, ‘The writer will indemnify and hold harmless the production company, its directors, officers, employees, agents, licensees, and signs from any claims, actions, losses, and expenses including legal expenses occasioned either directly or indirectly by the breach or alleged breach to any of the above representations, warranties, or covenants.’

“This feels like I’m giving up my right to do anything should they breach the contract. Is that right?”

**John:** Yeah. So, all of your concerns are understandable and valid. Let’s talk about what option agreements are. So options are you’re buying a thing but sort of not paying for the whole thing right then. So it’s a purchase but it’s not a purchase. There’s a time limit. They’re not paying the full amount right then. So it’s not weird for some of this stuff to be in there. But you’re going to want to listen to the episode where we actually had people talk about how they got their lawyers because I do feel like you’re going to want to have a lawyer look through this.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t generally like what I’m hearing. The stuff that concerns me the most is the idea that they’re going to set up copyright in their name. Yes, it should stay with the writer unless it’s purchased. Typically the option is for the producer to have the exclusive right to shop this to people that would then become the copyright owners, meaning studios, networks, and streamers. So I don’t understand that.

**John:** There’s a shopping agreement and then there’s an option. So the option is really they can at any point sort of exercise their option to fully purchase the thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That is probably more of what this is.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And if they fully do that then, yes, transfer the copyright to them is going to be part of that because that’s your chain of title. That’s a thing they actually do need to do.

**Craig:** But there’s a big number attached to that. And you haven’t told us what that is. You just told us about the dollar which is generally speaking that’s that thing. It’s the kind of exclusivity where they don’t have to give you any money. Yeah, I don’t know about this indemnification. That seems like a lawyer thing to look at.

The halted or interrupted by acts of god and all that other stuff, yeah, yeah.

**John:** Force majeure. I don’t know that it makes sense in this thing. In other agreements you will see stuff that does postpone and extend.

**Craig:** I’m not sure it matters. I don’t love it. I mean, so halted or interrupted by epidemic, well, F-U man. Because you can do your job in your place with your mask on. And, no, you can’t use things like COVID to say oh now we’re going to extend our agreement for five years. Well, you can pick up your phone and do your job as the selling producer at any point during an epidemic. So, no.

**John:** All right. A question about formatting. Wendy writes, “Several of us are wondering what is the best way to format a Zoom call in our scripts. This can get very complicated when there are 16 or more windows/characters onscreen.” This actually feels very addressable and very relevant to today’s world.

**Craig:** Yeah. Probably lots of different ways to do it. I mean, my instinct is that I would do it pretty much the way I would do any meeting scene, the only difference is that I would leave out anything that would happen in a meat space meeting scene. Meat space.

So, Zoom call. And everybody is on. The camera will move essentially just like coverage, right? We did this on Mythic Quest. There’s the grid view, which is sort of like your wide shot or your master. And then it just occasionally will go into coverage, meaning speaker view. And then the meeting proceeds. That seems pretty much the way I would do it.

**John:** Absolutely. So really you’re thinking about an extra space. So, you know, if you are in the room with some of these characters and sort of we’re in their bedroom as they’re talking on Zoom, or in Mythic Quest when we were in Craig’s office, for some of that stuff there probably was a slug line for his living room or his dining room table where he was at. But there’s also probably a slug line that is just basically the Zoom call, or the grid view, and the characters are just in that space together. And that tracks and makes sense.

Just don’t make it more complicated than it needs to be. Ultimately if characters are having conversation they’re just having conversation. And you can use – if there’s special Zoom stuff that happens you can call that out, but most stuff is just kind of normal people talking.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t even think – I mean, depending on what it is and how you want to do it, it’s all about perspective. If the idea is that a character is going to walk into a room, sit down, set up their laptop, take a breath, prepare for a difficult Zoom meeting, and then log on, then yes, you’re going to want to establish that in that room, in that space, and then you go into the Zoom. For something like just we cut to a Zoom screen, then where people are individually within the Zoom is not relevant. You can describe it. If their background is relevant you can mention it. But otherwise you’re just in the Zoom meeting.

**John:** Yeah. But like in Craig’s episode of Mythic Quest the actual layout of the final big Zoom call was important because there was stuff that was happening frame to frame to frame. So that’s a thing you would describe. But most movies, most times you’re doing a Zoom kind of thing you’re not going to describe what quadrant people are in Brady Bunch style. That’s just not going to be useful information.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** Chandler in New York City writes, “How would you go about determining if a screen adaptation of a true and high profile event from recent US history is already being adapted for the screen? The event I’m interested in adapting was the subject of much news coverage in the ‘80s,” so what is it, the girl down the well you think? “And a few award-winning docs.” Probably not. “And in-depth newspaper pieces, but none of my Googling IMDb searches or asking around has revealed anyone adapting it for scripted film or TV.”

Do you think it’s Chernobyl? Maybe it’s Chernobyl. And Chandler just doesn’t know.

“It would be very timely given our current political climate. So it could just be happening now. Any tips on how best to research this before undertaking the endeavor?”

John, what do you think about Chandler’s query?

**John:** I think you are just Googling. And I would say Google all the different parts of it and just try to look for any news that someone has optioned a book about this, has optioned any people’s life rights. People aren’t really all that good about keeping stuff like that quiet. And so if some major place was going to try to do it, if [unintelligible] was trying to make some version of that it likely would be out there somewhere and you could find it.

But you might not. And that’s also the reality of it. I’m thinking again back to Niko. If Niko had Googled he probably would have been able to find like, oh, the Weezer guy did set up a pilot that shot about his life and he might have known that and might have decided not to write the thing. But he wrote the thing and it’s good that he’s writing the thing. So, I would say it’s useful for you Chandler right now to do some Googling and see what other people are doing, see if there’s any big books about this topic that have been optioned to get a sense of what the landscape is. But don’t waste a week of your time doing this. Just do a little research on that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the answer generally speaking to your question is an event from recent US history being adapted for the screen, the answer is generally yeah. Yes. It has been already. And it’s being done again. Maybe you haven’t seen it actually come to fruition. Certainly when I was writing Chernobyl there was at least one other high profile Chernobyl project in development. And it doesn’t matter. Because there have been multiple Edward Snowden movies. There have been multiple – everything gets multiple coverage on these things. And so, yeah, I mean, I’ve seen more than one Hoffa movie and you just go about doing it. Your version of it is the value.

And, yeah, look, at any one given time can you have two movies in the theater about the US Hockey Olympic team Miracle on Ice? No. But there was a terrific movie. Could you do another one now? Yup. You could.

**John:** You could.

**Craig:** You could. So just do it. Just do it and do it as best you can. Because if that other project is super-hot or interesting somebody might just want to grab it to beat them to the punch. Or, as we always say zillions of times it would be a great writing sample.

Yeah, so no real way other than Googling around. But even if you Google around and you’re like oh my god somebody is doing it, you don’t know if they’re doing it at all. People announce stuff all the time. The trades are 98% nonsense.

**John:** Yeah. As is pointed out by this running with the news that CAA signed the deal and they had reached an agreement with the WGA. I love that headline. Oh, reached an agreement. Is it an agreement? It’s you proposing to your wife without – it’s your wife agreeing to marry you without actually agreeing to marry you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I have agreed that my wife will marry me. [laughs]

**John:** Ah, unilateral.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Let’s end on a higher note. Aisha from Los Angeles writes, “The Black List recently announced the Muslim List which is the same vein as their Indigenous List and their Disability List. I’ve been seeing some hate online where people insist that these lists, especially the Muslim list, are only being made because Muslim writers otherwise won’t be able to get any attention because apparently Muslim writers are mediocre. I don’t know what to tell them. It’s not my job to educate them. But it’s 2020 and people still think these lists/programs/labs for minorities will only hurt their chances of success. Stop being racist is the obvious response. Any other details I should throw in there?”

**Craig:** Well, I think – “I’ve been seeing some hate online” and I was like yup. So, look, there is a lot of good things that are happening in Hollywood. There are a lot of positive things that are happening in our world and in our culture. So, in Hollywood a lot of groups of people have been underrepresented and ignored and I would absolutely include Muslim writers in there. The fact that somebody like the Black List is paying attention by doing the Muslim list is a good thing.

And I think that you deserve, Aisha, to enjoy that. Meaning the rest of it, the haters, you can’t fix those people. And first of all a lot of them aren’t even – this is what’s so hard to grasp about some of these people online. They don’t even believe the stuff they’re saying. They’re just barfing. They’re literally barfing out. And they don’t know that you’re a real person. And they don’t know that any of this is actually landing on anyone’s ears.

It is profoundly consistent when I respond to some nut job troll 99 times out of 100 they will say some version of “I can’t believe you’re taking the time to respond to me.” That I’m an idiot for even taking them seriously. That’s how low their self-esteem is while they’re attacking me. And so what I would say to you is concentrate on the positive thing here. There’s nothing you’re going to be able to say to some idiot who is complaining about the Muslim List as if the Muslim List is going to ruin their job prospects which is insane. There’s nothing you can say. The best thing you can do is in your brain hit a big delete button and they’re gone.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re gone. Because these people will write something and stop thinking about it one second later. You will read it and not stop thinking about it for weeks. And that’s the power they have. So my advice to you is don’t worry about what to tell them. There is nothing you should tell them. You are not responsible to educate them, to correct them, to change them. You should enjoy this.

**John:** Yup. And what I’ll say about lists like these is the reason they exist, the reason why Franklin and company do them is because showrunners and other people who hire writers are looking for – they would love to include more people. Find me some great indigenous writers. Well it’s tough sometimes to find those indigenous writers. And so if you have a list of, oh, you want some really good indigenous writers, some really good Muslim writers, some really good writers with disabilities, here. Here’s a list. That’s helpful for them. And it’s because they want to hire these people, or at least meet with them.

So, that’s only a good thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, we do this all the time in everything else. It’s not like we go, oh OK, well because there’s something like what are the ten best movies of the year. Here they are. List is done. We are obsessed with lists. You know I hate lists. But Americans are obsessed with lists. So if you go on IMDb there’s not just what’s my favorite ten movies of the year. What are my favorite comedies of the year? What are my favorite rom-coms of the year? What are my favorite action movies that star exactly three women and one men of the year?

This is what people do. They break things out into lists. And it’s nice to see that at least there’s some interest in creating lists around underrepresented people. And you know inherently that that’s not hurting anyone. You know all that is is just a nice thing that’s helping people. So like I say enjoy that fuzzy feeling. Feel good about it. Know that – and it’s just one of the unfortunate realities. Decent people aren’t going to say much. They’re going to look at something like the Muslim List and they’re going to think well that’s good. And then move about their day. And if they see the Muslim List come out they will read it and go, ah, I should think about hiring some of these writers.

And then idiots will go, ah-ha, here we go. Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. And that’s what you see. So turn them off. Like a light switch just go click. It’s a nifty little Mormon trick. I think I could do that much before getting sued.

**John:** I was going to say. The stopwatch was going there. All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing, we’re not a very political show, but sometimes you have to get a little political. And my One Cool Thing I would urge you to save democracy itself. So this is as we approach this election one scary scenario that could come and because it’s 2020 anything could happen. Is that let’s say neither candidate actually gets to 270 electoral college votes, something like let’s say Florida never certifies it’s results. Stuff can happen. And we sort of all know that stuff can happen. And stuff probably will happen in 2020.

In that scenario where neither candidate gets to 270 votes it goes to the House where each state delegation gets one vote. And so right now democrats control 22 state delegations. The GOP controls 26. So in that scenario the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, would win. Which is just crazy.

And so the good news is that it’s actually not too hard to actually flip those state delegations. And so me and a bunch of other folks and other former Scriptnotes guests are throwing a fundraiser for seven specific House racings for those candidates to try to flip those seats. For Alaska, Montana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Florida. So, there’s a fundraiser we’re doing October 4, 1pm Pacific Daylight Time. There’s a link in the show notes. It’s not one of those crazy expensive ones like the basic I’m a supporter thing is $100. So, if you are a US citizen who wants to spend $100 as some kind of insurance hopefully to not have one nightmare scenario happen on Election Day come join us for this fundraiser October 4.

**Craig:** Yeah. I believe this was the scenario that occurred in the election of 1800. Where there was a tie and it was thrown to the delegates. If you had to choose, if you had to choose…it’s up to the delegates.

**John:** I’m trying to remember like Veep was a similar situation, too. Veep ends in a tie. And it goes to the House if I recall correctly.

**Craig:** Yes. When I was a kid, which was around the same time you were a kid, we used to get Newsweek. And Newsweek after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, well, technically 1979, yes, the fall of 1979, they showed the three different covers they had to prepare ahead of time. And one was Carter wins. And one was Reagan wins, which was the one that turned out. And then the other one was Deadlocked. They had a cover that they created for deadlocked.

Now, in a normal circumstance the deadlock that you consider is just because there’s a mathematical deadlock the way that the electoral votes break out it’s 269-269. And that’s not what this is. What this is is, yes, is it possible? Yes. I don’t like the underpinning panic behind this in the sense that I never like accepting ahead of time that somebody could do something wildly illegal.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** However, these days I guess we kind of have to presume that somebody is going to do something wildly illegal because that’s the way it’s going. So in that regard he’s correct. And in general I don’t need much of a reason. Right now if he said here is a scary but possible scenario, here is a lovely but possible scenario, here’s just something that I think we should do, I’ll do it. Because that’s where we are. We’re in a situation now where – I have never in my life been in a situation where I could just go, OK, legitimately there is only one rational choice. There is nothing I can say accept you either do this or you’re out of your damn mind.

I have never been like that in my life. At all. You know that. But this isn’t close. So, hopefully you are not out of your damn mind.

**John:** I hope not to be.

**Craig:** Yeah. Oh, and I have a Cool Thing. My Cool Thing has nothing to do with politics.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** My Cool Thing, you know, every now and then I like to say oh here’s somebody interesting on Twitter. And you know who I follow on Twitter who I find fascinating? A guy named Chris Stein. Do you know who Chris Stein is?

**John:** I don’t.

**Craig:** If I said music’s Chris Stein? Rock and roll’s Chris Stein?

**John:** I don’t.

**Craig:** Chris Stein, one of the major songwriters/guitarists for Blondie.

**John:** Oh nice.

**Craig:** The great Blondie. And he has a very cool account. He’s a cool guy, obviously. He’s in freaking Blondie. Oh, I love Blondie so much. And by the way huge crush on Debbie Harry. Like as a kid, because that was, you know, they sort of came up in the late ‘70s. I’m like nine. And I’m just starting to look at girls and stuff. And I remember Blondie being like that. I want that. I think that’s a thing now.

So, anyway, and Chris Stein I believe dated Blondie for a long time. So, hats off to Chris Stein for that as well. But he also publishes these old photos that he took of himself and other people around that time, that kind of new wave era, New York City, CBGBs, late ‘70s. And it’s so cool. And there is actually just tying back into the mention of the Madonna biopic, there was just a random photo he had and in it is a very young Madonna who is just part of the scene.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** And you look at her and you’re like, oh man, she looks like she’s 16. And nothing has happened yet to the face or the eyebrows or anything. It’s just a natural human being. It’s a hell of a thing. And so anyway he’s just a great guy. Really smart. And he puts these wonderful photos up. So, well worth a follow.

**John:** Cool. That is our show for this week. So Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Michael Karman. 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 or recommendations for where people should find lawyers.

For short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We have a bunch of t-shirts. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts. And you can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record about gaming consoles. Also, the bonus episode we’re going to do which is more of the pitch versus spec. So subscribe now. Thank you to everyone who subscribed.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Craig, I am so confused about the gaming consoles and I know there’s a new generation coming out. There’s a new PlayStation. There’s a new Xbox.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I don’t want to buy both. Which one do I buy? Just tell me. Craig, help me out.

**Craig:** Sure. Well, so first of all what’s so special about these consoles to begin with? Because the gaming world has changed quite a bit. It used to be that you basically had two deals. You had the PC where you would buy a game that was designed to play on your PC, not really your Mac. Or a console where it’s just the console was a computer, and that’s all a console is is a computer that does nothing except process the game. That’s it. It has no other purpose so it can devote all of its resources, graphics, memory, everything to the game.

So, generally speaking your consoles are much better computers for gaming than your PCs except some people would take their PCs and go bananas, soup them up, and turn them into gaming engines that were even better than the consoles, because PCs are very customizable. So that was kind of the way it worked. And then you had this whole online gaming explosion with Steam and all the rest.

So the line between console and PC-based gaming systems has blurred quite a bit because of the way people have souped up some gaming PCs. And generally speaking if you’re like a hardcore gamer you’re going to have one of those.

I’m not that person. I’m more of the guy that plays what they call triple A video games. The large video game franchises. So I’m talking about Elder Scrolls, Last of Us, Grand Theft Auto, Ghosts of Tsushima. These big, big games. And those are–

**John:** Titles that cost – the games are $50 or more.

**Craig:** Exactly. They generally are going to run about $60. Assassin’s Creed. All those things. And those are console games. I can’t quite recall how many years we’ve been in this particular cycle. There was the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox. Those were kind of like the beginning of the big wars between Sony and Microsoft. And that turned into the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox 360. And now we are heading – for many years, many years. I think about seven, I think, is where we’re at. We have finally generation’d up. Which is a long amount of time because in the computer world things generation up much faster. But in the console world not so much.

So PlayStation 5 is coming and Xbox Series X is coming. They are both coming by the end of this year, in time for Christmas. They will both sell a lot. PlayStation will sell much, much more I predict because it’s more popular.

The differences between these things. Very little Very, very little in terms of hardware. They are both going to be pumping out – they use almost the same chips inside, with like little tiny differences. Oh, this one uses an AMD Zen 2 with an eight-core 2.5 GHz. And this one uses an AMD Zen 2 eight-core 3.8 GHz. But then the other one has more IO throughput. It’s got a 5.5 gig IO throughput and this one has got a 2.4 gig IO throughput. Whatever.

They’re both going to look amazing. They’re both going to have solid state drives, which are going to go faster than the traditional spin-y drives that we were using before. The output resolution will be gorgeous at 4K, probably 60 frames a second, maybe even 120 frames per second. I mean, it’s all being figured out, I guess.

So, they’re both going to look amazing. What’s the big difference then? Which one should you buy? It comes down to the availability of certain games. A lot of the games are for both. You can buy certain games and it will work on both of them. But then there a number of games that are exclusive to each system.

**John:** For example Halo was an exclusive Xbox I know.

**Craig:** Halo was the big like – that was the reason that you wanted an Xbox, if you really loved Halo. And similarly on PlayStation, PlayStation has more exclusives. The Last of Us is a PlayStation exclusive. PlayStation, just Sony in general seems to make more specific stuff. But then there are plenty that you can play on both. Look, MLB the Show is exclusive to Sony PlayStation and that’s kind of how it works.

In general if I were to recommend, if you could only have one you should get the PlayStation 5 because it’s going to have the exclusives. There will be more exclusives, I think, and it’s more likely that they will be exclusives that you will want. But you know I’m going to get both. You know that.

**John:** So right now I have an Xbox 360 which I haven’t used in years.

**Craig:** Oh god, yeah.

**John:** And a PlayStation which I do use some. I’m just back playing old Diablo 3. I started The Last of Us and it was just way too stressful for me. So, I needed to go back to something really comforting like Diablo where I can just run around and smash things. So that will probably be the one that gets replaced, at least with the 5.

The PlayStation 4 that I have still has the ability to insert a disk in it, but I’ve not inserted a disk in it for a very long time. So it looks like one of the options I have with the Sony PlayStation, there’s just no disk at all.

**Craig:** Yeah. The disks are kind of going away. So people are generally – a lot of people. It’s actually, I’ll take that back. There are a ton of disks. I mean, one of the reasons that The Last of Us 2 was delayed was because they had to deal with the manufacture of disks during the pandemic situation. And, you know, I asked Neil, people still buy disks? And he goes an enormous amount. Particularly overseas where for instance in Europe the PlayStation Network which is the system you would use to download a game was throttled and may still be throttled because during the pandemic essentially the European Union said yeah, yeah we’re not going to let Netflix and Sony just soak up all of our bandwidth while we’re trying to pump out information to people and–

**John:** Schools were online and all that stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. So, a lot of people do still want those physical disks which they can use to install. So, looking at some exclusives on the horizon, there’s going to be a new Halo. So if you’re into that, huzzah. Xbox has Forza Motorsport, so if you’re a big car race guy and you like Forza Motorsport as opposed to Gran Turismo which is the PlayStation one, then fine. PlayStation 5 will have Spider Man Miles Morales and right there I can tell you that’s going to be a massive–

**John:** That looks great.

**Craig:** That will be massive. But then I think Xbox will also have I think it’s the new game from the guys who did Witcher I think, Cyber – should know what it is but I don’t. There’s a new Harry Potter Open World game that I believe will be coming to both platforms next year.

Here’s what’s exciting. Apparently one of the big limitations of the consoles was how they created light. You would enter a scene and essentially as a game creator you would set a light, like a fixed lamp, in place and that was the light for the room. And if you moved around it didn’t matter because the light didn’t move around. The light was fixed no matter where you go and no matter what happens. And for a videogame author like Naughty Dog that makes The Last of Us, if they want to make it cool, like they want to have somebody – as somebody crosses a window they want to create a shadow, they need to specifically animate a shadow in. But now with these new systems they’re using essentially live ray tracing. So, now people walk through the room and the light knows what to do.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** And so it’ll look pretty great. But it already looks pretty great, you know, so. It’s going to be cool.

**John:** So we haven’t mentioned the Nintendo Switch. So I have a Switch that I got at the start of the pandemic. I really love it. It’s a delightful system. I like that it’s just not trying to play in that same space.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** They have exclusive titles that are just their thing and they’re great for that. Honestly I mostly play on my iPad. I’m playing Hearthstone on an iPad which just doesn’t matter that you don’t have a great system. You don’t need a gaming PC to be playing Hearthstone.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But for actual real videogames I probably will upgrade. It sounds like on your advice I will go for the PlayStation 5.

**Craig:** I think so.

**John:** And any existing games that I have, will my PS4 games be playable on the PlayStation 5?

**Craig:** Yes. So there will be backwards compatibility for both of them.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** That’s kind of always part of how they roll. You will also see some of the older popular games get remastered.

**John:** One thing I’m definitely looking forward to when I get a new system is that my PlayStation 4 I bought in France and it is region-locked to French for certain things. And so there are times where I’ll get to a place where everything else is in English. I get to screens that are just completely in French. And of course it’s really technical gamey French. It just breaks my brain to try to figure this out. So like Witcher 3 I got there and no matter what you do you cannot get it out of French. It’s a really tough game when you’re trying to follow it that in French.

**Craig:** Witcher Trois. Oui. Yeah, you know, the English in Witcher is also kind of French. It’s strange – there are strange terms–

**John:** Layers stacking on top of layers.

**Craig:** Yes indeed. But Nintendo, yeah, they will keep doing what they do. They’re sort of like you guys fight over there. We’ll be over here. One day I suspect Disney is just going to buy Nintendo.

**John:** Yeah. Nintendo is big now.

**Craig:** They’re huge.

**John:** Disney is huge now, too.

**Craig:** Enormous.

**John:** Everyone is huge.

**Craig:** Everyone is huge. It just seems like talk about a marriage made in heaven.

**John:** Getting really off-topic, Apple had its announcements this last week where they announced the new watch and the new iPad. It’s great. Lovely.

I always thought that Apple should just buy Peloton because Peloton is a really good product and feels very, very Apple-y. And so what Apple did is just like, oh no, we’re just going to make our own Peloton. And they spent clearly a fortune to basically duplicate what Peloton is already doing.

**Craig:** Yup. And they’ll win.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** That’ll happen. I mean, that’s kind of the way it goes. It just – Apple came out with the watch, I don’t know when it was, five years ago. And I think a lot of people were like what? Oh, Apple, stupid. They sell so many watches. They are not just the largest watch manufacturer in the world. It’s not even close.

**John:** Yeah. If the Apple Watch were the only product Apple made it would be a giant top tier company.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Yeah.

**John:** And so, again, looking at Sony, looking at Microsoft, when Microsoft was trying to buy TikTok I’m thinking that’s weird. Microsoft, they make Windows. Oh, no, no, they make Xbox, too. They actually do have a big consumer-facing brand. It would have made sense for them to do it. Sony I think of being an electronics manufacturer, but like PlayStation must be such a huge profit center for that company.

**Craig:** Massive. And whereas Xbox has always been tricky for Microsoft because it isn’t their core business. Microsoft has generally stumbled when they’ve made objects other than–

**John:** Zune.

**Craig:** Computers. So they tried the Microsoft phone. LOL. The Zune. [Unintelligible]. And the Xbox has stuck around. The Xbox is a really good product. Don’t get me wrong. I have owned every version of the Xbox and I will buy the new one. I like the Xbox controller generally more than the Sony controller. Oh, the controllers I should add are also changing. There’s going to be more haptic stuff going on.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Vibrations and stuff. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Cool. Craig, thank you for talking me through this.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. Anytime.

 

Links:

* [CAA Signed Deal](https://deadline.com/2020/09/caa-in-deal-with-wga-1234576395/)
* [Madonna to direct biopic, Diablo Cody to write.](https://variety.com/2020/film/news/madonna-to-direct-her-biopic-co-written-by-diablo-cody-for-universal-1234770633/)
* [Blogpost on Loglines](https://johnaugust.com/2020/loglines)
* Write in to ask@johnaugust.com share advice on finding legal representation.
* [ASL Gloss Breakdown](https://www.slideshare.net/MsAmyLC/glossing-in-asl-what-is-it-eight-examples)
* [Save Democracy Itself! Fundraiser](https://secure.actblue.com/donate/tie-breaker-candidate-fund-1)
* [Chris Stein](https://twitter.com/chrissteinplays) on Twitter
* [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))
* 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/469standard.mp3).

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 472 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we’re getting emotional. We’re going to look at characters’ inner emotional states, why they matter, and how we approach them as writers. We’ll also examine the state of feature residuals and answer a listener question about how long you should wait before turning in your work.

**Craig:** And in a bonus segment for what I like to call our Bonus members – I know they’re technically Premium members, but I call them our Bonus members – we’re going to be talking about Jeopardy! because our friend and D&D comrade, Kevin Walsh, is the current champion, not by a little, but by a lot. He just keeps winning. And so of course we hope we’re not jinxing him by discussing it. I feel like we’re not because his D&D character perished brutally about three weeks ago. So I think we’ve done our damage to him and we can hurt him no more.

**John:** Yeah. And also we don’t know where he’s at in his Jeopardy! career because they’re all pre-taped. So we couldn’t really hurt him is what I will say.

**Craig:** Yeah. He knows what happened. So he can’t blame it on us.

**John:** He knows what happens. He’s ahead of us.

**Craig:** Exactly. He is. In so many ways.

**John:** But Craig, first off, we have to lead with the big news of the week which is we may finally get a Slinky Movie.

**Craig:** Oh thank god.

**John:** So longtime listeners will know we often bring up a theoretical Slinky Movie as the example of this is why Hollywood is dumb, because they will try to focus on ridiculous IP that does not need to have a movie made and try to make this movie. So they’ll have bake-offs where people come into pitch. They will have mini-rooms set up to like how are we going to make the Slinky Movie based on the success of the Lego Movie and other things like that.

But now suddenly there is a Slinky Movie and it’s probably not a bad idea. So talk to us about this Slinky Movie.

**Craig:** There is no better review than probably not a bad idea. So the new Slinky Movie is not the version that we would discuss all the time where you had to write a movie about a Slinky that comes to life at night and helps a kid regain his confidence after his mom dies. This in fact is more like, as far as I could tell, is more like Big Eyes. So it’s actually a story about the creation of the Slinky. The Slinky was technically created by Richard James, but the film is going to center on his wife, Betty, who took over the business after her husband left her with six kids and a nearly bankrupt company. And in a world dominated by male CEOs Betty holds her own and turns the Slinky into a Slinky empire.

**John:** It reminds me also of Joy. The Jennifer Lawrence movie, Joy, which is about the Wonder Mop. It’s like, oh, OK, I can actually see why there is a movie there.

**Craig:** It’s a genre.

**John:** It’s a genre, yes. So great. So we’ll need to find another thing to say instead of Slinky Movie and be clear that all of our previous bagging on the Slinky Movie is not about this Slinky Movie which is being written by Chris Sivertson, hopefully directed by Tamra Davis. I hope it’s great and I hope it’s fantastic. But we need listener suggestions for what should be the new thing we talk about for our generic movie.

**Craig:** I mean, technically this is not the Slinky Movie. This is a movie about the people who made Slinky. But I agree with you. It’s burnt. Right? We’ve burnt the Slinky. So my suggestion is Magic 8-Ball movie. But let’s see what people come up with because there’s got to be something even worse. There’s always going to be something terrible.

**John:** Yeah, I mean, Magic 8-Ball the problem is it doesn’t – just something about plot. There’s a monkey’s paw element to it.

**Craig:** That’s the problem?

**John:** Because it feels like there’s a plot, but no, there’s no plot. There’s no story.

**Craig:** Well because if you invite 80 screenwriters to come in and pitch the Magic 8-Ball Movie you’re going to get 80 of the exact same movies. A child shakes it–

**John:** Be careful what you wish for.

**Craig:** It becomes true. It knows the truth. Then what happens?

**John:** Then you drink the Magic 8-Ball juice and that gives you the power to see the future.

**Craig:** Totally. Yes. Or you become a character called the Magic 8-Ball. I like it. See, we’re doing it. It’s happening.

**John:** That’s the problem. All right. Some programming notes. So this past week we recorded a special live on Zoom voting episode. That was Ashley Nicole Black, Beth Schacter, me, and Craig. We were filling out our ballots. We’re not going to put that in the feed as a normal episode because it’s just so specific and esoteric. But especially if you’re an LA voter and you’re just confused by all the propositions and everything that’s confusing about that ballot take a listen. There’s a link in the show notes to that. And it’s also just a fun conversation with two awesome guests. So, join us for that.

I got to have a fun conversation with Eric Roth this last week. He is a legendary screenwriter who has written a bunch of things. So this was a special WGF event. This will eventually show up in the feed some week when we don’t have a normal show. But I wanted to call it out for Craig because Craig you often bag on Final Draft and how you prefer Fade In. Eric Roth still uses an MS DOS program to write his scripts, back from the ‘80s. It’s called Movie Master.

I’ve never heard of it. But to this day, like this is one of the busiest screenwriters in the world. He uses this MS DOS program that can only do 40 pages at a time and then it runs out of memory.

**Craig:** OK. OK. No. No, no, no. No. I’m not going to respect this. I know I’m supposed to. I know I’m supposed to say, “Oh my god, a genius like Eric Roth. His idiosyncrasies. The way that Steve Jobs would only wear one shirt. It’s a sign of genius.” It’s not. That’s just dumb.

Eric Roth is a great screenwriter. And, by the way, interesting question. Where do you become legendary? I’m wondering what the line is because you and I are definitely not legendary.

**John:** So I said legendary in the course of the interview and I think it’s just because you look at his credits going back to–

**Craig:** Oh, he is.

**John:** Like Forrest Gump. But he still had a 20 year career before Forrest Gump.

**Craig:** Right. He’s legendary.

**John:** He’s 75 years old and has like three movies coming out next year.

**Craig:** OK. So that’s what we’ve got to get. So we’re aiming for that kind of – you got to be working in your 70s and then you’ll be legendary. He is legendary. He’s great. There’s no excuse for this. None. Just none. It’s like if Eric Roth said, “I use this 1980’s app called Movie Master that only works 40 pages at a time. Also, I have a hand-crank air conditioner.” It just doesn’t make any sense. Just update. It’s not hard. It will take five minutes.

Come on, Eric Roth. Come on.

**John:** So I didn’t actually get into very much of this conversation with Eric Roth because of course as a person who makes my own screenwriting software I found it as maddening as you do. But it reminded me of another conversation I want to bring up here. So this is a question we got in from Dina who is a listener and she was put in touch with us by our friend Ryan Knighton. So let’s listen to what Dina has to say.

Dina: Hello, I’m Dina. A blind television writer in Los Angeles. I currently use Final Draft 8 and JAWS 18, screenwriting software for the visually impaired. Final Draft 10 and 11 aren’t compatible with any version of JAWS. My computer is on its last legs so I was ready to uninstall and reinstall the program into my new computer, but according to Final Draft I can’t install version 8 anymore because they no longer support it. Their advice to me was Final Draft 11 is on sale.

Basically, when my computer dies so does my ability to use Final Draft. Do you know of a workaround to make Final Draft 10 or 11 accessible with JAWS? Thanks.

**John:** All right. So the situation that Dina finds herself in, which is also Ryan’s situation, because he and I have talked off-mic about this, is they’re using generally laptops or desktop computers that have very specific setups that use JAWS which is software that reads the screen aloud. You hear like a Stephen Hawking voice and it’s everything that would be underneath their fingers.

So, JAWS works with Final Draft 8. It does not work with Final Draft 10 or wherever we are at in Final Draft right now. And unlike Eric Roth you’re stuck. So I don’t have an answer for them, but I wanted to shine a spotlight on this because it becomes a real accessibility issue in that if they cannot use the apps that they need to use to do the things they can’t do their jobs.

**Craig:** Yeah. The workaround is to leave Final Draft behind. So one thing that – I don’t know if Highland is JAWS compatible. Do you know if Highland is JAWS compatible?

**John:** So the problem is JAWS is essentially a Windows thing. So they’re all on PCs.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** So Fade In is a possibility, but Fade In uses weird esoteric stuff as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. What I can do is certainly check with Kent Tessman who makes Fade In and see if it is JAWS compatible. If not, it sounds like what Dina is saying is only Final Draft 11 is JAWS compatible. Is that what I got out of what she was saying?

**John:** No, I think it’s Final Draft 8 is the one that was still compatible?

**Craig:** But they said you can buy Final Draft 11.

**John:** But that–

**Craig:** It won’t work either.

**John:** It’s not going to work either. So this is not Final Draft’s issue. It’s an issue of the system that you have that lets you read the things aloud is working for the things that were there, but then technology moves forward. So it’s a real frustration.

I guess I’m calling out to listeners who know things about this stuff. Is the problem fundamentally that JAWS is not – that she and Ryan should probably move on from JAWS to the next thing? What are the real solutions here? Because I can only answer things on the Mac and we do everything we can for Highland and for Weekend Read so that it’s as accessible as possible, but I can’t solve this problem.

**Craig:** I wonder if, so Final Draft 11 was the first Final Draft to support Unicode, which is like saying that Mercedes put out a 2020 car that finally had–

**John:** Seatbelts?

**Craig:** Disk brakes. Or seatbelts. Just astonishing. Maybe JAWS relies on Unicode. I don’t know. I don’t know enough about it. But you know what we’ll do. We’ll do a little research. We’ll dig into this. We’ll see if we can get an answer for Dina. I suspect the answer is probably not going to be here’s a complicated workaround for you. I think it’s probably going to be use a different program. But, who knows, we might find something.

**John:** Yeah. I also want to acknowledge, you know, Eric Roth moving to a different system is going to be a lot of work for him.

**Craig:** It’s not as much.

**John:** It’s an adjustment, but he can probably do it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And Ryan or Dina moving to a different program is going to be a lot of adjustment, but it’s sort of on a different scale for them. So, I just want to sort of–

**Craig:** Feel like now you only included Dina’s question to shame Eric Roth into getting off of Movie Master. Like, dude, dude, this is the way it is for regular people. So as a legend could you please, please stop using a program you first installed on your VIC-20?

**John:** Well, he used a manual typewriter before then. The thing is he was cutting edge when he started on that program.

**Craig:** Leading edge. Yeah. That’s true. True.

**John:** So one of the reasons why someone like Eric Roth can have such a long career is because of residuals.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** So I want to talk a little bit about feature residuals. And Craig before we get into this conversation can you give us the quick refresher on what residuals are so folks know what we’re talking about?

**Craig:** Sure. Residuals are a fancy word for reuse payments. If screenwriters had copyright on the work that they did then every time the work would be reproduced, just like when copies of books are sold, or when musicals are performed in other places, even in schools and things like that, the author gets a reuse payment. A royalty.

Well, we’re not copyright owners. We’re employees rather because we are working under work-for-hire. The studios are the copyright holders. So the union essentially negotiated an equivalent to royalties. Now that equivalent to royalties is bandied back and forth between us and them and has been many, many times. But basically what it comes down to is this. There are a lot of weird little arcane formulae to determine how much we make when our stuff is show again. And that depends on where it is shown and how it is shown.

For movies, anything in the movie theater is considered first use. It’s not reuse. There’s not residuals. Anything shown on a plane is considered first use. There are no residuals. But when it is re-aired on television. When it is purchased and streaming. When it is bought on an Internet rental or Internet sale basis. Or of course old school DVDs and VHS. And we get a little tiny amount. And even if it’s just a nickel for every DVD that got sold, or a nickel for every download that happens, that adds up, especially for popular movies into quite a legitimate amount of money.

**John:** Yeah. And so we’re going to be a little bit more transparent about sort of how much money that is, because I want to make sure that people understand why it is so important. So we’ve been talking a lot about on the podcast about how the guild sort of – both the leadership and the membership needs to really pay attention to feature screenwriter issues because so much of what we do is organized around television.

Now, TV has residuals, too. Residuals are incredibly important in TV. But it just works differently in features. And because of the nature of first run versus later runs it can just be the difference between having a career and not having a career.

So, I’m going to have a blog post up where I have some of this stuff, but Craig I wanted to share a story of two different movies that are actually very similar. So two things that I’ve worked on. So Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Aladdin. And I picked those because they were both very big box office hits. They’re both four-quadrant family movies. Both centered around a star. They were 15 years apart but they feel like the same kind of movie. You could sort of swap them in time and they would make about the same impact on the box office and then you would think in their aftermarket.

So let’s take a look at the comparison between these two movies. In this first thing I wanted to take a look at the first 15 months since theaters. And 15 months is kind of an arbitrary time. It’s how much actual residual data I had for Aladdin, which is a more recent movie.

And a thing I should stress is that one of the actual real accomplishments I think at the guild over the last couple of years is that the online lookup for your residuals is really good. So if you have a movie that’s come out in theaters you can go into the portal, go to My Residuals, and see by project, by year how much residuals you’ve gotten. And it’s the guild that collects residuals. You as a writer are not individually responsible for tracking down the residuals. The guild does that.

And so I pulled up everything they had for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and for Aladdin. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory I was the sole credited writer, so all the writer residuals came to me. For Aladdin I share credit with the director, so I’m just doubling the numbers that are here because he and I split things. So the numbers that you’re looking at here really are apples to apples. Nothing has been split off.

So in the first 15 months the kinds of residuals that you get back are from home video, so these would be DVDs, VHS tapes before that. Pay TV, so things like HBO, subscription services where, you know, your paid cable TV. New media, which is both sell-through, so like someone buying it on iTunes. Or SVOD, which is through a streaming service.

So looking at those, for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory only those first two things existed when Charlie and the Chocolate Factory came out. So, home video and pay TV. And together they generated about a million dollars’ worth of residuals in that first 15 months. That’s a huge amount of money.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s significant.

**John:** That’s not just the whole package of like how much Warners made. That’s how much I got checks for in the first 15 months was a million dollars. That’s a lot.

**Craig:** That is.

**John:** Now, let’s take a look at Aladdin. For Aladdin those first two things still exist. You have home video and pay TV. Pay TV interestingly is about the same amount, even over the years, and I’ve not adjusted I should say for inflation. So, that’s a thing to keep in mind here.

But home video shrunk to almost – it’s a quarter of what it was before.

**Craig:** That’s the big story, right? Everything changed. The amount of money that used to be made by writers for even something that wasn’t a huge hit, but something that was like a medium hit, or not a hit by the way used to be significant because home video was such a big revenue source for the studios. By the way, also the reflection here not just for a writer income but also for the studios you start to see why they start making different movies because they can’t sell everything on DVD and video anymore. And so things change.

But no question. A hit back in the days of DVD would generate a lot more money for writers, just by volume. Because actually our formulas for like Internet rentals are spectacular. It’s the best formula we have.

**John:** Really good.

**Craig:** And formula for Internet sales is essentially double what it was for DVD. But DVDs would just sell more.

**John:** Well, I think when you and I were first starting our careers here Disney had a mandate where they were trying – this is under Katzenberg I guess – was trying to make like 45 movies a year. It was just a volume business. They cared about the movies. They wanted them to do well. But they wanted to have a movie in theaters every weekend and then also to have a new thing to sell, a new DVD to sell. And that was a really good business. And once that home video business started going south they shrunk back a lot. And you look at sort of how few movies a major studio will put out these days.

**Craig:** Yeah. Basically, you know, there’s like two evolutionary strategies for animals. You either have a whole lot of offspring, because most of them will die, or you put everything into one or two. So humans and elephants are kind of the high investment/low volume, and rats are the low investment/high volume. Studios used to be like rats. Low investment/high volume. Just make a lot of movies, not all of them at big budgets, some of that at tiny budgets. And now it’s put all of your eggs into these small baskets because you need those movies to be massive in order to justify.

The whole strategy has changed. The whole thing has changed because of the collapse of home video and the rise of new media.

**John:** Now, if you’re just listening to this podcast and you’re not looking at the chart you might say like, oh no, John made no money on Aladdin in residuals. And that’s not the case because new media, which is electronic sell-through, so buying it on iTunes, that is worth as much as home video is right now. So those two together are getting close to what home video was. But most of the money that I get in residuals for Aladdin are a thing that did not exist 15 years ago which is SVOD, subscription video on demand. So in this case it’s Disney+.

And because this movie was released theatrically first, and then it showed up on Disney+, Disney has to pay a residual on that based on a calculation of budget and other things. It’s complicated. But it ends up being a huge chunk of money. So all together Aladdin has paid more residuals in the first 15 months than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which is good news for a big hit movie. It still generates big hit residuals.

But, the asterisk is that I wonder whether this is one of those last movies that’s going to be this huge bonanza because this movie was released theatrically. If this movie had gone straight to Disney+ and was never intended for a theatrical market those residuals would be greatly, greatly, greatly reduced.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, we don’t know if there’s going to be theatrical movies at all again. I mean, legitimately. I don’t know. I mean, I suppose there probably will be. We’ve always been the people that snicker at the “are movies dead?” articles. But none of the “are movies dead?” articles contemplated a global pandemic that would shut down theaters. And all of those articles I think were written before everybody just suddenly had every movie in the world in their home, on their large TV, and also most theatrical movies are suddenly now being made for watching on your TV.

So, I don’t know what the future is there. But I do think that if theatrical movies come back the way they used to be what you will continue to see is a further progress on the trend line of fewer larger movies. Movie theaters will essentially be showing large events. And nothing but. I just don’t see how this works any other way.

**John:** Yeah. So the second chart I’m going to have up on the blog post I need to update a little bit because some stuff has changed based on the most recent round of negotiations, but I looked at Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and then I reached out to some other writers to get what residuals they were getting interesting he first three years. Because the first three years is when you really get a sense of what the residuals are going to be for a project. And what the split was between, again, free TV and cable, home video, pay TV, and new media.

And there’s a whole range, but you see like there’s real money coming in. But if those same movies had been made for Netflix or made for Amazon or made for Disney+ just the residuals that they would have gotten in are spectacularly lower. And so–

**Craig:** Well yeah.

**John:** That is really my concern is that our sense of what residuals may go away completely if we don’t have a better way of acknowledging that some movies are hits that are hugely important for those streamers while other movies are not. Because right now the residual formulas for things that are made for streamers, it doesn’t account for how many people actually watch it. It’s just one flat number.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think with streamers they kind of buy you out on the residual stuff.

**John:** They’ll buy you out based on a percentage of the budget.

**Craig:** They’re basically saying, they’re kind of letting you hedge a bet, right? They’re going, OK, if this were a theatrical bomb you wouldn’t make much in residuals. If it were a smash hit theatrically you would make a lot of residuals. We’re just going to chop the pot there and tell you we’re giving your somewhere in the middle. You know, either way you’re kind of buffeted from the extremes. And, look, I don’t like to view these things as gambling. But obviously that company does in a way. They figured out they’d rather just go with the certainty than have to pay out massively on things. You know, in principle I don’t love it. I’ll say that much. I don’t.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** I don’t think that that’s cool. But on the other hand it’s hard to get a hold on what feels businessly – businessly? I just made up a word. Businessly.

**John:** Businessly, I think it’s good. We need to quickly register that domain name because by the end of this podcast – when this episode drops businessly will be just taking over.

**Craig:** Hold on. Do you think there is a businessly already?

**John:** There’s absolutely.

**Craig:** I’m checking.

**John:** Stop everything. We need to check on–

**Craig:** I’m checking it right now.

**John:** And is it businessly.com? Or is it business.ly?

**Craig:** So it’s businessly.com. And businessly.com is – someone is squatting on it. There’s no information. It just says, “We own businessly.com.” Dammit. Businessly speaking, I have no idea what I was saying. I’m so much more interested now in pursuing businessly that I can’t – this whole thing is shot. [laughs] It does sound like a terrible new startup, doesn’t it?

**John:** It does. I mean, I think it could be the parent company of your escape room that you will inevitably build once the pandemic is over.

**Craig:** Oh, so many ideas. So many ideas.

**John:** Getting back to the notion about how we’re going to handle streaming residuals, the proposal going into this last round of negotiations was that you needed to have tiers to things. So basically for the first 100,000 views it pays this. And basically a bell rings every next 100,000 view.

Classically the pushback to that is they will never release the actual numbers. But if you have it in such broad categories where it’s just like way down here or you’re way up there, it might be meaningful. I just feel like we can’t give up on this notion that people’s work has residual value and they need to be paid for it.

**Craig:** Well, I guess, we’ll say Netflix in particular. There’s no real sense of what their numbers are. I can’t quite figure it out. I mean, they’ve changed it. They said if somebody watches something for five seconds it’s a view? So, you know they have to be decoupling that from how they pay, because they their interest is to tell the world that everyone watched a show and then tell the writer no one watched the show. It’s classic Hollywood stuff.

The point I was trying to make about businessly is that the current state of streaming in Hollywood is one where there is a content boom. Essentially everybody is investing massively in content. And every new player that comes in seems to want to go over the top of everybody else. So Apple I believe has committed to spending a billion dollars in content. A billion, which is astonishing.

**John:** Which is great for us.

**Craig:** It is great for us. The problem that we run into, and we have always run into this, is such. When a business is emerging, like the streaming business. And then people say, “Emerging? It’s been ruling the roost for years.” Well, yes, except it’s also kind of not making money yet for people. So, it is technically an emerging marketplace. When that happens the companies traditionally will say, “We don’t know what this is yet and we’re not making money off of it. Don’t kill this baby in the cradle. Let it grow up and then everybody will get paid,” which is on some level a reasonable statement to make.

The problem is once a marketplace matures they hold all the cards and they don’t want to give you anything. And then they’re incredibly stingy and they’re like, “Well no. You don’t like it here? Go work at some other Hollywood.” And there isn’t one. And so we are always caught between them. They know they’re doing.

And so I do sympathize somewhat when they are protecting an emerging business, but it’s hard to sympathize with them when I know that they never really properly take care of any of us – that means writers, directors, actors – when it is a mature business. They just don’t. And when we watch the business change we also slowly understand just how much money they make. Because all they do all the time is explain how they lose money. But think about the networks. Network television. There was a time not long ago when there were essentially three channels that ran premium television. And that was it.

And all of those shows were being watched routinely by 10 to 30 million people. All of them. And all of those shows had multiple ads that people would pay millions of dollars for. And then after that happened they would rerun it and do it again. And after that happened the studios that were making those things would then resell them to everybody else. And then it would never stop airing. Ever.

The amount of money generated by those things is kind of incalculable. Well, it is calculable.

**John:** It’s calculable, but it’s huge.

**Craig:** It’s enormous. And so now what happens is the ratings for a network program, which used to be like, oh my god, if you didn’t get a 10 you were canceled or something. I don’t know what it was. Now if you get a 2 it’s like, wow, look at you. What does that mean? It means they’re still making money off the 2. And that’s the part that makes me crazy is that I know like they’re all making money. Except the new streamers I think are definitely in a weird spend-spend. I guess they’re acting like the way Amazon did in its initial phase of sell everything at a loss to be the only store that people buy from and then make money.

**John:** So a lot of what we’re describing obviously means the same to TV writers, to comedy variety writers, and to feature writers, because we’re all writing for these same places. I think the thing I want to make sure listeners come away from this with is that feature writers we’ve always had, there’s been a theatrical feature and then it has an aftermarket life where it’s shown on smaller screens. And showing on that smaller screen is how we got paid residuals that made it possible to do this thing.

My concern is that we may both lose the theatrical window, but we may also define a way what it means to be writing a feature. And I don’t want to be pulled down to TV Movie of the Week rates for things. That’s not even talking residuals, but how much they have to initially pay you.

So, it’s just to make sure that we are always thinking about these 90 minutes of entertainment that was originally designed for the big screen, that’s designed for a certain budget, that it still means something five years, 10 years from now.

**Craig:** Yeah. When we look at residuals from a very far away view what we see over the history of the Writers Guild is that from our position we are always trying to protect something that is institutional. But we are also trying to figure out how to be adaptive to technological change. Because it has come along frequently. And by and by as things go on studios generally win when technology changes. They force us essentially to play to a draw, or to cut our losses. That’s what they kind of do.

So, on our side of things we have to do two things at once, and it’s really hard to do. We have to protect what we have but we also can’t be so rigid as to insist on a calcified formula that no longer applies to anything they’re doing, if that’s where we put all of our chips.

I mean, there was a weird point in our guild’s history, I’ll call it late ‘90s/early 2000s where a large segment of I guess the politically active people in our guild were obsessed with DVD residuals. And that’s fine because they were fighting a war that had been going on for at that point 20 years and we had taken a terrible blow when that stuff came along. The studios just unilaterally cut 80 percent away from the amount that they were giving us. Just decided to do it. And then we struck and we lost. And that became the kind of white whale.

But the problem was while we were chasing that white whale the world had changed dramatically. And we weren’t necessarily ready for what came next. So it’s hard. We have to do both. We have to somehow protect what is there and also be ready to get rid of what is there and rewrite it completely because if we don’t they will for us. It’s not an easy thing. And I don’t expect that we will – look, we’ll never be in charge, right? We’re always the ones asking for money. That’s always the weaker position.

**John:** We’re always labor versus capital.

**Craig:** We’re always labor versus capital. And we’ve done a pretty good job, I think.

**John:** I think the electronic sell-through rate and sort of how good that is I think is testament to strength at a moment and actually getting a pretty good definition that we could defend. And so it’s taking that as the example to push forward rather than the negative example of home video.

**Craig:** Yeah. The example I like to talk about is the Internet rental rate. Because that is our finest moment. Because we anticipated something and we anticipated before they did. That’s really what it comes down to is can we somehow figure out something that they haven’t yet figured out. And in doing so our internet rental rate is exceptional. It is double, I believe, what our sales rate is. And we had to strike for that sales rate in part because they were angry about the rental rate.

So, the trick is to somehow get those little victories in early when we can, but it’s not – I say that like if you just apply yourself it will happen. No. A lot of it is just luck.

**John:** Yeah. All right, let us shift gears completely, because I want to talk about a very crafty kind of issue here. The project I’m working on right now has characters who are experiencing some really big emotions and you and I, Craig, haven’t talked a lot about the inner emotional life of characters. We talk about sort of the emotional effect we’re trying to get in readers and viewers, but I want to talk about what characters are feeling because what characters are feeling so often impacts what they can do in a scene, how they would express themselves, literally what actions they would take.

And so to set us up I wanted to play a clip from Westworld. And so this is Evan Rachel Wood. I think this was from the first season. And what I love about it is that she’s so emotional and then because she’s a robot she can just turn it off.

**Craig:** What would you know about that?

**John:** I set myself up for that.

Evan Rachel Wood: My parents. They hurt them.

Jeffrey Wright: Limit your emotional affect please. What happened next?

Evan: Then they killed them. And then I ran. Everyone I cared about is gone. And it hurts so badly.

Jeffrey: I can make that feeling go away if you like.

Evan: Why would I want that? The pain. Their loss. It’s all I have left of them. You think the grief will make you smaller and sad, like your heart will collapse in on itself, but it doesn’t. I feel spaces opening up inside of me. Like a building with rooms I’ve never explored.

**John:** I’ll put a link in the show notes for that, too, so you can see what she’s doing in the scene. What I like so much about that is you look at how she is at the start of that scene and she’s so emotional. She has a hard time getting those words out. And then when she’s told like stop being emotional it brings her way back down and she can actually speak the words that she couldn’t otherwise say. And that’s so true I find both in my own real life as I get in these heightened emotional states I can’t express myself the way I would want to, but also in the characters I write. I feel when I know what a character is going through inside their head it completely changes how they’re going to be acting in that scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a pretty great clip. Evan Rachel Wood is an outstanding actor. And one thing that’s fascinating about that is that Jeffrey Wright who is playing there against her who is also a spectacular actor, what he says is limit your emotional affect. Not eliminate it, right?

And so what she does is – and because she’s a robot she can dial it from an eight to a three. Which, by the way, what he’s doing there essentially is what directors are doing all the time on a set. Which is they walk over to an actor, “Great, let’s just roll it back. Let’s just pull it back five points and see what that’s like.” Because then what happens is you’re still feeling emotion. She still has a quavering in her voice. You can still feel her pain. But, it’s like she experienced it three hours ago and now she’s starting to get a handle on it, as opposed to she’s in the middle of it. And so first things first when you’re thinking about your character’s emotional state is ask why are they experiencing these emotions and how distant are they from the source of it. Because that’s going to be a huge indication to you about how you ought to be pitching them.

**John:** Absolutely. So, one of the things you learn as you’re directing actors is to talk about verbs rather than adjectives. And so gives them a thing to do rather than sort of a description of how they are supposed to be feeling. Because it’s very hard to feel a thing. And what I might describe as being happy is a thousand different things. But if I describe invite the other character into the space. Share your joy with them. That’s a thing that an actor can actually play.

And so be thinking about sort of not only what is causing this emotional state but what is the actual physicality of that emotional state. What’s happening in there?

And it’s not rational. And that’s a hard thing to grasp is that we always talk about what characters want, what characters are after. This isn’t really the same kind of thing. It’s an inner emotional drive. Something they cannot actually control. It’s more their lizard brain doing a thing.

So what may be useful is imagine that you’re at a party and how differently you’d act or speak if for example you were terrified of someone in the room. Or if you were ravenously hungry. If you were ashamed about what you were wearing. If you were proud of the person this party was about. If you were disgusted by the level of filth in the room. Those are all sort of primal things that are happening.

And if you’re experiencing those emotions the affect is going to be different. You’re going to do different things. You’re going to say different things. You’re going to position yourself in the room differently. So getting an emotional register for each of the characters in a scene can be super important in terms of figuring out how this scene is actually going to play out.

And I do want to stress that we really are talking about scene work here. It’s not overall story plotting. It’s not even sort of sequence work. It’s very much sort of in this moment right now what is going to be the next thing the character says , the next thing the character does.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, it’s also what people came for. You’re absolutely right to distinguish between the normal acting place and the normal writing place as one of intention. I want something. So I’m going to figure out how to get it, whether it’s to get your attention, or have you fall in love with me, or stop the bomb from exploding. Whatever it is, that’s the rational stuff that actors go through. And that’s the rational stuff you’re writing in there. That is the plot.

But what people come for is the emotion because the emotion is when the character doesn’t want anything, they are simply expressing the truth about what they are experiencing in the moment. And that is the part we connect with. We do not connect with the intricacies of disarming a bomb. We connect with fear. We connect with the anticipation of terrible loss. The kind of foreshadowing of grief. That’s what we imagine.

If you’re a parent you know this feeling. You put your kid on a bicycle for the first time and whether you realize it or not your heart beats a little bit faster because you are anticipating them falling and getting hurt. So that’s the truth. And that’s what we all experience. That is the universal nature of this. That’s the part people come for. So, our job is to understand very realistically what somebody would be feeling inn that moment because while audiences will forgive things like – and so the first movie I ever had in theaters was a movie called Rocket Man. Not the Elton John story. This was 1998’s silly children’s comedy, Rocket Man. And the director wasn’t really – I didn’t get along with. Well, I just didn’t appreciate his creative instincts.

And one of the things he did I guess when he was shooting was there were all these scenes were these astronauts were walking around on Mars and the visors and the helmets were causing reflections from the lights. So he said let’s just remove those visors and we’ll put them in later with visual effects, because he thought that would be easy to do. And then later Disney was like, “This movie’s not even that great. We’re not spending more money on it.”

So there are scenes in the finished movie where they are walking around on Mars and there’s no visor in their helmet. And audiences will forgive that because they know on some level these people aren’t really on Mars and who cares. But here’s what they will never forgive. An inappropriate emotional response. Because they know what feels real and what doesn’t. That’s where they will kill you.

So our job is to be as realistic as possible in those moments to avoid the extremes of melodrama, where things start to get funny because they’re so wildly too big. Or to avoid the constraint of I guess we would call it unnatural emotional response where things don’t connect right or simply aren’t there at all. Is it better to underplay emotion than overplay? Usually. Can you underplay emotion to the point where it’s just not there and the whole thing feels kind of dead and battened down with cotton? Yup.

**John:** Oh, we’ve seen those movies. We’ve seen those cuts where it just got too stripped down. It sounds like we could be talking about actors and how actors create their performance. And this is not a podcast about acting. But there is such a shared body of intention here. And it doesn’t even necessarily go through the director. Because we are the first actors for all of these characters. And so we have to be able to get inside their emotional states and be able to understand what it feels like to be in that moment, you know, experiencing these things so we can see what happens next.

And so often when I find things are being forced, or when I don’t believe the reality of stuff, I feel like the writer is dictating, OK, this is the next emotional thing you’re going to hit rather than actually putting themselves in the position of that character and seeing what happens next and actually just watching and listening to what naturally does happen next.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s always a balancing act there.

**Craig:** Well, the mistake I think a lot of writers make is to think I want the audience to feel sad, so let me make my character sad. That’s not what makes us sad.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** At all.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** There are times when the character should be sad, but that’s not what makes us sad.

**John:** Absolutely. And so often the lesson you learn is that if you want the audience to feel emotional and sad limiting what we see of that character feeling that way or how that character externalizes that thing is often more effective. Like the character holding back tears generally will generate more tears from the audience than the character who is actually crying. Because we put ourselves in that position and we are sort of crying for them.

**Craig:** Yes. And sometimes there’s a situation where the actors, the characters may not be feeling an enormous amount emotionally, but what they’re doing is something we can empathize with so deeply that it makes us cry. I’m thinking there’s a moment in Chernobyl where Jessie Buckley’s character is with her husband who is a firefighter. And he is dying. Cleary. Evidently. And disgustingly. And she’s right next to him and she tells him that they’re going to have a baby. And she’s obviously – she knows this. She’s not super emotional in that moment. And he sort of just takes her hand and he’s not super emotional. He’s just pleased with this news. But I cry when I look at it because I feel such terrible empathy for them.

And it’s hard to even explain, to parse out exactly why that makes me so sad. Is it that she’s smiling and he’s smiling and they’re experiencing this moment of joy and hope even though he’s perishing in front of her? Is that what it is? It’s hard to say. But what I do know is that if I try to make people cry then it just gets dumb. So, you find your moments – and there are moments where for instance Jessie, who is a spectacularly good actor, and just has amazing instincts. There are moments in the show where she is very emotional. And I don’t necessarily feel emotional in that moment. What I feel is alignment with her. Like, yes, I’m glad you’re angry. Yes, of course you’d be scared. Yes, of course you’re upset.

**John:** Well that comes back to empathy. Because you successfully placed us as the viewer into her position, so we are seeing the story from her point of view. And that is not just the intellectual point of view, but the emotional point of view. And that’s why we’re feeling what we’re feeling. We are identifying with her.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But let’s talk about sort of how writers can be thinking about these emotions. I want to get back to your example of you’re the parent whose kid is riding off on the bike for the first time and you know they’re going to fall. That is such a specific example. And the reason you were able to summon that is when that happened you were probably kind of recording that. A little red light went off in the corner. OK, this emotional thing that I’m experiencing, this is real. This is a thing that I can hold onto. It’s in my toolbox right now.

A thing I’ve been doing since the start of the pandemic is I started doing Head Space, the meditation app. And one of the things it forces you to do is to really evaluate what are you feeling right now at this moment. And when you get good at being able to analyze what are you actually feeling you can start to think like, OK, what would it feel like to be proud of this moment. What would it feel like to be angry or fearful? And you can start to distill what that emotion is like independent of the actual cause. And sometimes as a writer you have to be able to do that. So you actually say, OK, what is the moment – a little bit more back to Evan Rachel Wood – with a little bit more fear dialed in. What is this moment like with a little bit more dread or curiosity dialed in?

Because with that you can actually – you’re like a musician putting together the chords and figuring out like, OK, what is the best version of this moment, this scene, this character’s experience in this moment because of the emotions that I’m aware of and able to apply.

**Craig:** That’s right. Then you have the difficult job of figuring out how that would work within the tone of whatever you’re doing. Because every piece has a different tone. And over time the way we generally make and then absorb culture changes. When you watch action movies from the ‘80s what you will generally see are a lot of people behaving in ways that are emotionally insane. Just insane. You know, stuff blows up and they’re just like, “Wow, should have worn my sunglasses.” Whatever the dumb crap is.

I mean, Arnold Schwarzenegger would quip after murdering people. So, you know, who does that? You just murdered a human being. I mean, he deserved it. He was a bad guy. But you killed him and then you have a little snappy joke that’s a pun based on the manner in which you killed him. Well that’s the tone of that.

As we’ve kind of gone on things do change. And generally speaking our culture has become more emotionally expressive and in touch. And that may be, well, I think it’s generally a good thing of course. And we are all of us living in a post-therapy age where many people have gone to therapy, or they’ve just read books, like Chicken Soup for the Soul, or whatever it is. We’ve been absorbing certain things and so now when we write this stuff part of what has to happen is you, the author, cannot be afraid of your own emotions. And you can’t be afraid to confront how you felt in moments. And that means being honest with yourself. And understanding that when we go to the movies, so forget about you wanting to project some image of yourself to the world, right?

It would be cool to project John Milius to the world. Because John Milius is super cool and everything. But I’m not John Milius. And I just don’t write tough like that. I just don’t. I kind of do the opposite. And so you have to kind of forget about projecting some perfectly strong invulnerable sense of yourself to the world and instead recognize that everybody who is sitting in there wants to feel comforted by a created human being’s weakness and their triumph over that weakness. Because that’s inspiring to them.

And if you want to look at one genre that encapsulates that the most, the embracing of the emotional self, particularly the emotional male self, it is Marvel movies. Because superhero movies were about kind of, you know, these sort of emotionally distant people, because they were perfected. And now it’s, you know, they’re tormented, which reflects Marvel.

**John:** Now it’s about Tony Stark’s relationship with Peter Parker. It’s very specific character interactions is why we go to these superhero movies, especially the Marvel movies.

**Craig:** Exactly. So you have to get it right. That’s the challenge. This is I think probably where writers will fall down more than anywhere else because they actually don’t understand their own selves, so they don’t know what a character should feel. How many times in our Three Page Challenges have we said, “Why is this person speaking in a complete sentence when somebody has a knife to their throat?” You can’t. You just can’t. There’s a lack of emotional truth.

**John:** Yeah. And so as you’re talking with actors and they can be frustrated. It’s like, “I don’t know how to do this scene. This isn’t tracking for me.” A lot of times is they’re saying I don’t know how to get from A to E here. You’re not giving me the structure to get from place to place. And maybe you just didn’t build that. Or maybe there’s a way there that you didn’t see before.

As writers, I mean, we’re not documentarians. So we’re not necessarily creating scenes that are completely emotionally true to how they would happen in real life. There’s going to be optimization and it’s going to move faster and people are going to have to make transitions within the course of a scene that they probably would not do in real life. But that’s the art of it. That’s how you are sanding off the edges and getting there a little bit quicker. But you have to understand what the reality would look like first before you try to optimize it.

**Craig:** Correct. That is absolutely correct.

**John:** All right. Let’s go to our final topic. This is a really practical one. It’s a question that Shannon wrote in.

**Shannon:** Hi John and Craig. I’ve been a professional novelist for 20 years but I’ve only worked on a couple screenplays and I have a question about screenwriting protocol I guess. When working on my first screenplay after one call with the producer her notes were pretty simple so I said, great, I can get this done in a couple hours and email the new script to you tomorrow morning. She said, “You’re new to all this, so let me give you some advice. Always take two weeks.”

I said but I don’t need two weeks. The changes are just line tweaks. And she said, “If you don’t take two weeks you’re not taking my note seriously.”

I hate the idea of deliberately slowing down in order to look a certain way. And when a production is on a timeline I would think that speed whenever possible would always be the goal. But on a recent project I managed to complete one of the rewrites much faster than the studio expected and instead of a “hey this is great” response the execs did not seem pleased.

I was reminded of that original producer and I wondered is there a code that writers are supposed to take a certain amount of time for things? I get that non-writers really don’t know how long each writing task takes, but if I revise too quickly does that offend them? Do I risk them assuming I didn’t do a thorough job?

P.S. I did a thorough job.

**John:** Craig, what advice do we have for Shannon here? It’s a great question.

**Craig:** Such a great question. Shannon, here’s the deal. The producer that gave you that advice was giving you good advice and here’s why. It actually ties into our topic about emotions. When people make suggestions for notes and things and how to change things, of course what they want primarily is to feel that they’re being taken seriously and that what they’re saying is worthy of your thought and your time. They don’t know how writing works. If they did they would be writers.

So, yes, you may absolutely be able to crush that in an hour. And crush it well and thoroughly as you said. The problem is if you say, oh yeah, I can do that in like two hours, what they’re hearing is, “OK, yeah, I’ll just put in as little time as possible because I just want to get past that.” It’s like I’m painting your house and someone says, “Oh, I don’t love the color in the kitchen.” “No problem. I’ll fix that in like 10 minutes.” “Well, no, no, take your time. Take your time. Be careful about it. Put some thought into it.”

So, yeah, it’s not like there’s a code or anything. But ask yourself if you were in their shoes how would you feel if they said, “Yeah, we’ll turn this around in two hours and fix it.” Take your time and if you do it really, really fast just sit on it. Just sit on it for a week. Like Scotty from Star Trek, everything will take two weeks. OK, I did it in two hours. That’s kind of good advice I think.

**John:** I think it is kind of good advice, too. And so I was originally going to be negative on that producer because if I was just turning it into that producer like well she could understand that I did the work, you can see the work that I did. The thing is taking a little bit of extra time you’re buying yourself some space from the last draft that they read to this next draft. And they will kind of forget how much work or how little work it was. They’ll be reading it with fresher eyes.

And so in television by the way you would be expected to like, no, no, I need this in 20 minutes. You don’t have the time to sort of wait around. But in feature land, yeah, everything does sort of space itself out and things take a while. And if you were to come right back with that revision that afternoon they might question whether it was really the right version, even if it’s exactly the same pages you would have turned in two weeks from now.

So, yeah, you kind of take the time. Here’s a tip for you. As you’re writing a draft there will naturally be some check-in calls to see like, oh, I just want to see how you’re doing, if anything is coming up. That’s a time for you to signal like, oh, I think I’ll be ready to turn this in in about a week. Even if you’re kind of already done there’s a moment in the writing process where you can signal to them when you expect to turn it in. That’s good on both levels because it sort of creates a sense that like, oh, you’re doing a lot of work so this is really going to take up all your time to do that, but also just clears some space in their brain for like, OK, in about a week I’m going to be reading this thing. That’s good. That’s the right amount of time. Shannon must be doing a really good job. And that’s just dumb psychology, but that’s sort of what happens there.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, by the way, Shannon, it’s also fair to say that while you did a thorough job in the two hours what you deprived them of was the idea that you would have three days later in the shower. And I have had those moments where I’m like I know exactly how to do this. And then after a couple of days I’m like, wait, hold on. Is this great or is it just good? What do I do here? And then I just start being creative as opposed to responsive. Because that’s really what they want. They don’t want you to just be like, OK, check, check, check, check, check. I did all your things like a little punch list. What they want you to be is creative and also responsive.

So, give yourself the time. Even if you don’t need it, give it to yourself anyway.

**John:** Yup. All right. It’s time for out One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a great initiative being done by Christina Hodson, a guest on our show from before, and Margot Robbie, the actress. Together they formed Lucky Exports. And what they did is they took six female writers, six female-identifying writers, and put together a writer’s room to sort of focus on female writers writing action and basically they were noticing that there were not enough female action writers like Christina Hodson. We need more of them. So they put together this writer’s room to talk about writing action. Then they worked with each of them developing pitches. They took those pitches out and they sold five of the six pitches around town.

I just love that they took the initiative to recognize a problem and work on solving it and that these five writers now have feature writing deals that they didn’t have before. So I just wanted to call out Christina Hodson and Margot Robbie for doing a real good in the world.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Big salute to Christina Hodson. I don’t know Margot Robbie but we do know Christina and that’s fantastic. And – and – most importantly they put money in someone’s pocket. Because that’s the point. There are a lot of initiatives that are there to look great on Twitter or sound good in a Deadline article or make people just feel like they’re doing something, and none of them put money in anyone’s pocket. This did. Therefore it is good. That’s the goal. That’s the goal.

**John:** Yeah. It wasn’t just a programmer like, “Oh, we should do more to help these writers.” No, we’re literally giving them jobs because it’s booking jobs and being able to turn in work and show what you did. That’s what gets the next job and the next job after that.

**Craig:** And obviously nothing wrong with programs that are advice-based or mentoring. You and I are both part of those. But there is no substitute for putting money in people’s pockets. So, excellent job there.

My One Cool Thing is going to shock you. A game.

**John:** Ah!

**Craig:** So have you ever played – I’m trying to figure out how to describe the genre. So it’s an app that is like a novel but the novel is presented in a very stylized textual way, in an interactive way. And sometimes there’s a little puzzle involved to kind of get to the next section. There’s a few of these.

**John:** I remember games going all the way back to my old Atari that sort of worked that way. It was kind of in between a thing you read and a game that you play.

**Craig:** Yeah. Never quite got it right. I just never really liked any of them that I tried. Until now. There is a game called Unmemory. And the premise of Unmemory is pretty cliché, to be honest. You have amnesia and have to figure out what happened. That’s about as old as dirt.

But the actual presentation of the story and the way you interact with it and the way you solve puzzles and the beautiful design and the fascinating way that the text becomes manipulated and changed depending on how you are interacting with it and the images is great. It’s like they solved it. And it’s a really engaging experience. The story is pretty good. Maybe come for the story but stay for the interactivity and the ingenuity of the presentation and the integration of puzzles.

So, Unmemory. It’s a game from developer Patrones y Escondites and publisher Plug In Digital. And it is available now on iOS and I guess on Android if you have one of those dumb things.

**John:** Thinking about this kind of genre of game and story, how does it compare to something like Gone Home? It feels like a game that you’re playing but it ultimately becomes a story.

**Craig:** Right. So, Gone Home, which is beautiful and everybody should play it, is kind of the epitome of what they call the walking simulator. There are these games where you’re basically walking around a space. You are not ever in any kind of danger. There isn’t a specific goal per se. You are just experiencing a space, digging into things, looking at stuff and learning. And in doing so a story starts to emerge. This is not that. This is straight up text-based with some sound and some images integrated. But the way the text is presented is fascinating. And each chapter involves a number of puzzles, some of which are quite tricky to figure out, before you can move onto the next chapter.

And so there’s far more interactivity and solving and thought and investigation in this than there would be in something like Gone Home or any other walking simulator.

**John:** I look forward to trying it.

And that is our show for this week. So stick around after the credits because we’re going to be talking about Jeopardy! But until then Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. Edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Rajesh Naroth.

If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

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

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segment. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**Craig:** This long-running television game show features Kevin Walsh as its latest repeat champion.

**John:** What is Jeopardy! I’m so excited that our friend Kevin is doing so well on Jeopardy! right now.

**Craig:** Not surprised.

**John:** No, not a bit.

**Craig:** So Kevin Walsh is a guy that we’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons with for many, many years. He originally came to us through Chris Morgan who has known him forever. Kevin is pretty much the top – we’ve talked about the story analysts and the readers at the studios. He’s pretty much the top guy there.

**John:** It’s the Kevin we referred to in that episode about reader pay and sort of the issues that readers are facing. That Kevin is this Kevin.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s the same Kevin. And so Kevin is sort of a top guy at DreamWorks, so if you’re submitting a screenplay to DreamWorks odds are he’s getting his eyes on it. And we know him also as just a very knowledgeable D&D player. He is a geek extraordinaire.

So this wasn’t like shocking per se that he would get on Jeopardy! or do well. But I don’t think anybody, including Kevin, would have anticipated that he would have had a run like this. It’s been astonishing. He has won five in a row and with the exception of one of those episodes he went into Final Jeopardy not needing to actually gamble because he had enough money to guarantee a win. And in one episode the other two contestants were in the negative when Final Jeopardy came around. So he did Final Jeopardy alone on his own. He is having a legendary run and it’s just fun to watch.

**John:** Jeopardy! has always been part of my life. I’ve watched it with my mom as long as I can possibly remember and my mom was actually on the original Jeopardy!, the Art Fleming Jeopardy!, way back in the day. So I grew up on a couch that had been won with earnings from Jeopardy! So, it’s always been a part of my life so it’s exciting to see it with Kevin.

But I’m also just in general happy that it’s back in this pandemic time. So, the show shut down for the pandemic naturally, but also because Alex Trebek has cancer and there’s a whole question of whether he’d be able to come back and host the show.

The show looks just like it always looks. I mean, the podiums are spaced a little bit further apart, but you wouldn’t know that we’re in the middle of a pandemic to see this.

One signal that might be out there that’s something is a little bit weird is that all of the contestants are from Southern California.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So they’re not flying people across the country. But other than that it feels like Jeopardy! except that our friend is running it.

**Craig:** I as a kid didn’t know about Jeopardy! until Weird Al Yankovic song I Lost on Jeopardy! which is his parody of the Greg Kihn Band Our Love’s in Jeopardy. And that I think was I want to say like 1984, so I was 13. Because Jeopardy! kind of went away and then it came back. And it came back and just became this like new part of culture again. It’s a fascinating thing that it was gone and then back.

And Jeopardy! is one of the last remaining cultural institutions that everyone is aware of, everyone respects, and also rewards actual intelligence. It is stringent. It’s not there to win a million dollars. There’s no crazy lights. The balloons don’t come down. It is – talk about unemotional – it’s an unemotional game. Alex Trebek’s character–

**John:** There’s no false drama.

**Craig:** No. His character is flat affect. That’s it. Right? And you as a participant are expected to also be very calm. You don’t jump around. There’s no squealing or cheering. It’s wonderful.

**John:** Now when the show came back, right before it came back in this pandemic time, they showed back the original Jeopardy! from when Alex Trebek sort of relaunched the show. And watching that first episode the audience would cheer and applaud after every single thing. It was so jarring. You would think that there would be more audience interaction over the course of time, but no, they got rid of all of that. And so they really made it much calmer which is one of the reasons I really appreciate it. It’s not panic-inducing the way other game shows are. They’re designed to activate those corticosteroids, the stress things.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, game shows in general are very Vegas. There’s lights. There’s cheering. There’s a kind of mania to it. Everybody seems coked up. They want you to be coked up. They want you to be jumping up and down and clapping. And Jeopardy! is like it’s an exam and you will quietly answer the questions. And everybody understands we’re here for quality. And if you can answer them, you’re quality, and if you can’t, you’re not. And it’s wonderful. I love it.

And I mean I’ve never taken the test. I’ve thought about it. But I’ve never done it.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve never taken the test either. And what do you think your best categories would be on Jeopardy! Craig?

**Craig:** Well, you know, the thing is you want to say one and then you realize, oh, then one day I’ll get there. That will be the category and I’ll just get the ones that I just happen to not know. But I would guess that my best categories would probably be in the sciences.

**John:** Yeah. I think I’m probably best in my sciences as well. Science and sort of general pop culture things. I’m not great with my presidents. That’s part of the reason why I memorized the presidents in order this year is because I wanted to be able to have some sense of where things fall. I’m not great with pop songs. Any sports thing I’m just dead on. So, those are the challenges.

But things like international cities or places I’m pretty good. I’m bad with my rivers. It’s fascinating there is just a body of Jeopardy! knowledge that is pretty specific that’s not even general trivia knowledge. It feels kind of unique to Jeopardy!

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s like a sort of Jeopardy! Studies could be a class. There are obviously people who cram on this stuff who take trivia very, very seriously. And paintings, I’m a zero paintings. Just a zero. I know there’s stuff I just don’t know. Shakespeare. I’ve read a lot of Shakespeare. I just don’t remember things.

**John:** I don’t remember who is in what play. Couldn’t do that.

**Craig:** To an extent.

**John:** One interesting thing, Jeopardy! is a WGA-covered show. So not a lot of these kind of shows are WGA shows, but Jeopardy! is one of them. So all of those questions and answers you see written, those are written by WGA writers which is great. There’s a special contract for game and variety shows. But we’re glad to see that be covered.

And I hope it goes on another 30 years. I don’t see a need for this to change. And I feel like at some point we’ll be in a post-Alex Trebek time and that will be sad, but it will also be fine. Because I think it doesn’t rely on his force of personality to work. I think it relies on the cultural consistency of who those players are and the way the questions are asked.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s going to be a change coming. We all know that. It’s a sad reality. And I just hope, and I expect, that the folks who make Jeopardy! will understand that continuity of tone is everything. That’s going to be the key. Continuity of tone.

But hopefully Kevin keeps winning. He’s up to a hundred and how much?

**John:** I think $111,000 as we’re recording this, which is fantastic.

**Craig:** After taxes that will be $12. [laughs] You know they give you the tax form right then and there. They don’t mess around.

**John:** Anyway, we’re very proud of Kevin, so continue to please watch him on the show. Root for him. It doesn’t really matter whether you root for him or not, but you know somebody who is on Jeopardy! right now. Through us you know somebody who is on Jeopardy! And weirdly because it’s been so LA-centric Franki Butler was on the first episode of the new ones, and she’s a person I know through WGA business, too. So, it’s been nice to see a lot of locals on our show. And hopefully people from across the country can come back to Jeopardy! at some point. But for now it’s nice to see a lot of LA folks.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Cool. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

 

Links:

* [Slinky Movie](https://variety.com/2020/film/news/slinky-movie-tamra-davis-1234794706/)
* [Scriptnotes Voting Special!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sl91khJ_ebw)
* [Eric Roth](https://screencraft.org/2019/01/10/5-screenwriting-lessons-from-oscar-winning-screenwriter-eric-roth/)
* [WGA Residuals](https://www.wga.org/contracts/contracts/mba/2020-mba-contract-changes-faq)
* Follow along to the discussion of [Feature Residuals in 2020](https://johnaugust.com/2020/feature-residuals-in-2020)
* [Lucky Exports](https://deadline.com/2020/10/christina-hodson-margot-robbie-lucky-exports-pitch-program-1234597030/)
* [Unmemory](https://unmemory.info/)
* [Kevin Walsh on Jeopardy!](https://deadline.com/2020/10/jeopardy-alex-trebek-one-contestant-final-round-1234597250/)
* [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 Rajesh Naroth ([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/472.mp3).

The original post for this episode can now be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/470-dual-dialogue).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Craig Mazin is my name.

**John:** And this is Episode 470 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we’ll look at what happens when two or more characters–

**Craig:** Well, the thing is if you have multiple bits of dialogue then you need to have people–

**John:** — talking at once, the best ways for writers to think about it. And–

**Craig:** — say them simultaneously. But how do you do that–

**John:** — portray it on the page.

**Craig:** — when they’re – oh.

**John:** Plus lots of follow up on delayed movies, mergers, assistant pay, and more. And in our bonus segment for Premium members Craig and I will discuss Halloween.

**Craig:** Ooh, Halloween. I love it.

**John:** Yeah. Do you love Halloween?

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** I don’t love Halloween. So we’ll get into that.

**Craig:** Well, I get why. I know why. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] You’ll have theories.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** All right. So lots of stuff in the news. First off, almost all the movies are delayed or the release dates changed. So we haven’t talked about this for a while but there was a pandemic. I guess there still is a pandemic.

**Craig:** So they say.

**John:** So they say. Some movie theaters are kind of opened. Most movie theaters aren’t really open. Tenet released in the US, sort of. Other movies have gone straight to video.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to an article that looks at some of the big release date changes, but essentially coming through the end of this year all of the Marvel movies got pushed back. Some of the Disney movies are coming out. Some of them are not coming out. Something like Free Guys, December 11. Dune, of course, is December 18. Wonder Woman is December 25.

**Craig:** I don’t think they are. I’ve got to be honest with you. I don’t think they are.

**John:** I don’t know if they are either. I was talking to some people involved with these movies and they said, “Yeah, I think it’s going to come out? Maybe it’s going to be out for like two weeks and—“

**Craig:** I would be shocked. Shocked.

**John:** I’d be surprised, too.

**Craig:** I think that this is going to be a while with these. If they don’t bite the bullet and just say, “We’re going to be charging you $30 to watch this at home,” then they have to wait. They just have to wait. Tenet was the movie that they all watched happen. And then they all looked at each other and said, “Ooh, no, no. We don’t want that.”

I mean, these things are economic propositions that have been well worked out with various formulae. A little bit like gambling where they’ve got it down to somewhat of a science, at least in certain ways. And not having a full theatrical release in the United States is simply untenable if you’re going to attempt to make your money back on some of these big bets. And they are pretty much all really big bets.

**John:** So I think the first question will be Pixar has some movies, Soul and the James Bond movie No Time to Die. Both of them are slated for November 20.

**Craig:** No way.

**John:** Yeah. That will be the first times we see. I mean, it’s not just the pandemic. It’s also it’s coming out of this election. I just don’t have a great sense for what America is going to be like at the end of November.

**Craig:** Normally if the movie theaters are open America is like I’m going to the movies. That’s normally what we’re like. But we’re not. We’re not going to be going to the movies on November 20. I don’t believe that. Unless something remarkable happens. It just doesn’t seem like it makes any sense. And the biggest moviemaking complexes are in the largest population centers. Those are the places that seemingly are most rigid and properly so about following the rules of social distancing. I just don’t see it happening. But, I mean, look, you can keep sliding things around on a calendar all you want. The nice thing is they don’t have to mail prints out anywhere anymore. It’s all beamed in electronically.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** But, nah, and I mean, and the marketing campaigns are flexible as well. So, no, I don’t think so. I would be blown away if we were watching a James Bond movie on November 20.

**John:** Yeah. And I don’t want to sound callous towards movie theaters. Movie theaters are a crucial piece of our infrastructure and they’ve just been completely hosed by what’s happened. And so I want theatrical movies to succeed. I want these things to be possible. I just don’t know that it is possible now.

And just using myself as a barometer, I’m a person who really likes to go to the movies and sees things opening weekend. But if I don’t feel safe going to movie theaters here, pretty well run movie theaters here, I just don’t see it being profitable for everybody.

**Craig:** No. The movie theaters are probably facing an extinction event in terms of the way it has been to this point. The removal of the consent decree and the pandemic have combined to – I don’t know how a large independent theater chain survives this. I really don’t. Maybe they have secret plans that are somehow opaque to me. But it does seem like the large media companies in the United States are sitting back waiting to see what happens with the pandemic ending and waiting to see how attendance works after that, at which point they will swoop in and buy these things at a cheap cost as distressed properties.

**John:** Very, very possible. I mentioned the election, Craig, what is your voting plan?

**Craig:** My voting plan is to receive my ballot in the mail. Fill the ballot out. And then I believe I’m going to be dropping it into a ballot drop box. That’s the last bit of research I have to do is see where that is. I assume it’s going to be at my post office. But it might be elsewhere. I will find out where that is. I will go to it and put my ballot into it. And I will do that on the day I get my ballot.

**John:** That is essentially my plan as well. I actually already got my ballot because the county of Los Angeles still thinks I live in France. And so they sent me this ballot early so it can get all the way to France. So I actually got my ballot. If it becomes a question of whether this is going to be problematic for me to turn it in early because they think I live in France then I will take this to one of the early voting centers and actually vote there as soon as I can do that.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So that’s the alternative. That’s what I did at the 2018 elections.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** So either way I will be voting as soon as I possibly can vote, just because you never know.

**Craig:** Well, I have always been a vote in person guy because I like the experience of voting in person.

**John:** I do, too.

**Craig:** I remember as a kid going into the voting booth with my dad. Back in the day, I don’t know if it was like this where you were in gorgeous Colorado, but in glum Staten Island what we would do is we would go to – it was actually my elementary school’s gymnasium and they had set up these little booths with this sliding curtain. And there was a machine in front of you. To me as a small child the machine seemed enormous. I suspect today it’s not. And it had levers. And you would flip the levers. Clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack. You make all your choices and then you would pull this big lever at the bottom from left to right and it would go…and it would register your vote somehow using, I don’t know, some ancient Babbage machine.

And then you would open the curtain and exit. And I just remember thinking that this was very high tech and very exciting.

**John:** Absolutely. So I remember my mom doing that once. And at some very early point voting in Colorado moved to the more sort of freestanding little desk kind of things where you’re poking holes and things, which aren’t nearly as much fun for a kid to see.

**Craig:** No. No. So in California we have the ink dot system, or at least we did, which I thought actually worked very well. You stick your thing in the thing and you flip the pages and you push down. The system now is more automated. It’s a little odd. When I voted in 2018 it was a little strange in that you tap the things on the screen and the thing comes out and then you have to stick the thing back in and then it comes back out. I guess for you to check and make sure.

Anyway, I’m filling my thing out at home. Bring it in. Let’s do this.

**John:** I’m going to fill my thing at home and make sure it gets in early.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But voting day is still a priority this year and sort of every year. Our friends Beth and Travis sort of spearheaded a movement to sort of get the WGA to say, “Hey, shouldn’t voting day be a paid day off for our members?”

**Craig:** Yes. 100 percent. So Beth Schacter worked in television for a long time. She’s currently an EP on Billions. And Travis Donnelly is one of our re-elected, freshly re-elected, directors on the board at the WGA. And they are both absolutely correct. This is something that we do need to encourage. The WGA cannot force showrunners to say, “Go ahead everybody, take the day to vote if you need to.” But we should be encouraging it strongly. And that means that the showrunners then have to turn around to the companies and say, “FYI, I’m doing this, and we’re not going to not pay people and that’s the way it is.”

It is incredibly important. And until we have a national holiday for voting this is going to be something we need to do. So, it’s a great idea. And we should encourage – the WGA should be doing this officially, encouraging the people running shows. And then you and I should just keep doing it and talking to our friends and leading by example in saying let people go vote.

**John:** Agreed. And hopefully WGA saying this and encouraging this will get other unions to be thinking about this. Hopefully this industry can be thinking about this way and other unions down the road can be thinking.

**Craig:** The other unions do not listen to us. And we don’t talk to them, which we know. However, we can take the lead on this.

**John:** However, they do draft off of things we get. So that is a useful thing.

**Craig:** Sometimes they do. It’s true.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, there were no residuals until the WGA got residuals.

**Craig:** That was back in the ‘50s. That is true. That is true. Did you see the latest pandemic – there was this big agreement between the companies and the unions about how to proceed in terms of managing COVID and testing on sets. And again everybody involved accept the WGA. Do not know why. But you know what? That’s something the new board can figure out.

**John:** Yes. So let’s talk about our new board. The WGA elections were held. The results were that all the incumbents were re-elected plus Eric Haywood. So congratulations to the incumbents and to Eric.

**Craig:** Meet the new board. Same as the old board.

**John:** Obviously we’ll put a link in the show notes to the results. I know and work with all these people. I have nothing bad to say about any of them. You have bad things to say about Patric Verrone.

**Craig:** Nothing but bad. Nothing.

**John:** There was a big cliff between Patric Verrone and the next vote-getter after that. So it wasn’t even a close, tight election.

**Craig:** No, no. Patric Verrone happily inhabiting that eighth slot every two years. That’s where he lives. So, I was bummed out. I was bummed out because Daniel Kunka who was the one feature writer running did not make it in. I don’t think any of these people are feature writers. So, Betsy Thomas, Deric Hughes, Ashley Gable, Patti Carr, David Slack, Eric Haywood, Travis Donnelly, Patric Verrone. TV, TV, TV, TV, TV, TV, TV, TV, TV.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And this is not tenable. It’s just not going to work. And I don’t know what to do about it because the membership is skewed. So we have a large and completely unrepresented minority in our union. And that’s just a recipe for disaster. I don’t know how this is going to continue like this.

**John:** OK. So, as a screenwriter who was just on the board pretty recently. It’s not that we have no representation. Michele Mulroney is a feature writer. Dante Harper is a feature writer. It would be awesome to have more feature writers on there. That’s why were both pushing for Daniel Kunka to be a representative of that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Having talked to all the people who are currently on there, I know they are well-versed in feature issues. And I know it is important to them. It is not affecting them directly the way it would affect a feature writer. So, let us just remind the people who are elected there some things that are super, super important for them to understand about feature issues.

Free work abuses is a thing that feature writers encounter that TV writers don’t encounter to nearly the same degree, which is basically being held on a draft and turning it in, basically not being paid because they keep pushing more and more stuff for you to do. And so you are working endlessly on a “draft” whereas a TV writer would have turned a thing in because they’re more on a weekly basis. That is a thing that is so specific to feature writers.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the problem that came out of mini rooms and the stretching of time where writers were getting paid the same amount in television for more and more time of work. The thing that made them crazy and led us to strike threat a couple of times. That’s been the state of affairs, times ten, for feature writers forever. So, if TV writers could just look at it that way. If they could just understand how much worse feature writers have had it in that area that they found so offensive for so long. If the 17 out of 19 people in board meetings could internalize that it would be enormously valuable for the thousands of feature writers that are in this union.

**John:** Yeah. Other things that are evergreen issues for feature writers is late pay. Basically you turn in your draft and it’s late coming. I will say there has been progress on this. Since the time I was on the board there would be more progress now that invoices and contracts are coming through to the guild. There’s already been work on this thing. It has to continue.

Teams. There are teams in TV. There are teams in feature. Teams in features, they’re screwed. You’re splitting a salary between two people. It makes it harder for everybody. So the issues that teams face are only magnified by the other problems in features.

And finally I would just want everyone to be mindful of the very definition of what is a feature film is in question. So if you’re writing a feature for a Disney+ or one of the other streamers let’s make sure we are using the terms of a theatrical feature and not getting dragged down to TV movie of the week. And we just have to be so vigilant that we are really treating these pieces of 110 minute entertainment that feels like a feature film that we’re paying these writers like they are writing feature films because that’s what they are.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is not unrelated to our discussion of a few minutes ago, the fate of theaters. If theaters eventually go away there are still movies. It’s just how we watch them. We don’t necessarily conceive of a massive difference at home. But the contract that we have with the companies dates back to the early days of television and the early days of theatrical exhibition. And that’s what it solidified into. Our contract is ancient. It is old and it is full of archaic language. None of which contemplated the Internet much less streaming and the blurring of features on big or little screens.

So all of that needs to be considered. But it can only be considered if it is a priority. And that means, again, that out of the 19 people in that room you have 16 board members and three officers. Of those 19 people, even though only two of them work in features all of them need to put features first. I don’t know how else to say it. Because all we’ve done is put television first and exclusively put television first for well over a decade. And I’m just going to keep banging this drum. I’m going to be – I’ll be that militant.

**John:** Be that militant. Several of the people I know who are on the board are also starting to do feature work. And I’ve had individual conversations with them about that. So I think as silos get broken down many of these writers will be more aware of what those issues are. It’s also the point in every one of these conversations where I also remind people that we have people who work in comedy and variety and they have it even worse than feature writers do. So, being mindful of those writers also facing challenges.

**Craig:** Sure. They will have to find their own Craig Mazin to bang that drum. I have one drum. One.

**John:** One drum. And he beats it loud.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Let’s talk about Quibi. So Quibi–

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw, Quibi. Quibi has short little videos for your phone. So, it won two Emmys this last week. Congratulations Quibi.

**Craig:** Oh. That’s pretty cool. I know that–

**John:** Yeah. It’s won more Emmys than I have. Fewer than Craig.

**Craig:** [laughs] No, Quibi has tied me for Emmys. Kaitlin Olson was nominated for an Emmy for her work on Quibi. I don’t know if she won or not. Was she one of the ones who won? I hope she was.

**John:** I don’t know. I didn’t see who actually won.

**Craig:** I’ll have to look it up.

**John:** So Quibi this last week engaged JPMorgan Chase to help the company review a range of strategic options. I’ll put a link in the show notes to the LA Times article about it. But let’s just talk about Quibi because we didn’t really talk about it when it launched. I had a conversation with Jeffrey Katzenberg, I don’t know, two years ago and there was a show I was going to do with Doug Liman and we just couldn’t make it work out financially or logistically.

**Craig:** At the Quib?

**John:** At the Quib. And I will say that the initial pitch I got from Jeffrey was kind of what the show ended up being and the problems that I sort of heard in the pitch became the real problems that were out there is that while it’s great in theory to have, oh, they’re videos that you watch on your phone, sort of like how you can watch YouTube on your phone. It wasn’t fundamentally compelling because those weren’t the kinds of things I wanted to watch on my phone. I wanted to watch things on my TV and I couldn’t watch things on my TV. I also couldn’t share anything that I thought was great about a show on clips on Twitter or Instagram. It couldn’t go viral because it was all locked down. There were fundamental things that were problematic about it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I have never understood it. I may be the only writer in America who has not gone in and met with people at Quibi and pitched anything to Quibi. I never understood it. To me, the concept itself sounded like an old person’s thrilling idea of how the Internet could or should work. But we have Quibi. It’s called YouTube. That’s how Quibi functions. Right? If you want short videos to watch on your phone, there’s YouTube.

But what people generally never wanted on YouTube were little mini-series that just played on YouTube. They just didn’t want that. That wasn’t a thing. They didn’t mind it on like a big laptop screen, but like on your phone? Nobody wanted that. And there’s been people who have trying that crap for a decade. It’s not what people want in that format. They just don’t.

**John:** So I’m going to take the position that Quibi in the end was a good thing in that it paid a lot of people a lot of money to make content.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Which is good. It increased employment. It got people to experiment and do new things. So even if it wasn’t a financial success for this company it basically took a bunch of stock market investor money and gave it to writers and creators and actors and other folks. And maybe that’s good.

**Craig:** Well, it gave the money to an executive who then gave it to a lot of writers and actors and folks. And if there’s a lesson here for the money people maybe it’s this. The guy who is famous for writing The Idea is Everything, Jeffrey Katzenberg, is not the guy who comes up with the ideas. He’s just the guy pointing at the concept of an idea and saying isn’t that important. Meaning what Jeffrey Katzenberg was famous for in the ‘90s was writing a memo saying, “Writers are everything. But let’s not pay them well. And also I’ll be in charge.”

Jeffrey Katzenberg, apologies to Mr. Katzenberg, doesn’t write anything. Doesn’t create anything. His big idea was to pay other people to have ideas. You don’t need him for that. What you need are people who come up with big ideas. Go to them. Go to them. You want them to be managed by somebody? I don’t know, hire four million mid-level managers for the same price of one Katzenberg. And his partner was Meg Whitman. She’s the Facebook lady, right?

**John:** Wasn’t she PayPal?

**Craig:** Oh, she was PayPal. She was PayPal and then she also ran for the governor of California at some point. Anyway, who needs them? They don’t do anything. They don’t do anything. I wish to god this capital would understand that. But I think sometimes the people who have billions of dollars only talk to other people that are like them. Oh, well Jeffrey Katzenberg is sort of like us. He’s an executive. And he talks in executive speak. Blech.

They don’t do anything. They don’t. Why?

**John:** There’s a struggle of disintermediation. So basically you’re objecting to the fact that people are giving money to Quibi who is then giving it to the people to actually make the things. And it’s like you should just give the money to the people who make the things. But someone has to build the distribution platform. So Quibi was trying to be that distribution platform the same way a Netflix is. The same way an HBO Max is.

It goes back to our discussion of theaters. You want to own the place where people see the thing because that is ultimately useful and powerful in your gatekeeper function. But I don’t know that it makes sense to – the same way that you don’t see a lot of tech money going into “we’re going to revolutionize movie theaters.” Or you see MoviePass trying to do that and it’s like well that’s a bad idea. Quibi is in many ways the MoviePass of video.

**Craig:** I think it is. And I don’t want to imply that there is no place for people that aren’t writers to run things in Hollywood, because there is. It’s just that most of the people that I work with are employed by a large corporation and their function is their utility in working with writers and filmmakers and directors and actors. They are good at it. So that’s why – at least most of them are good at it that I work with. And so that’s why they’re there.

But when you elevate a noncreative person to a kind of creative guru position then you are asking for trouble. Every time they do it. The Japanese via Sony truly believed that Guber and Peters they were gods of some kind. They knew something. They had cracked the code. And so if you’ve never read Hit and Run, which is a fantastic book about Sony’s purchase of Columbia Pictures you should. It’s amazing. And it really is just a story of how they got fooled by two guys who basically were just, you know, guys. One of whom may not even be literate. I mean, so I’ve heard. I’m not saying that in any actionable way. I’ve just heard that. It’s probably not true.

So this happens. Any time they escalate people like Katzenberg. And I have nothing against Jeffrey Katzenberg.

**John:** No. I think Katzenberg is very smart. And he deserves credit for the many things he has accomplished over the years.

**Craig:** Years.

**John:** And also congratulations you built a giant company–

**Craig:** Well, no. Now that one I’ve got to quibble – I’ve got to Quibi with.

**John:** You’ve got to quibble with Quibi?

**Craig:** A lot of people invested in that and are going to lose their shirts. And while the people–

**John:** I don’t think anyone is going to lose their shirts. I think it was money that was looking for a home.

**Craig:** Well, sure. But some homes are better than others. And these institutional investors, they themselves obviously are insulated from these losses because they’re fat cats. But they’re playing around with other people’s money. And those people ultimately get hurt. So anytime a business crashes of this scale, $2 billion, it’s bad.

**John:** And to stipulate it hasn’t crashed to – you know, $1.75 billion. It hasn’t crashed to nothing. It’s really hard to see how much it’s worth.

**Craig:** And on its way.

**John:** And who to sell it to. One of the interesting things about the Quibi business model which from the initial pitch is that the creators actually get their content back. And so after like seven years it goes back but they can also repackage it after it like two years, which does seem to be a tacit acknowledgment of like it sort of sucks to be working for somebody and have them own your thing for perpetuity.

Like I’m writing this movie for Netflix right now and it’s just it’s only going to be on Netflix. That’s all it’s ever going to be on. If Netflix goes away it gets sold off to somebody at some point.

**Craig:** Yeah. Somebody buys it.

**John:** It is locked away in ways that are frustrating for a filmmaker. So, Quibi was trying to acknowledge that.

**Craig:** Quibi was definitely spending money like a drunken sailor. And that’s the Netflix factor. This is why – I can imagine that pitch of just the only way to compete with Netflix is to out-Netflix Netflix. They’re a drunken sailor. We need to be an even more drunken sailor. And this is all in the short term good for folks who are receiving money for writing. In the long term it’s not good if it destabilizes because of eventually this all comes crashing down. Quibi has come crashing down way faster than I thought it would.

I’m confused by their insistence that this is related to the pandemic. The pandemic seems like it would be a gift from god for Quibi. But I don’t know.

**John:** Yeah. I think they built a user story experience where it was like you’re watching it on the train as you’re headed to work. That’s the ideal use case for it.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But honestly that’s so New York centric.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s such a view of one way that people live their lives.

**Craig:** Also, I’m sorry, but that’s not what people – in New York if you manage the catch the working wifi in between stations on the subway, yeah, you’re listening to music or you’re playing a game or you’re texting. You’re not watching a Quibi. For god’s sake.

**John:** Yeah. No. One place we can read all of the useful insight and criticism of this is in the trades.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** And so the trades are–

**Craig:** You mean the trade? [laughs]

**John:** Exactly. The trades are what we call – originally they were printed newspapers, but Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Deadline. They are the different places that report on our industry. And they’re now all essentially one company. They’re all one trade. So we will link to the Deadline piece on what happened. But essentially through joint ventures they’ve all basically become one thing.

Everything we think of being separate entities are basically one company.

**Craig:** Yes. And one of those companies is MRC which produces content in Hollywood.

**John:** Yeah. Funny that.

**Craig:** So you have a studio, essentially a studio, a financing arm of a studio that is the part owner of all of the major publications analyzing the entertainment industry. And that includes Rolling Stone, the Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Billboard, Vibe, and Music Business Worldwide. That’s all of them. That’s all of them. So, you know, you and I growing up out here in the ‘90s as young screenwriters we knew that there was Coke and Pepsi. There was Variety and there was the Hollywood Reporter. And I remember being astonished at how much they cost. Because back in those days, because it was a bit of a kind of duopoly to get Variety delivered to your office every day, Daily Variety, you had to pay some insane yearly subscription at that time. It was like a thousand dollars. I’m like, what, this is insane.

And now apparently Variety is free as far as I can tell to everybody in the world. And Deadline disrupted everything. And now it’s just all smashed together into one thing. And what happens now–

**John:** And so I don’t know what happens now. So, I mean, it’s worth noting that Deadline was actually – Nikki Finke drove me crazy, but Nikki Finke created Deadline as a separate independent site that was just journalism about the actual industry and became incredibly influential because it was actually just journalism about the industry. And it was gossipy and all the other things we can sort of throw at it, but it was outside the norm. So it does feel like there’s a potential for an outside disruptor to come in here and make the new version of Deadline that is actually independent. So that’s a possible outcome of this.

But I want to talk about the MRC of it all. So MRC is a company that is also tied up with the agencies and sort of the affiliated productions of the agencies in complicated ways. But they make actual TV shows and features. So, Ozark, The Great, The Outsider, The Golden Globe Awards, Fire Fraud, which I think it’s great that they were the people behind that.

**Craig:** Knives Out.

**John:** The Billboard Music Awards. American Music Awards. Knives Out. Baby Driver.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** So it’s just so complicated to be the trades who are supposed to be reporting on an industry that you actually are making the things you’re reporting on.

**Craig:** It is. And good journalists will often, you know, encounter this because of these multinational conglomerates. You’re always touching on something. And so they’ll say, “Full disclosure, this publication is owned by the same parent company as blah-blah-blah.” And so you say that out loud and they will say, OK, that they will have independence, which is fine. And I believe them to an extent because they know that if they don’t have independence then the property they just bought will become worthless. Because it will be pointed out and it will be skewered and devalued.

But what is not good is that there is the potential for – it just seems like an obvious potential for consolidation here. So you buy all this stuff and then you sit there and you go, so, um, we have somebody that does the same job at Variety as this other person at Hollywood Reporter. Why don’t we just fire one of them? And actually why don’t we just fire half of these people and just make one thing called the Variety Reporter. And then people will lose their jobs and also you narrow the diversity of voices.

**John:** It’s true.

**Craig:** That’s what worries me.

**John:** It’s the problem of any consolidation and having monopolies to control, or at least an oligopoly. It’s not even an oligopoly anymore. It’s just basically a monopoly. And particularly when it comes to, you know, creative expression and to journalism to only have one source of truth is very bad.

**Craig:** It’s not good. Even about something as frivolous as what Hollywood is doing. You know, I got to say I’ve gone full Bernie Bro on this episode. I’m just like swinging at corporations, Jeffrey Katzenberg for no good reason at all. I don’t even know him. Just throwing bizarre bunches in a wild podcast style. It’s been enjoyable.

**John:** That’s what we do.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s been enjoyable.

**John:** One of the wild swings we were throwing–

**Craig:** Segue man.

**John:** — months and months ago was about assistant pay.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** This last week UTA raised assistant pay across the board.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** Minimum is $22 an hour. Goes to $24 an hour for agency assistants and the agent training program gets up to $26 per hour. This is good. This is progress. And so I just wanted to call out UTA for doing good work here.

**Craig:** That is good.

**John:** And also doing it in a time which is admittedly very difficult for agents and for the industry. It’s hard to say like everything is struggling and so we’re actually going to raise pay. It feels like the right choice and a difficult choice.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. And this looks to me I think the new golden standard here. I think that this is better than the Verve or CAA commitment.

**John:** This does feel better. And so the Verve and CAA had other things built in there in terms of like quality of life stuff, but–

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** But money is money. So let’s focus on that.

**Craig:** Money is money. So this is very good. And I do agree with you that this is a challenging time for the agencies, of course. But if the people at the highest level of these agencies who make an insane amount of money are willing to forgo a little bit of their enormous lucre, because if you say to, you know, whoever – who owns UTA? Jeremy Zimmer or something? I don’t know who owns it, like how that works.

**John:** They’re privately held. They have outside investors. But they’re privately held.

**Craig:** Right. But whoever the biggest shot is there, if you say to that guy, oh, by the way, just because for reasons you’re not going to get paid anything this year. They’ll be fine. They’ll be totally fine. So, like it’s good to maybe hit pause on the money pipe – I’m Bernie Bro’ing again. And give the people who are holding your business up, you know, a chance to survive and flourish. Ooh, I’m telling you, man. I am just swinging the flaming sword of the workers of the world today.

**John:** All right. Let’s do a little bit of follow up here. This is Ezra. He writes in about How Would This Be a Movie.

Ezra: Hi John and Craig. This is a follow up to a listener email from Episode 465 on using the Battle of Blair Mountain on your How Would This Be a Movie segment. My wife and I spent two physically and emotionally taxing years trying to have our first child. After a successful round of IVF we had our first in 2017. This past February we had our second, also through IVF. Science. It works.

As a way to do with all of the feelings I accumulated over that time I began working on a pilot script for a show called Trying, a half-hour comedy about a couple with fertility problems. I thought this was my Chernobyl, but sadly it was my Winds of War. I was a new dad with a time-consuming day job, whilst still working to finish it in March 2020 when AppleTV announced Trying, a half-hour comedy about a couple with fertility problems.

I could get into the differences between the ideas, for instance they’re not actually trying anymore, they’re seeking to adopt. But the underlying lesson remains. I dragged my feet and someone else who had a similar and probably better idea got it made. Can’t say you all didn’t warn me.

So to my fellow listener, it’s not only that other people have the same general idea as you. They can have literally the same idea as you down to the title. For an aspiring writer the struggle of infertility could not have been any more real than to watch someone else get to have the little writing baby I imagined for myself.

This is all to say that I agree very strongly with both of you that no one has a 100 percent claim on an idea or concept, putting aside all that legal stuff about owning ideas. If you had the thought someone else has had it as well. In the best case you are in a race to see who can get theirs over the finish line first. I dragged and my heels and now I need to find another darling to work on. It’s OK. Grappling with infertility gave me a much more nuanced perspective on other people’s successes. Congrats Andy Walton. And what kind of let downs I am actually capable of absorbing.

**Craig:** Wow. Ezra, you’re a grownup.

**John:** Yeah. Listen to grownup Ezra there.

**Craig:** Yeah. What an adult. It’s refreshing to hear an adult speak in an adult fashion about adult things. And, yes, that hurts. I get it. I don’t necessarily know that it’s over-over, because TV shows come and go. And also there’s very different kinds of TV shows that often have very similar premises. I mean, if you had an idea for a show about a group of detectives that use forensics to solve crimes, well, if you heard about another one it wouldn’t stop you. There are 12 on the air.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** There can more than one show. And so one of the things is asking yourself what is it about their show that is inherently different than the way you would have done yours. Is there a different way to swing it around? Can you make it a different kind of couple? What is it inherent to that story that you love? Is there a way to repurpose it and rethink it? But it’s also perfectly fine to let it go and move on. And you’re absolutely right. Any idea that anyone is working on, it’s already in the work somewhere else.

You know what I love about Ezra is that he didn’t do the thing that seemingly 90 percent of ding-a-lings do which is like, “I’m suing.” No. Yes, sometimes people come up with the same idea. And even the title. Trying. It makes sense. That’s pretty much what people call it. Yup, we’re trying. So, yeah, you know, you’re going to be good, Ezra.

**John:** You’re going to be good. I want to go back to our conversation about loglines because it feels like really what it comes down is that the logline for Ezra’s show and the show that’s on Apple right now are the same. They have the same title. But that show by its concept is going to be incredibly execution-dependent.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** This is not like a meteor is headed towards the earth. This is relatable humans doing relatable human things. And the general situation, the framing, the premise has an overlap, but that’s really about it. So, the thing that Ezra is writing, it doesn’t just go away because this other show exists. And so Ezra you should finish that thing. It’s probably a great writing sample for you for working on your next thing and could be hired to do other stuff.

I’d pick a different title just so it doesn’t get confused with the thing that’s out there.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** But you did great. The reason why I wanted to play this is that so often on the show we’ve talked about like somebody stole my idea. And it just doesn’t happen. People have the same ideas. They have incredibly, specifically similar ideas. And this is an example of that. So thank you for sharing that.

**Craig:** Terrific. Thank you, Ezra, that’s awesome.

**John:** Also, last week we talked about lawyers and I asked our listeners, hey, if you have advice for how you got a lawyer or ways to get a lawyer if you’re an unsigned writer how to do it. People wrote in because we have the best listeners. So do you want to take Susan from LA?

**Craig:** Yeah. Susan from LA says, “Go to IMDb Pro,” I see you’ve got to get that account, “and pull up well-regarded recent indie films or documentaries. Scroll down the crew list until you find legal counsel. Then Google that person and check out their law firm home page. You can also look at Variety/Hollywood Reporter,” well who knows, Varollywood Reporter’s “power lawyer lists, but they’re a bit pricy and will require a larger retainer upfront.”

**John:** Susan’s first idea there is phenomenal.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I don’t know why I didn’t think about that. But as I look at–

**Craig:** You’re bad.

**John:** Yeah. I’m bad.

**Craig:** You’re bad.

**John:** As I look at like the attorney who helped me out with The Nines and sort of does independent film like that, it’s exactly their kind of gig. It’s what they do. And reach out to them. They can probably do it for you and they have experience doing this kind of stuff. So that feels like a great place to start.

**Craig:** And a month of IMDb Pro is, what, like $12 or something?

**John:** Oh yeah. That’s fine.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So you can totally do that. Erin writes, “In my experience legit entertainment lawyers are not asking for money upfront, at least that’s how mine operates. It is for future commission. Granted, my manager referred me, but this is what I’ve anecdotally heard as well. I do my due diligence before paying cash for an option red line. There will certainly be good attorneys willing to do it for free with the idea that they will receive commissions once you start to get paid.”

I disagree with Erin there.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, I don’t think Erin is correct at all.

**John:** I don’t think so.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And here’s the difference. I think because Erin is coming in here with a manager I think that manager is talking to that attorney and saying like, “Hey, this is a kid who I think is going to do well here. Maybe you do this for free and then you become his lawyer.” That’s not the general case situation.

**Craig:** No. I mean, lawyers in the entertainment business do an enormous amount of work on commission. Your lawyer does. My lawyer does. But that’s based on the notion that they’re negotiating employment contracts or the purchase of literary material. Those are large sales or large employments. Something where someone is coming in and saying, “I need you to look through this option agreement,” which may absolutely turn into nothing – no, that lawyer is almost certainly going to charge you some kind of hourly rate. They would be nuts not to. Because they can certainly say, “And by the way if you’re happy for this and it works out when it’s time to do the employment contract come back. That is done on commission. You don’t have to pay upfront for that at all.”

But, no, I don’t think there’s going to be good attorneys willing to do these option agreements for free. No.

**John:** I agree. I think your first choice of find the person who does this for independent films or just get other recommendations from people in similar situations is going to be better serving you for that first contract which as I recall last week is about like a $1 option agreement and a red-lining.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s not a situation – commission on a $1 – not worth it.

**Craig:** Ten cents. Five cents. Sorry, a nickel.

**John:** Five cents for an attorney. All right let’s get to a craft topic. I want to talk about dual dialogue because this week I’ve been writing scenes that have a lot of dual dialogue in it which is not something I often do. And I want to – we’ve discussed on Episode 370, we talked about simultaneity, basically when two events have to happen in the same time, but dual dialogue is a specific kind of that where people are just overlapping. And we may want the overlap for effect. We may need to hear information from two different sides. There’s a reason why we’re doing. It’s always a choice to do dual dialogue. And let’s talk about when you make that choice and how you might portray that on the page.

**Craig:** It is a little bit of a trap because if you watch movies, particularly certain kinds of movies where it’s very conversational, very dialogue heavy, almost all of it at times will seem like it’s overlapping somewhat. And so there’s a temptation to think this is going to make it realer. If I do dual dialogue it will make things look realer. The problem with dual dialogue is that it is such a heavy-handed instruction to everybody. Everybody is now going oh my god I have to actually – we are talking at the same time over each other very specifically. This isn’t a natural overlapping but a forced overlapping. So you have to be very deliberate, I think, about when you use it. It really comes into play rarely. I must say maybe three or four times in a script it’ll pop up. And even then I feel like I could probably get away with two of them, you know, get rid of two of them or something.

**John:** Yeah. So I think we often confuse and conflate it with people speaking quickly.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so I think in a lot of movies that we see and we love we think they’re overlapping, but really they’re actually just speaking quickly. And they’re anticipating their next lines. There’s just not pauses between things. But they literally are not stacked on top of each other. So, we see a tool in Highland or in Final Draft that gives us the ability to dual dialogue and we think like, oh, that must be the way you do it. And I’ll tell you that on the page often that’s not how you do it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So some of the choices you might make is as a parenthetical “overlapping,” basically saying like there may be scene description that says all of this is overlapping. Basically don’t wait to clear the other person’s lines before you start talking. That it’s meant to be sort of on top of each other.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** For example, Call Me by Your Name, there’s a sequence in which he’s sitting at the table and the parents and these other visitors are just all talking over each other. And it’s not important what they’re actually saying. It’s the experience of being there listening to that. And so that’s probably just an overlapping because it just doesn’t actually matter what the individual people are saying.

Other cases, you are very specifically trying to get information out there. So, we had Noah Baumbach on for Marriage Story. We had Greta Gerwig on for Little Women. And in those scripts, you can go back to those episodes and look at the PDFs, they’re very specific about where those overlaps are and you are supposed to be hearing what everyone is saying. And the fact that they are overlapping becomes very important. Be thinking about what the actual effect is you’re trying to achieve.

**Craig:** Yeah. But there are those moments where it really is the perfect tool. Like you say, it’s not frequent. I mean, for standard overlapping for casual overlapping you don’t want to do this. It is a heavy-handed instruction to everybody. But, then there are times where somebody is going to try and talk over another person. Arguments, for instance, where someone is going to be talking and the other person starts talking as if to say, “No, you stop talking,” but the first person will not stop talking. Or, situations in comedies sometimes where two people are trying to explain the same thing at once. It is a moment where it is absolutely required that two people are speaking intentionally over each other with knowledge that they’re speaking over each other and neither one of them is going to stop. That’s pretty much the best case use for dual dialogue.

**John:** Yeah. Basically neither one of them is yielding the floor to the other person to speak.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So even the conversation that you and I are having right now, we are anticipating when I’m going to stop talking and you’re going to start talking. But along the way I might try to shout over you a little bit. I may do an acknowledgment, which I think is a special case we should talk about here, which is the uh-huhs, the yeahs, if you’re doing The Daily, the New York Times podcast, it’s Michael Barbaro’s “Huh.” It’s that signal that you’re still part of it.

**Craig:** Huh.

**John:** So those are all meaningful things. And sometimes you’re going to choose as a writer to actually break up someone’s dialogue with that “huh,” that acknowledgment. But that’s rare. It would also be rare to put that “uh-huh” in a dual dialogue. So you’re going to make choices. Basically I’m saying you may not put every utterance of a person in the dialogue of your script.

**Craig:** And when you are there you are going to find some sort of naturalistic language that comes out. One of the stark differences between play text, from a playwright, and screenplay text from a screenwriter is that the play text is designed to be performed by as many different actors as possible. Whereas the screenwriting text will be performed by one. And unless there’s some remake of the movie 30 years later, it’s one person. So there is going to be a certain tailoring and idiosyncratic adjustment to that single performer as opposed to a play.

So actually I do see dual dialogue frequently when I look at plays, when I read plays. It seems like that gets called out quite a bit because it’s formalized. Whereas in movies not so much. It is a decent tool. It’s very useful for songs, when you’re writing songs in movies, and two people are singing at once. It’s perfectly useful. But I think it’s probably good to ask yourself do I need it. It is not fun to read.

**John:** It’s brutal to read.

**Craig:** I’ll say on the page. Yeah. If you see a page where it’s just strips of dual dialogue your eyelids will get heavy.

**John:** Yeah. Because you have to make the choice of, OK, am I going to read the left hand column and then go back and read the right hand column? It’s a lot of work.

**Craig:** It’s also hard to imagine. And you know we can play one voice in our head at once. We can’t play two. We just can’t.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, you know, you’re asking something there. Just use it – when you use it know that it is very intentional, very purposeful. It is a heavy spice, so sprinkle it with restraint.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to a question. Patrick writes in, “I was hoping you could discuss the singular they/them/their pronoun in reference to many non-binary people. I used singular they pronouns in a recent script for a non-binary character. It was a period piece where singular they was never used in dialogue, but it felt like the correct way to identify this seemingly genderless character in action lines. I referred to the character as androgynous in an introductory character description, and aimed to avoid pronoun confusion so it would be clear when the they referred to this character specifically versus multiple characters at once.

“However, I’m still worried that readers may be confused or distracted by the singular they. I want to leave it like it is, but I’m not sure I should. Have you had any experience using singular they in scripts, or reading scripts where others have? Would you advise us to use or not use it? And is a disclaimer necessary?”

**Craig:** Well, there is a natural singular they/them/their usage anyway. It’s not completely foreign to our longstanding use of the English language. When there is a gender – what would you call it – ignorance, I don’t know–

**John:** You just don’t know.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t know if this is a man or a woman, so it says the police officers walk in, adjust their guns, I guess that’s plural. But there’s ways where you do use it. I think if it’s a non-binary character I would probably want to call it out early and say I’m going to be using, just for the reader, just let them know I’m going to be using they/them/their because they’re non-binary. And maybe I might capitalize it inside of sentences if I am using a lot of other pluralized they/them/theirs for other people so as to not create confusion. But probably I would just call it out early on and not let…

So it says I refer to the character as androgynous. I would have added and I will be referring to this character, meaning I will be referring to them as they/them/their.

**John:** Yeah. I think Patrick is right to plan for – there’s a difference between the dialogue that we’re hearing as an audience, are we going to get confused by the they/them/theirs which can be a challenge? Because in real life conversations, like we have friends who have a non-binary kid, and the they/them/theirs are–

**Craig:** It’s tricky.

**John:** It can be tricky just because sometimes you don’t know, wait, are they talking about the group? Understanding whether you’re talking about the individual or the group can be tricky with it. That said, we’ve used it in English for centuries. We’ve used this as a singular thing for a long time when we didn’t know what gender to apply to a person that we’re talking about.

So I would say for Patrick if the dialogue and it becomes important to say this person uses they/them/theirs I would call that out just so that it’s not confusing in dialogue. In many cases it may be possible, because you have the luxury of time, you’re not actually speaking this aloud, to find sentence constructions where it just doesn’t become an issue and where you end up using the character’s name rather than a they/them/their. Basically just use the proper noun rather than the pronoun and you may not have this much of a problem.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s going to be hard to only do that. Because it can kind of get–

**John:** For a supporting character. For a character who only has a certain number of scenes, maybe you’ll be fine.

**Craig:** Sure. You can avoid it. But, yes, you’re right. We have this usage where it’s like the child brought their pet in to show the class. That is a normal usage we have for a singular person with the their. It’s in our minds, so you just have to spell it out for people early on that that’s what you’re doing. And by the way, if people are confused then they’re confused. Because that’s part of the deal is like our pronouns have not caught up necessarily to the way we’re starting to look at people and their gender. So there’s going to be some confusion. And, you know, you can just acknowledge that. Sometimes honesty is the best policy.

You can just say, “If you get confused it’s understandable. That’s kind of how it goes.” And they will try. I think most readers when they see something like that they’ll at least know that you’re acknowledging it. If you don’t acknowledge it then they’re going to think like I don’t know if Patrick understands how confusing this is. If you acknowledge then they’re like, OK, he knows how confusing this is.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Or they know how confusing it is. I don’t know if Patrick is binary.

**John:** Let’s do one last question here.

**Craig:** All right. Theo asks, “I’m a big fan of the podcast. It’s a phenomenal resource to both learn about screenwriting and to distract myself from screenwriting. I have a question though for John about his #writesprints. They seem straightforward if the purpose of the sprint is to write scenes from an outline. But how do you structure them when the project you’re working on is still in the development phase and you’re doing more brainstorming and character discovery?”

John, can you explain the nature of your tyrannical write sprints to Theo?

**John:** So, with write sprints this is when I sort of declare on Twitter that starting at the top of the hour for the next 60 minutes I’m going to be writing and just writing, no distractions, no nothing else. And then I’ll see in 60 minutes, and if people want to join in and do it that’s great. And this is an idea I took from Jane Espenson who is another former guest who is just phenomenal.

I’m using doing write sprints when I’m in scenes. When I’m doing real scene work or in the case of the Arlo Finch books when I was writing chapters. But I will also use them for outlining phase. Basically if I want to do a solid hour of work and not be distracted that’s the same thing as a write sprint. And so it’s just being purposeful for a period of time about the work I want to be doing. That counts as a write sprint.

If you’re doing an outline, maybe you’re not generating the same number of words, but if you really are figuring out stuff that’s what this is. It’s basically just trying to be single-minded on a project for a period of time.

**Craig:** Yeah. I find sometimes that if I’m in the state of progress that Theo is in that the best version of the write sprint is the write walk, where I take a walk. And I just go, well, I’m going to go walking around thinking about this. And I’m going to turn around and head back when I feel like I’ve achieved something in my mind, some sort of clarity or construction.

I don’t do formal write sprints like you do for actual generating pages. I just mostly wait until I’m disgusted with myself and then I start – but I only write in write sprints. That’s just my natural way of doing it. When it’s time, it happens.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, I’ve just never been a slogger. I’ve never been a like I’m going to sit down for a three-hour session and get stuff done, because I just found that those were not productive to me.

**Craig:** No, like I know what I’m supposed to do. I know where I am. I know who is in it. I know what’s going to happen. I know what they say. Now just do it, stupid. And then eventually I do it. And when I do it I do it. I get lost completely in it and I do it until it’s done. So, that’s basically my day, day after day, every day for the last 25 years. Good lord. Geesh.

**John:** Good lord. All right, it’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article that Ashley Nicole Black linked to. It’s an article in the New Station with Judith Butler. And she’s a professor, writer, gender theorist. And it was a discussion of trans-exclusionary radical feminism, which I knew about only because JK Rowling was associated with it. Basically JK Rowling just kept saying dumb things. And everyone said like that’s a dumb thing to say. And she would just double down on dumb things.

What I liked about this article was that Judith Butler was just so masterful at being able to sort of cut through the questions. Basically just challenge the premise of the questions. If you’re just curious about like how to handle arguments, or how to sort of deal with controversial topics being thrown at you I thought she just did a very smart job of dismantling what was being thrown her way and presenting it back in a way so that you basically can’t even like hit the ball back. It’s like, oh, crap, I can’t even do that.

So, an example sentence here. She says, “Women should not engage in the form of phobic caricature by which they’ve traditionally been demeaned. And by women I mean all those who identify that way.” And so she can just take some of the arguments being tossed her way and look at them and saying, nope, I’m taking this apart and giving it back to you.

So I just recommend people check that out because it gave me a good education in some of the terms and thinking behind this and also going back 30 years. So, I’ll put a link in the show notes for that.

**Craig:** So far afield from what you just said. My One Cool Thing this week is you and your fellow party members in our Dungeons & Dragons game. You guys made me so proud.

**John:** We did pretty well last week.

**Craig:** You did great. So, one of the things about being a Dungeon Master is you are not in control of anything. You are gently creating situations and then your characters do things and you have to react in an endlessly improvisational way. You have to hold boundaries, but you have to know when to be flexible. You have to know when to be rigid. And the whole point is to create situations that ultimately are fun, not necessarily fun in a kind of I put my videogame on god mode way fun, but fun in a sometimes my heart is pounding a little bit and sometimes there’s danger.

And last week you guys just played beautifully. You were collaborating and you were being creative and you weren’t all seeking individual glory but working as a team. And you defeated a very difficult enemy. And you defeated that enemy I would say handily.

**John:** Yeah. It was surprising. And I was definitely the person who was most nervous going into that encounter. What I will say was galvanizing and this is probably applicable to anybody thinking about storytelling is that this group of protagonists were only able to come together after the death of one of their party members.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And basically it took a death for us to analyze what went wrong and how do we avoid making that same mistake again. And so I feel like looking at those moments of failure and learning from them is such a fundamental thing in both life and in fiction. And I was happy that we were able to do that and sort of go into this next encounter with really not just a plan but – because stuff happens and you sometimes can’t follow that plan. But a set of principles in terms of what we are going to try to do and what are priorities are going to be. And by sticking to those principles and each person rising to do the thing that they are best equipped to do we were able to defeat this really far too challenging of a future for us to be facing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, you did it perfectly. And you guys have come a long way. And it makes sense. As you go through these things, just like in regular screenplays and stories, the character gains abilities and talents and insight and then the question is what are you going to do with it. That’s the booby prize of life is insight, as the great Dennis Palumbo says. What are you going to do with it?

And so you get all these powers and then, ooh, like we can polymorph people. And there was a session we had where one of our wizards polymorphed one of the bad guys into a dolphin while in a bar fight, which was smart on the one hand.

**John:** Don’t bring a dolphin to a bar fight.

**Craig:** Yeah, don’t. Because the dolphin doesn’t need to be in water to breathe. And the dolphin can hit people that are five feet away from it. And so it did. And everybody was upset. But I’m like that was a bad choice. You could have made it a lot of other things. And you chose to make it the worst possible water thing.

Well, this time around much smarter and thoughtful and just working things through. Because you’ve grown into your powers, which is exciting, because it’s going to get more and more dangerous as you go. Just like life. But I was so proud of you guys. You did such a good job. It was a joy to DM and I can’t wait to kill more of you later.

**John:** Aw. Nice. Tonight–

**Craig:** Oh, that’s right, tonight. You know what, I probably won’t kill any of you tonight. Not tonight.

**John:** All right. That is our show for this week. So stick around after the credits if you’re a Premium member because we’re going to talk about Halloween. But meanwhile Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Med Dyer. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. We have t-shirts and they’re great. Go to Cotton Bureau to find those.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts. You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Hey Craig. Halloween is coming up.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** It’s always the end of October. Growing up I loved candy so I liked Halloween for that.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But if I’m being honest I was never a big Halloween person. Were you a Halloween person as a kid?

**Craig:** Well, I was. I was. So on Staten Island Halloween had more of an anarchistic feel. So, I was a good kid and my parents were very strict, so I had to put on my stupid costume. Remember the costumes, they were like vinyl? And then you had the plastic mask that you could stick your tongue out of the rectangular little mouth-hole that would then cut your tongue.

**John:** Uh-huh. And it sort of hurt your tongue. And it had the elastic that went to the back.

**Craig:** Bingo.

**John:** And the mask could crack really easily, too.

**Craig:** Oh, absolutely. And the suit, “suit,” was just like a vinyl apron that tied in the back and had a smell on it, like an off-gas and plastic smell that almost certainly took years off of our life. And I would go out with that and my little hallowed out plastic pumpkin candy holder.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But the other kids, like if you were slightly older, it was shaving cream and eggs. They would throw eggs on everything and they would put shaving cream everywhere. So my memory, my sense memory of Halloween is the smell of Noxzema or whatever that shaving cream was, or Barbasol. Walking around, getting candy. And my sister and I after it was over would sit down in my room, we would dump it all out on the floor, and then we would begin to barter. Because I liked certain things and she liked certain things. And you make the swaps.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Loved it.

**John:** Bartering is important. And obviously I had an older brother and there’s, of course, the manipulation that happens both as the younger brother and as the older brother.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Now, did you have something growing up where the school district, I think it was the school district, maybe it was the city, they really wanted kids home by a certain point. I think by 8pm they wanted all kids home. Maybe it was it was like 7. It was really early.

**Craig:** This was New York. They were dealing with Son of Sam. They didn’t have time to worry about us.

**John:** So we had a thing where at school we had to fill out this little form with your phone number and then parent volunteers would say this is the goblin calling to make sure you’re home.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** And then it was like a raffle. If you actually were home you could win a pizza party.

**Craig:** Well that feels really actually quite frightening in a Handmaid’s Tale sort of way.

**John:** Goblin calling.

**Craig:** This is the goblin calling to make sure you are home before 8pm when the witches come out.

**John:** So basically they’re going to have a stranger call children at their house.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s really what the whole plan was.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is all backward. But we grew up, you know, John, the kids today don’t get it. We grew up in a time of full-throated panic. Gary Goldman has an amazing – this is my second One Cool Thing, my bonus One Cool Thing. Gary Goldman has an amazing standup special called The Great Depresh about his depression.

**John:** Oh, yeah, I’ve watched it. It’s good.

**Craig:** And Gary Goldman is just a legendarily good standup. And he talks about how in the ‘70s growing up America was inflicted with this notion that children were being snatched off the streets constantly. Some guy went on the news and said 50,000 American kids are being stolen and kidnapped off the streets every year when it turns out actually it was like 200 people. So, everyone went crazy. We lived in a time when we would go to school, we would get milk at school, and there would be some lost child’s face on the milk carton.

Everyone was in a panic, all the time. As he said vans used to be beloved, and now they were objects of fear. So around Halloween there was this additional aspect of the whole point of Halloween is someone is going to put a razorblade in an apple. No one wants the apple. No one wants the apple.

**John:** It never happened. No.

**Craig:** No one wants the apple anyway. Go ahead, put razorblades in the apple. No one will ever get cut. No kid is eating the apple. And also, no, no. That’s not lunatics work.

**John:** But it got to the point where you would take your candy and they would x-ray it at the hospital, which is just absurd.

**Craig:** Insane. Now you’re radiating food. It’s just insane.

**John:** So, Craig, you’re saying things are much, much better now because all we have is QAnon.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** I think there’s a natural progression from this fear of an outsider coming. Antifa is going to poison your kids’ candy.

**Craig:** Antifa and QAnon are the new razorblade and apple of our lives. One quick question. When you – because we grew up at the same time there were probably the same weirdo candies floating around that aren’t much of today. What were some of your favorites, like in terms of the weird ones?

**John:** I was always a Milky Way. Milky Way is go to. If I wanted a candy bar it was a Milky Way. Nothing against Snickers. No one wants a Three Musketeers.

**Craig:** You’re wrong. See, here’s the thing. You’re normcore. You’re so normcore.

**John:** Oh, 100 percent. I’m completely normcore.

**Craig:** Oh my god. You’re so normcore. I was all about the weird ones. I loved the Three Musketeers.

**John:** And the Marathons.

**Craig:** I loved how light it was. Marathon. I was also a fan of those old creepy candies from the ‘50s like the Mary Janes. Loved Mary Janes.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** I know. What is it? It’s made of plastic and nuts and dirt and sugar. I don’t know. Delicious.

**John:** A recent episode of The Boys, the second season, show on Amazon, they talk about the island of misfit candy bars. And people who are fans of the Bit-O-Honeys and stuff like that.

**Craig:** I love Bit-O-Honey. Love it. Most of the things that I liked tended to be mostly wax, I think.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Didn’t like those things that you have to like–

**John:** What was the wax bottles with a sugary thing inside? Who thought that was a good idea?

**Craig:** Those, the wax industry? Honestly the wax manufacturers of America had figured out. Those were called – I can’t remember what they were called. But, yeah, you would bit the top off and then drink the sugar liquid out and be left with just a tasteless thing of wax.

**John:** Wax. Yeah. Good stuff. Or like Wax Lips and other stuff like that.

**Craig:** Wax Lips. And of course the candy cigarettes which were the greatest.

**John:** It’s good stuff.

**Craig:** Teach your kids.

**John:** So this year’s Halloween, I thought Halloween would just get canceled, but then if you think about it it’s like, you know what, kids are already wearing masks. They put a mask over their mask. It’s actually not that dangerous. You’re outdoors. I say let the kids trick or treat.

**Craig:** Well, I think trick or treating has been somewhat canceled or something. I don’t know.

**John:** Over the years or for this year specifically?

**Craig:** No, for this year. I think that they have sort of said maybe don’t do it. I have looked up by the way what those things were called. The wax bottle liquid stuff. They were called Nik-L-Nip Wax Bottles. Nik-L-Nip. I don’t know why it’s called that.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** But that’s what they were called. Sounds kind of dirty.

**John:** It does sound dirty. Like some sort of…yeah.

**Craig:** You would bite it and drink it and it’s nasty.

**John:** Yeah. I just don’t know why the wax companies needed to do that. I mean, they said extra wax.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I think that was probably what it was. Someone was like, “You know, we could take this extra wax and put some sugar in it and morons will drink it.” They were right.

They were right.

**John:** So, Craig, Happy Halloween.

**Craig:** Happy Halloween, John.

 

Links:

* [Movie Releases Pushed](https://twitter.com/ErikDavis/status/1308814242569580544)
* [Black Widow Shifted to Summer 2021](https://deadline.com/2020/09/black-widow-jumps-to-summer-2021-spurring-marvel-pics-release-date-shift-west-side-story-delayed-a-year-soul-stays-theatrical-1234582771/)
* [Quibi Sale](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2020-09-23/quibi-sale-value-bidders-katzenberg-whitman)
* [All the Trades are Basically One Company](https://deadline.com/2020/09/pmc-mrc-form-publishing-content-venture-that-brings-rolling-stone-thr-billboard-vibe-under-one-roof-1234582626/)
* [UTA Raises Assistant Pay](https://variety.com/2020/film/news/uta-raises-assistant-pay-agency-wide-new-average-hits-24-per-hour-exclusive-1234778549/)
* [WGA Election Results Board of Directors](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/writers-guild-west-unveils-board-of-directors-election-results)
* [Scriptnotes, Ep 465](https://johnaugust.com/2020/scriptnotes-episode-465-the-lackeys-know-what-theyre-doing-transcript)
* [Scriptnotes, Ep 370](https://johnaugust.com/2018/scriptnotes-ep-370-two-things-at-the-same-time-transcript)
* [Judith Butler on the Culture Wars, JK Rowling and Living in “Anti-Intellectual Times”](https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-wars-jk-rowling-and-living-anti-intellectual-times)
* [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 Med Dyer ([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/470standard.mp3).