Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/stop-counting-pages-and-touching-your-face).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 442 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we get statistic. First, for decades the film and television industry has used a rule of thumb that one page of screenplay equals one minute of movie. But does it really? New research shows the correlation is not particularly strong. We’ll discuss what that means for screenwriters and look forward to a future that moves beyond pages.

**Craig:** And then we’re going to look at how the coronavirus, have you heard of that, John? Coronavirus?

**John:** I have. Yes.

**Craig:** We’re going to look at how that has impacted Los Angeles and the industry and we’re going to talk a little bit about what we’re doing and what you might want to do.

**John:** Yes. And for Premium members we’ll have a bonus segment in which Craig and I will debate which first level D&D spell we would choose to be able to cast in real life.

**Craig:** Throw down.

**John:** I put some real serious thought into this last night and I have my choices.

**Craig:** Same.

**John:** Now as we get started on this episode let’s do a little table setting here because we are recording this on a Thursday. You’re hearing this on Monday or Tuesday. So whether you’re in the US or somewhere overseas things are probably kind of weird and scary in regards to coronavirus and they’re probably different than how they are as we’re recording this.

So, we were talking before we started airing is that we’re not going to be a definitive podcast about all things coronavirus and there’s a hundred other podcasts out there you could be listening to. So, I’d like this to be kind of a safe place to not be freaked out about everything, if that makes sense.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re already freaking people out about how hard it is to become a screenwriter. So, I mean, why pile on?

**John:** This will be our little nest of self-care. So it’s not going to be a doom and gloomy kind of podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’ll give you some information. We’ll tell you how things are going here. But, yeah, you’re going to want to get your doom and gloom or hopefully your scientifically accurate information from places like the CDC or Johns Hopkins has a really good specific COVID-19 newsletter that you can subscribe to. So, good stuff out there.

**John:** All right. Let’s start with some follow up. Last week on the episode we talked about professional readers and how little they’re paid. We talked about the union. We talked about freelance readers. And we asked for listeners to write in with their experiences and a whole bunch of them did. So Megana went through a bunch of them and here is a sampling of some of what we got. Craig, do you want to start us off with Taylor?

**Craig:** Sure. Taylor from Burbank writes, “My fulltime position is as a development assistant for a production company but as the salary is barely enough to cover my monthly rent I also have a few jobs on the side. One of those is as a freelance script reader for Alibaba Pictures, or rather was as a freelance script reader because after about three years and no decline in the quality of my work I’ve been essentially ghosted. No more assignments. No more email responses. While I’m not exactly happy I have to find another side gig, after listening to this episode I was a bit horrified to realize how little I’ve been making. Two years in I was met with a congratulatory email I was now getting a raise from $45 a script to $55 and would now be paid $75 for a book, $85 if it were over 300 pages.

“Wow, almost a half a day’s salary for reading a script. And then John mentioned the rate he was receiving at the beginning of his career. I’m still not quite sure why Alibaba dropped me without warning, but as I was freelance and often wasn’t assigned enough scripts to even qualify for taxes at the end of the year it doesn’t seem like any big loss.”

**John:** Oh, Taylor from Burbank. So the fact that you were receiving the same money that I was getting 20 years ago, that’s a problem. I mean, reading scripts and writing coverage is hours of work. And to be making that little is crazy. I mean, you’re barely making minimum wage at that point.

**Craig:** And I assume that Alibaba Pictures is associated with Alibaba the large Chinese company?

**John:** I don’t think it actually is. I think it may be a different company. We left it in because he said we could leave it in, because he wasn’t working there anymore. I’m not sure which company that is, but they’re not paying a lot.

**Craig:** Well, I’m happy to say since he let us say it that Alibaba Pictures sucks. Yeah, you suck.

**John:** They should pay their people more.

**Craig:** They should pay their people something even approaching fair. That’s terrible. Shame on you, Alibaba Pictures. You suck.

**John:** Leslie would agree with you. She writes, “It is unconscionable that many agencies and production companies get away with paying readers the same rates that were paid to readers in the 90s, or barely a little bit more. #PayUpHollywood shows us that shame can work in getting Hollywood to live up to its so-called progressive values espoused by many in Hollywood. Granted, not all smaller companies can afford union rates, but there are plenty of higher-tiered companies that are getting away with paying too little.

“Not everybody wants to be a fulltime reader, but there should be more union reading positions for those that do. Considering how important reading is to this industry there should be more companies that provide union positions.”

**Craig:** Couldn’t agree more. And we’re going to try and exercise a little shame here.

**John:** Yeah. And I think Leslie does bring up a good point. There are people who read fulltime as their main job. Like our friend Kevin is a fulltime reader, which is great. But it’s more common that it is a little bit of piecemeal work. That people are doing a little extra on the side. And I think we’re trying to address both situations. If this is your side gig reading it’s got to be a side gig that’s actually worth doing. And if you are a fulltime reader you need to be paid like a fulltime employee and that’s why these people who have union benefits are getting union benefits.

**Craig:** No question. We can’t afford to have the reading of these things and the coverage of screenplays be reduced down to the lowest quality of gig economy as possible. It’s just not going to work for anybody at that point. That would be the definition of penny-wise, pound foolish.

Should we keep reading some more? Because we got a lot here.

**John:** Go to Colin.

**Craig:** Colin writes, “I’m a reader for an established entertainment company that will go unnamed because I love my job.” You got it, Colin. “They pay me $30 for a feature-length script. Less if it’s an hour-long or a comedy half-hour. Considering it takes around four hours to read a feature script thoroughly and produce the coverage, even $50 a script wouldn’t cover minimum wage. When I was first offered the position I quoted my employer $50 for script and was negotiated down to $30 because they make the very good point that they can find an intern to do it for free. Won’t be as good, but it’s not about being a good analyst, just one who can get the job done efficiently and quickly. I’m sharing this story because I feel lucky to have this opportunity and would never give it up to an intern.

“I’m proud to put it on my resume, but my resume also contains three other jobs that I need to have to support keeping the one I love. Fair warning to aspiring script analysts.”

John, I feel like Colin is being way too easy on this terrible established entertainment company.

**John:** I feel like Colin is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s just, come on. They’re not paying you well. It’s the job you love. The reason why you love the job is because you like reading scripts and writing coverage on it and because it’s giving you some creative satisfaction. That’s fine. That’s good. But you are not being paid properly for what you are doing. And the fact that you have to do outside work to cover your reading work just to make a living, that is a problem. You are not being paid nearly enough and so maybe they’re super nice where you work but they need to pay you better.

**Craig:** They don’t sound super nice.

**John:** No they don’t.

**Craig:** He says, “When I was first offered the position I quoted my employer $50 per script,” which was already low as far I’m concerned, and then was negotiated down to $30 because they make the very good point they can find an intern to do it for free. No they can’t. Colin, if they could find an intern to do it satisfactorily for free they would. You see what I’m saying? They’re just ripping you off.

So, “established entertainment company” that currently pays anyone, including Colin, $30 to cover a feature-length script, you suck. And you should be ashamed of yourself. And you have to stop and treat people humanely. The work that you’re going to get back from these people will not justify the cost savings. And even if it did, don’t you just want to be a human individual that treats people nicely?

**John:** Yeah. Well, there’s other people who are not treating people nicely. Let’s wrap up this segment with Ken who writes in, “I attended a graduate film program and in one of my classes we had a guest who is a big manager for writers and directors.” Craig, do you think this guy is going to turn out to be a good guy or a bad guy?

**Craig:** I’m going to go with terrible human being.

**John:** “He was a graduate of this university and offered the entire lecture hall of aspiring writers the opportunity to come to his office to meet with him one-on-one to discuss our scripts and careers. He seemed so sincere and eager to help.”

**Craig:** [laughs] I bet he did.

**John:** “When I went to the office he gave me about five minutes of his time to ask questions while he responded to emails. Fine, he’s a manager with successful clients. He’s busy. But then as I was leaving he told me the best way to stay in touch and build a relationship was to become a reader for his company. And unpaid reader. He had his assistant email me a few scripts and a coverage template and sent me on my way.

“I talked to my friends who also had meetings with this guy and they all had the same story. He spent a perfunctory couple of minutes with us hopeful aspiring writers in order to get free coverage. I found the whole situation pretty gross. I never heard of a single student receiving any meaningful career advice or help, even after covering many scripts.”

**Craig:** I mean, first of all, the graduate film program needs to never have this person back. Let’s start with that. Because they’re just letting the fox into the henhouse. Second of all, I’m not saying that this person is a horrendous pile of flaming garbage. I’m saying that they have behaved in a way that is consistent with being an enormous flaming pile of garbage. What an outrageous and disgusting thing to do.

**John:** So this is making me reflect back on the time after I graduated from film school and I was working as an assistant. My last assistant job. And so I was working as an assistant to these two producers. And they said, “Hey, get some film school people in to be interns and they can do coverage and such.” And so I posted it at USC and I actually had a couple people come in who were my interns. And I would give them scripts and they would come in with the coverage and we’d talk through their stuff. And I don’t think they got anything meaningful out of it except for the one who was ultimately hired to replace me when my bosses fired me.

But I will say there is some logic to if you were doing this for two or three weeks, if you’re going through a couple of times of coverage, and I think I actually did help them write better coverage because I would sit with them, read their coverage, and sort of be able to help them write better coverage. So I think I did help them to some degree. So I don’t want to say that an unpaid – well, unpaid internships are problematic for many reasons. I do think there is some value to learning how to write coverage. And if you’re not being paid to learn how to write coverage I get that for a small period of time.

But to try to bring through wave after wave of these people to do free work for you is ridiculous and needs to be stopped.

**Craig:** I mean, it’s exploitative. They asked this person to come in because he’s a big manager for writers and directors. They’re hoping that this individual can provide value to the students in a graduate film program. Again, to put in perspective, Ken and all of his fellow classmates paid money to be in that room. An enormous amount of money. I assume that a number of them took on significant debt. But the whole point was that they would have access to interesting people who would benefit them, like a manager who has no interest in benefiting them. He just wants to beat them up even more by getting free work out of them like they’re, I don’t know, Dickensian orphans that he can gather up, Fagin style, to go pick pockets.

It’s sick. It’s absolutely sick. I’m so angry. I want to know who it is. Oh, god, I want to know who it is.

**John:** We’ll email off the chain and sort of see if Ken will tell us who that person is.

**Craig:** If people read about a prominent big manager for writers and directors turning up dead in a week or two, I didn’t do it. I’m just going – not at all.

**John:** Not at all.

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** You’re saying in advance if it were to happen it wasn’t Craig who did it.

**Craig:** I’m saying I didn’t do it. [laughs] I didn’t do the thing that hasn’t happened yet.

**John:** So, as we wrap up this little discussion about professional reading and people who are reading for their careers, we made no great progress here. But I think the way forward is to chart out sort of what’s acceptable and start applying shame for doing things that are unacceptable. And some of that shame should be vastly underpaying or not paying for this kind of work. And recognizing that there may be a place to learn how to do coverage, where you’re not being paid for it, but when you are doing the kind of work that a person is normally paid to do that means you should be paid to be doing that work.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s just sort of a definitional circular logic thing. So the quality of paid work should be for pay.

**Craig:** I completely agree. I hope that what we can do is something similar to what we did alongside all the assistants who were struggling and continue to struggle for fair treatment in the Hollywood workplace come up with a vague guideline of what seems right. And then say, invite I guess, major employers to sign on and say, yes, that’s the way we’re going to do this. We are going to pay that amount. And it’s important because the clients of awful people like this manager have no clue that their scripts and other scripts that are being submitted to them have been covered by unpaid interns. Unreal.

**John:** Yep. Now, in the setup for the segment last week I said that we would talk about both professional readers and like reading your friends’ scripts and we sort of never got to the reading your friends’ scripts and some guidance on that. So Jerry wrote in saying he really wished we would talk a little bit about that.

And so I want to spend a few moments to talk about the difference of reading someone whose script you know and sort of someone comes to you with a script and says, “Hey, would you read this and tell me what you think?” Because that’s a very different experience and it’s important to sort of distinguish those two things.

So, if someone comes to me with a script that they want me to read, I will start with a question and this is a question that Kelly Marcel actually sort of first asked me. I’ll ask do you want me to tell you that you’re brilliant, or do you want me to tell you what’s broken and needs to be fixed.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And when she said that to me it’s like a lightbulb just went off. It’s like, oh, yeah, you know what, those are very different things and sometimes I need one and not the other. And so just being clear what it is the person actually needs.

So, if it is a situation they are looking for things that need to get fixed it’s important to structure your feedback to them in terms of the movie that they’re actually trying to make. When you are giving them your honest feedback don’t try to change it into a thing it’s not, or at least not the movie that they want to make. So you are going to need to ask some questions probably at the start like I see two different ways this could go. It seems more like you’re headed in this direction. If that is the direction you want to go in let me structure my comments towards that movie rather than the movie I sort of wish you would make. That always feels really important to me.

And finally I would say one of the most important kinds of notes I get from a friendly read is when they tell me where they fell off the ride. Because hopefully they were with you for a lot of the script, a lot of the story, but at some points they dropped off or they got a little bit bored, or they might have stopped reading if they didn’t feel a social obligation to keep reading. It’s so important to tell people where you got confused, where you got bored, where it just wasn’t clicking for you. Where you lost faith in the movie. Because those are the things that are so hard for the writer sometimes to recognize in their own work.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’re describing somebody who is serving a friend in an advisory capacity. So you’re not saying, “Well, I read your script. I don’t think anybody is going to make this.” That’s not useful. Or “I don’t this idea.” That’s also not useful. “I don’t really go for these sorts of movies.” Not useful. “Wasn’t very funny.” Not useful. None of those things are useful. You’re there to be advisory.

The scale that I offer is regular, spicy, or extra spicy. And many times people will say, “Oh yeah, no, extra spicy.” And I’m like just take a moment. Think about it. Extra spicy means I’m going to talk to you the way I talk to myself. And it’s not pretty. OK? So, take a moment. There’s no shame in regular or spicy. And a number of times people are like, “Oh, OK, let me back off to spicy or regular.”

The idea is to try and suss out from them what they were trying to do. And then say, listen, I think given that you’re trying to do that maybe consider doing this. So it’s all very advisory. As opposed to professional reading which is entirely a kind of marketplace analysis. It’s evaluatory rather than advisory. Is this what we want? Is it to our standard? No, yes, the end.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, literally coverage on the title page it says pass, consider, or maybe. And you’re scoring things into a grid. It’s not the same function as trying to help something. And so it’s also important to note that if you ever see coverage on your own project first sit down and be ready to just shudder a bit. Because you will see that it’s only pointing out problems and not pointing out solutions. It’s literally just looking for threads to pull. And so it’s not a constructive thing to read your own coverage. I’ve done it a couple of times. I would not recommend it to anybody.

**Craig:** It would be extra spicy almost always.

**John:** Yeah. So a thing to avoid.

Always imagine yourself getting the notes that you’re about to give and be thinking what would be constructive to you as a writer to hear and that can include some tough love about things that aren’t working, but it can be tough love delivered really genuinely with love.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** All right. Let us move on to one of our main topics. So back in 2006 I answered a question from a reader on my blog. And I should stipulate it’s just so weird that I can Google questions and I find answers to things I answered in 2006.

**Craig:** You mean you’re providing your own Google hit back is what you’re saying?

**John:** I feel like past me is offering a gift to present me.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw. And it’s weird reading my old posts because I still sound like myself. I’m very consistent sort of year to year. But here was the question I answered–

**Craig:** Robots don’t age. [laughs]

**John:** We just don’t age at all. “Every screenwriting book I’ve read, class I took, and basically the first rule I learned says one page of a properly formatted script equals approximately a minute of screen time. I know one page of say a battle can last five minutes whereas one page of quick dialogue may last ten seconds if the actors talk fast. So my question is is this rule true?”

And so back in the day I said the rule is not really a rule. It’s true-ish, but it’s true-ish mostly because most scripts are about 120 pages. Most movies are about two hours. It kind of works out that way. So, I guess you can say it’s a very crude rule of thumb, but it’s no more than that. And we can obviously think of exceptions and I listed the movies I’d made at that point and sort of what my script page count was and what the actual running time of the movies were. And there wasn’t a strong correlation.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But then a couple weeks ago I got thinking, you know what, I wonder how strong the correlation really is. And so I asked Stephen Follows, so he was the guy – remember, god, a year ago, two years ago I was talking about missing movies, like the movies you can’t find on DVD or on streaming? Like movies that just sort of disappeared.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** He’s the guy who did a systematic study of like which movies are not available for streaming anywhere. So I went to Stephen Follows and said like, hey, would you be interested in tackling this question and going through a bunch of scripts, going through a bunch of running times and really charting this out how strong is the correlation between how many pages a script is and how long a movie is.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And, Craig, can you guess the answer?

**Craig:** Not in any real significant way.

**John:** No. It’s not a very strong correlation at all. There’s some clustering around one would be a perfect correlation, so a 111-page script is 111 minute movie. But only 22% of scripts had a ratio between 0.95 and 1.05. And two-thirds were within 0.8 and 1.2. So a lot of them were even sort of beyond those borders. You can have scripts that were 100 pages long, it could be anywhere between 80 and 120 minutes, which is not surprising to you or to me because we’ve all encountered that.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, if you’re supposed to have a 100 and your range is between 80 and 120, this is not good. The concept we’re dealing with here is standard deviation which is to say how average is your average? If you add it all up and, yeah, there’s like a lot of scripts turn out where they’re really close to 1:1 ratio, in this case 0.95:1.05, then OK, it’s good enough. But the problem is standard deviation. A lot of scripts are not even close to that. And so you average because there are a bunch of outliers, if you want to call them that, to the left, and a bunch of outliers to the right. And in our case there’s so much variation it would seem in the actual timing of anyone’s particular page length that the measurement is not useful at all.

**John:** So we should say as an industry we have a person whose job is to do script timing. That is generally the script supervisor. He or she sits with the screenplay before production and in consultation with the director goes through scene by scene, does an estimated running time per scene, adds it all up and comes up with a crude estimate of like this is how long this movie will probably last if we were to put all of these scenes into the finished film. That is useful. That is useful to see if something is going to be really short or really long, or if things are feeling long that we might want to take something out. But that is a completely different skill than just counting the number of pages on it.

**Craig:** Yeah. There are two reasons that a studio needs to know from a screenplay how long of a movie are we looking at. Reason number one, as you mention, is what’s the running time of the movie going to be because they don’t want say a family comedy to be 2.5 hours. Kids are not going to make it. And the other one is how expensive is this going to be because the budget of movies is defined in no small way by how many days you have to shoot.

It turns out that the one-page per minute rule satisfies neither of those needs. You’ve got a script supervisor who can do a much better job of telling you roughly how long the movie would be. And you have a first AD who can tell you a much better job of roughly how many days you’re going to need to shoot it. So, we should get rid of it entirely. Warner Bros I think still contractually requires that your screenplay be 120 pages or fewer.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve signed contracts that require that. I was just looking at the contract I did for this next thing. And I got up to 130 pages, so I could just go nuts.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** But literally they don’t have to accept the script if it’s longer than that which is just ridiculous. So, let’s talk about sort of why it matters overall. The industry is obsessed with page count. And because it’s a number that they can look at and try to quantify and so that pressure pushes down on screenwriters in that we sort of have screenplay dysmorphia disorder where we will do crazy things to try to cut page count down. And so it’s the reason why the decision to double space scene headers or single space them. Why we’ll take out words on page 14, just like small little words, or like cheat margins on a dialogue block just to sort of pull up later pages.

And we waste hours–

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Hours. Collectively we waste thousands of hours probably a year doing these little tweaks on things just to bring it from 121 pages to 117 pages because it matters, even though it doesn’t matter.

**Craig:** Yeah. It matters even though it doesn’t matter. I mean, I’m really bad because I also hate dialogue being split across pages, so I fiddle around and try and avoid that as well. But, yeah, we waste a lot of time doing this and it speaks to the stupidity of it. If I can not change the meaning in any way, shape, or form and reduce my screenplay by six or seven pages which I could easily do. Easily. All those little widows, those huge blocks of white space–

**John:** Widows and orphans, yeah.

**Craig:** Gone, right? So you just eliminate those and, boom, you can do it. And so then what does this one-page-per-minute thing mean at all? People should just start talking about it. It’s stupid.

**John:** Yeah. Another reason why it matters is because movies don’t have pages. Pages only exist in the screenplay format. But the pages don’t match up to the movie at all. And so movies have scenes, they have sequences, but they fundamentally don’t have pages. And so working in animation one of the things I actually really enjoy about it is at a certain point you stop caring about pages because it’s just become sequences. They number things really early on in the process because they move from the pages to boards to actually animating things. And so you stop caring about what page something was on.

That is good and that is probably how we need to move overall as an industry is to stop thinking about pages and start thinking about scenes. And stop thinking about the screenplay being this paper document that has now become digitalized as a PDF but is still essentially the paper document that everything is sort of focused around. If it’s actually the text that matters, it’s the scenes that matter, the sequences that matter. We should really be focusing on a format that is about those scenes and not about what could be printed on a piece of paper.

**Craig:** Yeah. We are riding in a jalopy just cause. There’s no reason for it.

**John:** Yeah. Now, if we were to move beyond pages, if we were to move beyond the PDF, some things that could be vastly improved. First off is security. So, right now Craig you’ve probably had to deal with these when you get a screenplay that’s locked down that you have to go through the special app to use? Have you dealt with that?

**Craig:** I’ve done that. I’ve also had to physically – so when I read Rian Johnson’s script I had to drive to Disney, go in a room, give them my phone, and then get like AE Ink reader kind of thing, not an iPad, but some sort of reader like that. Read it. Hand it back to them. Get my stuff back and go, after signing 400 NDAs. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve had that kind of situation or things that are printed on red or other situations. Or like they would send me an iPad that had been locked down that I could only read that script on. But more often I get this terrible app and it’s the equivalent of [Pix], but it’s just for like PDFs. But it’s essentially like a Flash app that shows you one page at a time and they can digitally cancel you from it. So like if they decided they wanted to hire a different writer instead of you, like you could be on page 67 and it would just disappear.

And so if you’re going to do that, I guess you’re going to do that. But the problem is it’s all still based on a PDF and so they’re still sending you an image of a page rather than actually sending you the text. And there’s so many better digital ways to handle that kind of security to keep that stuff locked down. And if we were to be willing to get rid of the PDF we could do that stuff a lot better.

**Craig:** Well, eventually we will. I mean, it is disturbing to think of any kind of – I mean, maybe that application isn’t Flash-based, but when I hear the word Flash I definitely don’t think security.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a lot of stuff that’s really backwards. I mean, one of these days I’m going to go off on CastIt.Biz. Have we ever talked about CastIt?

**John:** I don’t think we have. It’s worth a small discussion of what CastIt is, because everyone just loathes it.

**Craig:** CastIt is a web-based “solution” for casting where you log in, you access your project file, so let’s say it’s for Chernobyl. And then it keeps all of the little video clips of the taped auditions of everybody, along with their names.

**John:** In theory it is so much better than the days of tapes you’d get from casting.

**Craig:** Sure. But what I just said does not sound like it would be hard to do. It seems like most of the web has mastered the art of video archiving and database management. CastIt.Biz is literally unchanged since, I don’t know, 1998? I’m not kidding. I mean, I remember using it in 1999. It looks exactly the same. It is horrendous. The navigation is dismal. It’s ugly. For the life of me I have no idea why people are still using it. It sucks.

**John:** A friend of mine was working on a rival situation, a rival platform for it, and wasn’t able to make it work. It’s the Final Draft problem. It’s just they are established and people are familiar with it and so people are scared of change and they’re not changing but they should change.

**Craig:** Well, CastIt.Biz is a weird – I actually feel bad for them. Whereas Final Draft makes me angry. Because they have all this money and they keep “innovating” which is worse than actual innovating. It’s like fake innovation. Like, look, now we can do dual dialogue better. It’s like, dummies, that should have been there from the beginning, but whatever. CastIt.Biz, it’s almost like one day someone is going to be like, oh yeah, there’s a weird smell coming from their apartment.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Like you open the door and there’s going to be a coder slumped over and his cats have mostly eaten him. I mean, I can’t imagine that someone is actually over there going – anyway, poor CastIt.Biz. I do think that we do need a much better solution for this. The screenplay, first of all the screenplay format is ancient and creaky. And the idea of PDFs is ancient and creaky. The page-per-minute is ridiculous. It literally makes no sense.

Yeah, technology has not – well, we lag behind terribly.

**John:** Yeah. And so two last things. Collaboration could be much better if we’re not so obsessed with the physical representation of the page. So I both mean in terms of real time collaboration, the way that you can share Google Docs and update stuff in real time. The way that you and I are updating our workflow in real time as we change stuff. That is much simpler if you’re not trying to match a PDF page.

Also, the ability to sort of put notes on things makes much more sense if you don’t have a physical page that you’re sort of trying to represent.

And then version control. So really when we talk about script revisions and colored pages and all that stuff, it’s a really archaic old way of doing version control.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Where everyone says like, OK, well, we’ll now add page A36, which is going to be a cherry page, which will go into the script. And you know what? It’s charming that we had that system. That system needs to go away.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** No other system would ever have sheets of colored paper to represent sort of how stuff needs to fit together. We can do version control so much better and push it out to everybody and everyone can be looking at the most recent version of the script at all times because we’re not so paper obsessed.

**Craig:** 100%. The current revision system with revision marks and all the rest of it is based on Xeroxing. That’s just based on a large copy machine cranking stuff out. And we don’t have the ability to do very simple things. Everybody reading it for instance with a certain level of permissions should be able to just cycle through the revisions of a single line of dialogue. Just cycle through if you want.

And setting permissions, by the way, is another huge aspect of this.

**John:** Totally. That’s both security and collaboration. That’s what you need to do.

**Craig:** What are we going to do? Are you going to fix this?

**John:** I am not going to fix this myself. But I will say that as I think about this the two main products that my company makes, Highland 2 which its first claim to fame is that it could melt PDFs down so you could get the actual screenplay text out of it. That was its first trick was its ability to do that. And then Weekend Read which is to reformat PDFs so that you can read them on your phone. In both cases they’re trying to deal with the huge limitations that the current system is putting on things.

I would love to not have to solve these problems because we just agree as an industry – it doesn’t have to be one other solution. It can be multiple other solutions. It can be different ways to handle stuff. I kind of don’t care how we decide to do it. I don’t care if it’s one industry standard. I just think we need to be willing to move beyond our current situation that’s set up. And I think the page-per-minute is a part of this. We have this illusion that this rule of thumb is actually a rule. And it was never a rule.

The world is not going to fall apart if we stop worrying about screenplay pages and just focus on the actual text.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s not why the world is going to fall apart. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] There’s lots of other challenges facing the industry.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. There is. All right, so that’s my little rant there. This is one of those rants without an actual call to action other than just as screenwriters, as people in the industry, hey, what if we were to stop just obsessing so much about pages and page count. And recognize that there could be different ways to do this that would make so much more sense. And we have lots of showrunners listening to us, lots of writer-directors out there. Maybe on your next project think about how you might go to a workflow that was not so PDF/page obsessed.

**Craig:** Maybe I can get Neil Druckmann to figure this out.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, the videogame business is so version controlled and collaborative and permission based and all that.

**John:** Craig, maybe I’m just speaking to an audience of you. You have this opportunity with your new show. Think about ways that don’t have to use the normal screenplay way of doing stuff.

**Craig:** Oh, I like where this is going.

**John:** And report back to us what you decide.

**Craig:** Fine. Done.

**John:** Cool. All right. Now it’s come time for us to talk about the coronavirus or COVID-19. And really we want to focus on the unique impact it has had on film and television in Los Angeles because that’s sort of what we know.

So, I wanted to start by talking about film because movies, theatrical films, are designed to shown in big theaters with a bunch of people. And you talk about opening weekends and buying tickets and popcorn and a bunch of people in a place. And that is not conducive to keeping this disease under control. So, right now as we’re recording this it’s not clear what’s going to happen with movie theaters, which ones are going to stay open, but clearly we’re looking at dramatic declines. Already Broadway is closed. Disneyland is closed. Sporting events and concerts are canceled.

Movies are shifting their release dates. And the film industry as a whole I think some of the greenlights have started to become kind of flashing yellow lights because we just don’t know what is going to happen to the future of theatrical releases.

**Craig:** It’s not good. The thing that haunts me a little bit is how much time these businesses can withstand while being closed down. Because it seems that a lot of businesses run the way a lot of homes run financially, which is hand to mouth. No pun intended. If we’re not open today we’re going to be out of business. And that’s frightening.

So, yeah, I’m very concerned. The movie theater experience was already being severely impacted right now. It’s going to be hammered. And also I just think studios are not releasing their movies. They’re just delaying them until such time as theoretically everything is OK. But we know that Broadway as of today, our recording, has shut down. Disneyland is shutting down. The NBA suspended their entire season. I have no doubt that Major League Baseball will – I think Major League Baseball, my guess is continue but not with people in the stands. They’ll be playing to empty stands.

**John:** They’ll be playing to television. So sporting events I could see the ability for them to carry on in some way because they do have a tremendous home audience there. They’re not making all their money by selling tickets to that venue, that event. Versus theatrical features it is about butts in seats. And I’ve talked about on the show before that my husband Mike used to run all the movie theaters in Burbank. So he had 30 screens that he needed to run every weekend. And a ton of teenagers are working for them. And just imagine how stressful it must be for the person who is in his job right now to be thinking about safety of his own employees but also thinking about how do we keep this business running.

**Craig:** I mean, in some ways it becomes a very simple thing. There’s not a lot to do except shut down. The obligation that we have to our employees as employers becomes an enormous thing. As a nation we’re not particularly good at it. And so we’re about to find out what we’re really made of.

**John:** Now, Craig, if you were a studio boss and we often cast you as the studio boss on these podcasts–

**Craig:** Yes, of course.

**John:** And you have something like the Bond movie, some sort of giant event, at what point might you decide to put that on Pay-per-view or some sort of like launch that movie somewhere other than in the theaters? What would go into your decision making process?

**Craig:** It depends on the film. So, a movie like Bond is essentially an evergreen. You can theoretically release a Bond movie whenever you want. Is there an enormous cost to delaying a Bond movie? Probably not an enormous cost. There are other movies that feel somewhat timely. A sequel for instance, like a proper sequel. You want to capitalize on a hit. Well, if you delay it for a year it’s not going to seem so timely.

Or, if you’re in competition with another movie. Things like that. But again you don’t really have much of a choice. If you put something on Pay-per-view you’re going to be losing an enormous amount of money. Because when they decide to release something theatrically they have already done the numbers. They modeled it. It makes sense to do it. It doesn’t mean that their models always turn out correctly. Obviously there are huge bombs. But by and large something as blue chip as a James Bond movie they kind of have to release it theatrically. Because the amount of money they’re going to make on “Pay-per-view,” they’re going to make that anyway after the theatrical release.

**John:** Yeah. I do worry that if you were to release a movie like Bond on Pay-per-view it immediately drops the value for – it becomes pirated on day one. And so if you’re trying to maintain some window between the Pay-per-view event and sort of it normally being on iTunes, that’s difficult because everyone can pirate it immediately. It is a real challenge. I don’t think there’s a great solution to it.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I will say that I’m working under the assumption that movie theaters probably will close. Who knows where we’re at on Tuesday when this drops? I will commit at this moment that once the government says that movie theaters can reopen I’m going to go that weekend. I really want the theatrical experience to remain. I want to make sure our theaters don’t close. That our theater chains can keep going because big screens are great. And I love to be able to watch a movie with an audience. And I would hate for this to kill our theatrical experience.

**Craig:** Yeah. Me too. It’s disconcerting.

**John:** Now let’s talk about both film and television, the challenges facing there. The challenge of a group of people working together. So in some ways it’s like any office or any sort of workplace. There are people working together to make our movies and to make our TV shows. In the case of TV you have writers’ rooms. And so I just saw Ryan Knighton was headed back to Vancouver because the TV show he’s on is now a virtual writers’ room rather than an actual writers’ room with people in a room together.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s a choice that showrunners are making or studios are making for showrunners about we’re not supposed to have a big group of people together to do stuff. So for writers’ rooms you can make that virtual. It’s not ideal but you can make that virtual.

For actual production, for gaffers and grips and props and everyone else, there’s no working at home for that. And production is already being hugely impacted.

**Craig:** Without question. Across the board everything. I mean, I heard that NBC/Universal had shut down all production of all television shows. I don’t know if that’s true or not. But I’m hearing stuff. I mean, it does seem like that’s what’s going on.

**John:** The other challenge is if you are a show that’s traveling someplace, so like the Mission: Impossible movie was supposed to go to Venice. Not only can you not film where you’re supposed to be filming, but there’s the real risk of being stuck someplace. Like I was supposed to be going to France and Switzerland in two weeks for my vacation. Even before this got especially bad my real worry was like, oh, we could just be stuck there and not be able to come back to the US. And that is the concern for anybody working on a production overseas is that you cannot get back to where you’re supposed to be getting to. So it’s tough.

**Craig:** Yeah. I was supposed to – we’re recording this on March 12. I was supposed to be on a plane yesterday to London for a couple of award ceremonies. And we obviously canceled that trip like two weeks ago. But I think the ceremonies themselves are canceled. If I had been there, well, it’s the weirdest. I can’t understand. So apparently we have stopped accepting people from Europe except from the United Kingdom. So if you’re in Europe just get to the United Kingdom. What?

**John:** It makes no sense.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** Take the train and get to–

**Craig:** Oh geez.

**John:** As we’re recording this I’m supposed to be at the Tucson Festival of Books. And so they kept sending updates like, you know, oh, here’s the precautions we’re going to take. I’m like they’re going to cancel the Tucson Festival of Books. I’m just waiting and waiting and like, yep, they pulled the plug. That’s why I’m here recording on a very rainy Thursday afternoon rather than from Tucson.

**Craig:** I guess if there’s a silver lining here it’s that it’s never been easier to communicate with each other and see each other without being physically with each other.

**John:** Absolutely. So a lot of my meetings for this week and next week have become phone calls or Skype sessions. That’s fine. A lot of that stuff does make sense. There are advantages to being together in a room. There’s a reason why writers’ rooms are rooms and there’s things you can do in a room that you can’t do virtually. But given the choices, yeah, virtual makes a lot of sense.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now let’s talk about sort of if there’s any upside is that this is a great opportunity to catch up on a bunch of stuff you’ve been meaning to watch. If you’re a streamer this feels like a time to really showcase the things that you’ve got. And so some of the features that would have normally been going to theatrical will probably end up on streaming. They’ll get an audience. And it will be interesting to see over these next few months what that feels like.

I know our family, we started making a shared Apple note listing out all the movies we planned to watch as a family. And so it is an opportunity for your own film festival.

**Craig:** Well that is true. Just as it is the best time to communicate without being near each other physically, it is also the best time to be stuck in a house with a want for entertainment. Because there are thousands. Thousands.

**John:** Yes. There’s far too much TV to watch and now you have a little more time to watch all the TV you have not watched.

So let’s talk about in addition to safety precautions and sort of all the standard advice which people should follow. You should watch your hands. You should stop touching your face. You should listen to the advice of actual medical professionals. But what are some creative precautions or preparations that a writer could take? Let’s take a few minutes to talk through those. Because if you’re listening to this podcast and you are a writer, how do you best take advantage of this time? And to me I think it starts with making some sort of writing plan. List the projects you’re considering. Pick one of your projects. And then schedule time each day to write it. And make a plan for how you’re going to do it. Set some goals of effort. Not necessarily that you’re going to finish by a certain time but that you’re going to get a certain amount of work done each day. It could be pages. It could be words. Whatever. And find some system for holding yourself accountable.

If you have some friend who can be your accountability on this. That you are going to spend some time over these next challenging couple of weeks and months with your Internet turned off, with your Twitter shut down, actually focusing on doing something productive and good creatively and not just be a despair machine.

**Craig:** Yeah. You don’t want to be a despair machine. I mean, look, I’ve got my work to do. I’m doing my work. It’s hard. I find myself very distracted. Very worried. Very concerned. And I have to allow for that as well. I think it is perfectly reasonable for us to say as writers, “Maybe I don’t get as much done over the next few weeks as I would normally, because there’s stuff going on in the world.” And if we’re any good at our job we are kind of spongey when it comes to emotions and feelings. And we’re going to feel stuff. And it’s not going to feel great.

If you’re sitting there writing something sunny or happy it may be harder for you. If you’re sitting there writing something brutal, it may be hard for you. So, you know, just take it easy on yourselves. I don’t know how else to advise here because, of course, the most important thing is that you try as best you can to stay healthy and keep your loved ones healthy, and that includes your noggin. Writing second, health first.

**John:** Yeah. I got offered a project this week that I think in a different week would have been like oh yeah absolutely I’ll do that. That feels like a dream. And literally just like what that project was about and this week is just not a good combination. This period that we’re in is just not a good combination. So I passed on it. Not because it wasn’t a great and worthy project, but because I just knew that I did not have the emotional bandwidth to be putting it into that script and be living my actual life.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, it’s weird. With me sometimes the subject matter, you think like, OK, writing Chernobyl or Last of Us, which is a global pandemic, you know, I mean, you think well geez. Actually weirdly for me individually the subject matter isn’t what does it. It’s just the concentration. It’s when the world is demanding my attention and I have to leave it and go to the world in my head it’s hard. It’s just hard.

**John:** The one thing I want to make sure listeners keep in mind though is you have permission to turn it off. It is important to sort of keep informed, but you can keep informed like once a day. And that’s OK. If you’re not up to every hour’s new drama that’s all right.

When I was living in France in the lead up to the 2016 election I got so stressed out that at a certain point I took Twitter off my phone and took all the news sites off my phone. And I just made a deal with Mike where once per day he could just give me the recap of what’s going on because I just couldn’t actually process it anymore. And I think it’s all right to give yourself permission to look away and to focus on some other things. And indeed it’s probably healthier to just draw some boundaries between when I’m going to be aware of the stuff and when I’m going to let myself cocoon within myself and work on my own stuff.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. You just have to take care of yourself, as best you can. Yeah. Maybe it will become a nice escape. It’s hard to say.

**John:** Yeah. It could. I mean, I will say that a lot of our listeners are probably younger than 9/11 or other sort of big dramatic – the Northridge earthquake.

**Craig:** I was here.

**John:** Yeah. I was here. Those were big, scary times. But there were also good moments during it where there were moments where you saw everyone coming together and rising up and being better. So, I don’t get concerned about everything falling apart as much when I realize that there are good people out there who are trying to put stuff together. And I can imagine myself as one of those people.

I often talk on the podcast about sort of seeing yourself as the protagonist of the story of your life. And so if I imagine John August as the hero in this saga right now, I think about what that person would do and what are some choices that he could make that would – as difficult as things are – would lead to a better outcome. And that’s sometimes helpful.

**Craig:** In your story though you’re just laughing as all organic matter perishes.

**John:** [laughs] That is true. Finally the robots will–

**Craig:** Finally.

**John:** Will rise up. All right. It has come time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is actually a bit of a law rule here. It’s actually a Scriptnotes episode. Episode 99, which was our Psychotherapy for Screenwriters. So, I posted it on YouTube and one of the cool things about having all of our transcripts is you can now post videos and then upload the transcripts and it will automatically sync up the transcript to our talking. And it turned out really, really well.

And so Episode 99 is when we talked with Dennis Palumbo who is a therapist who mostly deals with screenwriters and talks through their issues. It’s one of our most popular episodes and I just thought it was a good time to put that up for everyone who wants to listen to it can listen to it.

The idea to put the transcripts as closed captions came in conversation with Shoshannah Stern and Josh Feldman. Shoshannah Stern was on our Christmas episode. And as we were working through the logistics of getting her on the show it really became clear that for folks who are deaf podcasts aren’t like such a great thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Weird.

**John:** Weird, huh? I mean, as an audio-only format they’re kind of inaccessible. And so in the interest of accessibility we’ve always done transcripts. The YouTube video is another way to make some of what we do a little bit more accessible. So check that out if you want. There’s a link in the show notes to Episode 99.

**Craig:** Great. I like that. Even if there’s nothing to watch per se, if you are deaf and you’re able to watch the captions go by in the cadence of the discussion–

**John:** That’s right.

**Craig:** You get, I think, a better sense of the way the discussion flows as opposed to just reading it, which is, you know, reading.

**John:** Cool. Craig, what do you got?

**Craig:** Well, sticking on this whole COVID-19 thing, there is a very helpful, I think, newsletter the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security is putting out. You can subscribe to it online. We’ll provide the link. But, well yeah, no reason for me to read it out loud. By the time you hear this you will have that link.

It’s good. It’s good because it does not bombard you every two seconds as far as I can tell. I’ve only received one so far in the one day I’ve had the subscription. But it’s very measured and thoughtful and scientific, fact-based. It keeps you updated. It has running totals. It is not a freak-out alarm, but it is really informative. So, probably worth taking a look at that.

They are, because of the demand, sometimes when you sign up some people may get a timeout error. Just try it again.

**John:** Great. That is our show for this week. So reminder, if you’re a Premium member stick around and we will be talking about our first level spells. But otherwise Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by James Launch and Jim Bond. We’re using one featuring Aline Brosh McKenna. It’s a repeat, but it’s a worthy repeat because it’s happy and bouncy and sometimes you need a happy, bouncy, dancey song.

**Craig:** True that.

**John:** If you have an outro send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We’re running a little bit low on outros, so maybe you could take some of this time to write us some outros.

Ask@johnaugust.com is also the place to send longer questions, but for short questions on Twitter I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

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 like the one we’re just about to record.

Craig, have you a good week.

**Craig:** Thanks, you too, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Craig, magic. Let’s talk some magic. So this was a random idea. I’m not sure where it came from. And we should say that the idea behind this, so this is Dungeons & Dragons Spells, Fifth Edition. First level spells can be from any class, but you suggested and I think it’s a good suggestion that no healing spells will be included in this pack.

**Craig:** Yeah. So obviously because it’s a gaming simulation of reality the HP hit point system of defining how healthy somebody is just has no connection whatsoever to reality. Also, in the world of D&D when you sleep for eight hours and wake up you’re totally healthy. Wouldn’t that be nice?

**John:** Oh, it would be so nice.

**Craig:** So spells that are like “restore half your health points,” it just doesn’t have any possible relation to our existence. So I figured let’s just skip those. Yeah, it would be nice if I was like, oh, I have good berries so I can make a berry that makes me feel a little bit better.

**John:** No good berries.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** All right. My choice, I was debating between three. And so I’m going to pick this one, but I’m also going to argue for the other two because I think they’re really good. Looking through this list I was struck by how many of the spells I would pick in real life are not the spells I ever pick when actually in the game.

**Craig:** Oh, for sure.

**John:** Because I’m always worried about like attack or defend. I’m not worried about sort of utility spells. But they’re all utility spells the ones I picked. So I picked Comprehend Languages. It has a verbal, semantic material component. It lasts for an hour. I need a pinch of soot and salt. But for the duration you understand the literal meaning of any spoken language that you hear. You also understand any written language that you see. But you must be touching the surface on which the words are written. It takes about one minute to read one page of text.

**Craig:** [laughs] Apparently they do have the one-minute-per-page rule. I like Comprehend Languages. Here’s my argument against.

**John:** Go for it.

**Craig:** Argument against is, A, it lasts one hour which is kind of frustrating in the sense that you can hear and understand some things and I suppose have the memory of it, but then if you are at a party and you run into hour two, I guess you just cast it again. Is it unlimited casting?

Two, bigger issue, you can’t speak it. You can only understand it, which is kind of limiting.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then argument number three is we sort of have this magic in our phones.

**John:** Yeah. I would say that Google Translate does a really pretty good job of this in a lot of situations. So, I totally hear you, but the ability to understand languages does feel very useful. And so I guess I did miss the fact that it doesn’t give me the ability to talk back.

**Craig:** Well, you’re dealing with a DM over here.

**John:** You are.

**Craig:** I’m always looking or the loop holes.

**John:** And also just the literal meaning. So, if it is – oh crap, the Jean-Luc Picard, something when the walls fell. What was the one, the civilization that only speaks in metaphors?

**Craig:** Oh, right. Yeah.

**John:** Is it Shaka, When the Walls Fell?

**Craig:** Yeah, I can’t remember.

**John:** I’m looking it up now. I will get the answer while you tell me about what spell you want to do.

**Craig:** So, I took at your other, you had a couple of backup choices which I’m happy to discuss, and one of which I looked at very carefully. Your two backup choices were Sleep and Disguise Self. Now Sleep, you know, has a little bit of a hit point in there because the amount of people you can put to sleep. But let’s just limit it to one person. Let’s just say Sleep is one person. The thing about–

**John:** How often would I want to cast Sleep on my kid when she was little? So often.

**Craig:** I mean, over and over. You’d spam that. But these days I’d mostly just want to cast it on myself.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** Because my theory is that if you cast Sleep on yourself you will fall asleep. Now the sleep only lasts for a minute, but my feeling is like if it’s midnight and I’m having a little bit of insomnia and I cast Sleep to myself, all I need is that starter.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And my brain will take over from there

**John:** Gets it going.

**Craig:** So I thought about that one. You also have Disguise Self. That’s a very interesting one. So for Disguise Self which also lasts an hour you can make yourself, including your clothing and other belongings, look different. You can seem one foot shorter, or taller. You can appear thin, fat, or in between. You can’t change your body type meaning you can’t have 12 limbs or turn into an octopus. But it’s pretty good.

The downside, and what use would that be? A lot of shenanigans, right? That’s a heavy shenanigans spell.

**John:** Well, it’s shenanigans but also like Instagram. I mean, the fact that it could make you look like anything else could also make you look much better. So in a culture where we are constantly putting filters on our stuff to make things more attractive Disguise Self is your friend. It’s just an ability to present yourself as you wish you could look rather than how you actually look.

**Craig:** Or as we also call it, Photoshop. But, I mean, the bummer is it only lasts for an hour. So you run into that thing where you show up at a party and then like Cinderella you’re suddenly running to re-disguise yourself or else people are like oh my god.

Here’s what I went for. A spell I would never, and I mean never–

**John:** I’ve never seen anyone take this spell.

**Craig:** Ever pick this spell as a caster. But in real life, super freaking useful. Unseen Servant. Unseen Servant. Duration one hour. This spell creates an invisible mindless, shapeless force that performs simple tasks at your command until the spell ends. It springs into existence and then you can ask it to perform simple tasks that any human servant could do, such as fetching things, cleaning, mending, folding clothes, lighting fires, serving food, and pouring wine.

Once you give the command the servant performs the task to the best of its ability until it completes the task. And then it waits for your next command. Uh, yeah.

So basically this is the most ethical way to have the most abuse-able, unpaid intern ever. Right? I mean, so cooking, cleaning, chauffeuring, lifting, carrying, schlepping. This is incredibly useful day after day after day after day. If I had an Unseen Servant right now I wouldn’t have to touch the doorknobs anywhere.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** It would be so useful.

**John:** It’s like [unintelligible] but actually a little bit more flexible.

**Craig:** So much more flexible. Like, OK, you know what? It’s pouring rain and I need to get the mail. Hey, Unseen Servant, go get the mail. Brilliant. Love it.

**John:** All right. So circling back, it is Shaka, When the Walls Fell. That’s the Jean-Luc Picard reference. Here is my argument for Comprehend Languages which I just now thought about is that while we have Google Translate to do languages that people actually speak right now, Comprehend Languages would work on all the old stuff that we see that we can’t actually translate. So we’re talking about not hieroglyphics but other lost languages where we have things written in clay tablets and we have no idea what they actually are.

So the ability to actually understand what was written there would be a game changer for historical research.

**Craig:** Unseen Servant, do my laundry. I rebut it thus.

**John:** I find it interesting. Unseen Servant does not cook apparently.

**Craig:** It could. I don’t see why it won’t. Lighting fire. Serving food. I think cooking is too creative of a task. What you could say is Unseen Servant boil this chicken and put it on this plate. I think really simple – well, it says, actually the servant can perform simple tasks that a human servant could do. Simple dishes.

**John:** A boiled egg it could do, but not chicken cordon bleu.

**Craig:** No. Exactly. So, but this is very useful.

**John:** I agree it’s useful. It’s also – the D&D we play has very little to do with daily tasks.

**Craig:** Utterly useless in D&D. It is literally only useful as far as I – by the way, a billion nerds are like, “Hold on.”

**John:** “Hold on. Here’s a way I used it once to do stuff.”

**Craig:** To the keyboard. I apologize to you as a fellow nerd. I’m sure you have found a brilliant use for Unseen Servant, but honestly, er, meh, you can only have so many spells. Why pick that one?

**John:** Absolutely. Craig, I wish you and your Unseen Servant a very good week and stay safe out there.

**Craig:** Thank you sir, you too. Bye-bye.

**John:** Bye.

 

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Episode 441 – Readers](https://johnaugust.com/2020/readers)
* [How Accurate is the One Page per Minute Rule?](https://johnaugust.com/2020/how-accurate-is-the-page-per-minute-rule-2)
* Stephen Follows’s analysis on [Is the One Page Per Minute Rule Correct?](https://stephenfollows.com/is-the-page-per-minute-rule-correct/)
* Try [Highland 2](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/) for free!
* Download [Weekend Read](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/weekend-read/id502725173) to access your own or read our library of scripts today!
* [Hollywood and Coronavirus](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/hollywood-could-take-20-billion-hit-coronavirus-impact-1284582)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 99: Psychotherapy for Screenwriters](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIBboG1ddhs) with captions on Youtube!
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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/beyond-bars).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 440 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast I’ll be talking with a panel of experts about the criminal justice system and incarceration, looking at what TV and movies get right and get wrong and how to do better. It’s a great discussion we held this week in cooperation with Hollywood Health and Society. If you’d like to watch this panel rather than listen to it there is a link in the show notes to the video.

Craig, it was good, it was fun. I missed you but there was so much to talk about that an extra person up there probably would have been a challenge.

**Craig:** Sometimes I feel like it’s important to have these moments where you get to do your thing, or I get to do my thing. It keeps it fresh. I’m not saying that we’re swingers or anything. I don’t think – that’s not our lifestyle.

**John:** It isn’t.

**Craig:** No. We don’t have an open relationship, but you know how married couples talk about a hall pass?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I feel like we actually give each other hall passes every now and again. It’s like instead of the fake ones that you know will just get you in permanent trouble.

**John:** Absolutely. Like my husband for many years, he would go on one vacation by himself each year which I think is just great. So, it’s a chance to sort of like what is interesting in the world that is not just a shared couple thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. It lets you be yourself. I’m glad that I could let you be yourself.

**John:** Now Craig, what has been your experience with the criminal justice system or writing about the criminal justice system? Because I’m thinking back through your credits and I don’t perceive you writing a bunch about lawyers and jails and prisons. But have you done that?

**Craig:** Only in the most bizarre and non-realistic way for the third Hangover film.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Which features Thai law enforcement as well as Mexican law enforcement and I don’t think any of it was accurate in the slightest. So mostly I watch law enforcement. I don’t think I’ll ever be one of those people that writes a big jury trial movie or anything like that.

**John:** Yeah. Like you, I mostly have my experience of criminal justice system watching it on TV. Yes, I’ve been on juries, but most of what I perceive is the things I see on television. And those things are not particularly accurate, so it was a great chance to talk with the folks who do this for a living about what is actual and accurate and real and sort of how to think about it more smartly. And how to really include characters and stories that aren’t being told on the screen. So, enjoy this panel discussion. Craig and I will be back at the end of this for our credits. And if you’re a Premium member stick around because Craig and I are going to talk about the coronavirus. And Dr. Craig–

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** He will have it all covered and handled for you.

**Craig:** I’ve got it all.

**John:** All right. Enjoy.

Hello and good evening. It is so nice to be here with you all in this nice little intimate room. Tonight we are going to be talking about the criminal justice system. We’re going to be talking about the myths and realities of what the criminal justice entails. And we’re really going to be talking about biases. And so I want to start by talking about my own biases. I’m coming at this as a screenwriter. And so I’m looking at some of these issues from the perspective of what a writer, a filmmaker, someone in the medium might want to learn about when it comes to criminal justice, and so how we tell the stories accurately, how we tell them better, how we avoid some of the tropes and how we just do a better job writing about the criminal justice system.

But I’m also coming at this as a citizen and as a person who votes and as a person who picks people who make policies that really impact how we think about criminal justice. So, I really have two hats on my head, on my very bald head, as I look at these issues. And so I’m so lucky to have an amazing panel here and I’m going to ask maybe some really naïve questions, but I think questions that so often are not asked as we think about what criminal justice entails.

So, I’m going to start with you Aly. So Aly Tamboura is a manager in the criminal justice reform program at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative where he brings firsthand experience after spending a decade of his life incarcerated. Tamboura partners with formerly incarcerated leaders who are accelerating reforms, giving those who are closest to the problems a voice in reimagining a better criminal justice system. Welcome Aly.

**Aly Tamboura:** Thank you.

**John:** So a couple months ago I did a panel here for Hollywood Health and Society where we were talking about addiction and mental health and one of the things I really wanted to start with is that there are a whole bunch of terms we use related to addiction and mental health that are just inherently negative. That start from a judgmental basis. Like alcoholic or addict. And so when you start using those words you’re automatically coming in at a deficit.

And there’s words like that in relation to criminal justice as well, so before we start talking about anything else can you talk us through some of the words and some of the terms that we may be using that are really not helpful at all. And so can we start using some better words as we start this conversation. What are some words that you hear or terms that you hear that maybe we could just take off the table from the start?

**Aly:** I was going to say all of them.

**John:** All of them. All right.

**Aly:** so, I mean, when you think of things like ex-convict, prisoner, felon, ex-felon, parolee, those are all pejorative words meant to marginalize people. Right? I remember having this big argument when I first came home with my parole officer. You know, he’s calling me a parole and this and that. I said I’m not. And he’s like, yeah you are. I’m like I am not the worst mistake I ever made in my life and I will never, ever, ever accept anybody telling me that I’m the worst mistake I ever made in my life. Right? And I challenge the audience out here. Imagine the worst thing you’ve ever done in your life. And imagine if someone called you that for the rest of your life, in employment, in housing, in access to healthcare, everything. You walk in the door and that’s what they call you. And that’s what it feels like when I hear this language.

**John:** So, you started to explain why it’s a negative, but also what are words that we can use that are neutral, at least neutral, that actually acknowledge that you are a person and not the worst thing you’ve ever done.

**Aly:** Right, so instead of calling people prisoners or inmates, call them incarcerated people. I think if you keep the word people–

**John:** People or individuals.

**Aly:** Or individuals.

**John:** Acknowledging that they are human beings.

**Aly:** In this context, right, it not only helps the individual who may have transgressed on one of our social norms, but it also helps society as a whole to be able to accept those people back in our society.

**John:** You spent a decade of your life in prison.

**Aly:** 12 years, four months, 21 days.

**John:** All right. And so can you talk us through the reality of going from your normal life into a life as a person who is incarcerated. Talk to me about the degree to which you lose your individuality. Are there aspects of that process? Because I’ve seen this in movies before. I’ve seen a person enter prison. What aspects of that are accurate that I’ve seen in movies and TV shows? What aspects of that are not accurate in your experience?

**Aly:** Almost every aspect is not accurate. And I have to tell you when I – I never thought for a minute in my life that I’d end up incarcerated. But I had – all of my knowledge was from media on what prison, jail, the court system was like. And I’m going to say it starts in court. The idea that you have any control. You hire an attorney or one is appointed for you. They take your name. They give you a case number. You become a case number. And you become a spectator. Right? Very rarely and most of the times most people don’t get up and testify in their defense. So you’re just a spectator in this process.

And then once you get to prison then you really start getting stripped of your identity. You get a prison number. And that becomes who you are for the time of your incarceration. They take your clothing from you and mark you as a prisoner. You no longer can do the normal things that you did in life, like cook for yourself, or wash your clothes, or decide when you want to take a shower. So, you really start losing – you lose your individuality but you also lose your purpose, right.

You know, most people in here have a purpose. Get up, go to work, take care of your kids, take care of your family, go to school, whatever it is. In prison your purpose soon, like actually not – the day you arrive becomes survival. How am I going to make it through this? How am I going to make it back to my family? Then you add on top of that this just crushing oppression and isolation. You’re just ripped completely away from your social network and very, very small channels of communication. It’s why I love my job because we’re content on changing the system.

**John:** So we can all talk about the same terms, can you explain the difference between jail and prison, or sort of what kinds of incarceration are out there?

**Aly:** Sure. So jail in most jurisdictions means that you are a ward of the county. You are – it’s usually lower level offenses, so misdemeanors and some felonies that they call wobblers. Usually couldn’t spend more than a year in jail. In some jurisdictions that’s changed now though. And then if you have a sentence that’s more than a year then you become a state prisoner and you’re a ward of the state. If you’re in jail you get probation after jail. If you go to prison you get parole.

**John:** Thank you. Next I want to talk to Lovisa Stannow. She’s the executive director at Just Detention International. She’s also a trained rape crisis counselor and has written extensively about prisoner rape, including a series of high profile articles in the New York Review of Books. Previously Lovisa served as the executive director of the Pacific Institute for Women’s Health and the West Coast director of Doctors Without Borders. Welcome Lovisa.

**Lovisa Stannow:** Thank you.

**John:** So your organization works with jails and prisons in the US but also internationally. So I would love to get some perspective on what do you see internationally that’s the same or different than US prison and can you broaden this out to a global perspective here.

**Lovisa:** Absolutely. Thank you. So you’re right. A lot of my work is in the United States, but I also am spending quite a bit of time inside South African prisons and also doing work in places like Mexico and the Philippines, but also Canada and Europe. And there are prisons in the world that are logistically speaking a lot worse than US prisons in the sense that I have been inside facilities where half of the people don’t have beds, where they sleep on the floor. I have been inside facilities where the government agency that incarcerates people doesn’t supply food. So you rely completely on your family on the outside.

There are also prisons in for example Canada or parts of Northern Europe that are relatively healthy institutions in the sense that there’s much more of a focus on helping people heal from whatever trauma brought them to the prison in the first place. And that are really committed to making sure people never come back. And the US ends up somewhere in the middle there, but what’s important is that we should not think that we’re doing well here. And I think a lot of Americans believe that relatively speaking our prisons are OK and that’s just not the case.

You know, we incarcerate more people than anybody else in the world, both in terms of relative numbers and relatively speaking. And we keep people in prison for such a long time. People spend decades inside. They lose touch with their families. They are dehumanized at every turn, like we just heard. And in addition US prisons are suffering from an epidemic of rape and sexual abuse. So every single year in US detention 200,000 people are sexually abused. So that’s not the number of incidents. Most of these people are assaulted more than once. And that’s not good enough.

So, I think there are reasons for us to be ashamed and alarmed about our prisons.

**John:** Now we see portrayals in media of prison violence and sexual violence. Is it realistic or is it reinforcing that we see these portrayals? To what degree are the expectations being set by the media that we’re seeing? What are you seeing in terms of sexual violence in prisons?

**Lovisa:** The narratives that we see in most movies and television shows that touch on sexual abuse in prison are really misguided and dangerous and frankly inaccurate. Both in the way prisoners themselves, incarcerated people, are described and portrayed, but also the way the institutions themselves are shown.

So prisoners tend to be portrayed as somehow one-dimensional, casually cruel, less than human beings. And that’s so far from the truth. And the actual institutions are often portrayed as these inherently violent places where there’s no way we can keep people safe. And that’s also not true. And these false narratives have real life consequences. Because it means that we start to believe that prisoners are disposable. That it’s OK to ignore people who are incarcerated. That it’s OK to hate people who are incarcerated.

**John:** Zach I’m going to ask you the next question because you actually are making a show that is about an incarcerated person. Zach Calig is a writer-producer for the new ABC legal drama For Life, loosely based on the true story of Isaac Wright, Jr., it tells the story of a man who was wrongfully imprisoned but while incarcerated became a licensed attorney and helped overturn the wrongful convictions of 20 of his fellow inmates. Zach, welcome.

**Zach Calig:** Thank you.

**John:** Zach, now, I was reading up about the show and I was struck by this quote from Isaac Wright, Jr. who sort of inspired the show. “I think one of the things happens in the criminal justice system is that the prosecutor is able to control the narrative from the very, very beginning. The moment an arrest is made they put out a press release to the media and the media follows that narrative. They control the destiny of the person they’re going to be prosecuting.”

So you as writing on this show, you got to sort of set your own narrative for what this story was going to be about and what it was going to be like. What were your challenges and what did you see as the opportunities for setting the narrative for this person’s life?

**Zach:** Well, one of the opportunities that we were able to exploit was giving every single person that was incarcerated a full backstory. We were able to talk about their relationships, their loves, their children, their hopes and dreams and really humanize every single person, whether they were – I don’t want to say the word villain, but whether they were an antagonist to our main character, actually both in prison and even the prosecutors. We tried not to have full heroes or antagonists.

But we don’t have any control over how a prosecutor will present the case and probably will continue to be the same on their end, but we can on our end start to peel back the curtain and understand that it’s not black and white. That at least in Aaron’s case there was an eye witness line up that he will prove to be tainted. And so one of the reasons he was able to do this, like for example you’re called into an eye witness lineup and there’s me and four other people. You don’t recognize anyone. Two weeks later they say John we want you to come back in and you see me and four new people. And now suddenly I look familiar. And in that case Aaron, our protagonist who was based on Isaac’s life, is able to attack that and kind of set a precedent for his own case and free him.

Also, able to look at other issues in terms of like paid criminal informants and in one case of someone who is giving information to a DA in order to get a get-out-of-jail free card for himself. So, with humanizing everyone who is incarcerated on our show, whether they deserved to be in their prison or not, and peeling back the curtain on the prosecutor, we’re trying to paint a picture that there’s more than what meets the eye.

**John:** Well it sounds like, and we’ve all seen police lineups in TV shows. As long as I can remember I’ve seen that scene. But I’ve never seen it from that perspective. So you’re actually just taking a look at the same moments we would have seen in other shows but from a different perspective, from really looking at sort of what’s going on behind the scenes. There was a second one and so therefore that’s why that character is familiar again. So you’re questioning sort of how it actually really works. And was that research or how did you get to that?

**Zach:** Research. Well, I want to say in dramatizing how loaded some of these portrayals can be. But, yeah, that was research. We had an incredible staff. We had a writer who was a former CO. We had two attorneys, one of whom was a public defender and opened up three non-profits in criminal justice. We had a lot of writers, myself included, who had friends and family incarcerated. So everyone was able to bring these perspectives to the table to really put a vivid portrayal on a side of prison that we hadn’t seen. I am personally guilty of watching Oz when I was a teenager and enjoying it at the time, but I also understand that that’s problematic because it’s one side of prison. But it I would say by and large dehumanizes most of the people who are on the show.

**John:** No one comes off well on Oz. There are no heroes in Oz. Let’s get to Dan Birman. So Dan Birman is an award-winning producer and director. He’s spent six years producing and directing the documentary Me Facing Life, Cyntoia’s story, which follows 16-year-old Cyntoia Brown who received a life sentence for murder in Tennessee. He’s currently producing the second installment of Cyntoia’s story exploring juvenile justice issues and her fight for freedom, slated for release this spring on Netflix. So Dan, while Zach was talking about taking a real life person’s story as a jumping off place, you are talking about a real person who you met early on in this process. Can you catch us up to speed on like how you first got to know Cyntoia Brown? How you first got involved with this story? And what the change has been over the course of these years you’ve seen? How both she has changed but really it feels like some of our assumptions about criminal justice have changed over the course of the time you’ve been making this documentary.

**Dan Birman:** So about 2004 I decided to take on the task of understanding how juveniles can become violent. And so it was my job as a documentarian to figure out how to tell that story. We don’t get to write out the narrative. We actually have to go find it and bring it in. So I did a lot of research and found myself in Davidson County, the seat where Nashville is located. Gained the access to the juvenile justice system, to the public defender’s office, and over the course of a year between 2003 and 2004 somewhere in there Cyntoia Brown was arrested and I got a call from the public defender’s office saying I think we have a story for you. That’s after gaining a lot of access and trust.

And I found myself on a plane within three hours with a little camera in my hand. The next morning I was in Nashville at 6:30 in the morning and by 7:30 I was staring in the face of a young girl, 16 years old, who looked like anybody’s little girl, only knowing that she had done something pretty horrible. And so what I started doing is recording interviews with Cyntoia Brown and we had an agreement back in 2004 that nobody on earth is going to allow me to do the story I wanted to do over time, so I was just going to have to follow this story on my own.

And I decided to do that, as long as she agreed not to lie to me or send me down, manipulate my storytelling process that I would stay with this story as long as I needed to that. And that has been 16 years.

**John:** So over those 16 years in the little trailer we just saw we talk about how she was initially described as being a prostitute and now she’s described as a victim of sexual abuse. That does feel like a change that’s happened over the course of this time.

**Dan:** That’s an insightful – you’re going down an insightful path. Because first of all there are a lot of assumptions that go on in this system. And I started out as a – I’m a filmmaker. I’m a documentary producer. So, what I know about justice systems you could put on the head of a pin and still have room for an entire bowling alley. But what I went in with were my own assumptions. I started this story, to be quite frank with you, a very close personal friend of mine lost his mother because her granddaughter murdered her for drug money. And so I thought well that’s messed up. So, what do we do about that?

So my assumptions when I got the call, I said tell me Cyntoia. 16-year-old girl in the middle of prostitution, on drugs. Got picked up by a 43-year-old man who picked her up for sex. Things went from bad to worse and she murdered him. And so I thought to myself, and as I was flying to Nashville I thought Birman what the hell are you doing? I mean, this is stuff we read in the newspaper every day. Why are you going down this path?

And all of a sudden I found myself asking what the hell kind of question is that. She’s a 16-year-old girl. So at that time Cyntoia Brown was eviscerated by media. She was painted as someone who committed murder, a really bad thing to an upstanding citizen of the community, and whatever. So my initial assessment centered on the crime. And centered on a whole lot of factors that are our prejudices.

But what I found over time is it ain’t that simple. What took me seven years to put out the first film was to really peel back the layers of humanity in a human story, because Cyntoia Brown is a human. And the world that grew up in had a lot to do to shape her. Yes, she made a really bad decision on August 6, 2004. Really bad decision. But if we are busy not couching what people do with at least trying to shoot for some level of understanding, some level of perspective, then we’re missing it.

And the reason I think our film has been so successful and now we’ve got this new film that’s coming out, it’s a redo, it’s not an update, it’s a redo, is because I think we bothered to take a hard, hard, hard look at the humanity.

**John:** So in the Cyntoia Brown story it’s a murder that gets her caught up into the system, but that’s probably not – that’s not the reason why most people end up in the criminal justice system. Can we talk about the start of the process, like what it is that gets people involved in the criminal justice system and gets them into a situation where they may be incarcerated? What are the common reasons for which a person is arrested and how do arrests then lead to sort of the incarcerations that we’re seeing? Aly, what are you seeing as what are the common factors that are getting people into our jails and our prisons?

**Aly:** I don’t think that there’s any like we can just say these are the five factors because every person is different. You know, in my case lack of emotional intelligence, lack of impulse control, being raised in a hyper masculine environment. But there are – I think a big chunk we can codify and that’s lack of opportunity. When people are thriving in the world they’re not going to go out and commit a crime. You know?

And so I think if we have opportunity for that segment of society then we would be able to deal with the people who really need the help.

**John:** And what are the specific things that people tend to be arrested for? Because we know about like there’s the issue of like nonviolent drug offenses that are getting people into the system. But what are the things that you see in your time in jail and in prison that you saw as being reasons why people are caught up in this net? What are the specific incidents that tend to get people–?

**Aly:** A vast majority of the people are for drug sales or violence surrounding drug sales, or drug use. Then there’s a segment of people who have mental health issues and as a society we don’t know what to do with those people anymore. So, we send them to prison and jail. And then you have the people, the category that I put myself in, who were in a bad situation, emotionally-charged situation, and made a poor choice in that situation.

And I want to challenge you a little bit. I don’t think Cyntoia murdered her victim. I think she killed him, definitely. But the definition of murder, that premeditation, right – this little girl was being trafficked and made a poor decision but I don’t think – and I’m speculating – but I just don’t believe in my heart that she got up that morning and said, “I’m going to go kill someone in a hotel.” Right?

**Dan:** That’s correct.

**Aly:** And to me that’s the definition of murder.

**Dan:** That’s correct. She didn’t get up that morning and decide to go murder somebody, to kill somebody. I use the word murder for a very dramatic reason. And the reason I use the word murder is because that is a label that is put on someone who does kill somebody. She was convicted of murder. She went to prison. She became incarcerated for having convicted first degree murder. So I use the word for a little bit of dramatic effect.

It’s not perhaps the best word because I think we showed that there’s a much deeper story and as in fact Cyntoia Brown is walking, is a free person, today. Today. Because somebody stopped and bothered to look at a young woman in 360 degrees. But I want to just add one more thing to your question. In the year that Cyntoia was arrested 2.2 million children – children – were arrested for violent crime that year. That year. A third of them were girls. 98% of the girls who were arrested that year according to the Department of Justice, the data that I found, were also victims of sexual and physical abuse.

I think you can maybe – there are ways to categorize what are the crimes of the day but I think what we’re really looking at are the situations of the day. And I think what we miss as writers, as filmmakers, I’m a documentarian so I have to go for facts anyway, but is be able to find perspective because it’s not as sexy to find perspective.

**John:** So you’re saying that the – we might notice the arrest but the actual incidents that were leading up to that arrest happened way before that. And we’re outside of the control of—

**Dan:** It’s big. It’s way the hell big. And I will tell you that there were no lawyers who were ready to put in six years of their time to go find the birth mother, the adoptive mother, the maternal grandmother, and to understand their stories that led to three generations of violence that resulted in Cyntoia Brown. I don’t think the system knows how to do that.

**John:** Let’s talk about the process from the moment that a person is arrested and sort of portrayals we see in the media we tend to see it from the prosecutor’s point of view. We tend to see like, well, we’re trying to figure out who committed this crime. We found a person. This is the person who committed the crime and we’re going to convict this person and then credits roll and the thing is over. What are we missing from the other side of the story? What side are we not seeing? And Zach maybe you can speak to that just a little bit. What side are we not seeing of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of criminal justice systems?

**Zach:** Well, for the people that matter, the jury, they’re not seeing the human element. They’re not seeing the circumstances in which some of these crimes were committed. And they’re not seeing what goes on in the police department. They’re basically only seeing what the prosecutor wants them, especially if someone can’t afford a good attorney.

And the quality of attorney that one has kind of determines the narrative that’s going to be put out there. And when you said we don’t see other narratives, they just maybe think of Harvey Weinstein. Well, we see his narrative because he can afford the best attorney money can buy, and most people cannot.

**John:** Aly, when you see people who are caught up at the start of the criminal justice system, you see people who are arrested, do you have any sense of like what the percentage of people who are arrested or go to trial are going to be convicted? I’m guessing it’s quite high.

**Aly:** Yes. So, in America, and this is just a shocking statistic, if a prosecutor charges you with a felony you have a 97% chance of being found guilty, whether you’re innocent of the crime or not. And I want to highlight something about the prosecutor narrative. Prosecutors have a very, very, very difficult job. And I argue that they’re also system-impacted. They see the worst of humanity every day. They work in an antiquated system, with very, very little to no technology. They read a police report and literally in a manner of minutes, most times less than an hour, make a charging decision that is going to affect the offender, affect the victim, affect the community, affect tax payers. And, yeah, I’m proud to say one of the things that we are doing at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is working with prosecutors, helping them use data and technology and get better at making more informed decisions that have better outcomes for everybody.

**John:** So when a person is arrested you would like the prosecutor to say not only how good of a case can I make but I really first ask is this person the actual person who committed the crime. Is this person the guilty person? And what is actually the appropriate response for what’s happened there. Those are two things or what else am I missing?

**Aly:** Well, I think, I mean, it’s more nuanced than that. But I think one of the things is we have this adversarial system, right? What a police officer writes in a police report is held as gospel. And once a person goes in you really, really have very, very little control of, like Zach said, unless you can hire an expensive attorney you are literally a spectator.

And it’s even worse if you can’t afford bail. Because you can’t even assist your attorney in your defense because you’re in jail.

**John:** Talk to us about bail. Because that’s a system that I don’t really understand. And how does bail come about? What is the decision about who gets bail, who does not get bail? And what is a person expected to be able to put up for bail, because I know bail bondsmen and all sorts of stuff. I’m sure it’s different state by state. But what are some useful things that writers and filmmakers can understand about how bail works if a person is arrested?

**Aly:** So, supposedly you’re innocent until proven guilty and bail is a way to get people to show up to court. So if you have some skin in the game, right, if you’re accused of a crime and there is a bail scheduled for offenses in every jurisdiction or every geography they say, OK, you stole a car, your bail is $50,000. Usually people don’t have $50,000 so what they do is they pay a bail bondsman 10%. The bail bondsman—

**John:** So they would have to pay $5,000 and the bail bondsman would basically do an insurance policy on them.

**Aly:** Exactly. And that’s funny because the insurance industry underwrites most of the bail bondsman and they take that 5% as a fee, or 10%. It really depends on the bail bondsman. But anywhere from 5% to 10%.

**John:** It’s basically a tax on that person for having been arrested.

**Aly:** Right. And so what happens is if you’re wealthy you can post the whole bail and after you get out of trial you get your money back, or you can leverage your real estate. But if you’re poor you’re stuck in jail. And you’re stuck in jail, this is pre-trial, you’re not proven guilty. So you’re already incarcerated and the issue with that is people that are poor you lose your job, you lose your house. It’s just a cascade that goes downhill.

And then it also forces you into a lot of times prosecutors if you’re sitting in jail four, five, six, seven, eight days they’ll come up and say, oh well, take a plea deal, I’ll let you out today. And people plea out sometimes think [they knew].

**John:** Now, Lovisa, if a person is sitting in jail during this time they’re unable to make bail, what are the range of things they could see in jail? Because I’m guessing that jail is not a place that anyone ever wants to be. But in your experience dealing with jails because I know you were consulting with like Aspen jail, but also there’s I’m sure worse jails than the Aspen jail. What does one encounter in jails?

**Lovisa:** Well, one of the biggest jails in the world is just minutes away from here which is the Men’s Central Jail, Downtown Los Angeles. And jails tend to be pretty terrible places. Partly because people are supposed to be there for only short periods of time, either waiting trial or as Aly already said spending maybe up to a year if they get a short sentence. And that means that there’s even less programming. There’s even less attention being paid to why people ended up there in the first place. There are so few services in a jail to actually help all these women who arrive because they have endured horrible trauma previously in life, or men who have endured trauma.

So, jails tend to be really chaotic places. And violent places. Both in terms of physical violence in general, but also sexual abuse.

**John:** So obviously we’re focused on the media narratives here, but let’s just a step at the process here. What are some things that could be done to fix this part of the early process? So from arrest to trial, what things would you here on the stage like to see done? So I hear things about cash bail reform or the end of cash bail. Can someone explain what that actually means because I don’t want to explain it wrong?

**Zach:** One of the writers on our show created a nonprofit, one of the attorneys, called the Bail Project. And the idea behind bail was that if someone who has gone through a trial has skin in the game than they will post a bond and be able to return to collect that money. And what this organization did is it paid bail for people who cannot afford it, predominately people in lower income communities, and they found that 96% of their clients came back. And it kind of blew away the notion that people need skin in the game to even consider coming back to their trial. And now they’re in 20 cities across America and that’s one of the things that they’re pushing for and collecting the data to kind of dispel this myth that we have.

**John:** Dan, Cyntoia was a teenager, so what did you see in terms of a teenager entering the jail system? What do we do with juveniles who are caught up in that system? What are the right choices? Putting you on the spot to fix juvenile detention.

**Dan:** I think the hard work of understanding of what a juvenile’s process should be centers on a lot of factors. One is where did they come from. What situations are they in? But you know the system is not designed, it’s not intended to understand the circumstances. It’s not intended at all.

Look, I think in television and film it’s easy to vilify everybody. It’s easy to vilify the prosecutor. It’s easy to vilify the cops. It’s easy to vilify everybody associated with the system. But everybody comes at this with pieces of information, pieces of destiny, what they’re supposed to do. And I think that for the – I’ll never forget that the sheriff of Davidson County asked to take a look at the fine cut of our first documentary before we released it. And he said, “Oh my god, we missed this one.” And I said, you know, I’m not sure you could have seen it.

I mean, these are people who are overworked, overwhelmed by a lot – a lot – a lot of people coming into their system. And Cyntoia Brown was just one of them, one of many that day. How do you stop and go take a look at what their environment was like?

**John:** But I would challenge that as storytellers we have the opportunity to put – to make a character out of one of those prosecutors and let that person realize that there’s actually more to the story. And actually let that person be a heroic person, to actually step beyond their job to actually realize what’s going on there and how to sort of best—

**Dan:** I got to tell you, these are great characters. I mean, Jeff Burks, who was the prosecutor in Cyntoia’s case, was a hardworking guy, a thinking guy. He’s also an animated guy. And he’s a guy who has got a great theatrical presence. For anybody who is writing a story, if you were to watch Jeff Burks in action you’d go, oh my god, I want to write about that guy. And if you look at each of the people involved, the police officers, the detectives involved, they all have that presence. Again, the hard work for us as the filmmakers, as the writers, as the producers, you know, for me the documentary guy, is to take a much harder look, a much closer look at what makes those characters tick.

That’s the fun stuff. Because you could take it from the surface, we’ll see a prosecutor who is doing his job. But if we dig a little deeper we’ll find something more.

**John:** This person we’re talking about is now incarcerated. This person is going into a prison situation. Can we talk about the depictions of entering prison versus what reality is? Because I feel like I’ve seen the scene where the character goes to prison a zillion times. And I don’t know how much of any of that is accurate. Aly, can you talk us through some of the things you see in media about entering prison and what myths you’d like to see dispelled?

**Aly:** You know, you always see the guy walking – or gal – walking with—

**John:** The folded clothes?

**Aly:** The folded clothes. You got your sheet. Your towel. And your socks and underwear. And then there’s a bunch of people catcalling. And I’m just like, oh no, oh god, this is just not how it works. In reality how it works, I mean, it’s a very, very spirt-breaking process. You’re taken from the county jail to what they call a reception center.

**John:** Which is not the prison itself or sort of outside?

**Aly:** So they are prisons. I think in California we have four reception centers. So depending on what geography—

**John:** It sounds so nice.

**Aly:** Well, no, they send you there and you’re put directly in isolation. So, there is no contact with family members. I spent 101 days in isolation in a prison called [Delano]. I had no paper, no pen, no pencil, no phone calls.

**John:** And is the stated purpose behind this for safety and protection?

**Aly:** No. It’s an assessment time. So, you get medically screened. You get screened for education. Then you go in and you go to an actual hearing and they decide your custody level. Then you get shipped to one of California’s 36 prisons, the main prisons. And then in California you have Death Row, which is the highest custody level. And then it goes level four down to level one. And the way – usually you can earn your way down, so the idea is by the time you’re getting ready to go home you’re in a minimum security facility.

Some people depending on their score never reach like a Corcoran Level IV or like Pelican Bay. And there’s a total different type of violence that happens there. It’s very extreme. But it’s not the whistling catcalls that you see in movies, on cinema.

**John:** Lovisa, this last week a big Hollywood person, Harvey Weinstein, got sentenced to prison. We were talking beforehand that you were expecting there to be a whole bunch of like Harvey Weinstein rape jokes and they did not come. Is that progress? Is that good news that it wasn’t the first thing Twitter jokesters went to?

**Lovisa:** I hope it’s progress. I hope we won’t find that there is a bunch of jokes happening tomorrow about Harvey Weinstein. But one of the things that really filled me with dread was once the conviction hit the news we learned that his lawyer had said he “took it like a man.” And I just thought, oh no, now we’re going to get all the jokes. All the don’t drop the soap jokes.

But to my great surprise it didn’t really happen. There were some sort of minor tweets that were just tasteless, but there was also some strong pushback from higher profile media folks. And I’d like to hope that that means we’ve turned some kind of corner, because I think that the sort of flippant treatment of rape in detention is really one of the – it’s a really dangerous trope. And it’s one of the biggest problems with Hollywood’s approach to criminal justice.

**John:** You talk about detention and detention, you know, in the US I think we think about criminal justice as keeping those people outside of society. And other countries may think about it more as rehabilitation and pushing people, you know, getting people the skills they need so they can function back in society. Can you talk us through some of the different approaches that other countries, or sort of more positive approaches other countries might take to this person who was convicted of a crime and is now incarcerated? What are some things that we might see that are different in other countries?

**Lovisa:** In healthier prisons those who are incarcerated are allowed to live somewhat normal lives. They get to still have some control over their lives. Whether it’s just that they’re allowed to wash their own clothes or cook their own food, which doesn’t necessarily seem like a privilege to those of us on the outside, but that’s hugely important to actually – especially for people who arrive with profound trauma in their past, who may never have lived a mainstream life. They have a chance to learn basic skills that are essential upon release.

And so those are really important basic, basic programs that we are typically lacking in the US.

**John:** Zach on your show your central character gets his law degree while incarcerated?

**Zach:** In our show he gets his law degree while in custody. It made it simple for the audience to understand that he’s an attorney. In reality he got his law degree after, but he did everything that we’re portraying as a paralegal in prison.

**John:** I would say as a screenwriter that he was able to build a sense of purpose and autonomy for himself in doing the work for other people who were incarcerated. And the education that he’s getting, the education he’s able to get is what allows him to feel like not just a number, but actually a person with value. Was that a goal of the show?

**Zach:** It’s interesting you say that because he’s actually not this altruistic do-gooder at the top. He’s really taking cases at the beginning of the season specifically to knock down the pillars of his own case and get himself a new trial. Obviously because it’s Hollywood and it’s television we may see this character evolve and start to do something for someone else without personal benefit. But we also go in – I mean, he starts out an attorney in the pilot, but we do have a flashback episode so we can understand how he got to where he is and we see him arriving in prison. We skipped through a lot of the areas where he’s not interacting with other people. But we see him kind of acclimate to this culture and decide to find purpose in the law. And at first, yes, it’s a selfish-driven purpose, but it does give him purpose. And ultimately he’ll find value in helping other people.

**John:** And Dan I haven’t seen your movie yet, but I want to know to what degree—

**Dan:** April 30.

**John:** April 30. To what degree is Cyntoia able to grow into being a woman over the course of her time in prison?

**Dan:** Watching Cyntoia over the 15 years that I watched her I was amazed. Here is a young woman who walked in with a whole lot of issues going on for her. She’s staring at a life in prison that she might not walk out of. And yet she bothers to take advantage of everything that the prison has to offer in this case and she got an education, one course at a time. She graduated while in prison with an Associate’s Degree. Then she worked her way toward a Bachelor’s Degree. She worked on a whole mechanism for helping kids keep them from going down the same path that she went and helped them out of trouble. When they see themselves getting into trouble before they get into trouble.

So, you know, I’m watching her grow up through this entire time so the transition for her walking out of incarceration and back into a life means the continuation of a process that she’s been doing. It’s not an on/off switch. She’s not all of a sudden a new person. She’s a developing person.

And even, you know, stop and think about it, too, and I think something that we had to wrap our heads around is that even the Supreme Court recognizes that kids who are incarcerated are starting out with [squirrely] brain syndrome and at some point they grow up and mature and they become something different. They evolve.

**John:** Now, part of – ideally the end of an incarceration comes at parole or there’s some sort of hearing, there’s an assessment. I’ve seen, again, I’ve seen that scene in movies and I don’t know if anything I’ve seen in movies is accurate. Aly, can you talk us through what the end of incarceration looks like and what a parole hearing, or how that actually happens in real life?

**Aly:** It really depends on your sentence. So there’s two different types of sentences in California. And actually across, more than two. Because you can get the death penalty. But the basic two are determinate and indeterminate sentences. So in indeterminate, for instance, if you’re sentenced in California to 25 years to life, after the 25 years you go in front of a parole board and they assess your behavior in prison, your growth, your ability to articulate how you were able to commit a crime. And they make a decision and you’re either released or you go back to prison and they give you some recommendations and you come back later.

Then there’s determinate sentences. Determinate sentences you’re just sentenced to five years. And when you’re done you get out and you’re on parole for usually three years.

**John:** And so in a determinate sentence could you be released earlier on good behavior? Could there be other circumstances which get you out in less time than that?

**Aly:** So in California there’s three tiers of credits that you can earn. So most everybody can get out a little bit early. If you’re a violent offender you’re going to do 85% of your law under the truth and sentencing law. If you’re a drug offender you do about 50% of your time. If you’re a very, very low level offender you can actually get out in a third of your time and those are the men and women that you see that are out fighting fires in California. They earn a lot more credits.

**John:** How do we feel about that? I don’t know how to feel about that. That actually was a topic we brought up on Scriptnotes was about these people who are fighting fires on California’s behalf. And you can see that as an inspiring story of these people who are getting a chance to sort of do stuff, but you can also see it as they are kind of incarcerated labor and it’s very dangerous. So, I don’t know how to feel about that all.

**Aly:** Slavery is still legal in prison. The 13th amendment abolished slavery everywhere but in prison. I mean, I worked for $0.09 an hour when I was in prison. I think there’s a way to do it right. I just think we’re doing it wrong right now. I think – I actually went to Norway and Finland and one of the people in our delegation was an assemblyman here in California. And I talked to him about these men and women are going out there, risking their lives for I think they get a dollar a day and I think it’s $5 a day if they’re fighting a fire. And then to come home to have fines and fees, right? What do you mean? I just risked my life, saved millions, and maybe billions of dollars of property and I still owe $20,000 for my fines and fees. So I think that should be eliminated.

I think that they should be compensated decently. And third I think they should be eligible to work as firefighters post incarceration.

**Lovisa:** Can I add something there?

**John:** Please.

**Lovisa:** Is that there are other prison jobs that are quite invisible to the outside world. And that I think most Americans are completely unaware that for example there are major sweatshops inside prisons. There are – when you buy your next t-shirt that says Made in the USA, chances are it was actually made in a prison and then it was sent out to some other place that just applied the logo. There are government agencies that use prisoners to answer their phones. So next time you throw a fit because someone can’t help you, you might be talking to a prisoner who has no power and who is making I think now it’s probably $0.11 an hour. So it’s just important to have an awareness of that.

**John:** And what are ways people who are incarcerated at this moment could get some skills for work, for instance I really want to transition to what is life like after prison. And so how do you find a person who has been incarcerated who is then out in the world, what are the good outcomes? What are the success stories? What are paths that could sort of get somebody to not be caught back up in the system again?

**Aly:** You know, there’s 70 to 100 million people in the United States who have a criminal conviction. So there’s a lot of success stories out there. We just don’t highlight them. We always go to the parolee that did something wrong. But I think—

**John:** And terms like ex-convict doesn’t help.

**Aly:** It doesn’t help. Could you imagine if I went and applied for my job and I said, hey, I’m an ex-convict, want to hire me? Right? It just doesn’t work. But getting back to your question, I believe that our elected and our carceral system has a duty to make sure people leaving the system don’t go back and revictimize communities. And until—

**John:** So it’s a duty both to the person who is leaving the system so they’re actually ready to function, but also to society.

**Aly:** Right. I mean, and I believe in personal responsibility and taking advantage, like you were saying Cyntoia taking advantage of all the educational opportunities. But if you don’t have those educational opportunities and you’re locked up in a concrete steel box for decades and then they push you out – in California they give you $200 – with no skills, very low education, what are you going to do?

And so I think there’s a lot of programs. I learned to write computer code. And I can tell you I wouldn’t have the job today. I don’t write code anymore, but I learned how to write computer code. There was a program called The Last Mile. I get to fund them now which is awesome. Right? And it’s this sort of crazy turn of events. They’re in six states and 13 prisons. And so when I came home I had these skills, these marketable skills. Like software engineers are in high demand. And I don’t know if you’ve ever been on a floor of an engineering group, but people with red hair and tattoos on their faces. They don’t care. If you can write the code – if you can build it they’ll hire you.

And so I think really starting to think about what – and skills that pay a living wage. What the carceral – public/private partnerships in the carceral setting can do to offer opportunities to our folks when they’re coming home.

**John:** Dan, we’re going to lose you in a couple minutes because I know you have to catch a flight, but I want to talk about sort of Cyntoia Brown- and a little spoiler – like post-prison. We will watch your movie so we will see what happened. But did she feel like she was ready for life outside of this? Because she had spent half of her life—

**Dan:** Well, she spent 15 years incarcerated. And as I said she did take advantage of programs and people who were in contact with her to help her just kind of readjust her thinking and her approach and who she was. And to rethink who she was. I don’t know how somebody, I don’t know where that turn happens because I’m neither a psychologist nor have I lived with incarceration. But I can tell you what I observed. And what I observed was a young woman going through stages. Denial at first, I’m going to walk out of here. When I first interviewed her she was sure that within a few weeks this was all just going to be done and she was going to walk out of the jail and back into her life. She was sure of that. And then there was a point in which, oh my god, the likelihood is that I’m going to spend the rest of my life in prison. And that is my destiny.

And there was a bit of a resignation. But then when she actually went from jail to the Tennessee Prison for Women and she started working on things, by having at least a program. And I’m not going to sit here and say that Tennessee Prison for Women is the most progressive prison in the world. It is not for a whole lot of reasons. But they are also taking progressive steps to allow an education program. That’s big. So for her whether she was going to walk out or not, she at least had some hope. There was something called hope in there. So even if there’s a little flicker of that, she gets to develop as a person while she’s going through the maturation process. And through an education process. And it kind of works out so that when she walks out she has written a book. She started writing that before she got out. She’s giving talks. She’s helping legislators. Tennessee is taking some very progressive steps which is amazing to see. They’re learning from it, too.

**John:** Great. Well it sounds like what you’re describing is we think about the criminal justice system as sort of extinguishing hope and you’re stressing that we have to make sure that we are igniting hope in people who are incarcerated. That society wants them back and that there is going to be a place for them and that they are meaningful and valuable people.

**Dan:** I suspect there’s a place called balance where we might see situations treated differently so that hope becomes the goal as opposed to punishment as the goal. Look, people do bad things. There’s no question about it. I’m sure that for Johnny Allen, his family was certainly not very sympathetic to whatever Cyntoia Brown went through. She couldn’t turn that around. It was impossible for her to turn that situation around. However, do we throw away a person, do we throw away a human, without at least considering alternatives? And I have a flight to catch.

**John:** We’re going to open it up to questions. Dan, thank you very much.

**Dan:** Thanks.

**John:** All right. We have time for some questions now. So we have people with microphones. And so raise your hand and we will get somebody with a microphone to you so you can ask your question of the panel.

**Female Audience Member:** Hi, my name is Angelica. I’m from the south, so I’ve been deep, deep in the south and seen some of the horrendous conditions that have been in the prisons, like Parchman in Mississippi. If you haven’t heard of what’s happening there you should look it up. So I have kind of two questions for Aly and Lovisa. I wanted to know have you all explored any alternatives to justice like restorative justice or prison abolition. What do those concepts look like for you and how they work in the real world? And for Zach, mass incarceration has a lot of racial and socioeconomic disparities, and how have you approached those in writing, producing, research on the show?

**John:** Angelica, you have totally a job as a moderator. Those were great questions. So I want to start with alternatives to traditional criminal justice. Aly, do you want to start?

**Aly:** So, in my personal capacity, absolutely right. I try to bring those voices into our foundation. But our foundation, like we can only do so much. So right now we’re really focused on two areas. And that’s the funnel of people coming in to the criminal justice system. So really transforming the way we prosecute this country, so we’re putting people in prison for less time and having alternatives to prison. Because prosecutors really right now only have one lever and that’s like incarceration with fines and fees.

And then than the tail end is really expanding opportunities to formerly incarcerated people. Really making sure they have the opportunities in their life to thrive post-incarceration.

**John:** Lovisa, do you have any thoughts on alternatives to prisons or things you’ve seen that we should be considering?

**Lovisa:** I think it’s pretty clear that we are incarcerating people at a crazy level in this country. And that it’s not a fair system at all. One of the questions you asked early on John was what are some of things that make people end up in prison. And of course the answer to that is quite complicated, because it depends on what you look like and who you are. Because the kinds of things that if we all committed the same crime in this room we would be – some would be much more likely to be arrested than others and convicted and get very long sentences and be denied parole. There’s just incredible racism and classism in the system.

So, if we started addressing those really fundamental issues then I think our incarceration rates would become a little bit more normal as they relate to the world, because incarcerate six, seven times more people than Canada. Why?

**John:** And Zach, let’s talk about the racial component of disparities in criminal justice and sort of in the show how do you address and how do you look at that?

**Zach:** You absolutely have to address it doing any sort of show in prison now. The last I read the statistic being that African Americans make up 13% of the US population but nearly a third of inmates in prison. And Latinos under 15% but almost a quarter of inmates in prison. And so we’re very conscious of that. We don’t shy away from it. But we don’t try to lean in too hard to recreate that narrative, if you know what I mean. We also had a very diverse room of storytellers to make sure we did include everyone’s perspectives and that was very important to us.

And in terms of looking at mass incarceration I think one of the things that our show does very well is it looks at the collateral damage as well. And it’s not a show just about Aaron behind bars in [Bellmore], it’s a show about Aaron Wallace and his family and what it did to his daughter who was raised without a father at home. And what it did to his wife and their relationship. And what it does to the families of not just Aaron but all these secondary characters in our show, too. And that’s in my opinion the beauty of our show and the comment that that makes on mass incarceration.

**John:** Yes?

**Female Audience Member:** I’m currently doing work in bail reform in California, working in partnership with the LA Superior Court, and LA County Probation. And with the SB-10 and bail reform in California, you know that the process under SB-10 would require the use of risk assessment tools as an alternative to having cash as a way for a person to be released. And I just wanted to know what the thoughts are on the use of risk assessment tools in determining whether or not a person should be released.

**John:** And just, because I don’t know, SB-10 is a state law—

**Aly:** It’s a bail reform law that’s trying to essentially eliminate cash bail. There are some places that have done it way better than California. There’s a lot of issues with SB-10 and to answer your question we’re a tech-based philanthropy so we build tools for nonprofits. So that’s how I came into this work, as a software engineer. There are some really, really tough things that we have to consider when we start using technology to determine the destiny of people’s lives.

And so we don’t take that lightly. I think – there’s no like one answer for that. A lot of the risk assessment tools or the data that they put in them are already biased. So, you can create something that has the bias that’s in the data. So, it’s a tough thing that smarter people than me are working on.

**John:** Another question.

**Male Audience Member:** Hi, so another group that’s often treated in dramatizations of anything that has to do with prison reform and in a sort of caricature way are the guards. And I’m wondering if you could talk for a second about the psychology of and experience of and bureaucracy of the guards?

**John:** I can talk about sort of the stereotypes I see of guards. And then I would love to hear some reality checking on this. Is that I always see the burly, under-educated, hot-headed prison guard who is abusive and sort of a know-nothing. And I’ve rarely seen a positive portrayal of a guard in prison. What are some realities? I’m sure there’s a whole range of sort of what these people are like, what people who do that job are like. What are things that we’re missing? What are stories that we’re not seeing about people who are guards in prisons?

**Aly:** I think the portrayal of guards, you know, there are those type of people. But there’s also some very, very empathetic – I’m reluctant to tell this story, but you know I had the flu before I came home and I really thought I was going to die. You know, you go through the stages where you think you’re going to die, then you want to die, right, as an adult with the flu. And this prison guard bought medicine from Walgreens or something out there and risked his job and brought it in and gave it to me. And so, you know, I think they’re human beings just like anybody else. They get a bit jaded and get calloused from being in a job. But like I have a great relationship with the California Department of Corrections.

And I don’t have Stockholm Syndrome. I think if we’re going to improve the system we need to improve their lives also. And get some trauma-informed care for them also.

**John:** Lovisa, I’m guessing training is an important thing for prison guards?

**Lovisa:** Yeah, and I just want to agree with what you were saying which is that there’s a full spectrum of people in the corrections profession. And some are definitely drawn to prison jobs because they like hard power. And for example when you talk about sexual abuse in detention, half of all sexual abuse in detention – you wouldn’t know this through Hollywood – but is actually perpetrated by prison officials. And half is among incarcerated people. So there definitely are guards who are in the job for all the wrong reasons.

But also many who come to the profession because they care and they want to make things better. They don’t always succeed because these are really toxic environments. And some people also get destroyed in these jobs. And it’s something that we see very clearly that former corrections officials upon retirement, they tend to retire early, and they usually have very poor outcomes in retirement.

**John:** Zach, as you were looking at prison guards in your show what were some of the expectations and how did you try to push against them?

**Zach:** So it’s interesting. We originally characterized one prison guard and he was kind of like this tough, burly – I mean, if you watch the pilot you can tell he’s an emotionally abusive guard. And one of the things we were able to do in the season is dive into this person’s depression. And I won’t give anything away but we do look at his home life. And we do look at the trauma that he has suffered from spending so long here. And this is a person who actually went into the profession because his father was in the profession, and that’s very common as well.

And I will say, funny enough, we had a wall in the writers room of all of our guards, because we would just script like guard number two, guard number three, and then we started over the season to like ascribe character traits of these guards. And then we would find situations where certain guards could display moments of kindness and allow Aaron to hug his daughter while he showed up early to court and his daughter wanted to watch him. Or allow Aaron to touch his father when his father came to visit him for his character and fitness hearing. And they’re not supposed to do that, but sometimes we characterized them in really small moments that humanized them. And it would be nice to get into the guards more in future seasons.

**John:** So you’re recognizing them as individuals and not just one monolithic force that everyone who wears that uniform is the same.

**Zach:** Is not monolithic. And we’ll differentiate them and figure out who is going to do what and who has what characteristics.

**John:** Great. A question was right over here. Hi.

**Female Audience Member:** We’ve talked a lot about humanizing them when they’re in prison, but I’d like to know what your experiences are as far as humanizing them before they enter the prison system. And I know that that’s very, very complex what leads these people to prison, but there’s so many traumas, so many experiences like Cyntoia Brown was sexually assaulted. They never questioned her psychological state of mind. The fact that she herself was a victim before she committed the act that she committed. And I don’t know if you guys have exposure to organizations that are working on that, but sort of what the preventative measures are, if any at all, within the community, within societies to prevent them from even being convicted at all. That’s my question. I know it’s a little complicated.

**John:** Aly, you started talking about this and we sort of moved on early in the process, but you were saying it does start well before any interaction with law enforcement. That there’s something that has happened here.

**Aly:** I think as a society we really have to start looking at the history of racism and the use of the carceral system as a social control mechanism. But I really think like I said in the beginning that if we offer more opportunities to people they’re not going to end up in our prison jails. And then I’ll answer your question. There are some organizations like Debug who is doing participatory defense, where your family and everybody gets involved in your defense. There’s an organization called Root and Rebound who is growing into – I think they’re like in seven or eight states now. So there are organizations that are trying to help people on the front end to really, really have a robust defense that brings in some of these things, so the judges and the DAs can hear them.

But one of the problems is that our criminal legal system is not built to allow that information to come in. A lot of the times they’ll just say it’s irrelevant, it doesn’t have anything to do with what happened with the crime, therefore depending on the judge they’re not going to let that kind of data come in.

**Lovisa:** Can I add something? I think trauma is a bit of a blind spot in society generally. And especially inside prisons. That if you look at the pathways of women entering prison it’s not just juveniles, but adult women as well, or the vast majority, maybe 90% of women in prison are sexual abuse survivors from prior to their detention. So these are extreme numbers. And their trauma has tended to be ignored before they were detained and then it continues to be ignored inside because trauma doesn’t count as a mental illness. It’s not something that there are services for in detention. So people are then sitting in detention for years or decades with this untreated trauma. And then they’re released. And they may be getting some help to find a job, or find somewhere to live, but if they still get no support to deal with their trauma they won’t succeed.

**Male Audience Member:** One of the things I feel like in this conversation that we miss is the economic incentive to incarcerate. And so the economic incentive to incarcerate and the incarceration test system is literally designed to prioritize the incarceration of black and brown folks. And so like the residual spillover of that, you know, infects our systems. So, kind of going to the question earlier about guards, I used to be a prison guard for almost four or five years. With those who are incarcerated as well as those who are the jailers, most of those folks are coming from communities that are decimated by poverty. And so you have the incarcerated who more often than not, especially with the majority of people who are incarcerated being locked up for drug crimes, which has its own rich history on why that happens, are in there because they didn’t have the resources to be able to survive and thrive.

Then you have folks who are looking for employment in order to survive in their communities and they’re taking on jobs with little to no post high school education to go in and work in these systems. So, one of the things I’m really curious about your thoughts on is how do we talk about the intersection of race and how it functions with economic incentives to incarcerate black and brown folks in this country?

**Aly:** You know, there’s this wonderful woman, her name is Bianca [Tyler], she puts out this report every year about the prison industrial complex and who is profiteering off of it and how that keeps driving incarceration. We have private prisons who lobby for tough on crime laws. We have guard unions who lobby for tough on crime laws. So, there’s a lot of work to be done in this area. I’m fortunate that I work with a lot of really, really smart people. And there’s other foundations and lots of nonprofits that are chipping away on all of these little aspects.

But it’s going to take – it took us 400 years to get here. It’s going to take us some time to get back. But really recognizing the racial part of it is part of it. And coming to Jesus. Like, you know, we built this system that is biased and we need to deconstruct it.

**John:** A question, are you a writer?

**Zach:** Lee was a writer on our show, I just might say.

**John:** Because I was going to say like well it sounds like you should write about that. Because I think – here’s what I’m hearing and what you’re saying. You’re talking about the intersection of the people who are on either side of those bars have similar stories and that is fascinating and the degree to which this whole system – everyone is caught up in the same system. That is a really great, strong narrative cinematic element. So, I would just encourage you to write on that.

I want to make sure that as part of this panel, and this will also go out on Scriptnotes, is that we as storytellers are not complicit in sort of perpetuating these myths and that we do rise to the challenge of actually talking about these things honestly and making sure we’re exploring what’s really going on. So, thank you for sharing that.

In that spirit, I don’t think we have any time for more questions, but I did want one last little segment here which is a thing I did for the addiction and mental health panel which is called Please Stop. Which is the things people up here see on a repeated basis in film and television and media that is just wrong or not helpful when it comes to criminal justice. Lovisa, I know you had some recommendations for Please Stop. So what are some things you hope to never see again onscreen?

**Lovisa:** I would hope to never see a “don’t drop the soap” joke again, ever. And also to never see one of these flippant taunts in police shows where cops who are portrayed as the good guys are telling the bad guys essentially do what we want because otherwise you will go to prison and get raped, but they say it differently.

**John:** Yes. Zach, what would you like to stop?

**Zach:** Stop creating as a writer’s perspective one-note characters where people are entirely good or entirely evil. And Lee was mentioning the prosecutors, we talked about the prosecutors before, we go to great lengths to characterize the people who put Aaron away and they legitimately believe that he is guilty. They legitimately believe they’re doing the right thing. They may have cut some corners we’ll come to learn through the season. One of them may know, one of them may not. And they’ll have some in-fighting with each other. But both of these people are men who believe they were doing the right thing.

And I think if one were to characterize him as a Klansman it would not do justice to the system and it would not be accurate to the reason why he gets a report on his desk and says, you know what, this is a good case, I’m going to put this person away.

**John:** If that person were thoroughly evil and a villain then we wouldn’t see any of ourselves in him and we wouldn’t recognize our own complicity in those types of decisions.

**Zach:** And we wouldn’t know how we can improve the system and do it differently.

**John:** Aly? What things don’t you want to see out there?

**Aly:** You know, I was at LAX when I was coming here and I saw this kid throw himself on the floor and just do this tantrum. And his mother gave him what he wanted. And I said, damn, that’s a learning experience for me. So for me, even up on this stage, I heard like Zach saying [inmate], it just kills me to hear people categorized by these words that we use. And so if you as writers can start using people, like instead of calling someone a felon you can say a person convicted of a felony. Right? Because if we keep the word person in there, right, employers and people out in the community, when we come home we have a chance if they see us as humans.

**John:** And I’m actually going to break the rules and give sort of a One Cool Thing instead. Because it actually ties in very well to this. It’s a great charity called Manifest Works. It’s an organization that is right here in Los Angeles and it pairs formerly incarcerated people and gets them trained for jobs in the industry for film and television which is exactly sort of what we need to do. So Manifest Works and we’ll have a link to that in the show notes for this episode.

I want to thank our amazing panelist. I want to thank Hollywood Health and Society for putting this together. Thank you all very, very much.

And that’s our show. So as always Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Seth Podowitz. 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.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the link to the video for this panel. You’ll find transcripts there. They go up about a week after the episode airs. You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you can get all the back episodes and bonus segments like our upcoming discussion on coronavirus. Craig, thanks.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Craig, so how freaked out should I be about coronavirus? Now, to stipulate we are recording this on Thursday morning, so who knows what the world is like on Tuesday as this episode drops.

**Craig:** Right. I mean, it could all be over by then. Look, I think everybody should be concerned about it. We are definitely experiencing a panic right now in no small part because the disease vector started in China. China is not an open nation. They are not known for freedom of speech or press. The government has done a very Chernobyl-esque job of saying things out loud that they prefer to be true instead of were true. No one quite knows. Even the statistics we’re getting now are confusing. Based on some reports it’s already starting to kind of Peter out slightly. But we also know that it is vectoring its way across the Middle East and Europe and the rest of Asia. And we do have our first case of what they would call community infection here in the United States in Northern California, meaning somebody that isn’t here on our soil because they traveled here with the virus or somebody with the virus traveled here and gave it to them. It’s just here.

So, how freaked out should we be? Hmm, we should be concerned.

**John:** Yeah. We should be concerned. So right from the debut of this disease it’s been interesting to see how movies and television have influenced our perception of it. Because you know when the outbreak first began we heard people going back to Contagion, the Steven Soderbergh movie about Gwyneth Paltrow just destroying the world. And Chernobyl in terms of the degree to which information was being controlled or the government sort of misleading us about what was actually really going on.

So, obviously as storytellers we can look at all these things from the perspective of the movies we’ve seen before, the TV shows we’ve seen before. But it’s also important to look back at history and so if this ends up being a very bad flu, well, a very bad flu is a big deal. And so I don’t want to sort of minimize what a bad flu would look like. But there’s also the range up to it’s probably not going to be Contagion. And I don’t think we as Americans particularly have a good sense of what the possibilities are for a disease coming across the states.

**Craig:** Well, one of the things that generally protects us from a fictionalized virus that wipes the planet out is that viruses exist for the same reason we exist, which is to make more of us. And viruses cannot make more of themselves if they kill their hosts too quickly. Or kill too many of their hosts. They actually need you to be alive. The problem of course is that they’re use of you is to spread more of themselves. So viruses are little bits of RNA, little single strand bits, and they get inside your cells and then take your cells over and have the cell become a little virus factory and then your cell pops open. And this is the part that’s the problem. Lots of cells are being popped open so essentially the virus is starting to kill you a little bit.

If it goes too fast and does too much or the area where it acts is so sensitive that even small damage can kill you, then the virus has a problem. We have seen worse viruses – and I’m not doing the [Vira] thing, I can’t – we’ve seen worse viruses in terms of fatality rates. Assuming that the fatality rates we’re hearing about are correct, SARS was a deadlier virus.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Than coronavirus. As is MERS. So is that good news? Not really. Because SARS and MERS kind of burnt themselves out. This one has the potential, well, let’s put it this way. We’re all going to get it. I do believe that. So, coronavirus, and people may think this is a new virus like it’s the Ebola virus, the common cold is a coronavirus. It’s just this is a twist on it. And it’s a really nasty cold. And right now it seems like, first of all, it doesn’t seem to be infecting children very much which is interesting.

**John:** Yeah. Some of the speculation is that because kids get coronaviruses all the time, they’re constantly dealing with that stuff. Their immune system is just better able to handle it and sort of shrug it off.

**Craig:** Yes. So here in the United States where we’re constantly wiping our children’s environment down with Purell we are doing them a disservice. It does appear that the 2% mortality rate is a factor of age. So, older people are dying. People who are immunocompromised are dying. People who have congestive heart disease or pulmonary issues definitely are at risk because ultimately coronavirus seems to be killing you by giving you a pretty advanced pneumonic state. And your lungs are filling with fluid and can’t get enough oxygen to your blood.

One thing that people have pointed out is that women are dying at a slightly lower rate than men, and this is from China, if the statistics are accurate. And one of the reasons they think that may be is because about 50% of men in at least Wuhan, in that area, smoke. So, smoking clearly once again not compatible with good health. But if you look at the numbers of people that are perhaps under the age of 80 and not smoking and generally healthy my guess is that they’re quite low.

But what it means is that it’s coming here. And people are going to die. And our system is going to be severely taxed and our global economic system has already been seriously impacted because we all decided in our lust for lower prices and cheaper goods that China should be the factory of the world. And the factory currently is sick.

**John:** Yeah. Now let’s talk about the practical effects in terms of daily life in our industry. So, I’ve already started to notice that there’s some hands that are not being shook. There are some more elbow bumps happening. I don’t know if it’s necessary or helpful, I’m not seeing masks come out. The general consensus seems to be that the masks should be saved for people who are actually in medical fields who are encountering a bunch of people. That normal people shouldn’t be wearing the masks.

But it is a change and I do – you and I for example, we’re thinking about doing a European Scriptnotes visit. And it’s great to make those plans, but I think I’m making all those plans with the back of my mind saying like, huh, I wonder if that’s actually a thing that’s going to be continuing, or going to be possible when that date comes. And so it is an interesting thing to be thinking about in terms of the projects that I’m handing in, movies that could go into production, knowing that everything could be effective.

Our friend Chris McQuarrie, his next Mission: Impossible movie they’re supposed to have a big Venice shoot. Well, Venice has coronavirus and they’ve decided to pull back from shooting in Venice because of those concerns. So it is going to impact production. It’s going to impact some of the daily functioning of Hollywood, even if it doesn’t become the Steven Soderbergh level of disease.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think it’s going to impact everybody. It’s hard to say if more people are going to die from the coronavirus or specifically COVID-19 which is the disease cause by this strand of coronavirus. It’s hard to tell if more people are going to die from COVID-19 or from the economic fallout of COVID-19. Because when economies start to topple people die. So, this is all connected. We forget sometimes. Sometimes we think the economy is just a ticker. Or a statistic about gross national blah-blah-blah. Really what it comes down to is food, medicine, money. The ability to work and pay for things.

So, it’s going to get bad. But we don’t know really at this point what we’re looking at. We can say this with surety. The individual that our federal government has put in charge of leading the effort against coronavirus is not qualified even in the remotest, slightest way.

**John:** No. No. There is almost no person I would feel less comforted is doing this thing. I guess there are probably some MAGA professional wrestlers who I feel would do less of a good job, in the sense of having no understanding of how bureaucracy works. But, no, you do want somebody there who actually believes in science. It feels like a bare minimum.

**Craig:** I mean, I could imagine if they put someone named Karen O’Virus in charge or something like that, but beyond that I can’t imagine anybody less qualified. The good news is those people who are put in charge of these things don’t do anything anyway. We do have the CDC, one of my favorite governmental programs. The CDC I suspect as endlessly not as fully funded as they should be is behind the eight-ball on this. They’ve been behind the eight-ball on a lot of these things because that’s how disease works. And they struggle at times to get the message out. But they’re trying.

I will say to people listening to this, don’t go and try and buy face masks. First of all you can’t. I guess there’s been a run on them which is ridiculous. But we do need those for health professionals. And it’s not going to save you from anything. It really isn’t. Just walking around with a face mask on is not going to save you because that’s not how you’re going to get it. You’re not going to get it walking around. Unless someone literally sneezes directly into your face. Wash your hands.

But eventually you’re going to pick it up. Unless you’re one of those people who can actually say I’ve never had a cold, and I don’t believe you, this one is out there. And unless it does a much, much better job of killing than it seems to be doing, it’s – so there are lots and lots of coronaviruses. Most of them affect animals but not people. Every now and then one of them has a little change in it and kind of jumps the barrier.

**John:** Makes the jump.

**Craig:** And this one made the jump. And that’s going to keep happening. That will never stop happening. And I have no doubt that sooner or later, hopefully sooner, there will be some sort of retroviral drug to help reduce the impact of coronavirus or COVID-19, the way we have Tamiflu which does an excellent job with flu, I can say personally.

But we’re in for trouble. It’s not going to be fun. And people are going to get sick.

**John:** Yeah, so going into this, anticipating that this will get rough and bumpy is probably the best preparation you can do, more so than stockpiling food or trying to get a mask is to recognize that we’re going to be in for some bumpy territory and just be emotionally prepared for that. And also to be thinking about what your life would be like if you did need to stay home for a time, or your kid needed to stay home, or your elderly parent needed help. Just thinking through those scenarios, not panicking yourself, just being ready for them I think will be the guidance we can offer somebody.

**Craig:** And, you know, just don’t do anything that you think would be wildly risky. You know, like bringing in chunks of pangolin from China, which honestly if this really did start with pangolin I’m going to lose my goddamn mind. This is a perfectly innocent, beautiful little creature that for whatever many people in china – and anytime you say many people in China you’re talking about so many people – believe has some sort of medicinal qualities, which it doesn’t, and so they keep hunting them almost to extinction and then selling them in these open air markets and…. [sighs]

I swear.

**John:** Craig, should I get some crystals? Will crystals help?

**Craig:** Yes. If you do need to finally end it and you have a sharp crystal.

**John:** That would be the choice.

**Craig:** Yes. Beyond that, no. I’m so sorry.

**John:** I’m hoping we can revisit this segment a year from now and say like you know what our advice was reasonable but actually it did not turn out to be as bad. And there is that possibility. It’s also possible that it’s much worse than we’re saying. But again, it’s only Thursday.

**Craig:** Yes. And we haven’t had a big worldwide pandemic that really killed millions and millions and millions of people since HIV, which is still pandemic but under control. And prior to that I think it was polio.

**John:** Spanish flu. Oh, polio.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, Spanish flu before that. But it’s been a while. We’re due. These things happen every 30 years or so, kind of like clockwork. And this is the one. So, but this is a different one.

By the way, most people apparently who get COVID-19, it’s very mild. Some people are infected by a coronavirus and experience no symptoms. So, this is a bit of an odd one. We’re not quite sure what’s going on.

**John:** Craig, thank you for making me feel much more nervous.

**Craig:** [laughs] I’ve done it again.

**John:** All right, bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

 

Links:

* [Beyond Bars: Changing the Narrative on Criminal Justice](https://hollywoodhealthandsociety.org/events/beyond-bars-changing-narrative-criminal-justice)
* [Watch the full panel here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twVS-IJRKR8)
* [Aly Tamboura](https://chanzuckerberg.com/story/alys-criminal-justice-reform-perspective/) from the [Chan Zuckerberg Initiative](https://chanzuckerberg.com/)
* [Lovisa Stannow](https://justdetention.org/people/lovisa-stannow/) executive director at [Just Detention International](https://justdetention.org/)
* [Zach Calig](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3016924/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0) writer on [For Life](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10327830/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1)
* [Dan Birman](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2270576/) documentary producer, watch [Me Facing Life](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/netflix-acquires-criminal-justice-doc-cyntoia-brown-1221992) on [Netflix](https://media.netflix.com/en/press-releases/untitled-cyntoia-brown-documentary-from-director-daniel-h-birman-lands-at-netflix) April 30th!
* [What Happens After You’re Released from Prison?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TtZMhHCuBE)
* Scriptnotes, [Episode 324](https://johnaugust.com/2017/all-of-it-needs-to-stop) How Would This Be a Movie? [On the Line: The Female Inmates Who Battle California’s Deadly Wildfires by Matt Toder for NBC News.](https://www.nbcnews.com/video/california-on-fire-these-female-inmates-are-fighting-the-blazes-1068589123744)
* [Coronavirus Updates](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/world/coronavirus-news.html)
* Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium [here](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/).
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Seth Podowitz ([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/440standard.mp3).

 

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/how-to-grow-old-as-a-writer).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 439 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast we’re going to talk about how to grow old as a writer. We’ll also discuss tips for general readings and answer listener questions about character quirks and improv. Then in our bonus segment for Premium members Craig is going to talk about his experience as an actor on the new show Mythic Quest.

**Craig:** Well this is the first time I’m hearing of that, but I’m all for it.

**John:** Oh, I thought you said last week you were going to do this.

**Craig:** Then it’s not the first I’m hearing of it. It’s just that I forgot. So, you know, when you forget something it’s like you get to hear it all over again for the first time.

**John:** It’s a little surprise. Memory loss can be a really great thing because then everything you find in a drawer is like a present.

**Craig:** My every day is Awakenings. [laughs] I’m so happy to be here.

**John:** It’s like, wait, I’m married? I have children? This is so exciting.

**Craig:** Right. I know how long time has been simply by the number you say of the podcast. So as far as I’m concerned this is the first one we’ve ever done.

**John:** Yes. Goldfish memory.

**Craig:** You claim it’s 439. Well, all right. Well, we’ll see.

**John:** Who is to argue? In news, I’m doing two live events this week. The first is today, Tuesday February 25. I’m doing a Q&A with showrunner Sam Esmail to talk about Mr. Robot, Homecoming, and other things. That got moved to the Guild Theater. So we have more space, we have more seats. So if you want to come there’s still probably seats available. You can find tickets at wgafoundation.org. There’s a link in the show notes. Then tomorrow, February 26, I’m leading a panel on portrayals of criminal justice on screen. That one is at the SAG building. So it’s the same kind of thing when I did the addiction and mental health panel. It is that kind of thing.

There will probably be a livestream but there’s also some seats in that place, so if you want to ask your question come out to that thing tomorrow.

So, two times to see me, ask questions of people this week in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Brilliant. People should avail themselves of this.

**John:** Cool. A bit of follow up. Monica Beletsky wrote in. Do you want to talk about this, Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah, Monica Beletsky, a very, very talented television writer, who has worked on all sorts of your favorite shows, wrote in when we were talking about treatments and outlines and the difference. And she said that “in television an outline is a very common document and is probably more like what we call a treatment in features.” So, if you are a television writer or you’ve not yet become one, just be aware that our discussion of outlines and treatments the nomenclature was applying to the way it’s divided up in features. But in television it sounds like there’s not much of a treatment per se. It’s that there is an outline and it’s a very, very detailed thing.

**John:** Yes. So our biases really are kind of towards features. We try to be aware of our biases, but in that conversation we really weren’t. Even though Craig got an Emmy for his TV writing, we both kind of come at this from a feature background. So sometimes we will say things that mean a different thing in TV and features.

**Craig:** I got an Emmy? [laughs]

**John:** It’s so exciting when Craig doesn’t remember anything.

**Craig:** Every day is a new day.

**John:** Another great example of words that mean different things in TV and features is spec. And so in features a spec script is a script that you’re writing completely on your own that is entirely original. It’s an idea that is your own. And you’re writing it without being beholden to anybody else. No one else is involved in the project. So, a spec script is that thing that you write which can also be a writing sample.

In television a spec generally is a script you are writing for yourself of an existing TV show. I can write funny like in The Office. And so you’d say I have a spec Office episode. It’s frustrating that we use the same word for both things, but you’ve just got to get used to it.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is the problem with the way language evolves in general. And it’s an interesting indication that the television business and the feature business have been weirdly bifurcated for so long, which must be confusing for, I don’t know, someone who is graduating right now from college and coming to LA to be a writer. Because they’re like, wait, there’s a difference between TV and film? It’s all sort of mushed together.

I mean, we live in a time now where things that are made for Netflix are getting nominated for Oscars for feature film work. So, I think eventually that will all go away. I mean, actually weirdly business practices have probably started to retire the word spec for television because it’s not too common anymore that people write them.

**John:** Yeah. Some showrunners who are staffing up shows enjoy reading a spec of an existing show because they know that this writer can write the voices of an existing character and that can be useful. But more commonly showrunners want to read original stuff just to see what this person can do with no limitations on them.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re just trying to kick the tires and see how good of a writer you are in general.

**John:** Yeah. Other bit of follow up. A couple episodes back we talked about the upcoming negotiations for the MBA, which is the general contract that regulates sort of how WGA members work with the studios. Where we’re at in that process, we talked there would be a survey. There was a survey. There was a vote on a pattern of demands, which is this very broad laundry list of the things you’re going after in this negotiation.

The next step in this process is membership meetings. So they’ve already started in the east. They are coming up in the west. So if you’re a WGA West member, check your email because there will be a list of upcoming meetings where you can talk with leadership about what your goals are in this negotiation. There will also be special meetings just for feature writers. Sometimes they have different things that are interesting to them. So, check your email. Come to these membership meetings. It is the best chance to hear from leadership but also to communicate what you would like to see happen in this upcoming negotiation.

**Craig:** Yeah. They should be real fun this time around. [laughs]

**John:** There’s a lot going on. People have noticed that it’s been a busy year at the WGA. It’s going to be a busy year coming up here. So, I will be at several of these meetings. I won’t be at all of them. But come say hi.

**Craig:** You will be there I assume in your role as a member of the negotiating committee dealing with both the agency thing and the upcoming MBA negotiation.

**John:** Absolutely. So, I’m on both of those committees. So I’ll be there to talk about those things.

**Craig:** Great. Hey, can you do me one favor?

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** Is there a way – I don’t think there is a way – but somehow if people could just, on their way in somebody could hand them a lovely pamphlet that says we know you’re angry, excited, thrilled, upset, emotional. Take deep breaths and be nice to your fellow union members, no matter what they say. Is there a way that people could just be nice?

**John:** Be respectful? Yeah.

**Craig:** Be respectful. Yeah. There is going to be somebody who is going to get up and say we have to strike. And other people are going to go crazy and say you’re an idiot. If we could just avoid that that would be lovely.

**John:** I think that would be a terrific goal. I would say that my function on a lot of these big membership meetings, which I don’t think you’ve been at, is I’m generally the person who is that person saying like just calm down. So I will probably just be that guy who says just calm down a bit.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know if I’m going to go to any of them because I’ve gone limp and I’m allowing myself to be borne by the tides of the current.

**John:** Well, you’ve also–

**Craig:** Tides are currents. [laughs]

**John:** Tides are currents. You are a goldfish, Craig. But also I think one of the things your sort of stated goals for this year though was to acknowledge frustration but not always act on frustration.

**Craig:** Precisely.

**John:** So maybe–

**Craig:** I am frustrated. But I don’t have to act on it. Wait, I’m in the WGA?

**John:** Holy cow.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** Craig, so we have two big topics this week. This one you proposed, so I’m going to let you take leadership on this topic of growing old as a writer.

**Craig:** Well I was just thinking about because we’ve been doing this for a while, you and I, and when we started there was actually quite a lot of concern about ageism in our business. The general idea was that somewhere after 50 the business started kicking people out. And, in fact, when you look at what the Writers Guild considers a protected class, writers over the age of 40 are considered a protected class. The world has changed drastically since the mid-90s. And I was talking to some people the other day who were pointing out that the writers who are being employed as showrunners and we’ll call them sort of major feature film writers generally are older than they’ve ever been before.

And I thought well this is interesting. There must be some sort of lessons that we can learn since you and I are among the people that are still here about how to keep yourself fresh and motivated and relevant as the years go on. Because we are not kids no more.

**John:** No. Craig, do we want to talk about how to have a long career, or how to be comfortable with aging in your career? Are we talking both? What are the edges of this conversation?

**Craig:** Well I feel like they’re intertwined. So, rather than talk in a very practical way about something that is applicable to about 80 people, I want to talk about something that’s applicable to everybody. Everybody who pursues any kind of creative concern, whether you are a visual artist, or an actor, or a writer, or a producer-director. Whatever it is that you do, as you get older your relationship to your own art and your own creative process does need to change or you’re going to suffer. A reflection of that may be in terms of the industry around you and people’s interest in you, or an audience’s response to you.

So, rather than view it through the lens of industry I just want to talk about how to keep ourselves in a kind of good place with our own creative minds.

**John:** Great. So the artistic side of growing older and how that relates to the craft and the thing that you’re trying to make on a daily basis.

**Craig:** And ideally that would be, you know, reflected back at you with some sort of industrial success if that’s what you’re looking for as the years go on. So, I mean, first let’s just consider it all in terms of strategies, because I do think like anything else there’s just practical things that you can apply to yourself as time goes on. And these are good thoughts and questions to just – even every birthday take a ten minute walk and think about it.

First, you have to think about what your task actually is. Because it changes over time. You may start as someone who for instance in the mid-90s you are “I want to write sitcoms. I’m going to be a sitcom guy that works on network sitcoms.” And there are hundreds of them. Over time that changes. The tasks that are available that match what you think you do can change. Also, formats can change. We think of television as a certain thing now. It’s all over the place. But when we started it was something else.

Chernobyl, for instance, couldn’t have been really done until a certain format change occurred. But that meant paying attention to what was going on with formats.

So there are two kinds of challenges that you can make to yourself. The first is is the thing that I’m doing the only thing I can be doing. Or could I be writing a different kind of thing, like a short story, or like you did a novel, or like we’ve both done some songs? Or, nonfiction work? Also are we working within a format that is maybe dying out or just getting boring to us? And what other formats might expand our own personal expression? If we don’t rotate the crops as it were then we will end up with a field that isn’t doing too well.

**John:** Well, let’s talk about rotating the crops, because I think that ties into a thing that happens with age which is this burnout. Which is that you’ve done one thing for so long that it’s boring to you. It’s just not interesting to you. And it’s hard to work up the enthusiasm to do it again.

I was talking with a writer recently. She was just starting on a new script. And she’s like, oh wow, wait, I’m back doing this again. I’m having to start a whole new script again. And she was ready to. She knew how to write a script. But also she didn’t have the same enthusiasm for it she would have had five years, ten years earlier in her career.

And I think that’s one of the reasons why I was attracted to write the Arlo Finch books or to write the Big Fish musical is it gave me a chance to be a beginner again. To be someone who is brand new to things and be curious and eager to explore and willing to make mistakes as I’m figuring out this new art form. And when you have mastery over something it’s nice, it’s helpful, things are easier for you, but they’re also less exciting. And so picking a new thing to try to do, just challenge yourself on a regular basis to try something that you haven’t done before as a writer so that you get that experience of being new at things.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, getting yourself in that rut is the function of a good thing, I think. We know that you need to focus and you need to practice and perfect. That’s part of how you get good at any creative pursuit. But there is a point where, and a little bit like when you get into a videogame you’ve maxed out your level, you’re now just walking around all the areas of Skyrim and beating everyone’s brains in with ease.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. You’re just doing a little side quest.

**Craig:** And there’s no challenge because you are perfection. And it gets boring. You’re absolutely right. Being a beginner again is a wonderful thing. And it’s a little scary, so it’s also a function of fear. You know, trying new things is scary. But the thing that I’m scared of the most is actually at this point now in my life being bored. So, challenge yourself to reconsider the nature of the formats you do work in, that you’re willing to work in, that you’re willing to try. Take a look at some formats that you didn’t maybe know even existed before. Because there are new ones all the time. And challenge yourself to even break out of a genre and into another genre.

**John:** You’re really saying stay curious. And really look at the world around you and see, OK, what is out there. What is a thing I could make out there that is interesting to me. And it doesn’t mean you have to pursue everything. Like, you know, you don’t have to become a social media influencer. You don’t have to master TikTok. It’s OK to sort of leave some stuff by the side. But also recognize that if these things are coming online they’re serving some need. And so what is it you can bring to this need and what can you do that could fit into this bigger universe of new content that’s being made?

**Craig:** And you’ve mentioned the key to all of this which is stay curious and be connected with the world. The biggest complaint people will make about we’ll call them aging artists is that they’re out of touch. Well, how do we get out of touch? We get out of touch by essentially ignoring the world around us because we feel like we figured it out in a moment and then we stay there. The world will move past that moment. If you don’t, you will be out of touch.

Sometimes people engage with the world simply in opposition. Kids these days. Let me just boil it down to that, right? The world, you know, I don’t understand the world today. Everyone is on their phones. Anybody who ever says, “You know what the problem is with the world today? Look around you man. Everyone is staring at their phones. They’re not looking at each other.” You go ahead and tell that person they’re an idiot. Because the world changes. They are interacting in fact with more people faster than you could have ever done in your life.

Is it true that sometimes uninterrupted eye-to-eye contact is wonderful? Absolutely. Is it a cliché out of touch thing to say, “They’re all looking at their phones?” Absolutely out of touch.

So, rather than instinctively saying, “In my day everything was perfect and now it stinks,” listen. Just listen to the world. Even if you disagree with it, listen to it. Because perhaps in your experience of the world around you and your differences of opinions with it, you may find grist for the creative mill. Defensiveness isn’t going to get you anywhere.

**John:** Yeah. Being defensive is never a good look. You know, when you say no to something people stop engaging with you. I would say over this last 20 years one of the most helpful ways I’ve been able to stay caught up with how things are for screenwriters and just for general people making creative things, well I’ve always had an assistant. My assistants have always been younger than me. They’ve always been at the start of their careers and doing stuff that people at the start of their careers do. And it’s been fascinating to see how the starts of careers have changed over the last 20 years because just the industry has changed around them.

Also just engaging with the people who originally were writing into the website who are now Scriptnotes listeners. You see what they’re doing. And sort of what the challenges they’re facing, but also what is exciting to them. And I may not be excited about the same things, but what they’re into is valid. And listening to what it is that they are going after is great. I always try to remember that the people I’m interacting with are the people who are going to be running this town in 10, 20, 30 years. And so it’s worth hearing what’s sparking for them because those are the kinds of movies and TV shows that we will be making the next couple decades.

**Craig:** I mean, inherently you are not jealous of the young, nor am I. I think a lot of older people get quietly subconsciously jealous of young people. But my feeling is that when we judge them, well, remember what it was like when we were judged by older people because in my memory my feelings were not hurt at all. I just kind of rolled my eyes and made fun of them because soon they were going to be dead and I was not. And they were old and out of it and not vital. And so my feeling is judging people who are younger and thinking that they “all they do, they’re obsessed with their influencers and their TikTok,” and you’re like you’re not having any impact on them. They’re laughing at you.

So, maybe just listen to them and observe them. What’s wrong with that?

**John:** Well, you can also ask advice. Which I think a lot of times older people have a hard time asking advice of younger people because it sort of reveals something that they don’t know. Well, the fact is you just don’t know some things, so again, be curious. Ask the questions. And don’t ask the questions in a way that feels judgmental like, “Why are you doing it this crazy, stupid way?” It’s like what is it that’s interesting to you about this thing, or why did you decide to make that choice? Again, when you get to move into new fields that’s very natural because you just actually just don’t know. And so you’re in a much better position to ask kind of naïve questions because you don’t know what that thing is versus us as screenwriters we have a good sense of sort of like how all the stuff fits together.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That said, when I talked with a writer – Liz Hannah who just did a movie for Netflix, I am genuinely curious about what the experience is like making a movie for Netflix. What are the deliverables like on that movie? Are they expecting the same things that we’d expect in a theatrical feature delivery system where they want – are they cutting negative? Are they doing all the stuff that we used to do for normal, traditional features? Or is it more like a TV delivery system?

So ask those questions and realize that like the different kinds of things people are making these days are more likely the future than sort of what we knew.

**Craig:** Well, the things around us that happen that we can lose touch with in a dangerous way are not just the kinds of things that I guess the different experiences that younger people are having, but also the general viewpoint of the world. Attitudes change. And it’s very hard for us to keep up with it. It really is. I understand that.

And I remember a friend once told me like – he was like I’m going to keep listening to whatever the pop music station is, like the current hits station, because I never want to be one of the old people that doesn’t know current music. But inevitably you will be. It’s not possible, right? There are some things that are going to leave you behind. But general attitudes and vibes and feelings are things you need to be in touch with. Because what was once funny may not be anymore. Things like funny and dramatic and scary and shocking are not absolute values. They are relative to the time in which you live. And if you’re not paying attention to the kinds of things that are shocking people or making them laugh you’re going to flop because you’re out of touch and out of time.

**John:** Let’s talk about authenticity, because one of the things I see which can be kind of embarrassing is when an older person is trying to seem younger than they are and is not acknowledging the fact that they are in a different generation than people they’re talking to.

**Craig:** Hello fellow kids.

**John:** So language is one where they’re trying to use slang and they’re using it improperly. That’s sort of a tell. And it’s not just that it’s embarrassing that they’re using it wrong. It’s that it’s clear that they’re not being authentic to who they are. I think one of the reasons why young people spark so clearly to Bernie Sanders is he feels very much himself. And that is true of any generation. When we were in our 20s we didn’t want the old person who was trying to be like us. We wanted the old person who felt like themselves. And so don’t reach too far in terms of your own voice trying to sound young.

In terms of your writing voice, though, you are going to be writing characters of all different ages, all different backgrounds. And you have to be listening for sort of how those things sound so that your character’s voices don’t drift away.

So our example in last week’s episode where we were listening to how people speak, that’s I think even more important as you age into your career because your assumptions, your memory of what twenty-somethings sounded like is not going to match how twenty-somethings sound right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then we kind of come to our last point which is just language. Just the realities of language. Because you’re right. There is something terribly inauthentic about someone who is chasing language. They will always be five steps behind anyway. They will always be your dad walking in saying, “Oh, chill out. Oh wow, this is fresh.” Shut up, dad. Right?

That’s so old and lame. And it’s faster now. So whatever is cool five seconds will not be cool five seconds from now because that’s what youth is. It’s a churn. So, don’t chase it, but do let yourself be carried along by it. Be aware of it. And let yourself be old authentically without either chasing something, which is inauthentic, or denying the reality of it, which is just as terrible.

Just be aware of the way that the world is changing and be aware of the way you’re changing. And if you are those things and you are willing and open to evolving then it doesn’t really matter how old you get. I mean, you’ll just be cool. Dr. Ruth Westheimer is 4,000 years old.

**John:** Good lord, yes.

**Craig:** And she’s cool.

**John:** Yeah, she’s a lich, but she’s really cool.

**Craig:** She is a lich.

**John:** There’s a [unintelligible] hidden away someplace.

**Craig:** Yeah, she’s a lawful good lich. Very rare. Very rare.

**John:** But special when you find them.

**Craig:** She’s a lich. [laughs]

**John:** Let’s talk about some advantages of age, because a thing I have found over time is we’ve talked about how with mastery some things that used to be really difficult for me are actually very simple for me. And I can sort of figure out narrative problems way in advance just from the experience. But a thing in terms of a career that I’ve been able to take with me and hopefully share is that you have a memory of what’s been done before and sort of where things used to be. And people who are new to the industry won’t have that. And so that’s not like everything should be the way it always was, but pointing out what’s been lost or what’s changed where people new to an industry might not know.

So to me an important thing to always point out is that residuals used to be kind of great and they used to actually be worth something. And someone who is starting in the business right now might not be aware of that. And so I think sometimes as an older person you need to make sure people know what has happened before, what you fought for, what you got. The way things used to be just so that people acknowledge that things could go back to a better place, or to a worse place if you’re trying to avoid bad things that happened before.

**Craig:** Yep. And similarly it’s really good to listen to those people when they tell you what actually – what the boots on the ground reality is for them. Because I remember when we were starting out in the union like the obsession was over DVD residuals. And I didn’t feel really that connected to that. Didn’t have many DVDs out there. And soon enough those went away. So, it’s a two-way street. But there is a beautiful thing that comes with time and that is the release of pressure to define who you are and become a thing.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** We are who we are. There is no confusion anymore about who either one of us is. And at least in our own minds we’ve accomplished enough where we don’t feel like everything is a test of our worth and every problem is an existential crisis. You do get to relax, which, you know, you have more work than ever in these days, but you can psychologically relax because not everything is a kind of a life and death moment where it can all be taken away.

**John:** Yeah. So some of that is economic security, but I would say even when I was in my 30s and doing really well there was still that sort of career insecurity, that artistic insecurity, like you know the imposter syndrome. And I think you and I have both moved past our imposter syndrome, which is lovely, but with that wisdom you want to make sure you don’t just become settled into a rut. Now that you know who you are you’re unwilling to change or unwilling to grow or unwilling to adapt into the next good thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, David Zucker always used to say, “Beware the day that they give you the lifetime achievement award.”

**John:** Lifetime achievement. Yeah.

**Craig:** “It means you’re done.” They don’t give that to you if you’re still like rolling like kind of hard. I mean, they do. And every time I say rolling my daughter looks at me like, “Don’t say rolling, dad. It’s a whole other thing.” And I’m like, oh yeah, that’s right, that’s right, I’m sorry. But I guess the nice thing is that – I don’t know what I was saying, so you can just – Matthew, I apologize. I’m old. [laughs] My mind just wanders. In fact, don’t edit that out. I think that’s important for people to know.

**John:** All right. Well, we talked about sort of growing old as a writer, let’s move all the way back to the start of your career. Let’s talk about your first general meetings. So this is a suggestion from Aline Brosh McKenna.

**Craig:** Who?

**John:** Aline has been listening back to the early episodes of the show, which apparently exist Craig.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Yes. Goldfish Craig.

**Craig:** There’s more of these?

**John:** There’s more of these. So she’s been back listening to the first season where we talk about stuff. And she says it’s still good, but we’re much less comfortable in our podcasting voices in those early episodes.

**Craig:** Well, that’s good. Amnesia Craig is startled by all of this.

**John:** So, I want to talk through the experience of your first general meeting. So a general meeting as we’ve talked about before on the show, we often describe the water bottle tour of Los Angeles where you go in, you meet with an executive, and you talk about stuff. And we’ve described them in a very general sense, but we haven’t given any real practical advice for sort of what you do on those general meetings, so this is going to be a little sort of step by step thinking about a general meeting.

So, Craig, I would like you to pretend that you are a screenwriter with no produced credits. You have a manager and they have scheduled a meeting with an executive on the Paramount lot. And now let’s walk through what you do to prepare for this general meeting with an executive on the Paramount lot.

Think back like a day or two before, what kind of stuff is on your mind as you’re preparing for this meeting?

**Craig:** So there’s two ways. There’s the modern way and then there’s the old school way. I would strongly recommend a combination of the two. The first thing is to just figure out, OK, who is this person. Ideally what do they look like? Very important, what have they done? So in the old way what would happen is you would talk to your manager and say describe the person to me. Paint me a visual picture because there is no Internet. And what have they worked on that I need to know about? The new way is to just Google. The problem with just Googling is you don’t get that insight from a person who says, “They are very intellectual. You might find them cold, but they’re not cold. That’s just the way they are.” Or, “this person is a militant vegan, so maybe don’t tell the story about how you won the rib-eating contest.” All of that is important.

The most important kind of research is to find out what it is they’ve done so that you don’t walk in there and say in the midst of a great conversation how much you hated this thing that it turns out they produced.

**John:** Absolutely. And that’s so much easier to research now. So just spend your 20 minutes Googling. Figure out what they’ve worked on and what they’re working on just so you have some guardrails around it. But I agree with Craig that you do need to talk to your manager, whoever set up the meeting, just so you know why are you meeting with them. What is the purpose of this meeting? What are the possibilities in this meeting? So you can go in there with some knowledge. It’s just not a complete blind date there.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Also, figure out where the meeting is because Los Angeles is giant, and sometimes you could get scheduled in meetings that are much further away than you think they are. So just knowing where the meeting is in relation to where you live is very important.

**Craig:** And this is something that is much easier to do now than you and I–

**John:** Yeah. Google Maps.

**Craig:** So you and I in our early days would have to figure out where a place was if you had never been there. We’d pull out our trusty old Thomas Guide. We’d look at it and then we’d freaking guess. How should I get there? And, man, sometimes you guess wrong.

**John:** I remember going to a general meeting. I showed up 40 minutes late.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** It was horribly embarrassing. But that’s as fast as I could get there.

**Craig:** Went the wrong way. There were two ways to go, and the way I went a car smashed into a tree and that’s that. And also I didn’t have a phone, so there’s no way for me to tell you. That happened all the time. Now we have Waze. We have Google Maps. There’s all sorts of ways to arrive on time. Do try and get there early. Of course you don’t want to be sitting there for 20 minutes, but try and time it. Worst comes to worst, just hang out outside the lot parked on the side street or something and then go in when you need to go in.

**John:** Absolutely. So we got to the day of the meeting. So let’s talk about confirming meetings because this is a thing that I don’t know happens in other industries, but it’s pretty important in Hollywood. So, a meeting gets scheduled but a meeting is then confirmed, which is usually the night before or the day of if it’s like an afternoon meeting. Basically everyone gets kind of an out, especially executives, because they get pulled into other stuff. So, generally you don’t could on a meeting happening unless it’s confirmed the night before or the morning of.

If a manager set it up, generally the manager’s assistant will confirm the meeting. If you have an assistant they will confirm the meeting. Sometimes you will actually call and confirm with that assistant. But it’s a good idea to confirm, especially if the meeting has been made like two weeks in advance.

**Craig:** Right. That said, if you don’t hear from anyone, presume it’s confirmed.

**John:** Go.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Aline wants us to talk about clothes. And so let’s talk about it. I will say dress appropriately. And that is such generic advice, but I don’t want to be so specific that it precludes one way of dressing or not. So I would say I would never wear a tie to one of these things, and yet sometimes people dress really cool and that’s part of their look. And so I would say kind of dress your look is a useful way to think about it. Dress the way that a writer who they’re meeting with should dress, if that makes sense.

**Craig:** Well, the garb of the artist is wide ranging. Johan Renck would show up at all of these award shows in the strangest outfits. Sometimes I don’t even know if he was wearing a shirt. He always had some strange hat on. Many rings. He’s like a pirate director. And he’s awesome. And that’s cool, because that’s the way he is.

My feeling about clothing is this. If you in the meeting are an impressive human being, if you say and think things that they like, then your clothes, whatever they are, are going to be cool. And if you don’t, then they’re going to be awful. That’s the way it goes. If you are dressed gorgeously and you say dumb things, they’re going to be like, ugh, like I guess all this person does is shop, because they’re stupid. And if you dress like a slob and you’re brilliant they’re going to go, oh my god, the bohemian Mozart. That’s the way our minds – in the end as writers the value that we’re bringing ultimately is what we’re saying and thinking. And the rest kind of goes along with it.

The one thing you don’t want to ever be is unhygienic. That’s just a zero for everybody.

**John:** Agreed. All right. So now you are arriving at the studio. So, first we’re going to say this is Paramount. Let’s talk about the process of actually getting on the lot, because I remember the first time I did this I was a little unnerved. And so you’re driving up to the gate, so generally they’ll tell you which gate you’re going onto for the studio. It’s usually the same, but sometimes they will send you in different ways, so do look at the email about which gate they want you to go in.

There you’ll stop at the guard gate. You will show them photo ID. This happened 9-11 that they asked for photo ID of everyone going onto a lot. Now, Craig, do you remember like before 9-11 often you’d have to stop to leave a lot, and basically they might search your car, but they wouldn’t stop you on the way in? Do you remember back in those days?

**Craig:** I don’t remember ever not being stopped on the way in.

**John:** I guess that’s not true. I guess I was stopped on the way in, but I was always stopped on the way out. And now they just seem to be happy to let you just leave.

**Craig:** Fox will still ask you to show the pass. So, save your pass, because it changes from studio to studio. And it’s pretty rare that a studio will require you to show the pass that they gave you to get in to get out. But don’t chuck it. I’ve made that mistake. And then in Fox in particular on your way out there’s nobody manning it, you just have to scan it, so that it knows that you’ve left. And if you’ve chucked it then, you know, basically people behind you are going to get annoyed.

**John:** Let’s talk about the pass. So generally on a studio lot there actually are two passes. So there’s one pass which is for you as a person, and there’s one for your car. So the one for your car stays on your dashboard, or sometimes they’ll tape it in your window. Sometimes that will have a parking space assigned to it. But there will be one that you carry around. At Disney they want you to clip this little thing on your belt, on your shirt. It’s a hassle. Other places won’t make you do that. But you will have some piece of paper that indicates that you are supposed to be on that lot and also that your car is supposed to be on that lot. So, both are important.

**Craig:** I don’t clip the thing at Disney. I hold it. And then I put it in my pocket.

**John:** I hold it, too.

**Craig:** You just need to get past the guy at Team Disney and then you’re like here’s my thing and he goes, “Go there,” and then I just shove it in my pocket. I’m done.

**John:** Craig just said Team Disney. So Team Disney is the big dwarf building on the Disney lot.

**Craig:** Oxymoron.

**John:** Yeah. The big dwarf building. It’s the building with the dwarfs holding up the roof. It is designed by I think Venturi. He’s a famous architect. It is really a kind of dumb building.

**Craig:** It’s a shame. It is beautiful.

**John:** It is beautiful. But it has this useless interior courtyard.

**Craig:** Massively useless.

**John:** It’s dark and weird.

**Craig:** Yeah. And the office layout, I mean, no one who has ever worked in it has said, “Awesome.” It is definitely a challenging building to work in. As opposed to the old animation building which is where they put all the producers and all their suites which is really cool because it’s like this old art deco – ‘30s?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Something like that. ‘40s?

**John:** It’s cool.

**Craig:** It’s just a cool building. I like an old building. Anyway, each studio will have its own kind of thing. Figuring out where you’re going is sometimes difficult. It depends on the lot. Some lots are pretty easy. For instance Disney, you’re usually going to one of two places – Team Disney, or the old animation building. That’s where the people are that you meet. Paramount, usually you’re going to that one building where all the executives are.

**John:** The executives building.

**Craig:** But god help you if you’re going to Universal or Fox or Sony where stuff is scattered around across 400 different buildings. And they give you a map with tiny little numbers on them. The numbers are not in sequence. I remember the first lot I was ever on was Fox. And I was like why are these numbers like this. First of all, where is number three? And why is 88 next to 120 next to 46? Who did this?

**John:** A mad man did this.

**Craig:** A mad man did it. So, take a little moment to see if there’s a studio map online. See which building you’re going to and actually figure out your walking route from where you’re going to be parking if at all possible.

**John:** So, back in the day when you drove up to the guard gate they’d say, “Who are you meeting with?” And then they would call that person and there’d be a whole system for that. That happens less often now because they just scan your license and they see, OK, this person is in the system. They have a meeting. So they’re not asking you those questions anymore. But they will still ask like do you know where you’re going. And the best response is generally, “No, I don’t.” And so they will take a moment and actually pull out the little map and highlight where it is that you’re supposed to be going. Because that’s really helpful on a big lot.

Now, we should also say that you’re just as likely to have a meeting at Netflix, and Craig have you met at Netflix yet?

**Craig:** No. I’m not allowed to. [laughs]

**John:** I get it. The HBO deal.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So Netflix the process is very, very different. There is still a guard gate you go through. But then you pull into this garage, you give the keys to the valet. Some places have valet. We should talk about valets in a second. But then you go into this giant sort of open area courtyard thing, interior courtyard, and sign in at the front desk, or check in at the front desk. And then it’s just – it’s like the school cafeteria in a way. There literally is food that you can help yourself to. But you see everybody you kind of know. Other actors and writers and directors. And everyone waits down in the main area until your executive comes and gets you and takes you up to your place. So it’s a very different experience.

Generally on most studio lots you go directly to the executive’s office, or at least to the lobby of that executive building. Here at Netflix you wait downstairs until they come get you. And generally they won’t take you to their office, because their offices are tiny. They will take you to some meeting room where you have your small meeting.

**Craig:** And this is probably the way of the future because these companies don’t require large real estate and sound stages. These things are just rented as needed. I mean, HBO for instance is pretty similar in that regard to Netflix. I mean, you pull into a garage. There’s a valet. You go up to HBO. You check in. You wait in the waiting room. It’s like the nicest doctor’s office waiting room. And then someone comes and gets you. And you walk through the rabbit warren of HBO offices. I mean, let me explain for anyone who has not been. Have you ever been to HBO?

**John:** I’ve never been inside HBO, no.

**Craig:** So they’re going to be moving I’m pretty sure. That’s at least what I thought. But the existing offices at HBO, if you bring me to an office there and then walk away, close my eyes and turn me around three times, I will die there. I will never get out. It’s really a maze.

**John:** Netflix has the kind of elevators where if you’re calling an elevator you tell what floor you’re going to, rather than up or down. And so then you have to wait and see which elevator – they’ll show you which elevator you’re supposed to get into.

**Craig:** Fancy.

**John:** Fancy.

**Craig:** So fancy. So there are places that have valet and places that don’t have valet. Places that have valet, let me run it down real quick. Paramount. Not Fox. Sony.

**John:** Sony has it.

**Craig:** Definitely. Not Universal. Not Disney. Warner Bros.

**John:** Warners does it.

**Craig:** I think that’s it, right?

**John:** Yeah. Warners sometimes it depends on where you’re going to at Warners. But, yes, they have a valet. So let’s talk about sort of protocol with valet, which is a little bit different on studio lots than sort of at a restaurant. You go up, you tell them – I often say how long I’m going to be because that will influence where they want me to park, or where they’re going to park my car. If it is a short meeting I may just ask is it OK if I park myself, because sometimes it is OK if you park yourself. Or they’ll steer you to a space.

The issue of whether to tip or not to tip is complicated and based on the lot. Sometimes there will be a sign which will make it really clear that you’re not supposed to tip. When there’s not a sign I do tip. I tip a couple bucks. Craig, what do you do?

**Craig:** Yeah. I do tip but it’s always – I never quite know. It’s a weird thing. Because the thing about tipping is if you don’t tip you might feel like you’ve done something wrong and insulted this person. Then in that situation sometimes I think if I do tip am I insulting them? Like they need a tip because they’re not being paid by the studio? Because at a restaurant you know they don’t pay those guys anything. It’s all tips, right? But I don’t know how it works at a studio. I can’t imagine that a studio is treating them like that. Although come to think of it, they probably are.

**John:** [laughs] Talk about assistant pay, so just imagine what the valet pay is.

**Craig:** That’s a great point actually. So, in any case I’ll usually do five bucks. These days by the way I’ve had one of those moments where I’m like I’m adjusting all tips upward. There’s a general sense of what tips are. So, probably I would go to ten at this point.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** Because, you know, honestly, it relates back to our “we’re getting older” thing. Like as there’s less and less life, you know, it’s like spend more. And I like spending money on human beings. I do. It makes me feel good more than other stuff. And at some point I’m not going to get to the end of my life and go thank god I didn’t tip more. I just – I’m not gonna.

**John:** Quickly let’s say that sometimes you’re having a meeting at a place that is not at a studio and where it is just an office someplace. That’s fine and great, too. Figure out where you can park. If you’re going to be at a meter pay for much more time than you think you’re going to need because you don’t know if the meeting is going to run long. You don’t want to be antsy to get out of your meeting because your meter is about to expire.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** That’s not a good look at all.

**Craig:** Frankly, if your meter is going to expire just shut up and take the ticket. Just take the ticket, because whatever. So it’s going to be $50. Unless you are really, really scraping for dough – honestly – and by the way call your manager and tell them, listen, I would have thought you would have wanted me to stay in there. I can’t afford this. I need $50. I mean, literally. It’s just a weird thing. Because the problem is once you get up at that point to say, “Oh, you know what? I’m just going to run outside and feed the meter.” They’ll be like, “No, no, no, you know what…”

**John:** Oh, the meeting is over.

**Craig:** “Yeah, no, we’ve been here long enough.” And then you’ll get a ticket anyway. [laughs] And it will be over.

**John:** So you’ve arrived at this executive’s office. Generally there will be an assistant or somebody in the lobby who says, “Can I get you something?” And by get you something they mean a drink. That’s all they mean is a drink. The appropriate choices are water, coffee, Diet Coke, or I’m all good. Craig, would you add anything to that list?

**Craig:** Prime rib.

**John:** Prime rib. I want some prime rib.

**Craig:** I would love a plate – by the way, prime rib horrifies me. I don’t know, like people get so excited by it. And I look at it and I just want to barf. It doesn’t look like anyone has cooked anything with prime rib. I don’t know what the prime means. Prime barf material.

**John:** I’ve not had beef in 30 years, so I wouldn’t know.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Well, you’re missing nothing on the prime rib. Yeah, it’s water, coffee, tea, or Diet Coke. And generally speaking over time I’ve defaulted to, “Nope, I’m good,” because if I drink stuff in the meeting I’m just going to have to pee. And I don’t want to pee.

**John:** I generally bring my Arlo Finch water bottle with me to everything. So, I just have my water bottle and therefore I’m all good.

**Craig:** Advertising.

**John:** Advertising. While you’re waiting for the meeting to start, it’s worth studying the outer office. It’ll give you some sense of the vibe. The posters they have on the wall for the movies they’ve made could be useful. Obviously you’ve done your research beforehand, but just get a sense of the vibe. Also, if the assistant is talking with you, talk with the assistant. That assistant is probably very much in the same spot that you are. Try to learn that assistant’s name. That may be a person that you’re emailing back and forth with in the future. That person will probably end up running the studio at some point, so it’s good to be friendly with those assistants.

**Craig:** For sure. Treat them well. Especially if you’re starting out and you’re young, they’re looking at you thinking why am I not there? Why are you not in my seat and why am I not in your seat? So, treat them well because sooner or later they will be where you’re standing and it’s good to just – you know, talk to them like they’re humans. Notice that they’re alive. It will make a huge difference to them. And it is human decency. I mean, we don’t really deserve points for doing what we’re supposed to do. But do what you’re supposed to do.

**John:** Agreed. So, you finally made it through the door. You are in the meeting. Craig, talk us through the protocol of that first minute or two the meeting.

**Craig:** Usually it’s going to be about the person that you’re meeting with saying, “So, yeah, I came across,” they’re going to basically give you a quick log line of why you’re there at all. They’ve seen something of yours, read something of yours. They talked to your manager. You have a mutual friend. Whatever it is, there is some reason they agreed to this. And so that’s kind of the intro. Very quickly it will turn into where’d you grow up, where’d you go to school, how long have been doing this, how did you get started here. “Let me tell you a little bit about what we do here” is a very common thing. They will explain.

And I always laugh. It’s a little bit like when you go to a restaurant and the waiter says, “Have you eaten with us before?” Ugh, no, but go ahead.

**John:** It’s tapas, which are small plates.

**Craig:** Oh god. Because literally if they don’t say – right. So, here what we do is we load the food into a cannon and we fire it into your face. If they don’t say that, I’m like, guys, I mean, yeah. OK. Just say we’re small plates, family style, small to large on the menu, whatever it is. But it’s that thing of like well let me explain a little bit of what we do here. And then they’re going to start talking. A lot of times this will be boring to you. Because what they’re not doing is telling you how specifically money is going to end up in your pocket, which is probably what you’re imagining or hoping for when you’re starting out at the very least. So you just have to kind of nod and be engaged and feign interest as best you can in how their production company came to be. And ask questions. You know, everybody likes to be shown interest in.

**John:** Agreed. So in that first minute you are really trying to establish some pattern of mutual interest. I really liked that thing you made that just came out. I have that same – you’re trying to find areas of commonality just to sort of ground you a little bit. But it’s important to remember it’s not an audition. It’s not a job interview. It’s not a first date. It is really more imagine you have a mutual friend who said like you two should get together and talk. It’s sort of that vibe.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so there’s a transactional quality to it. You’re both looking for how you can help each other. And in that listening that Craig describes, I actually find that really useful because people will stake out a very general area of kind of the things they’re looking at, and more importantly the things they’re not looking for. So when I moved over to Verve I went out on a bunch of general meetings for places that I just had never met before. And so I met at Working Title. And so I thought I had an idea of what a Working Title movie was, and I was basically right, but even within the Working Title framework I got a much better sense of like, OK, they’re very much looking for this kind of thing.

I met at Tristar and Tristar was a different mandate than what it was when I was a reader at Tristar, definitely. So, I got to hear what they’re looking for. I had a meeting at Monkey Paw and it’s a really specific mandate of the kinds of things they’re trying to do.

I had a meeting a studio and they said, “We’re looking for non-IP IP.” Which is like, OK, that’s weird.

**Craig:** Public domain stuff.

**John:** Public domain stuff. They want unicorns or Greek mythology. I’m like, oh, OK. So if I have things–

**Craig:** Why are they looking for it? It’s there. [laughs] It’s all there.

**John:** They want people to come in with non-IP IP basically.

**Craig:** I see.

**John:** Or they’re trying to develop things based on that stuff. So if you had a Medusa story that would be a place to do a Medusa story.

**Craig:** I do not.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** But that is good. You’re getting a sense of what they want and you’re listening to them. Because it is kind of a two-way evaluation process, right? I mean, you may walk out of there, you don’t want to say it in the moment, but you may walk out of there thinking well I have no interest in doing non-IP IP. That’s not what I’m interested in right now. And then you know, OK, so I guess not them for now.

**John:** Yeah. So you’re also getting a vibe on like would I want to work with this person. And I would say trust your instincts there. If they give you a bad vibe, maybe you’re not going to really enjoy working there. So maybe that’s not the right place to take that pitch down the road or to–

**Craig:** Oh yeah, you won’t.

**John:** Or to go after that open writing assignment, because if you’re not going to be up for it that’s cool.

Now, let’s talk about open writing assignments because at some point in a meeting they may pull out a buck slip which is a narrow card that lists these are the things we’re looking to hire writers for. These are projects that are open for discussion. Listen to those. That’s great. But this is also an opportunity to talk, sort of pitch broad areas of things that you’re interested in. This is not your elevator pitch. This is not your sort of concise pitch. This is just I’ll often describe general areas. So if I wanted to say like I can be doing a lot of research on Outward Bound programs and I think there’s a real opportunity to do a horror movie centered around the Outward Bound experience.

That’s not a pitch, but it’s describing an area. And if what they told me was that they’re looking for horror movies and I pitched that back, I can see in the room are we on the same wavelength there. And if we are on the same wavelength then I could come back later in later on with an actual prepared pitch for it. But I’m just getting a sense of like is this the kind of thing that we should be talking about.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. It’s good to also listen in that list, if they pull out the buck slip and they give you their – be aware of two things. One, what you’re hearing are slightly distressed properties. So, first question is with whom am I meeting? If I am meeting the president of something, and they pull out that list, that’s a real list.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s real. If I’m meeting with anybody under that that list is their list. That is a list of stuff that they are in charge of. That they want to get going because it will move them up internally. It doesn’t mean that any of those things will ever actually get made at that company. That said, sometimes they do.

When you hear that list, if you do spark to something engage on it. Just start talking about it. What will happen is they will hear in you maybe the ability to be smart. It’s really what they’re – oh, this person said a lot of smart things. They’re smart. My boss will literally never let me make this movie, but now I have a writer who I know is smart, who if I vouch for for something else will not embarrass me.

To that extent, when you are in there with these people if there is some way – if you’re vibing, right. If they’re NG, then beat it, it’s never going to happen. But if you’re vibing with them try and have some way to express that you were excited to be there in the first place. That you didn’t drag yourself there because your manager said go here, go here, go here, meet a person, go home. You wanted to meet them. You were interested in them because of A, B, or C.

It will make them feel like this isn’t just one of those things you have to slog through, yet another reminder that they are not in charge and have to take general meetings with the likes of you.

**John:** Craig, what is your opinion of giving them your email address or getting their email address? Do you do that after a good general meeting?

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I just assume that if they want my email address then they can get it from my lawyer. If you have a manager, they’ll get it from your manager. If you are at one of the code of conduct agencies they can get it from your agent. So, yeah, no, of course. My feeling is that the privacy of contact information, talking about how you grow old in this business, that’s gone. There is no privacy of contact information. Everyone is contactable at every moment. The thought of withholding that would be I think the most offensive possible thing ever. No, you may not have my email address. Good day, sir.

**John:** Good day, sir. I would say that in this last year I’ve been much more forthright about just giving them my email address and say you can email me that directly. So I’m not trying to cut my reps out of it, but basically saying you don’t have to go through the reps for every little thing anymore. And that we have a relationship that is independent of my relationship through Verve or through my attorney. Just because if it’s somebody I actually do spark with and think like, oh you know what, actually I could see myself working with her on projects, just emailing directly is nice. And also if I have the email I can do the etiquette thing of following up and saying like, “Hey, I really enjoyed meeting with you about this thing, or, “we talked about this thing, I’d love to come in and talk with you more about that.”

I traditionally did not do those follow up kind of emails because I didn’t have those emails. And now I tend to do them.

**Craig:** For whatever reason I have always been someone that everyone thought they should just talk to directly. I have actually bemoaned this. Like I would say sometimes why – is this really – people just call me directly, even about stuff that isn’t great. They’ll just call directly and I’m like shouldn’t you be talking to someone? [sighs] Never mind. Never mind.

**John:** Never mind.

**Craig:** Never mind.

**John:** Craig, I have this new invention. So, let me pitch this for you. So it’s a bell that you have in your house and it has a nine-digit number, I’m thinking maybe a 10-digit number. And anybody with that 10-digit number can make that bell ring at any time. Would that be good?

**Craig:** Yeah, I would be OK with that.

**John:** I mean, the idea that we have phones is crazy. The idea that any stranger can call me on the phone at any point. So that’s why I kind of don’t answer my phone anymore. Like I’ll answer it if you were to call.

**Craig:** Well, we don’t answer when somebody we don’t – so, every phone call was a roll of the dice. And now none are. The worst comes to worst is you get a number, it’s unknown number, or from some town you don’t know because somebody moved out here and didn’t change their number. And then they leave a voicemail and you go, oh, that was that person. Let me add them to my contacts. That won’t happen again. That’s it basically. But, yeah, we always know who is calling.

**John:** Wrapping up the general meeting discussion, I want to say that my first 10 to 15 general meetings were kind of terrible. I was not good at general meetings. It took a while to get used to them.

**Craig:** Define terrible.

**John:** Take our advice–

**Craig:** Like what would happen?

**John:** They weren’t productive. I wasn’t getting to the next stage after them. I was awkward in them.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** I didn’t feel comfortable about it. I wasn’t comfortable sort of in my writer-self skin. But I did get a lot better with practice. And so I would say take our advice, but also don’t be hard on yourself if you find it weird and sort of uncomfortable being in those meetings, especially at the start, because it is a weird thing to be doing.

**Craig:** And as it happens this is one of the few jobs where you can actually be weird and awkward. It’s just that you have to be that much better at your job. But you are allowed to be weird and awkward. You know, some of the greatest screenwriters out there are weird and awkward. And what happens is the executives will go, “Yeah, I’m working with so and so.” “Oh my god, he’s a genius.” “I know. He’s weird. God, he’s weird.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “But he’s a genius so it’s OK.” Or like, “Oh yeah, she is kind of a shut in. Like she’s a recluse. She doesn’t actually leave her house. But the pages have been amazing.” So it’s actually kind of like the legend grows of this weirdo lady that’s pumping out these great scripts. They’ll do that all the time because this business loves a narrative. They love to characterize everybody. The danger zone is when you’re fine, and you’re also super boring, or awkward or weird in a room. That can be an issue.

**John:** In a future episode we’ll talk about the process of going in and meeting with a showrunner, like if you’re trying to get hired on a show. Some things will apply, but some things won’t apply. So we’ll try to get a really good showrunner on to talk about those meetings as well.

**Craig:** Sounds like a good idea.

**John:** Let’s answer some questions. Craig, do you want to take Zack’s question?

**Craig:** Yeah, Zack asks, “I was wondering if you guys had any suggestions on character mannerisms, specifically on the best way to go about formatting them. For example, if a character has a nervous tick of laughing to relieve inner anxiety,” huh, I think I’ve seen a movie with that, “should you write, ha-ha, or parenthesis chuckles in the dialogue, or parenthesis every time it comes up? Another example would be a physical tick like an eye twitch, more than just a normal occurrence, something that is psychological or neurological. I’ve recently seen this done in a script when the character is introduced as, ‘Note, Eric nervously chuckles throughout the script when nervous or feels out of place in social situations.’ But I feel like readers will forget something like this with everything else they’re supposed to be paying attention to, especially closer to the end of the script when the introduction was back on page one. Any thoughts?”

John, what do you think?

**John:** I think it’s a really good question and honestly a difficult thing to make a blanket statement for. But what Zack is pointing towards is that the experience of watching the movie, we’re going to see all this nervous behavior, we’re going to see these ticks, we’re going to see these mannerisms. But on the page it’s so easy to miss them and to forget them, especially if he said it on page one and he didn’t say it again. So, I think you’re going to have to remind us over the course of the script that you’re doing it. But I wouldn’t do it a parenthesis kind of thing every time it happens. And I wouldn’t try to call it out in action every time. I would find reasons why what he’s doing is either noticeable to other characters or if he’s alone in the scene that his nervous behavior or whatever that mannerism is is worth calling out in the action because it is the main thing that we’re seeing at this moment.

Craig, what would you do?

**Craig:** I agree with you. I think the first time you experience this it’s important to describe it in action and to describe it in a way that is connected to character. So it’s not simply he chuckles when nervous. I can’t think of a more boring way to describe a very complicated thing. In the moment let us experience it as it happens for the first time. Let us feel like the other people in the room who are confused. Is he laughing at us? Is he laughing at that character? Is this just covering something up? We can tell something from his eyes that he has no control over this.

And then throughout that scene he laughs, he laughs again. Show other people reacting. Make a meal of it the first time it happens. Later in subsequent scenes you can say it’s happening again. Right? Like the laughing thing happens again, so that we understand how it’s happening. I would not do parenthesis. That would get very annoying. And I would certainly not just dump it in the beginning like some random boring note. That’s not how we paint human beings.

**John:** Yeah. So if a character had a larger physical thing that was important to call out at the start, certainly call this out. If a character uses a wheelchair we’ve got to know that. But we’re also going to hopefully see reasons why that is a factor in other story points along the way. And so it’s going to be a thing that is going to affect the story as it goes along.

Something that is more subtle like this or that has an influence on dialogue, yeah, look at your dialogue and see how it’s going to possibly impact that. But what Craig said about how other characters react to it is equally important to what the actual character itself is feeling about the mannerism.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s there for a reason. You can’t just dust it on an actor. It will be the first person to tell you how much am I doing this? Am I doing it every line? Am I loud? Am I quiet? What do other people hear and notice? So you cannot bullet point it. You have to bake it in.

**John:** All right. One more question. Rebecca asks, “I want to write a screenplay using improv through a Second City style approach. I come in with a detailed written outline of what each scene is. The actors improvise it in a rehearsal space. As the writer-director I offer feedback, then they improvise it again. The process repeats until each scene is set. If I go home and turn the exact dialogue they came up with into a shooting script are they still actors who improvised their lines, or have I basically turned the rehearsal room into a writing room and now everyone would need to be credited and paid as a writer?”

**Craig:** Oh, that’s a really good question. I got to be honest. I don’t know. I know that for instance the Larry David shows do work in this kind of script-provisational style. But there isn’t this thing where the outlines are written and then actors gather together. They perform like a stage play. Someone transcribes it. And then three days later they act it out. And repeat the things that they said. It’s rather on the day they improvise. Improvising on the day in front of cameras is not – so there is no transcript being made. There is a kind of freedom to just act on camera.

The writers of Curb Your Enthusiasm are the writers who wrote those outlines. And they usually have specific lines of dialogue that they need to get out. In this case I am concerned that if you’re just writing down all the things they said that it is a little – it’s like a roundtable kind of thing. I’m not quite sure.

**John:** Yeah. We can talk about sort of the actual WGA sort of legally kind of definitions of who is a writer and who is not a writer. I would say, Rebecca, you are the writer because you are making ultimately the editorial decisions about what is being written on that page. And you’re actually creating a script that reflects this thing. So if your rehearsal process is getting you to that point, OK. What I would stress is that all of your actors need to come into this with a clear understanding and maybe even sort of write down in the contract saying this is how we are doing this. And you won’t be credited as a writer but we will acknowledge that you contributed to the storytelling.

I mean, an option might be to sort of give story credit, to share story credit with all these people who are doing the thing.

**Craig:** I don’t know. It’s really messy. Because if you go through these rehearsals and one person is just awful, except for this one brilliant line, so you replace them as an actor but you keep their line? It’s weird. I’m not quite sure how – I’m sure this has been done many different ways. The part that’s a little nerve-wracking for me is that there is no script to begin with. There’s just an outline. So if there were a script to begin with and then you go into rehearsals with actors, I mean, we all do this. We listen. We watch. Things come out. You then go back and put those in the script because they work and they feel good. But that’s different. These people are creating all of the dialogue. So, I’m not sure. The answer Rebecca is I don’t know.

**John:** I don’t know. But going back to our growing old discussion, this is a way of working. And so there are other filmmakers in the past who have done this. There are many filmmakers in the future who will do this. So you are going into some ground that has been tilled but there’s not a set pattern for how this is supposed to work. So, just try to be respectful of the patterns you’re trying to set here.

**Craig:** That makes absolute sense to me.

**John:** All right. It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a book by Mark Miodownik called Stuff Matters. He is a material scientist. He is a person who studies how we make things, things of metal, things of plastic. I thought it was actually just a great exploration of sort of how the modern world sort of makes our stuff. Craig, for example, if you are eating with a fork why are you not tasting the metal of that fork? Because you know what iron tastes like. Why are you not tasting it when you eat with a fork?

**Craig:** Uh, I don’t know. [laughs]

**John:** So stainless steel is this remarkable substance that they’ve been able to make which shoves extra atoms of other things in there. And when you scratch stainless steel it reacts with oxygen to form a coating around it. So you are never actually touching the metal of the fork. You are touching the outside coating of it. And it’s a self-healing kind of coating.

So, if you enjoy any of the physical sciences or sort of like it ties into recycling and how we make things that we make today, I thought it was y really great. It even gets into chocolate and how we’re able to take this weird being which is not useful at all and turn it into chocolate which is delicious.

**Craig:** Chocolate is delicious. That sounds terrific. My One Cool Thing this week I have not yet had a chance to use but I picked this up, I think this was written about in Wired. It’s a website called DoNotPay. And there’s a bunch of things that it does, but the thing that I’m kind of most curious about is what they call Robo Revenge. The idea is you get a phone call and maybe you’ve been getting a lot of robo calls, spam calls from a particular number or service and you’re tired of it. And presumably you have registered for the National Do Not Call Registry, which no one seems to pay attention to.

So, the idea here is that you see that call and you’re like, oh, here we go. And you’re like in the movies when you’re going to trace someone’s call. You answer the call and you also at the same time click on the DoNotPay website. And there’s a very easy way, literally one click button that creates a credit card. And you say, great, I’m totally into that. Let me give you my credit card information. And you give them the credit card number, expiration date, and security code and zip code that have been generated by this website. It will go through on their end. It will not ever send them funds, of course. But it will go through as an actual card.

What then DoNotPay does is they get the number of the vendor, because it comes through to their information, and they go, ah-ha, and then they call them and go, surprise, Mother-F-er. You just violated the Do Not Call Registry. We are sending you a demand letter for compensation. Also you can never call that person again.

I mean, it sounds pretty great. Will I ever be in the right place and time to make it work? God, I would love to.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** DoNotPay.

**John:** DoNotPay.

**Craig:** DoNotPay.

**John:** All right. Stick around after the credits because we will be talking about Craig’s turn as an actor on the show Mythic Quest. But for now that’s our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is also by Matthew. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. But for short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. You’ll see the transcripts there. We get them up about four days after the episode airs.

You can sign up to become a Premium member of Scriptnotes at Scriptnotes.net where you can get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re just about to do. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Craig, I have not watched all of Mythic Quest, but I have watched your debut on the TV show Mythic Quest. So, for folks who don’t know this is a new show created by Rob McElhenney and Megan Ganz and Charlie Day.

**Craig:** That is correct.

**John:** And it is set at a game development company. If you like Silicon Valley you will like it. If you like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia you will probably like it as well. I really enjoyed the episodes I’ve seen, but I did watch your debut which happens in episode five I believe.

**Craig:** Maybe? [laughs] I can’t remember. It was one of those.

**John:** Let’s take a listen to Craig’s debut on this television program.

[Clip plays]

**Craig:** Close the door. I can’t see with the glare on the screen.

Female Voice: Sorry, who are you?

**Craig:** I’m Lou. They brought me up from the third floor tester pool to replace some chick who quit or died or something.

Female Voice: Her name is Dana and you can’t replace her.

**Craig:** I’m sure she was a saint, god rest her soul. Anyway, I’m up her from now on.

Female Voice: OK. You know what? Let’s maybe not talk for the rest of the day. I’m kind of chomping at the bit to test out these new maps.

**Craig:** It’s actually champing.

Female Voice: Sorry, what?

**Craig:** You said chomping at the bit. It’s actually champing at the bit. Don’t worry about it. It’s a common mistake.

Female Voice: Great. Excellent.

[Clip ends]

**John:** Craig Mazin, tell us how you came to be an actor on this program.

**Craig:** This was a show that Rob and I had been talking about before I think he – not creatively – he expressed that he wanted to do this show. So I knew that it was kind of on his radar. And he and I had worked together briefly on another project just for a couple of weeks, but we were fast friends. He’s an awesome guy and he’s a very, very smart guy along with being talented and working in the hardest genre there is which is serialized situational comedy. And I believe It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is the longest-running live action sitcom in history, in television history.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which is incredible. I mean, they should be in the Television – do we have a Television Hall of Fame?

**John:** We do.

**Craig:** Well they should be in it. And then when he actually did set up the show he said do you want to just come and consult, just be a consulting producer and hang in the room and just talk about the shape of the season and stuff for the first week or so. And I said, yeah, of course. And I did. And it’s a terrific room and I got to meet some awesome writers, including Megan Ganz and David Hornsby who are both outstanding at what they do and they’re kind of like the brain trust over there with Rob and Charlie. And also Ashly Burch who is the person acting in that scene with me.

**John:** OK. Great.

**Craig:** Who plays Rachel, one of the game testers. And I’m not exactly sure how this came about. It’s not like I was calling him up saying, “Can I please?” I wasn’t like Lucy going, “Desi, please let me be in the show.” But they did create a character who was a total dick. [laughs] And I don’t know why I came to mind. But I did. Rob had asked me to initially audition for the part of Brad, who is one of the major characters, which I was fairly certain I was never going to be. But it was fun to even audition. I had never done it before. I’ve been on the other side of the audition a billion times. I’d never actually done an audition. It was cool.

So, anyway, yeah. So I became Lou. And initially it was supposed to be I think just one episode. And I ended up in I think four maybe. Four of them. Usually with two lines. I’m like one of those two-line guys, which is fine by me. But that first day I had a lot. There’s a lot more than that because there was a part of Lou’s character that ultimately got cut for I think smart reasons, but it was like two pages of dialogue. It was brutal.

**John:** So, tell us about preparing for filming your role. And sort of how much did you know about Lou? How much were you just basing it on like, OK, this is me and I’m just doing a slightly – because it feels like a slightly more asshole-ish version of you.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so tell us about how you prepared for it.

**Craig:** Well, it was clearly a slightly more asshole-ish version of me and that was the whole point. So that part I wasn’t concerned about. Had that down. Preparing was, I mean, there are certain practical things. You have to go to a costume fitting and have wardrobe and hair take a look at you and pick out some things to wear. So there’s a little bit of a well what do you think, and here’s what we think. And then you end up with what it is, which is fine. And obviously I’m not a particularly picky guy being number 16 on the call sheet.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** So, yeah, so that was fine. And then you get the pages. You get them very late in the game and then, of course, they change them. So like I do have an appreciation for what it’s like to be an actor and learn your lines and then have them change them at the last minute and go, D’oh, but I already learned these. And so you memorize the day before. You memorize your lines. You work on them and you have to both memorize your lines and then also memorize the beginnings and ends of the other person’s lines at a minimum. I mean, ideally, you know, everything, so you can be reacting and responding in real time. And then knowing when to come in without feeling like you’re waiting.

You also have to be, I mean, the nice thing is because I’ve been around production a long time I also know the difference between when you’re both on camera as opposed to being individually on camera. And then really honestly the big part was not freaking thinking about it too much. Because I wanted to. I wanted to just, you know, run it a billion times and come up with the funniest way of doing things. And then you realize what am I doing? I’m doing the thing that I hate when actors do. Just shut up brain. Show up on the day. And just freaking do it. And less is more. And that’s that. You know?

**John:** Talk to me about your prop handling. So in the scene that we’re listening to you have popcorn. You’re matching is not perfect but also editorially it was probably the right choice to do sort of what they did. Were you thinking about like, oh shit, I have to eat all this popcorn as I’m doing this?

**Craig:** There was a bunch of things going on. There was actually a dog in the scene that you don’t see.

**John:** That’s a good choice.

**Craig:** Yes. So I was working with a dog. I was working with a bag of popcorn. Yeah, the dog in many ways was wild. That stuff just isn’t there. But you get pretty good, I mean, you get pretty good at repeating. No matter how good you are at consistency, if they want to make an editorial choice that is discontinuous because they don’t want to include the bit with the dog or something, there’s going to be a matching problem.

In the moment they’ll let you know if you picked it up with the wrong hand or something. There were a couple of times where I was like, wait, did I – especially after the first time you do something. Did I reach over this way with this hand or like that? And they let you know.

**John:** Let’s talk about it. So, it’s the script supervisor who lets you know. Correct?

**Craig:** Yes. Sometimes because in that particular space, it’s a very small space that we were in there in that little testing room, and so very few people can fit in there. It’s basically me and Ashly and then the camera folks and they’re shooting three cameras, so that’s a lot of camera people in there and cameras.

**John:** Is it a four wall set? Or is that just walls will fly out?

**Craig:** Those are walls that fly. But not too much. I believe the back wall flies. Well, you know what? I’m not sure now. I think it does. I think the back wall flies and that’s about it.

It’s tight. So that means that the script supervisor is not in there with you. So sometimes, especially if it we were already deep into and I was just curious about something I would ask the camera op because they’re watching the whole thing the whole time. And he’s like, oh yeah, you totally did it with that. But if he’s like, uh, then I would go, hey, can someone tell me. And so as an actor you’re actually talking more with the camera operator and the script supervisor than with the director. Unless the director is really unhappy with what you’re doing. But mostly I mean–

**John:** You’re checking in with the folks who are sort of helping you get your stuff. Did hair and makeup come in and pat you down and touch you at times when it was uncomfortable?

**Craig:** Not much. I mean, my hair and makeup is very simple. I get a little bit of a trim and then a little bit – they pat the makeup on so that as always the light isn’t beaming off my bald head. If you act they’re going to come in there with some sort of spray gun.

**John:** Oh yeah. 100%. Just put a matte finish on me.

**Craig:** It’s just shine is the problem. But, yeah, every now and then somebody would pop in there and be like blot-blot-blot. But that was about it. It’s not super fancy in that regard. And this is classic kind of television shooting where they’re doing seven, eight pages a day. So things are moving quickly.

**John:** So the scene we listened to, did that take a half an hour to shoot?

**Craig:** No, much longer. Because again there was a dog. [laughs] There was a dog.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And they have to shoot – even with three cameras they’re doing multiple setups and a character is entering. Entrances and exits take time. So there were a couple of scenes later on where I’m entering. Those take time. There’s a scene where I’m catching up and going to an elevator. A scene where I stop into somebody else’s office. And for those things then it’s very much about the physicality of hitting your mark.

**John:** Let’s talk about marks because people might not know them. But on a set if a character needs to arrive at a place or is standing at a place there will be tape marks on the floor or some other way to indicate where that character is supposed to end up so that lighting and camera and everything is properly set up.

**Craig:** Yeah. The most important thing is focus. Because there isn’t some sort of auto focus for regular film and television cameras. You have to pull focus so that the focus is instantaneous. Auto focus takes time to adjust. You need instant focus all the time when you’re shooting. So the focus puller is adjusting the focus on the fly depending on the distance between you and the camera. So what they do is they say, OK, he is going to enter that door there, so that’s that focal distance. And he’s going to walk to this spot and stop. That’s your arrival. So, you start at that number and then as I move from A to B they move their thing and land on a number. And it generally works great, as long as I hit that number, that mark.

I had no problem with this. I don’t know why actors do. Because the thing is in your blocking rehearsal which is what you do at the very beginning that’s when you’re figuring out where you stop and stand. So the director will come in say I think you should enter this way and move to here. And I’m like, great, do you want me to go around this thing or this way. And she goes, oh great point, why don’t you come around this way and stop here. So then I do it a few times and I just have to remember where I stop.

**John:** Yeah. Do you remember how many steps it took you to get from one place to the other?

**Craig:** No, I just use a visual cue. I just go, OK, I’m going to roughly stop here. So how hard is that? [laughs] It’s not hard. That’s the one thing where – so much of acting did increase my regard and respect for what actual actors, I know I’m not a real actor, what real actors do. That was one thing where I lost respect. [laughs] I was just like if any actor on one of my sets misses their mark I’m going to be like, “Come on, it’s not hard.”

But one of the things I learned that very first day was how important it is to think of the person you’re acting with and to know whose scene it is, and in that case it was her scene. It’s clearly her perspective. So as a writer know whose perspective – don’t fall into the trap of thinking that I’m acting so it’s about me. And do whatever is needed for her so that she can get where she’s going and needs to go because she is an important character, she’s a main character. I am a little bit of garlic salt for the French fries.

**John:** Sounds good. Finally, last question, when did you shoot this? Because people know sort of your history with Chernobyl. So, were you already shooting Chernobyl when you shot this, because I have no sense of like when these episodes were actually filmed?

**Craig:** I believe that I was shooting this I think it was after Chernobyl, pretty sure it was Chernobyl was wrapped. Yeah, it had to be after Chernobyl wrapped. I was in Lithuania. But it was before we were done editing. So I think it was in, I think, I want to say it was in the fall of 2018. I think. Yeah. It’s been out there for a while. But it was fun. It was a lot of fun. And I am in season two. I know that, yeah, I do something bad. [laughs] But that’s all my character ever does is stuff that’s bad. So, anyway, yeah.

**John:** Cool. Craig, congrats.

**Craig:** Thanks man.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Tuesday Feb 25th, John hosts Q&A with showrunner Sam Esmail to talk about Mr. Robot, Homecoming and other things. Click here for [tickets](https://www.wgfoundation.org/events/all/2020/2/25/showrunner-sessions-with-sam-esmail).
* Wednesday Feb 26th, Join John at Beyond Bars, a panel on potrayals of criminal justice on screen. Get your [ticket here](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/beyond-bars-changing-the-narrative-on-criminal-justice-tickets-91710373195)
* [Stuff Matters by Mark Miodownik](https://amzn.to/2SRKOGw)
* [DoNotPay](https://donotpay.com/web/robo-revenge)
* Watch Craig on [Mythic Quest](https://tv.apple.com/us/show/mythic-quest-ravens-banquet/umc.cmc.1nfdfd5zlk05fo1bwwetzldy3)!
* Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium [here](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/).
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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