Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/18606).

**Craig Mazin:** Hi folks. This episode does contain some strong language so put in those ear buds, put in those headphones. Keep those children safe.

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 445 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today it’s our very first ever live video Scriptnotes. We have some number of people watching us live on YouTube, each of them wondering, wait, is that what Craig and John actually look like?

**Craig:** No. This is not what we look like.

**John:** No. So we do live shows fairly often, a couple times a year. We do one in Austin generally. We do a holiday show. This is a special occasion so we’re doing one live streaming on the Internet. People aren’t really here to see us. They’re here to see our two very special guests who we’re going to bring out in a moment. We’re also today going to have a game segment. We’re going to have audience questions. So it will be like our normal live show, except I won’t have had 1.5 glasses of wine which is the amount of wine I need basically to do a live show.

**Craig:** And that’s a bummer because you will be 1.5 times less entertaining. I’m just going to be honest.

**John:** Yes. So, this is 10am. We’re recording this on a Saturday in Los Angeles. But people around the world are watching this which is so exciting. So, as we’re talking right now I now see that there are, let’s see, how many people are watching this? 654 people–

**Craig:** We’re on our way to 14,000 which is my – that’s my target, 14,000. Yeah. Seems reasonable. A small arena. That’s how I work.

**John:** So this is free for the world. This is not a fundraiser for anything. This is just a morale raiser. But for Premium subscribers, Craig you don’t know that we’re going to do this. We’re going to do a postmortem after the show, maybe tomorrow we’ll record this, to figure out what we learned and what went well and what went wrong in the process.

**Craig:** Great. I’m sure that under what went wrong I will feature heavily.

**John:** [laughs] It is a weird moment in which we’re all now just broadcasters. Somehow we’re supposed to be doing television, just everyone.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, it turns out that broadcasting is not the rare talent that we were all told it was.

**John:** Mm-mm. Anybody can do it in their basement.

**Craig:** Yeah. People would say you’re no brain surgeon or radio broadcaster. Well, we’re all–

**John:** We’re all broadcasters now.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re all broadcasters now. It’s not hard. It’s not hard.

**John:** All right. Let us welcome our two very, very special guests. First off can I welcome Phoebe Waller-Bridge. She is an Emmy, Golden Globe-winning writer, and actor, whose credits include Killing Eve and Fleabag. She’s joining us from London. Phoebe Bridge, please turn on your camera and join us on Scriptnotes.

**Phoebe Waller-Bridge:** Hey.

**John:** Phoebe!

**Craig:** There she is.

**Phoebe:** We did it!

**John:** We did it.

**Craig:** She looks just like she does on TV. It’s amazing.

**John:** It’s incredible. Actors are wonderful, beautiful people.

**Phoebe:** I know.

**John:** Phoebe it is so wonderful to have you here. Thank you so much. It’s a fantasy to have you on the show at all, but to have you all the way from London is a special, special treat.

**Phoebe:** Thanks for having me.

**John:** Our second guest, Ryan Reynolds is an actor, writer, producer, gin magnate, and somehow a wireless provider. He’s known for such films as Deadpool and The Nines. Ryan Reynolds—

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Welcome to Scriptnotes.

**Ryan Reynolds:** Very nice.

**Craig:** Hey!

**John:** Ryan Reynolds!

**Ryan:** You forgot some of my awards like MTV Movie Award Best Kiss nominee 1998.

**Craig:** Good year.

**Ryan:** Very good year.

**Craig:** Who won? Who could have possibly beaten you?

**Ryan:** I think Tobey Maguire. Pretty sure it was Tobey Maguire. Hi everybody.

**John:** Ooh.

**Ryan:** This is very exciting.

**John:** It’s nice to have everyone here together, around the world, to talk and do things. And we’re all looking directly at our camera lenses which is something which is a question I want to start off asking the two of you about, because last week on the show we were talking about Clueless. We did a deep dive on Clueless which is one of my favorite movies of all time. And we were talking about how important Cher’s narration was in Clueless because she is talking directly to us as an audience about her experiences and we would not understand the movie without that.

But the two of you are known for looking directly at the lens and talking to the audience and having a relationship with the audience as characters which is so different from most movies. So let’s start with you, Phoebe. As a writer and as a performer how do you make that decision to suddenly start talking directly to the people watching and what’s the decision process in terms of when is the right time to break that seal?

**Phoebe:** Well Fleabag started as a play and it was a one-woman play. So that was all directed to the audience anyway. And I always felt like I wanted the audiences’ experience to be that they feel like they know someone really intimately and then they get sort of betrayed by her halfway through. So it starts off as a sort of mini sort of standup act. And then you realize halfway through that actually there’s sort of more going on. And that by the time you like her and she’s made you laugh she then divulges things to you that you feel uncomfortable about but you feel complicit in that moment. And so bringing that into the TV show sort of felt like a no-brainer.

But then what was hard was that when I was doing the play I was the only person there. It was a lonely experience. And also I was in total – the character in that was completely in control of the narrative. Whereas suddenly in the TV show there’s actual real life things happening around that are also truthful. So I had to kind of shift it so she wasn’t just the only person describing the world. You could see the world. So then it had to become about her – about having fun with it a bit more. So she would tell you someone was going to behave in a certain way and then they don’t. And then she’s actually a bit knocked by that. So lots of little sort of games and stuff that we were playing throughout it.

But overall for me in the TV show it was to create a relationship between Fleabag and the camera that actually changed and evolved itself. So, at the beginning she’s sort of like, “Come in. This is going to be fun, and sexy, and cool, and I’m in total control.” And then by the end of the first season the camera won’t leave when she wants it to. So she’s like, “Oh, fuck, I should never have done that. I should never have let you in.” So sort of made it a central relationship.

**Craig:** Is there any parallel to your actual life now that the camera will not leave you alone? Oh, fuck, why did I do that?

**Phoebe:** I mean, yeah. It cuts quite close to the bone there, Craig.

**Craig:** Good. That’s my job here is to upset. Ryan, say something that I can then make you feel bad about.

**Ryan:** Oh, please, there’s ideas, a whole list alphabetical and chronological that you could probably make me feel bad about.

**John:** But Ryan I was going to say as long as I’ve known you you’ve been trying to make the Deadpool movie. So you were always obsessed with this character and this character in the comic books did break that fourth wall and seemed to be aware that he was in a comic book. But at what stage did it become clear that, oh, in playing this role I will be directly addressing the audience? There’s going to be a relationship between me and the audience that’s different than sort of a normal hero.

**Ryan:** On Deadpool in particular he has a very intimate relationship with the audience. I mean, even by virtue of the fact that Deadpool exists is exclusively because of the Internet and the audience that made it happen after the test footage leaked that we’d made years before. They were the ones that sort of generated the energy that convinced the studio to say, yes, we’ll make this film.

So, it sort of started off that way and I love it. I love how intimate – there’s an intimate relationship there. Deadpool is constantly acknowledging and playing with the cultural landscape. And I think in doing that there’s a bit of a nod-nod-wink-wink with the audience. So, it’s always been – it’s just something to be judicious about with us. I find that less is more with it. I mean, by the second movie I think we’d done it about half as much as the first one. But I do love it. I do love a good fourth-wall break.

**Craig:** There’s something about that connection that both of you guys do that I find fascinating in its relationship to comedy particular. Because I do love comedy, you’re both hysterical. Fleabag is wonderfully funny. Deadpool is wonderfully funny. But you are also talking to the man that was crying on a plane at the end of Deadpool 2. Crying. Like a lot. [laughs] And I was crying a lot because I cared.

**Ryan:** The efficacy of alcohol is much more severe on an airplane.

**Craig:** I wasn’t even drinking. I was not drinking. It was just that because you loved her and you got to say goodbye. Anyway, the point is when you are having these conversations with people it seems to me that you are also getting at something that is true underneath comedy in general which is that funny characters at their best are funny because we understand also that they are sad. That in some way there is something profoundly sad about everyone that is being really, really funny.

And I’m curious what you think about that in terms of how you create your particular characters that you’re so well known for and why people connect to them so well, especially when they’re kind of one-on-one.

**Ryan:** Hopefully this will be pithy, but I do think that the key difference is one is obnoxious and then funny to me is usually steeped or filtered through some kind of prism of pain or you’ve earned it in some way, otherwise you’re just spouting obnoxious jokes. So, that’s always the trick. I know certainly for Deadpool it was always a trick to weight the B side of everything or the A side depending on how it’s constructed but with some pathos or some kind of pain. And it’s also what I find most challenging about writing on Deadpool is that we really have to take everything away from this guy in order for him to exist, otherwise he would just be too much. So you have to – for both of those movies – we have to strip everything that he holds dear away in order to create this real estate in which we can sort of create a bit of a playground. So making that guy the underdog by virtue of his face, he’s all sort of scarred up. He looks sort of hideous under the mask. All those kinds of things. Those are all, I think, those are all the key ingredients to allowing this guy to sort of spread his wings and fly and be as funny as possible.

So, that’s the sort of unsexy work that goes into it. But I do think, I just don’t want to forget this, I think the most beautiful use of a fourth wall breakup I’ve ever seen is Phoebe’s in the last season of Fleabag. That goodbye was, uh, it just – it pulled every vital source of oxygen out of my body. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

**Craig:** It’s also, I mean, let’s just buff her up a little bit more here. The moment where Andrew Scott notices the camera was one of the first acts of actual cinematic invention I think I’ve seen ever. Because I think by the time like I came along in 1971 they’d invented everything. We had flashbacks and montages. People had broken the fourth. But that was astonishing. It was so astonishing – it was a brand new way to tell people in an audience she’s in love with him and he’s special and he deserves it because he’s on that – what a brilliant…what a brilliant thing to do.

Why are you so smart? There’s your question.

**Phoebe:** Um…well. I’m going to put it down to, do you ever – I don’t know if you guys have this, but you know sometimes when you slightly dissociate yourself from ideas that you have? Because that one I do – I remember having that idea really early on before I’d even come up with the character of the priest. Thinking, fuck, that is smart. And it happens but it’s like outside of you, so like all the painful stuff happens like when you’re actually trying to make something work or fit together, but there are moments – and literally I was thinking – it was less of “fuck this is smart,” more like “that will be cool.” And it just affected me in a way.

And I thought but what would that mean for her? Because I think like Ryan was saying you’re constantly trying to find a way to throw rocks at your characters and like especially if they’re funny. Because being funny takes a confidence. And also to be able to be relentlessly funny takes an awful lot of effort. And I think if you meet people in real life who are just like constantly on, you know, you think the [unintelligible] so hard underneath and you think why are you working so hard?

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**Phoebe:** And what are you hiding?

**Craig:** Yes.

**Phoebe:** What happens when you stop? And in some ways that was what the idea when Fleabag began anyway was that she was just the first five minutes of this, like when I first started writing the play was just joke, joke, joke, joke, joke. And I was getting exhausted. And I was like she is clearly miserable. And then it was finding out what that was.

But I also think there’s g really heroic about people who try and be funny. Because you can die multiple times in a moment and there’s a real risk in it. And so people being really funny in a really heartbreaking situation can feel both heroic or can feel kind of cowardly at the same time. And I think that’s a really fun thing to be able to play with in a moment. And also the moments that the character isn’t funny, or doesn’t crack a joke and actually lets you in a little bit, is a really powerful tool to have.

**Craig:** Right.

**Phoebe:** But I think, yeah, I have to believe that the funniest people in the world are in deep, deep pain. [laughs]

**Craig:** Yes.

**Phoebe:** Like you say, otherwise it is just endlessly – they just get boring after a while.

**John:** So a question for both Phoebe and Ryan, as you’re doing asides to the camera, as you’re having this direct relationship with the audience, as the writer and as the actor who are you seeing there as the audience? Are you really playing it to the camera operator right behind that? Or are you trying to picture the viewer at home? Who is the person you’re having a relationship with when you’re doing these asides?

**Ryan:** I mean, I typically just right down the barrel. I’m also not, you know, I don’t come from any particular – as you may or not know – school of acting. So I don’t have – person, tennis ball, whatever. [laughs] You know, I can do it. So I don’t need to have that extra feedback in order to kind of pull off the two camera look. It dos help if I enjoy the A-camera operator in the moment because, you know, I feel like you’re sort of delivering it right to him, or her. But that’s, yeah, no, it’s just right down the barrel.

If the camera is too close, though, you can get a little cross-eyed. And I’m naturally cross-eyed, so it’s already an uphill battle.

**John:** Phoebe who is the audience as you’re doing your things?

**Phoebe:** Just the audience. I think I’m the same. I didn’t think of anything too romantic to think about because I don’t know how I’d act that actually, how I’m going to act continuously that there’s another mysterious person that I’m thinking of and trying to communicate that to the audience would feel like a complicated message to get over which is why I think.

So, yeah, I just imagined an audience. And also I felt like the part of it that Fleabag was just desperately trying to keep their attention. So every time looking at the camera was stay with me, I’m here. And then when it changed it would be like, oh, don’t look at me. So sometimes it was a happy welcoming thing, and sometimes it would feel like, you know, an evil eye.

But, yeah, the relationship with my DP who was the camera operator as well was really important, especially when he was like, “Put your face down. You look gross.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Phoebe:** It’s like, “Head up. Head up.” But I really loved in Deadpool 1 as well that really little moment when you just pushed the camera aside and you just give us that little break. And you go, “I don’t think you guys want to see that.” And the fact that he has care for us in it really – because there’s so much bravado and then he’s actually like, “Oh, actually give yourself a break.” I really loved that bit.

**Craig:** Fleabag and the Deadpool movies both have this meta awareness which does not undermine the reality of what they’re doing at all. It kind of oddly enhances it. It’s a common thing I think for people to think when they’re writing something that if you start to break the fourth wall what you’re doing is blowing apart the reality of the situation therefore people will not care about the characters.

So, I’m kind of curious as you guys went through this process, and Ryan I know you were writing on Deadpool 2, as you were writing was this a concern that maybe by doing this too much or in the wrong places that you would undermine what was real and what people would care about, or did you have an innate sense that if it was done in certain ways and certain times it would actually make us connect more to the fake reality of the world you were building?

**Ryan:** I think it’s both. I think it’s a cheat, for me at least. I’m not going to speak for Phoebe or anyone else. But for me it’s a bit of a cheat, you know. I think you want to be very judicious with it and you want to make sure that you’re not overdoing it obviously. But there’s a whole sequence. I remember, I don’t know about you guys, but I find I can spend two days – first off, let me just say this is the perfect [unintelligible] – I hate writing. I just hate it. It’s the worst thing ever.

**Craig:** No, that’s accurate.

**Ryan:** I find that I can get fixated on two lines for like four straight days. I can just be hammering away, fixated on these two when I should just be moving on. And then other days I can put out 20, 30 pages. But I remember there was this one scene in Deadpool which is like a 15-page scene which is already a bit of a no-no in a film—

**Craig:** Slightly.

**Ryan:** Yeah. But it’s a scene where Deadpool has lost the lower half of his body and he has these little child legs growing back. And I loved writing it because as long as you can go in the scene without revealing these child legs to me was very funny. And then we get into some kind of weird cinematic trope where I break the fourth wall and I – oh, we’re talking about time travel that was it, which is also another just horrendous thing to write.

And I remember breaking the fourth wall and saying, “That’s just lazy writing.” So, you know, really that’s a complete cheat because that was lazy writing and we’re forgiven for it to a certain degree by acknowledging that it’s lazy writing. And then kind of carrying on.

But I tend to use it initially as a crutch a lot. And it’s rarely written into the screenplays. I mean, Deadpool we almost never wrote it in. And then Deadpool 2 I think it was written in at one point during an extraordinarily belabored death sequence at the end of the movie. I just did a couple in the script. I wrote, you know, “straight to camera.” But other than that we didn’t, you know.

**Phoebe:** You had decided to do it before filming though? But it wasn’t in the script?

**Ryan:** Oh yes. Oh, 100%. Yes. Breaking the fourth wall. That’s actually not an invention of ours. That’s from the comic books. He’s constantly talking to the reader in the comics. But we did this elaborate death sequence at the end of Deadpool 2 and I was just doing everything – at one point I even did somebody’s award speech from the Golden Globes straight to camera. It was another person’s. Absolutely kitchen sink type stuff.

**Phoebe:** Oh, I can see just that moment right now.

**Ryan:** Right. Just on and on and on and on. But it was, yeah, I do love it. I mean, I do really love that sort of after a while it creates a bit of a trust I think there. And just as long as you don’t overdo it.

**Craig:** You planned for it to happen but you did not plan ahead in terms of actually writing what it was that you were going to say or even when it was going to happen.

**Ryan:** No.

**Craig:** Whereas Phoebe, I’m just going to go out on a limb here and think that you planned it all pretty carefully because you were coming from the stage where obviously you had to perform every night in the same way.

**Phoebe:** Yeah, yeah. And I crumble under the pressure to be able to be spontaneous with the straight to camera. I would lean on the script. In terms of how many times I spoke to the camera that was really scripted. But there were looks that weren’t scripted. I went with abandon with that when we were shooting. And then we just took them all out.

**Craig:** Not all.

**Phoebe:** I was like being all creative. And there’s a cut of the first episode of the second series when I just wanted to see what it looked like when there was just no looks to camera or no talking to camera at all. And my poor editor Gary was sort of like, “Are we really going to do this?” And just to see how it sits without it so you can feel the impact of it again. And we just scripted so far back, because I think it can get irritating because there’s a self-awareness about it and somebody being consistently self-aware all the time is a bit like the same thing as someone making jokes the whole time. But it’s almost like commenting on what’s happening. And so I did put it back quite a lot.

But, god, I really went for it in a few scenes and it’s a shame. It’s a shame.

**Ryan:** You would side eye the camera, though, which was just one of my favorite things that you would do. In an emotional moment there would just be this little side eye glance to the camera. Oh, it was such a great use of it.

**Craig:** I do them sometimes. I try and do them. Like in my house sometimes if something happens—

**Ryan:** Always.

**Craig:** And I screw up. There’s one thing that I always do from the Howard Stern movie Private Parts where he’s gotten his first job at a radio station and he pours Dr. Pepper on a record and he goes [laughs like Howard] and I’ll do that any time I drop something. And now if I screw something up or somebody says something ridiculous I’ll just sometimes look over. I’ll look over to a Fleabag camera and just go…

**Phoebe:** Oh good. Good.

**Craig:** You’ve ruined me.

**John:** Nice. Well, let’s talk about self-awareness because both of you are writing things in which you are going to star. And you’re going to be the principal person we’re going to see on screen. And it must change your relationship to the material and to all your collaborators. So you are the person, you’re the face of this thing, but you have directors, you have producers, you have other actors in the thing. How do you balance, and especially both in production, but when you get to post, how do you balance your relationship as the person who created this thing with the person who is the centerpiece star of it? How do you take in outside feedback to make sure you’re doing the right things? You are the center of this whole project. How do you make sure that it actually makes sense? Who do you turn to and how do you have those conversations?

Ryan, I’ll start with you. Who do you enlist in your circle of trust because the camera is aimed at you and you’re talking directly to the camera, how do you know when you’ve gone too far? How do you know when to rein it back in?

**Ryan:** First off, fuck everyone else’s opinion.

**Craig:** There we go. There it is. I knew it. I knew it.

**Ryan:** Secondly, no. I am so self-loathing. You know, look, this panel of people right here have forgotten more about screenwriting on this call than I’ll ever know.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Ryan:** I’ll start with that. But I’ll say this, though. I am so self-loathing that there is no part of me that is really precious about more me in anything. I do struggle, you know, this film I did this year called Free Guy, which is one of my favorite things that I’ve ever been a part of, I struggled writing other people in it. Not myself so much, but I did struggle making sure that their voices felt three-dimensional and important. It’s easy to give other people jokes. But, yeah, in the post-production process sitting in there I had no problem. My biggest problem is pulling out too much stuff. You know, I’ll start to – I’ll pull stuff out and the editor or in this case Shawn Levy who I was working with, the director and producer, he would say that you’re taking out exposition at this point. You’re taking out important information that we need to know. Just because you don’t want yourself…

So, yeah, that’s never been a huge problem of mine. But then there’s also – the flip side is I can get a little crazy about certain jokes or beats or things that are for whatever reason super important to me. But, you know, I take feedback in a test audience the same way anyone else takes feedback in a test audience. I can walk away and if there’s a resounding no to something then it’s got to go.

**Craig:** Phoebe, self-loathing also?

**Phoebe:** Yeah, huge amounts of self-loathing. All the way through every part of the process. I lean really heavily on my director, Harry Bradbeer, and my producer, Tony Robbins. Because they are really brutally honest. No matter how much that hurts it’s so valuable. But also there’s sometimes when I, from a performance point of view, I feel there’s so much going on. Sometimes I just wouldn’t know. And feeling like you’re in it when you’re also running it and that kind of stuff is a luxury. I don’t feel very in it all the time as an actor. I don’t actually know if I’ve felt like that to be honest. It’s so bad.

But so I would – I’d just be like is it funny, is it sad? Basically is like the question that would be thrown across the set. Sad enough? And Harry would be like, “Sadder.”

So, I really rely on them. And then I suppose, I can’t remember what the other thing I was going to say. What was the other thing that Ryan said?

**Ryan:** I don’t know. No idea.

**Craig:** He’s not good at writing. And…

**Ryan:** And now, yeah.

**Phoebe:** Oh yeah, he’s a terrible actor. He’s terrible at writing. Really bad at producing.

**Ryan:** I’m OK at some stuff. I’m OK – I can drink like a fish. Yeah.

**John:** Ryan, I think we can help you out because from the very start of Scriptnotes we’ve been trying to offer sort of useful advice. And to steer people away from bad advice that they often get as screenwriters. Because new screenwriters are sort of inundated – they read the books. They go online. They look through all these guides to teaching you how to be a better screenwriter, how to even get started as a screenwriter. So I thought we might play a game the four of us together to figure out sort of like how to sort through the good advice and the bad advice.

So what I did last night is I went online and I Googled “screenwriting mistakes” and I pulled some of the advice I found online about screenwriting mistakes. And I’m going to invite on a contestant to play this game with us.

**Craig:** Hey Paige.

**Paige Feldman:** Hi.

**Phoebe:** Hi Paige!

**John:** Paige, can you introduce yourself?

**Paige:** Hi, I am Paige Feldman. I’m a writer and director. I’m living in Los Angeles. I just signed my first feature deal like on Monday.

**Phoebe:** Yay.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Craig:** How about that? We have really – I mean, our listeners are quality.

**John:** Yes.

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**John:** Now, Paige, this is going to be a game segment. So what I’ve done is I’ve pulled this advice from the Internet but it also introduced some things I just made up myself. And so your job is going to be to figure out what was real bad advice and what is fake bad advice. And so as a new screenwriter this is important stuff for you to figure out.

Now, I should ask you have you ever played on a game show before?

**Paige:** Yes. I was a contestant on Jeopardy! in the teen tournament when I was 16.

**Craig:** Wait, hold on. Hold on.

**Phoebe:** What?

**Craig:** Where have you been all my life?

**Ryan:** Yeah buddy. Let’s walk that back a second.

**John:** Paige, you have to tell us about this teen tournament. So, how did you do? What were the questions that got you? Tell us.

**Paige:** So, I lost in the first round. Lost on Final Jeopardy!

**John:** What was the answer, what was the question? Let’s see if we can get it. Craig will probably get it. We’ll see.

**Craig:** I’ll try. I’ll try.

**Paige:** In 1859 this man said to Horace Greeley, “I have 15 wives. I know no one who has more.”

**Craig:** Ooh, that was 18-what?

**Paige:** I think it was ’59. I mean, it was in 2001 that I was on the show so this is—

**Phoebe:** Have you got people in your head for the other years, Craig?

**John:** I was going to guess Brigham Young, but I’m not sure.

**Craig:** I was going to guess Joseph Smith, but I don’t think we’re right.

**Ryan:** I was gonna go Joseph Smith.

**Craig:** [laughs] That was the fakest – I was Brigham Smitherson.

**John:** Paige, what is the answer?

**Paige:** It was Brigham Young.

**Craig:** Oh, you got it. Great. You picked the right Mormon.

**Phoebe:** Oh my god.

**Ryan:** John August!

**Paige:** You could have won the Jeopardy! Teen Tournament, John.

**Ryan:** Wow.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Who did you pick out of curiosity, Paige?

**Paige:** I had absolutely no idea because I didn’t know who Horace Greeley was when I was 16. So, I just—

**Ryan:** For shame!

**Paige:** I just chose the only person I knew who had a lot of wives which was Henry VIII, even though I knew he only had six. And I enjoyed myself on the show until I got eliminated and then I got to watch all of my friends do fantastically. So.

**Craig:** All right. Well, I hope that they all paid for it somehow.

**John:** Let’s hope you can do better on this one. I think you probably will do better on this one.

**Craig:** High stakes.

**John:** All right. So let’s start with some really basics. We’ll have Craig start with a first bit of advice. So this will be A, B, and C. Craig, you start.

**Craig:** Basics of formatting. Is it, A, only use Fade in and Fade out at the beginning and of your script?

**John:** Or is it B?

**Phoebe:** Dissolve to is the proper transition to use within the script if needed.

**John:** Or is it C?

**Ryan:** Make sure to underline jokes in your script so that even idiot actors can understand them. Save italics for dramatic moments like when Deadpool remembers his hot dead wife.

**Craig:** I love that moment.

**John:** So, Paige, which is the fake answer there?

**Paige:** I am going to guess it’s C unless Ryan was adlibbing the idiot actors part.

**John:** C is the correct one.

**Phoebe:** She’s good, guys. She’s good.

**John:** She’s good. She’s good.

**Craig:** She’s on it.

**John:** A pro.

**Craig:** She’s on it. We’re going to have to step this up.

**John:** Question two, let’s talk about technique on the page. Phoebe, why don’t you start us off? Is it A…

**Phoebe:** When you’re writing scene description it’s OK to use “we see” as a way to communicate an image or action every now and then.

**John:** Ah, the controversial “we see.” All right, Ryan, B?

**Ryan:** Slug lines should not contain dates or times.

**John:** No dates or times in slug lines. Or is it C, Craig?

**Craig:** Every screenwriter worth his or her salt uses Final Draft.

**John:** Paige, what do you say, A, B, or C?

**Paige:** This one is a little bit tougher but I’m going to guess it’s A because there’s so much like “no one should ever use we see” happening which is silly.

**John:** The correct answer was C. I made it up just so Craig would have to say to use Final Draft.

**Craig:** I’m so angry. I’m so angry for so many reasons. One, Paige, I thought you knew me. You don’t.

**Ryan:** Craig, are you like John where you just charcoal sketch your scripts?

**Craig:** No, no, John goes from legal pads to his own proprietary software. And then at some point I think he ultimately does the formatting within one of his many multiprocessors. Whereas I use a lovely program called Fade In Pro. But I do not like Final Draft. I’m on record.

**Paige:** I just switched to Fade In.

**Craig:** Oh, good for you. Well done. And John has Highland.

**John:** Mostly Craig I wanted you saying that on the air so that they can snip that out and use it.

**Craig:** I know exactly why and I’m not upset, but a little bit.

**John:** Question three. Talk about nuance and detail. Ryan, can you start us off?

**Ryan:** In screenplays detail is poison. Film is a collaborative art form. The director, cinematographer, set designer, makeup artist supervisor, special effects supervisor and so many others will decide the details. Now, your job is to convey the broad stroke image as quickly as possible so the reader can visualize it quickly and move on to the next image they’re supposed to be seeing.

**John:** Or is it B?

**Phoebe:** Whatever you do don’t have your protagonist look to the camera and deliver a devastating line. [laughs]

**John:** Or is it C?

**Craig:** If you character isn’t listening to music and you simply included the song as something to be played over the scene that is not your job.

**John:** Paige, tell us. A, B, or C?

**Paige:** While I would assume that B would be given as advice of someone who wanted to, I’m thinking that it’s probably a little too specific to Phoebe, so I’m going to guess B.

**John:** You are correct. Correct.

**Craig:** So just to be clear, the other ones they’re real things that you’ve read?

**John:** They’re real things. So in the show notes I’ll provide the links to where I took these all from. These are actual articles online. So things about “detail is poison,” that came from an online thing.

**Craig:** Well, we’re going to ruin that person’s day, month, year, life.

**John:** All right. Question four. Structure. Oh, structure is a big bugaboo. People have a hard time with structure. Whole books are written about structure. Phoebe, can you start us off with answer A?

**Phoebe:** A, in a properly structured movie the story consists of six basic stages which are defined by five key turning points in the plot. Not only are these turning points always the same, they always occupy the same positions in the story.

**John:** Ooh, or is it B?

**Ryan:** At the exact midpoint of your screenplay your hero must fully commit to her goal.

**John:** Or is it C?

**Craig:** Do not indicate where to place the title of the film or where to roll the credits. These notations are superfluous in a speculative script. Such matters are usually decided by the director.

**John:** Paige, tough one here. A, B, or C?

**Paige:** I feel like I’ve heard all of these. I am going to guess – I’m going to go with B.

**John:** It’s a trick question. They were all actual things I pulled out.

**Craig:** God.

**John:** So-called experts said all of these things.

**Phoebe:** So my first instinct was correct.

**John:** Your first instinct was correct. We’re going to give you the chime. All right, final question. These are takeaway lessons we can sort of get out of what we’ve learned. Craig, start us off. A?

**Craig:** For a character to be engaging, even likeable, they have to be deeply flawed.

**John:** All right. Or is it B?

**Ryan:** Physical descriptions including race, height, clothing, etc. matter far less than most writers think. Leave the costuming up to the costume designer.

**John:** Or is it C?

**Phoebe:** You may think that there are rules for how a screenplay is supposed to work, but in fact there are merely conventions. And while it’s important you understand the conventions you should use them as a foundation upon which to build your own work, rather than a straightjacket to constrain you because after all isn’t that the point of art?

**John:** Paige, what’s the answer?

**Paige:** I mean, this is about the bad screenwriting advice and C was very good screenwriting advice, so let’s go with C.

**John:** C is correct. Paige, you have won the game. I’m not sure what you won. You got a chance to hang out with us on the Zoom.

**Paige:** That is winning.

**John:** Thank you so much. Good luck with your screenplay. Sorry about Teen Jeopardy! but I hope this made up for it.

**Paige:** Absolutely. It’s better than Teen Jeopardy! Thank you guys so much.

**Ryan:** Well done, Paige.

**Phoebe:** Nice to meet you, Paige.

**John:** Thanks Paige.

**Paige:** Nice to meet you.

**Phoebe:** Killed it.

**John:** Bye.

**Ryan:** Bye-bye.

**Craig:** You know, better than Teen Jeopardy! was all I ever wanted.

**John:** Yeah. It is.

**Ryan:** John, Brigham Young, like just pulling that out.

**John:** That’s Colorado. Growing up in Colorado. So Horace Greeley, there’s Greeley, Colorado is named for Horace Greeley, so I had a sense of the time and place of it all. It’s just sometimes you’re born lucky.

**Phoebe:** Very good.

**John:** I have a specific question for Phoebe and Ryan, because you are the two people who actually have done this. Hosting Saturday Night Live, you both hosted. When you get to the end credit things how do you know which person to hug first? I always stay for the end credits because I want to see the hugs. How do you know which person to hug first? And does one of the cast members come up to your first? Usually it’s the musical guest you sort of huge first. But tell us what is the decision process on who to hug first at the end of Saturday Night Live?

**Ryan:** I aim for hierarchy. I just go for the most powerful person on the stage first. And then work my way down to the audience.

**Craig:** Right. And then through the audience in hierarchy as well?

Ryan. Yes. 100. And then to my family. Through that hierarchy as well. By the end I’m just hugging sperm.

**Phoebe:** I actually got stuck in a non-hug world of pain at the end of mine. Because I was sandwiched between Taylor Swift and Matthew Broderick. And I’d already hugged Taylor earlier. And I’d never even met Matthew. So suddenly when they were like now is the time to fucking touch them I was like, well I turned to Taylor and was like well we’ve done this so I should probably go and do it. It all happened in like split seconds. I should probably go to Matthew and I gave her a look, as she was coming in. So I like—

**John:** Oh no.

**Phoebe:** [Unintelligible] Taylor, turned to Matthew who was already on his way back, had to like claw him back. And then he kind of already gone. Then I turned around and Taylor said to me, “I’ll hug you.” And then we hugged. And then someone actually sent me a gif of the whole thing.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s wonderful. None of us will be watching that right after this. In fact I may–

**John:** We’ll put a link to that in the show notes.

**Craig:** I may leave for a moment to watch it. I mean, I need to see it now.

**John:** All right, we have 1,277 people watching the show right now live.

**Craig:** 13,000 fewer than I thought, but OK, go.

**John:** Some of those people have written in with questions already. Megana Rao our producer she’s going to read some of the questions that people have joined us with. Megana, welcome.

**Megana Rao:** Hello.

**John:** Megana start us off with a question from our listeners/viewers.

**Megana:** OK. We’ve gotten in so many questions. So the first one is from Brady. And he says, “Aside from Beyoncé who inspires us all what’s the most obscure place you’ve pulled creative inspiration from for your projects?” Brady also says, “PS, I love you all.”

**John:** Aw, Brady. We love you, too. Obscure place of inspiration, where you get stuff from?

**Phoebe:** I accidentally, I was a little bit stuck and I just try and pick up like random things when I’m a bit stuck and just have a read, sometimes like three sentences can just get your head out of something. And I picked up a book called Vagina by Wolf that was on the side, it was my friend’s book, and I’d seen it hanging around and I wanted to read it for ages. But I literally opened it at one chapter and I read like five sentences of it and it gave me the idea of the godmother orgasming when she paints, which then rolled into [unintelligible]. This beautiful chapter about how orgasms can connect to your creativity. And so it really helped. So I just dove straight into a vagina.

**Ryan:** Wow.

**Craig:** I’ve done that, but it hasn’t – I mean, I haven’t gotten any great work out of it. Got to be honest with you. It’s distracting frankly.

**Phoebe:** Uh…

**Ryan:** I usually – I’ll dip into music. I find anthemic synth rock, Phil Collins. I don’t know why. That will just pull me right out of whatever kind of funk I’m in. Yeah, Enya. Stuff you wouldn’t expect. Weird sort of not – unexpected kind of stuff that’s melodic and synthy and, I don’t know. For some reason it shakes me out.

**John:** Cool. Megana, another question.

**Megana:** OK, this one is for Ryan but I guess you can all speak to it. It came in from another Ryan and he says, “After being in a one-room film like Buried how did that change your relationship with locations in any given–?”

**John:** Yeah. Buried. I enjoyed your film Buried. So in the film Buried you are in a coffin for basically the entire film. How did it change your feeling about sets?

**Ryan:** Well, the funny thing about Buried was it was shot in Barcelona. It takes place in a coffin. And I was like can’t we just shoot this in my fucking living room? Why are we going to Barcelona?

I don’t know if it changed my relationship to sets but it certainly was a lesson in that, because you do think, OK, this thing is a single location, it’s a claustrophobic movie, isolationist kind of film. But actually there were 17 coffins that we shot in. Each one had a different sort of purpose. So it really did require a tremendous amount of engineering and crew and space and that sort of thing.

But, yeah, locations are – my mentality they’re kind of irrelevant. I don’t really think about it like that necessarily. But, yeah, I do remember that. That was a lot of travel for one coffin.

**John:** Phoebe for Fleabag did you write to specific locations? Do you know like this is the coffee shop I want to be using? Do you have places in mind as you’re writing or is that just normal location scouting after you had scripts?

**Phoebe:** Well, a mixture of both I think. There were one or two places I felt I would write to and I felt really connected to. Like there’s a scene in a Quaker Hall in season two and actually Andrew Scott who plays the priest in it and taken – when I was first pitching the idea to him for the show we met up in Soho and we were talking about religion and all sorts of stuff for hours. And then he at the end of it said I want to show you something. And he took me into that Quaker Hall.

And we sat and spoke in there. There was no one else in there. We weren’t breaking the rules. But then I really desperately wanted that location for the real thing, because it was gorgeous, but also it was in the center of London. This felt really good. And also it had that history between us. And we couldn’t get it. And so we got another place somewhere else. And at the last minute that one fell through and the one we loved became available. And so we got to film in there in the end. And it is really joyful I think when you find yourself in locations that you’ve written to. But it’s rare I think that everything falls into place that you can.

**John:** Megana, another question.

**Megana:** OK, awesome. So Eleanor asks, “As a writer are you ever insecure about using autobiographical elements in your work?” With a follow up from Andy who says, “When you incorporate something that’s vulnerable are you ever surprised when people praise you for that instead of judging you?”

**John:** Great. So incorporating autobiographical elements and sort of the vulnerability that happens with that. I mean, Ryan, you and I can speak to the movie we did, The Nines. That middle character that you play, you play three characters, the middle character is sort of me. And so one of the initial conversations we had to have was sort of like you’re free to take anything you want to take from me. My mannerisms. My whatever. And it was really great and weird to sort of see it being mirrored back. But it worked well together. So, you’re incorporating stuff from the real world.

If it’s a moment that I’m sharing with another writer I will sometimes ask like are you going to use that thing that just happened between us because I want to – I don’t want to take it if you’re going to take it. Phoebe or Ryan, do you encounter that, stuff in your real life that’s maybe becoming part of stuff you’re writing where you have to feel some protective bubble around certain things?

**Phoebe:** Ryan? [laughs]

**Ryan:** I was so excited to hear what you were going to say.

**Craig:** I mean, I was on the edge of my seat.

**Ryan:** Well, I mean, I don’t know about protective. Sometimes something – if something completely wild happens and you have some sort of expectation that we come 90 degrees to and we’re all sort of freaking out about this funny thing that just happened. And I’m amongst a group of people that may or may not be writing screenplays, I might sort of do the same thing John is doing where I might say can I use this because it’s fantastic. I think I could do it justice.

And certainly I don’t write anything autobiographical other than it’s about myself. And I did enjoy playing John with John five feet away from me every scrutinizing moment in his home lo those many years ago. But, no, I look at it more like influence. When I was younger I was in a writer’s circle online. This is about 15 years ago and there was heavyweight writers on this thing. I mean, all over the place. But you could sort of lurk as well. And I was always too nervous to jump in this circle and, you know, write stuff. But I certainly learned so much from the voices. There were so many distinctive voices in these writer’s room. And while trying never to steal from any of them, I did sort of learn about sensibilities and how they can just so be so completely polarized. So, yeah.

**Craig:** Phoebe, do you ever wrestle with the fact that a lot of people think you are Fleabag and Fleabag is you?

**Phoebe:** Yes. But it’s not so much of a wrestle. I just sort of realize that – because it’s not autobiographical but it’s really, really personal. So I think – and I think that question is beautiful about do you feel like people actually reach out a bit, they don’t judge you. They actually are so relieved when they feel that something is honest and truthful. And I think when I was writing stuff before – Fleabag was the moment where I just thought oh fuck it, I’m just going to write this. And I think when you have that feeling sometimes that’s when you kind of – I don’t know if you guys have had that – but when you just go off.

And when I first started writing the series I was writing what I thought a TV show version of Fleabag should be. And I was writing that and I was getting really angry. No one told me to write it like that. No one said it. It was just a part of my brain that said this is what people are going to want. And then I was angrily writing that and I got so angry writing it that I started writing what turned out to be the TV series as like rebelling against myself for writing the sitcom version. And I was like I hate that they’re making me do this. And I’m like this is what I’m really going to do. And then I sent that one off with a real like Fuck You to my producers. And they read it and they were like OK. And then I was like and this is what I really want to make. And they were like, “Well good, because that is so much better. Why are you wasting your time doing that?”

And so it was quite confusing at the beginning trying to write something that sounds and feels like something people would like. But then there’s always an emptiness about that. And then the moment you start writing something that feels really personal and you get a little bit nervous writing it. Or I remember in season two of Fleabag when I was writing the speech. She does the speech like two-thirds of the way through when she’s saying “I just want someone to tell me what to do.” And she just does this whole list of “I just want someone to tell me what to wear, what to eat” and it felt a little bit dangerous writing that as a central female character just going like, “Just tell me what to do.”

And I was writing it going like, oh god, I’m going to get bashed for this. How dare I say that that’s what a woman or anybody secretly wants underneath it all, let alone a kind of heroine of the story? And that was one of the speeches that people have been so responsive to. And that’s a really comforting feeling.

**Craig:** I think the audience is very good at detecting something that is true, as opposed to something that is designed to seem true.

**Phoebe:** Exactly.

**Craig:** And so their willingness to forgive things, because we are complicated people. There’s a subtlety there that they just got. I got it when I saw it. I just thought that, oh, this actually – I understood why it was a dangerous thing for her to be saying AKA you to be saying. And I also understood therefore that it was a different thing than you are weak and I do want to be dominated or told what to do. It was really more of this – it was an instinct we all have that is different from our – it’s complicated. I got the complexity. It worked. It worked beautifully. Well done. Good job, Phoebe.

**Phoebe:** Thank you. But it’s funny because when you do something like that you just don’t care how you get judged because you feel like it’s truthful. And then I was just like that is true. And I’m going to stand by that character in that moment.

**Craig:** It usually works.

**Phoebe:** Whereas when you’re being false it’s far more scary. They’re going to find out. They’re going to find out. And they always do. They always do.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s come time for our One Cool Things. Craig, do you want to start us off with a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** Yes I do. And, look, we’ve done a great job I think of keeping this a light, lovely podcast. We’re not getting all down. But even in the best of times I have some anxiety problems. Just vague medicated anxiety problems. And so I’ve tried all sorts of the cool mediation apps and the things like that. But the thing that generally works the best for me is just good old breathing. Just simple deep breathing does miracles.

But then I start getting in my own Jewie way, I start freaking out that I’m breathing wrong which is the most Jewish thing I can think of. Like am I breathing right? Did I count enough? So I’m trying to remember this. And a couple of years ago and this just got recirculated around a guy named Nathan Pyle made some little animation, some little web animations to help you breathe rhythmically in a nice deep breathing way. And they work so beautifully. And they’re very simple. It’s just like a ball rolls down a little hill. And up the hill. And you can sort of breathe along with them. And they’re wonderful.

And for whatever reason these days I’ve felt the need to do quite a bit more of that. So, if you’re prone to anxiety and you’re prone to those moments where you’re feeling a bit jelly-legged or butterflies in the stomach or just afraid and you feel like a nice little deep breathing session would help will include a link to those because I find it a wonderful tool.

**John:** Excellent. Now, Craig, on a previous show you had talked about Horse Paste which is a version of Codenames that’s online. Megana and the rest of the office we were trying to play that yesterday and it was down. So instead we went – maybe it’s back up now, but instead we played Drawful 2 which is on Jackbox.tv which was actually tremendously fun.

So, it’s a thing that’s probably most designed for playing on AppleTV with people in a room together and you’re drawing on your phone. But it actually works really well over Zoom. And so you can share one person’s screen and then everybody else is drawing on their phones. And so it’s a way to have a party game when you cannot physically be together. So, Jackbox.tv. It’s a game called Drawful 2 if you’re looking for something to play with your family, no matter where your family is, or your friends.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** Something out there in the world. Ryan Reynolds, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?

**Ryan:** I have one particular podcast that I’ve been going back to since Christmas. John, I think I sent it to you. It’s Anthropocene Reviewed. It’s John Green, novelist/screenwriter. He has this great podcast. It’s once a month. It’s called The Anthropocene Reviewed. I think it’s the last Thursday of every month. But there’s one particular episode that I revisited right now in these times that we’re living in, like you guys, we’re all needing to take some deep breaths. But it’s basically about Auld Lang Syne, the history of Auld Lang Syne, the song. Auld Lang Syne and where it comes from and its use, because it does actually have a use. And it’s heartbreaking. And it’s so beautiful and it’s one of the most beautiful 22 minutes of podcast I think I’ve ever heard in my life. And I think it’s really resonant for right now. So I keep going back to that.

It’s the podcast from I think this last December. John Green. The Anthropocene Reviewed. I highly, highly recommend it.

**John:** Yeah. I listened to that in a train in Japan on your recommendation. It really is a terrific episode.

**Ryan:** Yeah. Beautiful.

**John:** Phoebe, do you have something to recommend for us?

**Phoebe:** I do. It’s a TV show. So it’s not quirky, but I feel so passionate about this TV show that I just have to say. And I don’t know if it’s actually out there. I think it’s being remade. It’s a BBC show called This Country. Do you guys know of it?

**Craig:** This Country?

**Phoebe:** This Country. And it’s a brother and sister, Daisy May Cooper and Charlie Cooper wrote it together. And it’s based on their experiences growing up in the Cotswolds.

**Craig:** Oh, I’ve seen much of this. It’s excellent.

**Phoebe:** It is so good. And it gets right under your skin. And it is so funny and so witty. And it’s a kind of documentary style but their performances are so, so detailed and so extraordinary. And I was grief-stricken when it ended. And they’re not going to make another one. They’ve made three series. But I think Paul Feig is remaking it in America. But catch theirs before because it has so much heart. It is so funny. And it is a really accurate depiction I think of the Cotswolds life for teenagers.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know if it’s watchable here unless you’re—

**Phoebe:** Well find a way.

**Ryan:** In that case just go with CSI: Miami.

**Craig:** It’s a similar show.

**John:** One or the other.

**Craig:** If you use a VPN and you can fake where then I think you can probably watch the BBC.

**Phoebe:** Maybe you can buy it on iTunes? I don’t know. Maybe there’s–

**Craig:** It’s possibly purchased. Obviously you’d want to ideally purchase it if you can. It’s extraordinary. And it’s one of those shows where I started to feel like I was starting to learn a little bit about Britain. I was starting to learn a little bit about people.

**Phoebe:** Yeah. And it’s not a side of it you see very often.

**Craig:** No. No it’s not. And it was fantastic.

**Phoebe:** What do you feel like you learned from it?

**Craig:** Well there is actually this fascinating connection, because now I’ve spent a bunch of time in the UK, and I’ve started to become closer to this fascinating connection between people in Britain and people in the United States. I mean, growing up I used to think that British people were, you know, quite British and quite posh and everything was wonderful. And then we were just a bunch of rooting, tooting Yosemite Sams just shooting in the air.

And as it turns out I guess there’s a huge swath of rural America that matches up quite nicely in a weird way with Northern England and some parts of Southern England. And it’s just the accents are wildly different. Wildly. But the general deal is not wildly different. And I was shocked at why I was shocked. Because it’s where everybody came from.

**Phoebe:** Of course. Of course. It’s the same everywhere.

**Craig:** It’s literally the same. And we did spend, you know, for Chernobyl we had, I don’t know, probably of our cast I think 90% was UK and of that 90% probably 50% were Northern England. And, I mean, and this isn’t to say that I didn’t love everybody from London, but the folks from Northern England are awesome, and Scotland are awesome. I mean, it was just – I had the best time. They just felt like home in a weird way. They felt American and so I love that show because there was a weird camaraderie in the clumsiness and the brokenness but beauty of our people together. I thought it was great.

**Phoebe:** Aw, that’s lovely.

**John:** That is our show. So, Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, who I get to see. Hi, thanks Megana.

**Phoebe:** Thanks Megana.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Special thanks this week to Nima Yousefi and Dustin Box for helping us out. Our outro is by John Spurney. 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. But for short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Phoebe, you’re not on Twitter. You’re so smart.

**Craig:** So smart.

**Phoebe:** So scared. So scared.

**Craig:** And then tell us what dummies thing is. What is it? @Vancity?

**Ryan:** @VancityReynolds.

**John:** Excellent.

**Ryan:** Ryan Reynolds was taken.

**Craig:** Of course. Of course.

**Ryan:** True story.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll 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 including the postmortem on this episode.

**Craig:** All that money. Oh, so much money coming into John.

**Phoebe:** Still on air. Still on air.

**John:** Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Ryan Reynolds. Thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thanks guys.

**John:** Thank you so much for being our very first ever video guests. This was remarkable. Thank you so, so much. Thank you to everybody who watched. I’m supposed to tell you because we’re on YouTube that you have to push that like button and subscribe.

**Craig:** Smash that like button. Smash it.

**John:** I don’t care.

**Ryan:** Smash button. Yeah.

**John:** I don’t care. Don’t subscribe if you don’t want to subscribe. But thank you both very, very much for being on the show. It really means a lot that you came on board.

**Ryan Reynolds:** Thank you guys.

**Craig:** Thanks guys. You’re the best.

**Phoebe:** Thanks so much.

**Craig:** Have a great one.

**Ryan:** Lovely. It was a pleasure.

**John:** Bye guys.

**Phoebe:** Bye.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right. It is 25 hours later. Craig how was that live show for you?

**Craig:** Well, I mean I thought it was deeply enjoyable. First of all, it worked, so thank you because you did everything. You and Megana and your crew put the whole thing together. I thought it worked kind of flawlessly, from my point of view at least, because we could see them. There were a couple of moments where there was a little bit of video lag, but honestly in today’s day and age for there to be not a ton of that is lovely. And we were able to have a great conversation. It seemed like a lot of people watched it.

**John:** So we had a bunch of viewers. We had simultaneously like while we were recording it the peak number of viewers was 1,315. Overall, so we’re recording this on Sunday, there were 10,559 views to the video so far.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So a normal episode of Scriptnotes gets about 40,000 or more people listening to it over the course of the week. So it was good to have for our first ever video thing it felt really good that we got that many people watching. And the report back from the folks who I had moderating the comments was that everyone was lovely and positive and they didn’t need to ban anybody or put anybody on time out. Everyone was great in the comments section.

**Craig:** [laughs] What a weird thing. That our expectation is that adults will behave like little nursery school kids and need time outs. But unfortunately that’s kind of the way the world works.

**John:** So I want to talk a little bit about the technical side of this for folks who might want to try to do something like this at home. The four of us and our guests were speaking in Zoom. And so Zoom is a privacy and security for nightmare for a lot of reasons, but it also works really well. And so the fact that Phoebe was all the way in London and our latency was not bad at all that’s credit to Zoom. So despite all the scary things you read about Zoom are probably true, but they actually do work really well.

So we were all talking in Zoom and then if you use the Zoom webinar feature which is about $40 a month you can pipe that through to YouTube Live. And so that was my choice to not have our normal viewers watching us in Zoom which was possible. I pushed it all to YouTube Live just because that way no one can Zoom bomb us because we were safely behind a wall. That was the instinct behind that.

It went OK. I would say that Megana and I and you actually at one point were in little test screens where we were seeing to make sure that it all worked right and every time we did that it started a new YouTube Live session. And so people would join us and then finally when we actually got the real thing going it could happen.

But I wanted there to be an ability to sort of pause the YouTube streaming so that we could actually talk to Ryan and Phoebe before we went on camera and there really wasn’t a good way to do that.

**Craig:** Well, it still worked.

**John:** It worked.

**Craig:** And I thought you did a great job.

**John:** Aw, thank you. Thank you. And I thought it was a good conversation and they were just lovely, smart people. They had never met before and they felt like, you know, they should have met.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, I can’t be the only who was just watching them and listening to them talk and thinking, yeah, I could see these two guys in a movie doing something together.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** Yeah. It feels like a decent team up.

**John:** I don’t remember if Ryan was texting me this or tweeting me, but back when he had watched Fleabag he was like, “Oh my god, I hope she will put me into a movie or a TV show at some point.” He was so impressed by her way back when in the day. And she’s just great. It was lovely to have them together.

I don’t think Scriptnotes is overall going to pivot to video. I don’t think we’re going to be a regular television show.

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** But how are you feeling about doing more of these?

**Craig:** I’m fine with it. I mean, I don’t get nervous about any of this stuff. I don’t mind it. As long as there’s no expectation of people getting all dressed up and things. But there seems to be a fairly robust environment of podcasts that are now also video casts where it’s like there’s a camera stuck in a recording booth so you’re looking at a guy talking into a microphone.

Personally, look, I find the whole thing bizarre in the sense that any – I’m excited that people listen to our podcast. As you know, I’m endlessly amused and shocked that anyone listens at all. And then the thought that people would watch something also seems kind of crazy. If they want to, I guess. Yeah.

Look, I’m a bigger fan of our actual live shows because there are people there and you can feel a room and warmth and an audience. It’s a very experience. So I’m on the ends of the spectrum. I like a nice quiet just you and me. We’re out on our couples date alone. No one can bother us. Or, we’re at a big party.

**John:** Yeah. I will say that when you and I are just recording the show by ourselves there will be times where we’ll get into tangents or we’ll get on a thing. It’s like, you know what, let’s cut all of that out and pretend we never had that conversation. And in a live show or live stream we really can’t do that. I was mindful that I had to watch myself a little bit more because everyone was listening to us live as it was happening. So there’s something comforting about when it’s just us on tape because you and I both have the ability to cut anything out.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah. I mean, I’m so generally oblivious. I mean, it’s a rare thing for me to go, oh god, why did I? Oh no, I shouldn’t have said that. And I do every now and again and I say, “Hey John, can we cut that out?” But every now and then it would occur to me that we were live, but you know the nice thing is when you’re doing this with two very accomplished actors they’re so calm, even if they tell you later that they were not calm at all, but at least in the moment they appear so calm that you can’t help but mirror their general demeanor.

**John:** Now we may want to talk about this in the real episode that we’ll record for this next week, but we’re recording this on Sunday where all of Twitter is abuzz about the New York Times Maldives story. So we should maybe have a quick moment because this was actually part of my morning was this conversation about like, oh, is this going to be a movie? And of course it’s going to be a movie.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. I mean, writes itself basically. Actually the problem is it’s so obviously a movie that you almost don’t even want to see it because you’ve seen it. Like I’ve seen it in my head. But then again, if somebody does a really good version of a great formula picture then it can be wonderful. I mean, I’ve already put my own little spin on it which is that a couple gets married. It’s not like an arranged marriage or anything, but there was pressure from everybody because they were perfect for each other and they kind of bought into it and they got married. And they both realized individually and separately like minutes after they said “I do” that this was a huge mistake. But the honeymoon is already booked and so they decide I’m going to tell my partner on the honeymoon that this was a mistake and it has to end. And they’re both thinking it. And then they get there and then they both say it to each other and they’re both hurt. And then seconds later they’re told they cannot leave.

**John:** Absolutely. So that’s easy good approach. I’m not dying to see that movie honestly.

**Craig:** I don’t want to see any of them. [laughs]

**John:** I was texting with Ryan this morning about this saying like, hey, this could be a movie. And he was like, yeah, my executive assistant just sent this to me. And he’s like do you want to do it, we could do it together. And I’m like give me a second for my morning coffee to wear off and then I’ll get back to you. And I ultimately – I “passed” on it, not that it was ever offered to me, but to me it was like there are – I can think of 20 writers who could do a great version of this story, or at least could do this movie. And if 20 other writers could do this and do a bang up job on it like there’s no reason for me to be chasing this movie.

What I do think is interesting about a possibility for this is in some ways it feels like a play. Because it is contained.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** It’s within a single space. Except that it’s the Maldives so you don’t want it on a stage. You actually want it beautiful shot everywhere. You want it to feel like you’re on location or some sort of Lucas Film Mandalorian where you create the Maldives through the magic of video screens. So, it wants to be a movie just because it’s going to be gorgeous and beautiful, but it is essentially a chamber drama or chamber comedy between these people.

Something that people have been bringing up on Twitter which I think is a good point is that it can feel like Beauty and the Beast where everyone else who works at that resort are kind of like–

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** These animated things. And that is potentially really problematic.

**Craig:** Hugely.

**John:** To not have their perspective on what’s actually going on there.

**Craig:** Hugely.

**John:** I think the opportunity would be to do sort of a Wes Anderson kind of thing. They’re trying to keep this couple here because they actually – as long as this couple is here they don’t have to go through quarantine. There’s like a whole process. So they’ll do whatever they can to sort of keep this couple together.

**Craig:** I like that. That’s fun. So, then it’s really like the company said, OK, well, we’re going to fire you as soon as the last guest is removed. But if there is a single guest there, of course, you have to stay because that’s our policy. And so they cannot let those – and those people really want to leave but they can’t let them leave. The problem is then the quarantine aspect gets a little mushy.

**John:** It does. So, there’s problems. I think the other opportunity in terms of that central couple is that the way you can chart an entire marriage in this very hot box environment is potentially great. All the progress when you can’t actually leave this person sort of what happens. It can be a microcosm of a marriage within this small period of time.

But someone else can write it. I’m not going to write it.

**Craig:** I agree. And sometimes I think when everybody looks at something and goes, oh my god, that is so a movie. What they’re really saying is oh my god that reminds me of a lot of movies I’ve seen.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** What was the movie that Dana Fox worked on? Couples Retreat.

**John:** Couples Retreat. Yeah. The one where she’s in a resort in the Maldives and she’s just crying and trying to figure out a way to print pages.

**Craig:** It was actually Bora Bora in French Polynesia. And that’s a movie is Dana Fox writing that movie in Bora Bora. But that movie is very much couples in paradise except that it’s contrasted with the trouble inside their relationship and all that. So, you know, makes sense. Yeah, I can see – there’s all sorts of–

**John:** Couples Retreat meets Contagion is basically the pitch on that.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. And this is almost now we’re starting to put our finger on what the problem with Hollywood is is that that requires zero effort. So there’s an entire merchant class of producers who do nothing but sort of just go, neh, heh, and then someone else goes, meh, and then they have to go find writers. It’s like it’s not necessarily a thing. It’s just because it sounds like stuff you’ve already seen. But that’s kind of a blemish isn’t it?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, isn’t that partly why you just don’t want to do it? Because it just feels like what new thing can you say with that kind of high concept? Yeah.

**John:** There’s a couple projects that I’m writing right now and what I will say about them is that they are things for which I am incredibly passionate about doing and I feel like, yeah, I’m the right person to do it. So that’s why ultimately I was like you know what let one of the other 20 writers who would be great at this pursue this project and I’m going to try to chase less in this next decade.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know what I’m perfect for.

**John:** You’re perfect for The Last of Us.

**Craig:** You know what? I do love it. I love it. God, I love it. And weirdly also a pandemic just happened.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That is the strangest of things. Yeah.

**John:** Craig, one last question for you. What is happening in Russia and are they just completely concealing the actual numbers? Is it actually just horrible there and we’re just not hearing about it?

**Craig:** Well, you won’t until you will. But certainly in the initial days of sort of Russian reporting on COVID if you looked at the maps of the world and you start to see where the cases were every now and then on the map there would be this little white spot on their color chart. And that indicated there was no COVID there whatsoever. And Russia was this enormous white spot. See, there was no COVID there according to them. In fact, there was. Of course there was.

What was happening was they were simply failing to classify it. Not failing, deciding, determining under pressure to not classify pneumonia cases as COVID. That is akin to just sort of saying, oh yeah, there’s been a lot of pneumonia, like weird cystic pneumonia and it’s not because of AIDS. It’s just pneumonia. But it is because of AIDS. Because we know that. So, that’s what they were doing.

And then they’ve stopped because it got out of control. So there is sort of – suddenly Putin starts doing things. I think because he started to realize how bad this could be.

It is remarkable that the same delusion has landed on the doorstep of very similarly minded political people. And it’s not about – I wouldn’t say that it’s about being strong men per se. But there is this group of political leaders that are men who feel like they don’t need to take no guff from the experts. And that it’s the damned expert elites who are ruining everything and just good old fashioned common sense like back in the old days, John Wayne types, you know?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So Trump, Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, and of course the uber Vlad Putin, all of them have the same responses which is, oh, boloney. I’m not crying over some flu. That’s what the French do. Well, the French didn’t really do it well enough either. Well, now they’re crying. So he’s finally now, or at least over the last two days, he started to shut down Russian businesses and places where people can gather and so on and so forth.

They are not in good shape. They’re in bad shape. This is not an economically healthy country. Their “democracy” is incredibly fragile. They have had a number of political convulsions that Putin has successfully knocked back. But it’s things like these that cause real problems.

I don’t know how bad it’s going to get over there. Obviously I never wish ill will on anyone. Certainly no one wants to see a bad leader suffer by his citizens dying. But I do suspect that it’s going to be quite bad over there.

**John:** Well, it strikes me that looking back to the Chernobyl age, you know, at least then there was a central planning sort of authority. It felt like they bungled, they lied, they did bad stuff, but they actually could sort of muster their forces and do massive things. I don’t know that Russia today can do that. So, that is the challenge. You have all the problems with none of the actual solutions.

**Craig:** Well, there was a strange kind of spirit in the Soviet Union. They were obviously more than happy to deny reality and to make decisions that cost lives and to lie to the rest of the world. But once they understood the enormity of something they were capable of reaching back into this interesting collective Soviet spirit of fighting. So World War II the Soviets I think something like 40 million–

**John:** The meat grinder of, yes.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, 40 million casualties, military and civilian combined from World War II. That’s a five-year, six-year stretch. That’s insane. We don’t understand what that means here. We have no sense of it. They do. And that was after World War I and the Revolution. So, they have a certain kind of spirit.

Over here what we’ve done is fragmented ourselves into 50 fiefdoms. We have a central leader that doesn’t lead. And our John Wayne go-it-on-your-own spirit is currently being tested in the sorest way by a little clump of RNA surrounded by a lipid layer.

**John:** Yeah. It is not a great time.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. But to bring us back to a happier note, thinking back, the postmortem on our show, and the possibility of a Maldives movie, I do think Ryan Reynolds and Phoebe Waller-Bridge writing and starring in that couples movie could be ideal. I could picture them together. They are beautiful. They are funny. That is the movie we need right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I’ll watch anything with those two. I think that would be awesome.

**John:** Craig will watch a livestream of a podcast with them in it. That’s how much he enjoys the two of them.

**Craig:** I watched it as we were doing it. First of all, you’ve been friends with Ryan forever. And that was my first time meeting him. And he really, like I said on the show, his reputation is just sterling. I mean, it’s a rare thing when you hear somebody just say, oh yeah. And it’s not that every Canadian has that reputation, by the way. Don’t get fooled. There are some bad Canadians out there. Not many. There are some.

But he’s just terrific.

**John:** So I’ll put this in the real follow up show notes, but for folks who might be curious about it Ryan texted me afterwards to say that he kept meaning to talk about the original fourth wall-breaking movie. It was Mary MacLane’s 1918 silent film Men Who Have Made Love to Me. And so if you look up the Wikipedia entry it’s actually fascinating. So it’s a lost film. There’s no prints of it left. So there’s only reports about what actually happens in the film. But it is a silent film where the writer-director star, this woman who actually kind of looks a lot like Phoebe Waller-Bridge, does turn to camera and speak directly to camera and acknowledge sort of what’s happening.

So that was sort of the first – apparently the first time in cinematic history where that fourth wall was broken.

**Craig:** Men Who Have Made Love to Me.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So she would turn to the camera and then–

**John:** And then title card.

**Craig:** Title card.

**John:** So, I mean, she’s a pioneer.

**Craig:** I love it. I love it. Well, I mean, first of all like what a cool proto feminist thing that in 1918–

**John:** What a great title.

**Craig:** Yeah. She’s like I’ve had sex. [laughs] I like it.

**John:** All right. Craig, thank you for a fun show and we’ll do one of these again sometime.

**Craig:** Awesome John. Thanks.

**John:** Bye.

 

Links:

* [Watch the episode here – Scriptnotes Live: Episode 445](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRV5O0ZSNc0)
* [Deadpool](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1431045/) and [Deadpool 2](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5463162/)
* [Fleabag](https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B01KW5IIJM/ref=atv_dp_season_select_s1) and the [play](https://www.theatermania.com/new-york-city-theater/news/phoebe-waller-bridges-fleabag-play-to-stream-_90860.html) to release soon!
* Huge thank you to [Phoebe Waller Bridge](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3564817/) and [Ryan Reynolds](https://twitter.com/VancityReynolds)!
* [Breathing Cartoons](https://twitter.com/nathanwpyle/status/1139676955316559872) by Nathan Pyle
* [Anthropocene Reviewed: Auld Lang Syne](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/anthropocene-reviewed/episodes/anthropocene-reviewed-auld-lang-syne)
* [This Country](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6583806/), now on [Hulu in the US](https://www.hulu.com/series/f3e3f7ed-134f-411d-9dc8-e8048b2d6b7e)
* [Free Guy](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6264654/)
* [Drawful on Jackbox Games](https://www.jackboxgames.com/drawful/)
* Bonus How Would This Be A Movie, [Couple Stranded in Maldives](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/style/coronavirus-honeymoon-stranded.html)
* [Men Who Have Made Love to Me](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Who_Have_Made_Love_to_Me)
* 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 Jon Spurney ([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/445standardv3.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/what-were-up-to)

**Craig Mazin:** Hi folks. All of you I presume are listening at home, which means that children are about. Unfortunately for them this episode does contain some strong language, so put in those ear buds, put in those headphones. Keep those children safe.

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 443 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we’re going to be talking about working from home, a subject Craig and I know very well. We’ll talk about what works for us and what might work for you if you find yourself in this situation. Then we’ll be hearing from some of our favorite guests about what they’ve been up to during this period of uncertainty. Not surprisingly they’ve had a range of experiences and some surprises.

And in our bonus segment for Premium members we’re going to talk about math. What we remember from school and what we actually use.

**Craig:** Woo-hoo!

**John:** Woo-hoo! Craig, this is not any different from our normal recording situation. We are usually on Skype. We are back on Skype. It’s just nothing is different.

**Craig:** Yeah. You and I have been social distancing from each other since the very beginning. And so I’m at home, so the microphone is not quite as professional but hopefully is holding up OK. And, I mean, technically my office is safe because I’ve sent my employees home. Bo is working from home and Jack is working from home. But I don’t think technically I’m supposed to be going there now because we have this full shutdown other than essential workers and people that are staffing stores with essential supplies.

**John:** Exactly. So, Megana is also home. She’s going to be getting this episode together. Matthew is cutting this at home as he usually does. So it’s all going to work out. It’s just some differences and changes along the edges. But this is not unusual for us and we can share our experiences and some tips for folks at home.

But first and most importantly we should talk about what did happen this past week, because actually a bunch of stuff did go down. Last Saturday I was texting with you, Craig, about this Go Fund Me that Liz Alper was setting up. Liz Alper is the woman behind #PayUpHollywood and that whole movement.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So as we started talking about assistant stuff she started talking about assistant stuff. We did a town hall together. She was trying to raise $100,000 for assistants, readers, and other support staff laid off because of COVID-19. I proposed to you that maybe you and I could each agree to match the first $25,000 that were raised. So together we raised $50,000. Hopefully we could get the rest of the industry to kick in $50,000. And it went really well.

**Craig:** It did. So we reached out to all of our friends that we thought that were of the sorts of means that could make significant contributions. And pretty much they all came through and did, which was amazing. Currently we’re looking at over a half a million dollars that we raised in basically a week to distribute to the assistants and I think readers and support staff as you said who have been laid off.

Now, that’s amazing. And congrats to us and everything. But there is a message I’d like to send out to the world through our podcast which is simply this. You and I and our friends are after all employees in Hollywood. And the companies that employ us have enormous resources, billions of dollars of resources. Now I’m not suggesting that they can deplete all of their money. I don’t really know how money works. I’m going to be totally honest. They can’t just dump it all out there. But it does seem to me that they could be doing more. And at the very least they could be contributing to funds like this one, or creating their own for that matter.

So I am calling upon Warner Bros and Universal and Paramount and Sony and Disney/Fox and all their associated businesses to put some money toward this and if you can’t keep people on the payroll at least help support them during this time, because this is going to go on for a while. And you’re going to want those people back when it’s over.

**John:** Yeah. So when Craig says put some money towards this we don’t mean towards this Go Fund Me. No, we mean actually continuing to pay the people who had been working for you. And when at all possible to not lay them off. So, in this Go Fund Me it was really structured around those workers in Hollywood who are not kind of full time employees. Those people who are like between jobs, those folks who were hired on to work on a production and then production just went away because everything got closed down. Or folks who had been laid off.

And so this was really targeting the most vulnerable population and trying to get some money into their hands as quickly as possible. So, again, support staff, PAs, folks who are really vulnerable for this. But Craig and me, our job is to remind people listening to this podcast who do employ others, find a way to keep them employed. Find a way to keep them protected because we will need these people when we come out of this situation.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And the fact of the matter is for a lot of folks there is a way to actually keep these people working, like I’m keeping my staff working. Now, it’s a little easier for folks like you and me, John, because we’re writers. And we can do a lot of our work without lots of people around us. It’s a little more difficult when you’re carrying a lot of folks that are specifically connected to something that cannot happen, that cannot continue to go on. But do your best. Argue with your employers to hold as many of those folks on the payroll as possible for as long as possible.

This business has made a lot of money off of a lot of people. And it would be nice in a moment like this if they could give some back. Just give some back. That would be really good for a moment if maybe profit wasn’t the most important thing. Just give a little bit back.

**John:** Absolutely. One of the things I want to stress as well is that over the past few years we’ve been trying to make more and more efforts on equity and inclusion, making sure that we have people working in this business who better represent the wholeness of America. And that includes people who don’t have the economic background to be able to weather this storm without outside help.

As we do these surveys for the situation with assistants before all this started everyone was living paycheck to paycheck. So these people are the most vulnerable. If we don’t step in right now and tide them over through the storm a bunch of them are going to move back to wherever they came from. They’re going to leave. And we’re going to lose out on a generation of talent who should be here. The people who are going to be winning Oscars in 2035, well right now they are PAs. So the next Shonda Rhimes, she is probably a script coordinator on some show who might have to move back to Texas. We need to make sure that we are protecting them at this time.

**Craig:** And when this is all over I think there’s going to be a long discussion, a very long discussion, about why people have been living paycheck to paycheck in a business that generates so much money and has generated so much money so consistently for so long. And I’d like to point out that while a ton of other businesses and industries in our nation are shut down, you can still rent or buy just about every single movie or television show that has ever been made.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** It doesn’t stop. Right? The production has stopped momentarily, but as someone once said to me, “If you want to make money in Hollywood have a big library of stuff and don’t make new stuff.” So it’s all money coming in now and very little going out. So it would be really great if these corporations rose to this moment and did something good for people. It would be great.

**John:** Now I would say what we were able to do this last week was the best I’ve felt since this whole thing began. And so as we were able to hit those numbers and we saw over a thousand donors chip in money on this campaign it was phenomenal and it was the best I’ve felt throughout this whole experience.

The next steps for this is getting the money out the door. So we’ve hired on a production accountant to sort of go through and make sure we’re rigorous in sort of how we’re tracking the money that comes in, the money that goes out. But the goal is to start getting money out the door by the time this episode drops so people can actually know that they’ll be able to make their rent or get through this next week or two of troubles.

So, that’s the goal. I want to thank everybody who chipped in. It was sort of weird that we couldn’t – we didn’t have time to get an episode out to sort of encourage people to do the Go Fund Me. So, enough people followed us on Twitter and other places, so thank you to all our listeners who chipped in. It was a good thing.

**Craig:** And of course a huge thank you to all of the writers that we know who stepped up and made these very significant contributions. And we should probably say all of their names, but I don’t have the list in front of me, do I?

**John:** I don’t have the list in front of me, either. And there’s a few more who might still be coming in. So, maybe next week we’ll do it.

**Craig:** Next week we will do the honor roll. For sure.

**John:** Great. All right. We still have some trappings of a normal show. So this will be the follow up segment. Mitch from Marvel, Tennessee wrote in, “In the recent How to Listen episode I heard John say Appalachian. This is certainly an acceptable pronunciation but I wanted to point out for your possible future usage that most who live in this region tend to pronounce it Appal-ah-chian. There are those around here who will argue the other way is correct and they’re not flat out wrong, but I moved to East Tennessee 30 years ago and have noticed over the years that most people I know who are native Appal-ah-chians pronounce it the latter way. That’s also what you’ll hear on local TV news outlets who pronounce it.”

**Craig:** That is true.

**John:** So, Appal-ah-chian.

**Craig:** Appal-ah-chia. Appal-ah-chian. Yeah. That’s how they do it.

**John:** Great. And so that’s kind of the distinction that is really hard to make in a script. You generally wouldn’t make it in the script. And so it got me thinking back to when we were doing Big Fish and Big Fish is set in Alabama. The past elements of it are sort of a storybook Alabama. And we had to make decisions about how all these actors, most of the British actors, what accent we were going to do. And so we brought in a dialect coach who was working with each of them. And I had to work with her about sort of are we pronouncing Rs. Like did Edward Bloom go fight in a wah or in a war? And the rhotic R was important. So we had to sort of get everyone on the same page.

Generally in the script you won’t do that. You might get a sense of like the rhythm of speech, but you won’t get down to the details of Appalachian versus Appal-ah-chian. So, it would generally be a dialect coach or someone else who is working with production in preproduction to figure out exactly what the accent is going to be for everyone who is speaking.

**Craig:** Yeah. Really the only time I draw any attention to specific pronunciation is if it’s part of the moment. That it’s important for people to know that the character – for instance it’s very common for people to mispronounce the word Nevada. They will say Ne-vah-da. But in Nevada, Nevadans call it Nevada. They don’t like it when you call it Ne-vah-da. OK.

So if somebody is going to say Ne-vah-da that way you might have to say they pronounce Ne-vah-da as opposed to the way – and everybody stares. That kind of thing.

**John:** Exactly. So if it is an important story point then you do call it out in the script. Generally you won’t call it out in the script. Those kind of regional pronunciation differences.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Cool. All right, now to our marquee topic – working from home. Something I’ve been doing for 20 years or so. In thinking about this segment an article I read this last week actually laid out a lot of really good points. So I’m going to start with this article by Alice Goldfuss about working from home.

Some of the points she makes are to recreate your rhythm, to get dressed, to separate your desk from your sleeping space. To keep your stuff tidy. To think about social spaces. Think about not just working from home but the degree to which when you are working in an office there’s a social component there, so not to neglect that social component. And most importantly to put some boundaries on things. Recognize a time when you stop working and actually to start living your life because that can be one of the toughest things, especially if you’re dealing with people overseas is that there’s no boundary between being at work and being at home.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, listen, it is hard. When I first started working at home I think I was, yeah, 23 years ago maybe. And there is an adjustment period. And one of the things about working from home that’s tricky if you haven’t it before is you don’t quite know if you’re doing it well. Meaning, am I working too much? Am I working not enough? There’s a little bit of a sense that you had when you were first off to college and suddenly there were no report cards and no parents over your shoulder. Am I studying enough? Too much?

There’s going to be an adjustment period. Give yourself a little bit of a break because you’re not going to know for a while how you’re doing.

**John:** Absolutely. And I think when I first started working at home it was just me in my studio apartment. And I could – as a writer I could write all night. I could sleep all day. That was sort of the life I was in. But most people’s jobs now do involve some interaction with people. And so you’re going to have to find something approaching a work day to make, OK, this is the time at which I can actually get this people to email me back or sort of get word back on sort of the projects I’m working on. That becomes an aspect that wasn’t true when it was just me as bachelor guy writing.

I think my working at home also changed a lot when I moved in with Mike, when we had a kid. Things got much more routinized because I couldn’t stay up all night suddenly because then I couldn’t actually be a responsible father. So, you find yourself getting into a rhythm that actually makes sense for your current life situation. And given the pandemic everyone’s current life situation is just understandably confusing.

**Craig:** Yeah. And by the way I don’t know about you, I’m scared to ask you this question. But I don’t have necessarily any more or less time per day to do the writing that I’m supposed to do. These last couple of weeks, it’s been hard. Really hard. I mean, I’ve done work. I’ve written. I’ve moved the ball forward. I’m not like falling terribly behind or anything. But it seems so much harder. And I wonder if that’s true for you. And then I also wonder by extension if it’s true for everybody, no matter what their job is, because we’re all upset.

**John:** Yeah. We’re going to hear from a bunch of our previous guests and I think that’s a common refrain. It’s been difficult to sort of get the work done. Even though the format of the work changes, the actual getting writing done has been more difficult. I fall back on my writing sprints a lot, which is just I’m blocking out an hour of time in chunks and I’m only going to write during that time. And doing that has gotten me back into a place where I can head down focus on the thing I’m writing. But the chaos of every day has been a big factor.

Having my daughter home from school is a big factor. So it feels like we’re on a spring break or a summer vacation, but there’s no sort of relaxation/enjoyment quality to it all. It’s all just a big stirred up.

**Craig:** Yeah. And this is also probably a particularly difficult time for extroverts. There are people who need – I know this is going to sound weird, but just hear me out, John. There are people that need to be around people. Like they need it. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I feel bad for them.

**John:** Absolutely. And you know if you’ve worked in an office, you know who those people are. They’re the people who will come over and sort of linger by your desk. And those people who linger by your desk that is just sort of how they’re wired. And so how they linger by your desk if they can’t do that? And so those people probably need to recognize that in themselves and plan to take some walks. Even though you can’t actually hang out with – you should maintain that six-feet distance between people, you need to see some other people. You need to sense you’re in the world or you feel like just too floaty and disconnected. That’s definitely something I’ve been noticing.

I mean, I haven’t left the house in a week and there is a weird unreality that does set in. I remember I was reading this new D&D book that I got which is great. And I had this strange moment where I realized, wait, am I actually married with a kid and living in a pandemic? Or am I some other person? And just for a moment it did all sort of – this seems very unlikely. It seems strange that this is who I am and this is where I am. So, yes, acknowledging that this is a strange moment is important. And yet even within this strange moment there are some basic principles we can remind you of.

So, when I was living in France for the year we moved into this apartment and it was so hot. It was like 100 degrees. I was writing the first Arlo Finch which is all a winter book. And we didn’t have our desks. We didn’t have any place. But I knew I needed to get those hours of writing in. So what I would do is I would put on my headphones, I would play this ambient track from YouTube of like winter storm sounds. And I would just sit there and listen and I would sort of psychologically make myself cold. And then I could just write.

And there was something really calming about just being able to do the work. And so I would say that even though this is a stressful time and you should forgive yourself if it’s hard to get work done, I would say do try to do some work because you may find rather than it being frustrating it’s actually sort of calming to get back into a place where you can focus on something that is not the outside world.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a good idea. We are going to need to kind of astral project a little bit.

Yeah, especially if you live in a neighborhood where it’s going to be tough. I happen to live in the relative sticks of Los Angeles County. So, you know, I took the dog for a walk today. I saw some people from a distance. But, you know, mostly I could just be alone and not worry about being on top of people. That’s not going to be true if you’re in a really tight urban environment. So, yeah, you’re just going to have to astral project.

**John:** So, one thing that’s been different in this experience is Zoom. So this was my first week using Zoom. I had two directors meetings and a meeting on a different project. And it all actually went really well. And it made me realize that when this is all over I think there’s a bunch of meetings that I’m going to ask to take place online versus going in person. Because if I never have to go to a five o’clock meeting on the west side again, hooray. Because some of what I was willing to put up with in terms of getting face time in a room with people just it wasn’t worth it. And these two directors meetings I had on Zoom, they were productive. And we got through stuff. And these people were on different continents and it was a pretty good experience.

So, I don’t want to say there’s any silver linings to what we’re going through, but it was a good lesson that you can adapt and sometimes in adapting you actually get to some smarter choices.

**Craig:** I mean, you know I love me some HBO. But they’re in Santa Monica and I’m near Pasadena. So five o’clock isn’t – forget five o’clock. I can’t even go there if it’s two o’clock. So, yeah, I mean, I think I’m going to be requesting Zooms frequently. It works really well.

The first kind of group video chat I had when this all started was on Google Hangout. Not a fan. Got to be honest.

**John:** It’s not as good.

**Craig:** No. The Zoom people have figured something out. I don’t know what it is, but hats off to them. So, anyway, point being, yeah, I’m with you. I don’t want to drive to the west side ever again either.

**John:** I will tell honestly there was a project that I was considering doing with a company that was on the west side. And it was going to be a TV thing that I knew was going to be a ton of meetings. And I did not go with that company because it was on the west side. I liked the people involved, but I just knew that I would need to be at that office and, no. My life is worth more. And the number of hours that I’d spend in the car getting there are hours I could spend writing or doing other stuff. So, yes. The more Zoom the better. I will take it.

**Craig:** More Zoom the better.

**John:** So, Craig, other tips for people in terms of working at home? Things you think might be helpful.

**Craig:** Sure. So, a few things that are going to come up that you probably weren’t expecting. Well one is a bit specific to the time we’re in now. Suddenly I’m getting a lot of calls from people that are just calling to say, “Hey, how you doing?” Because they want to talk. Because they are probably people that like talking to people. And I’m, you know, I’m fine with that, but I’m not really that person. And more importantly some people may not understand that you’re still at work.

There are some people who cannot work right now. They are essentially on a forced furlough. And so they’re not working. And they may make the mistake of presuming that you’re not working. So, you’re just going to have to figure out how to boundary that off. Maybe just not answer the phone for a while. Like John said, carve out some time. And I think it’s important for you to – if you can – get some exercise. If you can get outside.

I mean, even here in California where we’re on essentially a statewide lockdown, exercise is allowable. Walking the dog is allowable. You’ve just got to practice Safe Six. Do you like that? Safe Six. I didn’t come up with that.

**John:** I like Safe Six a lot.

**Craig:** Yeah. That was Jeanine Tesori. Tony award winning Jeanine Tesori was the first person that used that near my ear. And I was like, ooh, I’m using that. I’m going to steal it.

I do think that if you can support local businesses, ordering in is a nice thing to do. It’s not something you have to do for every meal. You’re not obligated to hold up an industry at the expense of your own waistline. But ordering in is fine. Food safety wise, from everything I’ve read, food does not appear to be a major vector of COVID-19. That said, to be on the safe side when we order in we’re sticking to food that has been cooked. And we’re taking it out of the containers and doing some reheating which should be enough to kill any microbes.

If you have time on your hands and you’re at home, take a look at that room that’s got a lot of clutter in it. Get to work.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is a good chance for some COVID cleaning.

**John:** My daughter’s spring break is not this week but next week. And we are looking forward to – there’s shelves in our library which we’ve never actually dusted the shelves. So it’s taking all the books off and actually dusting those shelves. Getting to the places that you never actually get to. This feels like a good time.

We pulled all of the various Arlo Finches in different languages off, and so they’re all on the office table now. And we will find something to do with all these Arlo Finches because I don’t need four copies of the second book in Swedish. One will be plenty.

**Craig:** I think so. I think you should be OK with one. And for people who are fortunate enough to be able to employ housecleaners, well they’re not coming to you right now. So, this is a chance for you to dig in and use a little elbow grease. For everybody else, maybe just pick a project. Even if it’s just once a week pick a project, do a little tidying.

**John:** On the housekeeper front is that if you have somebody who normally cleans your house and you don’t want them coming to your house to clean your house, they shouldn’t. For your safety and for their safety. Pay them anyway.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Find a way to pay them through this time. Because they rely on the money that you’re giving them to make a living. So, help them make their living. Pay them. And then what we did is we just made a schedule of like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, this is the thing we clean on those days. So Thursday is bathrooms day. It sucks. But it’s just one day. And it’s 30 minutes and we’re done. So, making yourself a cleaning schedule feels very Little House on the Prairie, but it does also provide some structure. Because that’s one of the most frustrating things about being home when you’re not expecting to be home is that there is just no structure.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And every day feels like a Sunday.

**Craig:** That’s right. So without a doubt if you can continue to pay – if you can afford a housekeeper I’m guessing you can afford to keep paying your housekeeper for a bit. There are quite a few people who pay their housekeepers under the table as it is. I don’t. My housekeepers are actually on a salary with the payroll service that I use. Either way, if you can – if you can – please do keep paying them. And it was really important for us to say, before the lockdown happened where it wasn’t even a possibility for them to come by, to say to them you don’t need to come. If you have even the slightest whiff of a bad feeling you don’t need to come because you have a job still. You’re getting paid.

And that leads me into my final thing. Which is give. While we are locked down and you’re working from home and we’re all inside our homes, try and give. That doesn’t necessarily mean money. If you have means and you can give money that would be great. If you have items that you can donate that would be great. For instance, I have a friend who knows someone who works in the prop business. And he happened to have boxes of masks. Hospital masks. Because, you know, if you’re doing a hospital show you need them. He donated them all. Dug them up out of storage. Donated them all to a hospital.

If you can give somebody one-on-one attention. If you can offer somebody an ear to cry into. If you can teach somebody something online. If all you do is just give thanks to somebody that would be great.

But please think about going outwards with the technology that we have that allows you to do it. It’s going to make you feel better. I guarantee it.

**John:** Absolutely. My mom is in a senior living place in Boulder. And one of the things they’re starting to do is have the residents call all the other residents every day just to check in and see how they’re doing and have those conversations. Because isolation is a really necessary thing for this pandemic that we’re in, but it’s a really unhealthy thing overall for people and their mental health and their physical health. So anything you can do to keep people from feeling so isolated and so lonely during this time will pay off dividends. And you will feel better for having done it.

**Craig:** 100%.

**John:** Great. Let’s take a listen to what some of our previous guests are up to this week. And so I emailed out to a bunch of our previous guests and asked if they would record a minute or two about what they’ve been doing since this all went down. I was not surprised that they had a whole range of experiences and that they were really generous sharing what they’re feeling and what they think our listeners can take from what they’re encountering out there in the world.

So, this is going to be an usual segment because we’re not going to be coming in between all these people speaking. I’m going to start off with Emily Zulauf who joined us for our live show in Seattle. And we’ll just let them introduce themselves as we go through this. Also I should clarify that a lot of these were recorded on Wednesday before the official lockdown sort of happened in Los Angeles. So, if you hear people talk about going from house to house that’s not really happening right now. So, here we’ll start with Emily Zulauf.

**Emily Zulauf:** Hi John. Hi Craig. I hope you guys are well. I am…not sure where to start when, John when I got your email asking for an update on how we’re all faring in this. So I live in Seattle. [laughs] That probably doesn’t need a lot more explanation. I work a block from the Kirkland border. So I think we have been in triage mode a little bit longer than everybody else.

My office has been pseudo closed now for a couple weeks. My daughter’s school was canceled. We are on our second week of that. It’s surreal. It’s completely surreal here. I think I’m feeling the same level of helplessness that a lot of people are feeling right now. Wanting to help and literally physically not being able to go out there and help is paralyzing and scary and I find myself reaching out to my friends and trying to sort of feeling this sort of ache to connect with people and just make sure that people I love are OK. And feeling scared for all of us and feeling also so connected to everyone in the same breath. So isolated and so connected. And I want to hug everyone. [laughs] Although hugs are not something that we do anymore.

But I am thinking about you guys. I’m thinking about all of my friends. And just, you know, sending love and wanting to connect with everyone and tell everyone that I love them and that somehow this is going to – this is going to work out. And that I’m here for anything that they need.

**Mike Birbiglia:** Hey, it’s Mike Birbiglia. Friend of Scriptnotes. Writer. Comedian. I just want to say hey. I’m holed up in Brooklyn with my wife and daughter. And on the screenwriting front I’m not doing much because the screenplay I was writing I’m not kidding or exaggerating is about a global pandemic. [laughs] It’s a comedy about a comedy pandemic. That’s the backdrop for the whole plot. And so we have to sort of see how things go before I figure out how the movie makes sense and in the new normal. What is the new normal and how does the movie differ from that?

And so what I’m doing on a comedy front is I’m trying to figure out who is in need in the comedy space. And so on my Instagram, which is @birbigs, I’m doing live livestreams where me and another comedian – this week it was Roy Wood Jr. and John Mulaney, Gary Gulman, Jacqueline Novak, and others. Next week Nicky Glazer and a bunch of other comics. And I do a chat where we pitch new jokes to each other. And then give feedback in real time. And then people watch the livestream and then can contribute to a site called tipyourwaitstaff.com.

And it’s a way to help comedy club wait staff that is currently not working because all the clubs are shut down across America. Because the restaurant and bar industry is obviously really struggling. So, I’m just trying to sort of be positive and be creative but also look around for who needs help right now.

That’s it for me. Continue doing this great, great podcast. Love you guys.

**Megana Rao:** Hey John and Craig and our Scriptnotes friends. This is Megana Rao, Scriptnotes producer. I’m currently socially distancing or safer at home in Los Angeles. And I guess a lot of us feel a bit like the “everything is fine” dog in that meme where the room is on fire. I’ve been working from home, sitting at my dining table. I really miss going into the office and seeing John and our office pup Lambert. But I’m so grateful I have a job where I’m able to work from home.

We’ve also been working with #PayUpHollywood and our support staff initiative. So, this is for those in our industry who have lost their jobs because of the shutdowns. I’ll definitely put a link so look in the show notes for information on how to donate or reach out for assistance if this fund applies to your situation.

Otherwise I’ve been rereading the books on my shelves. Going for walks. Checking in on my parents. Facetiming with friends. And generally trying to be as optimistic as possible. Normally it feels like social media creates this digital barrier between us, but right now I’m so happy that I can see my friends and my mom’s face. You know, it’s just so comforting because I think our instinct or mine at least when I’m worried or processing crisis is to be with loved ones, to be with people and gather a community. So, something I have to keep reminding myself of when I’m driving down a street like La Brea and it’s empty and completely surreal is that the way we’re coming through this and looking out for one another is by staying home. And as someone with family who works in medicine it’s heartening and encouraging that in what I’m saying seeing is this negative space, you know, we actually are united and doing our part to support the medical community, allowing those who need treatment to get it, and our healthcare providers a fighting chance in an already under-staffed and under-supplied situation.

So, you know, even though it’s hard for us to see it, I’m taking solace in that we’re each doing our part to contain the virus and protect our community. So thank you to everyone who is staying at home and thank you to all of the people who are going to work with essential functions. I’m especially grateful for the ways we’re adapting and able to stay connected.

I’m personally relying on my podcasts for a sense of normalcy. So if you think there’s anything we can do to support the Scriptnotes community please let us know and thank you to each of you for doing your part. Stay safe and be well. Thanks.

**BJ Novak:** Hi. This is one-time Scriptnotes guest BJ Novak responding to the request to share with listeners how I’m spending the time. I will say that although I am feeling very appreciative and lucky that my creative profession is one where I can do things at my own pace and I feel for producers, actors, let alone people not in our field who need to be more collaborative. I do feel very lucky.

In addition to having a long list of things that I want to watch and write, I am also making a point to be open to the moment, which I think is natural in a moment like this to just be overwhelmed. And there’s one instinct to think, oh no, I’m not pursuing things on my own schedule like I said I would. But there’s something very important to being an artist that is just being open to the moment and letting things surprise you and responding from somewhere deep in your subconscious to whatever is going on and creating something that you hadn’t expected to do. And that can be hard for writers like myself who are kind of more Type A.

So I think relaxing, not doing anything, and worrying, and thinking, and waiting for something to come to you out of necessity and truth rather than self-drive might be something really important.

**Chris Nee:** Hi. This is Chris Nee. And I’m the creator and executive producer and Doc McStuffins and Vampirina. And about a year ago I moved over to Netflix where I’m on an overall deal. We got sent home last Thursday. My staff is primarily the writing staff, so we were one of the first ones out. Obviously Netflix has been shut down about a week.

The weird thing about animation is that we are oddly situated to be able to keep going. You don’t have to shut down production. So Netflix has been really working overtime to get kind of kits and computer stations installed in all of the animator’s homes. Same thing is happening for my overseas studios. The biggest problem we’re having is voiceover records. That’s a little bit more of [the stumbling]. So I will be doing a lot of scratch that will live with our animatics and animation for quite some time until we can get our cast back in, which of course is totally fun for me.

And other than that it’s weird because everyone suddenly has all this time and they’re knitting and they’re learning to play the banjo and to be honest my days have been completely full. I have four shows that are going. And they’re all still going. You just get this very weird version of now seeing inside everyone’s homes. Seeing their pets. Seeing their wives and boyfriends and girlfriends. And that is a really funny version of it. I have found the need for people to chat more, doing a lot of emotionally trying to take care of my staff, and do check-ins and make sure that we have like a good texting feed going.

So all of that. Also, you know, there’s some hearts of darkness shit going on. I have spent some time recording all three parts of like English Madrigals that I remember from my childhood on Garage Band and I’ve spent hours doing that. And no one will ever hear that. That will never make the light of day for god’s sakes. And, you know, anyone who follows me on Twitter @chrisdocnee knows that my son is also home with me most of the time and is very much a 13-year-old boy. So his favorite thing is connecting to my Sonos with this which is just the opening licks of Eye of the Tiger. Here I go. So that will just show up on my Sonos very loud and very long by the way. This is half an hour. And no the beat never drops.

So, that’s kind of what I’m up to. It’s a little bit of business as usual without it not being business as usual at all. And I think kind of like finding that middle ground of taking care of people, giving them a purpose. So that’s what I’m up to. Animation continues. I wish it could come out faster. But around the world everyone has moved home and they are animating in their kitchens, their bathrooms, their bedrooms, their living rooms. Onward in these very, very strange times.

**Charlie Brooker:** Hello John and Craig and all your listeners. This is Charlie Brooker. Black Mirror person. And Londoner. And that’s where I am. I’m in London. Indoors, like lots of people are. Quite sensibly at the moment. I’m supposed to be focusing on doing a script. Quite a comedy script actually, which is both a challenge in the current climate, but also a welcome distraction at the same time.

Now I’ve also been an anxious person and a catastrophizing kind of person. Who would have thought that the brain behind Black Mirror was a paranoid flipping prick?

And oddly when things like this actually happen in the real world I find sometimes I’m kind of calm almost like I expected it. And I don’t know if that’s just me, or if there’s other – any of your other more anxious listeners feel like that. And I think strangely what that does mean is I’m staying optimistic. I’m sure that when this epidemic is over – I would like to be sure that when this epidemic is over we all will have had quite a wakeup call about our interdependence on one another about the need for investment in healthcare and each other. And, you know, I’m sure we’ll all get through it and I hope that we see a better world on the other side of it.

Now that’s the uncharacteristic, optimistic bit. Another weird thing that happened was quite a few people alerted to me to the fact that in Germany there’s a series of the reality show Big Brother where the contestants didn’t know anything about the coronavirus happening outside. Because they’ve been kept away from the real world. And people pointed out that this was very similar to the storyline of a show that I wrote before Black Mirror. A show called Dead Set which you can see on Netflix in the US and elsewhere I think in the UK.

And it’s a zombie show based around the real Big Brother house in Britain. And it does have eerie parallels. So, there’s been lots of things we’ve done in Black Mirror which have sort of come true. So if I am going to be – if it turns out I am Nostradamus, first of all I apologize. And secondly I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that I made a positive prediction a few moments ago. And let’s hope that comes true.

I hope everyone stays safe and well. Washes their hands. And let’s try and set up some virtual writer’s rooms worldwide. I don’t know. Write a fucking sketch show or something. Because otherwise, you know, what else are we going to do? Grow our hair? Take care. I’d say peace out, but that makes me feel like Ringo Starr. Bye!

**David Iserson:** Hi Scriptnotes. This is David Iserson.

**Susanna Fogel:** And this is Susanna Fogel.

**David:** And this is how we’ve been spending our quarantine. So, yeah, we had scheduled what we assumed was going to be like the last in person pitch at Netflix on two Thursdays ago.

**Susanna:** And brownnosers that we are, we got there an hour early and we were excited to get ready to really knock them dead.

**David:** And then we got like an email, or a phone call like ten minutes before we walked in that said, “Oh, yeah, they found somebody in the building who tested positive.”

**Susanna:** Oh, we had walked in. We had walked into the building.

**David:** No, we’d walked into the building. Before we walked into the pitch. Yeah. Ten minutes before they found somebody in the building who tested positive for coronavirus so get out. And then just like the flee and the flood of people heading to their cars. And we got mixed into that.

**Susanna:** So we figure that now they owe us a sale. They owe it to us to buy this high concept and rather mid-budget to high budget movie that they may or may not want to make. But now they really should.

**David:** So since then we’ve kept the sort of pod of people we interact with small, but we have chosen to continue to interact in person with ourselves. So, Susanna will come over to my house most days. And, you know, we try to get our work done.

**Susanna:** Yeah. You know, I think like most people we spend some time actually getting things done and some time dicking around on the Internet, which is not really any sort of change from what we were used to doing. Only now we’ve saved several hours a day in traffic that are now spent staring into space, indulging my Etsy obsession.

**David:** Yeah. We’ve found a lot of time not taken up driving from place to place. I’ve been posing my dog in like elaborate photographs, like a photo series of how we’ve been spending our time in quarantine, which I would not be able to do if I was busy trying to commute to things.

**Susanna:** Or busy being judged or how productive and employed you are. So, yeah, we spent some time talking about the end of the world like we all do. We spent some time then talking about what scripts we can write about the end of the world. Then we spent some time wondering if anyone else is writing about the end of the world and how many other people, particularly people that we feel competitive with, and whether they’re writing about the end of the world, and if they’ve already got a three-picture deal to write three scripts about the end of the world.

And lastly if people are listening to this podcast now and stealing our very unique idea to write about the end of the world.

**David:** Yeah. Someone like was I should write about the apocalypse that’s going on right now. That’s what our week in social distancing has been. Thanks guys.

**Damon Lindelof:** Hey John and Craig. Damon Lindelof here. How are you guys? I’m great. Just awesome. Fantastic. I’m just treating this whole thing as an opportunity for self-reflection. And I know I’m going to come out of this the other side as a better human. But seriously I’m scared and I’m worried. And I’m wondering how much I should project confidence that everything is going to be OK. Because I think being scared and worried is the more appropriate headspace for all of us to have in terms of just being safe right now. I guess the point is I’m Jewish.

I’m catching up on a lot of reading. I recommend Dave Eggers’ short new satire, The Captain and the Glory. It’s delightful. It made me laugh a lot. I’m listening to way too many podcasts about politics which are now kind of about the pandemic and I have to stop doing that. And the thing I’m enjoying most is that I’m finally binging The Crown. I don’t really care about the monarchy and I’m not an anglophile, but I love The Crown. And it’s excellent. And it’s actually gotten me to care about the monarchy and why the monarchy is important. And more importantly I guess it’s gotten me to care about the people in the monarchy. They’re quite miserable.

If you’ve seen anything that I’ve written I like writing about miserable people. And it is not easy being the Queen. I just started the third season a couple nights ago. I’m into the third season. And Olivia Colman has taking the rein – the reign – from Claire Foy. That’s reign, Craig. It’s a pun. Because taking the reins is when you hand over control. But it’s like reins when you’re steering a horse cart. But this is the kind of reign, R-E-I-G-N, that a royal person has, which is why it’s so, so clever.

I’m going insane. I love you guys. I’m glad you’re doing your Scriptnotes. Please stay safe. Bye.

**David Wain:** Hi, this is David Wain. I am spending my time in quarantine doing a series of things like solving jigsaw puzzles, going for walks, trying to read books, making YouTube videos, drawing, playing the piano, thinking of ways to make a whole movie starring myself in the house. Thinking about if I should start a dating website just for the COVID-19 infected. Throwing out everything in my house. Going through to-do lists from 2008. Putting on my own episode of Cutthroat Kitchen in my home with my children. Taking my bicycle apart and putting it back together. Writing thank you notes to people who have helped me out with things over the last 40 years. Checking out Breaking Bad for the first time. Answering emails from the ‘90s. Catching up on the college admissions scandal. Meditating. Binging General Hospital from the beginning. Planning a dinner party for August. Practicing magic tricks. Playing poker with friends online. Thinking about the record number of screenplays that are probably being written right now. Practicing the Rubik’s Cube. Watching The Wire. And conceiving of a new career path that involves not leaving my house.

**Mari Heller:** Hi. This is Mari Heller. I am surviving the coronavirus isolation as best I can. I’m with my kid and my husband out in the country in Connecticut with another family and we have been self-isolating since middle of last week. And we’re home-schooling our kids together. And the way we’re trying to get work done, because we’re all in the middle of writing scripts, is the dads are taking the morning of school, the moms are taking the afternoon shifts. We’re trading off working. And we’re sticking to a pretty strict schedule. Trying to keep the kids in a routine and give them a lot of outdoor time, but also give them expectations that they can trust in. And then we’re all trying to get work done.

And none of us are getting enough work done. Isn’t that a huge surprise? It’s pretty hard to concentrate when the world feels like it’s falling apart. But we’re trying. And that’s my update. Also next week I’m going to start trying to edit a project remotely with my editor, Anne, who is in a different part of the state and we’re going to see if we can figure out some kind of an Evercast or some system like that where we remotely edit. So we’ll see how that works.

All right. Hope everybody is staying safe out there.

**Rawson Thurber:** Hey Scriptnotes, it’s Rawson Thurber checking in from Atlanta, Georgia. Down here making my movie. We got put on hiatus for a couple weeks. Looks like it might be a bit longer than that. I’m here with my lovely kid, our two girls, or brand new baby boy, our dog, couple other folks. And we’re hunkered down and holed up here in Ainsley Park. And we’re using this period as sort of an ad-hoc vacation, looking at it as sort of forced time to not work. Spend time with each other. Read books. Watch movies. Catch up on the little things that maybe we don’t quite pay attention when we’re so busy all the time working, working, working.

So, kind of a strangely welcomed respite from the grind of shooting a movie. We were about halfway through when the plug got pulled. So it’s sort of interesting to be sprinting a marathon and suddenly have the finish line about halfway through it. Anyhow, looking forward to getting back to work. Please everybody out there stay safe. Wash your hands. And try not to lick any doorknobs. OK. I’ll talk to you later. Bye.

**Liz Hannah:** Hey guys. It’s Liz Hannah. I hope everybody is safe and healthy over there. It’s been a very weird week. For my part, you know, my husband and I are trying to just stay active, stay positive, and for me a lot of that is staying off of the news and social media as much as I can. That doesn’t mean that I don’t check it out or try and stay informed, but when this started I just found myself spending all day watching MSNBC and that was not healthy for me physically, mentally, or emotionally.

So I’ve tried to tune that out. We go on long walks with our dog. And obviously in practicing social distancing in all of the parameters that we’re instructed to do, but try and get some vitamin D in there. And then, you know, I’ve honestly found it really hard to focus. I think a lot of it was at first feeling this pressure that because we’re all stuck inside we should be writing that next great American screenplay. And there’s enough pressure to just put a cohesive sentence down on a piece of people that somebody can read.

So, I think, you know, kind of the end of this week I’ve found myself getting into a better place, of being able to remove that pressure and remove that instinct to make everything perfect. And I’m writing again and trying to give myself kind of a routine. Trying to stay healthy. Trying to watch something new so it’s not just the same ten minutes of the last ten minutes of a movie I’ve seen 47 times on HBO. Read a new book. I’m reading Kurosawa’s autobiography right now which I couldn’t recommend more. And I’m watching a lot of stuff on the Criterion Channel.

There’s the puppy. Yeah, so I don’t know. I think the only thing I can recommend is try not to put pressure on yourself to make this situation perfect. Just do your best to stay healthy mentally and physically. And get outside if you can. And if you can write, you can write. And just know we’re all in the same boat and we’re all doing this together.

**Malcolm Spellman:** John August and Craig Mazin and the Scriptnotes people this is Malcolm Spellman, arguably the greatest guest in the history of Scriptnotes, and most underrated for sure of all time. Dealing with corona on Thursday. The update is writer’s rooms are being handled through Zoom. It works. It’s definitely not as good as being in the room with people. There’s just a thing that’s lost with it. But it’s way, way – it’s closer to being right than it is being wrong. Dealing with a lot of fear from the people around us. We still got a lot of folks that are dealing with, you know, real shit. People with regular jobs, not in Hollywood. And you can already see some of that shit falling apart which is very, very sad and, you know, this is just starting. So, we kind of feel like we’re getting a preclude – me being me and Nichelle. Getting a preclude to what’s coming.

Our mood is good though. My dog – I’m in a battle right now where I bought my dog like a leather chew toy, not toy, but kind of thing that’s leather that you – whatever. I’m fighting with my dog over this thing. He doesn’t want to eat it, but he bites if you try and take his shit from him. So, it’s a deadly dance right now up in here.

Let me think. Music wise, Nichelle controls the music. It’s a music of hip-hop and ‘80s rock. That’s the norm over here. Sometimes some blues. We’re watching War of the Worlds on EPIX. Our mood is good though. And, you know man.

**Alison McDonald:** Hello Scriptnotes. Alison McDonald here. Prisoner of Second Avenue. Actually I have a deadline today but wanted to fire off this dispatch because I adore John and have a saint-like tolerance of Craig. Social distancing has always existed on the continuum of being a writer in my experience at any rate. So, the plague redux hasn’t been all that disruptive to my daily routine. And fortunately New York City has just made it legal for bars to deliver cocktails, so look for the silver lining people.

Apart from becoming Tennessee Williams – not in terms of talent or career, obviously, just temperament – I have been mainlining books. And I think most writers would agree that reading is the most purposeful form of procrastination. I read three books this week and have two on tap for the weekend. And because there’s such a great deal of economic peril for small businesses as entire cities shut down I have made it a point to purchase from independent online booksellers as much as possible and encourage you to do the same.

**Ryan Knighton:** Hey Scriptnotes. It’s Ryan Knighton. Unscripted in the quarantine. Where am I now? I’m actually back up in Canada and it was a very strange couple weeks as it has been for everybody. I was in the writer’s room on the third season of In the Dark. We had just started when the room was dissolved and we moved to working remotely. So, I went back up to Canada to try that instead of being in Los Angeles. So, I’m in my house in Ucluelet which is a small fishing village on the coast and has naturally enforced social distancing because there’s no people.

And that’s where this blind guy is. I’m in the woods. And so what am I doing? I am on Zoom a lot doing the writer’s room through Zoom these days. And writing in the day. And then, you know, basically killing time by going for walks on the beach and in the woods and things in between. So far so good. I’ve got my white cane with me and I haven’t gotten too lost yet, unless this isn’t my house. But, I think it is.

And in the evenings what do we do around here? Well my teenage daughter and I kill time in a horrible way. She’s been trying to teach me TikTok dances which is horrible if you can’t see. It’s sort of like doing origami but you can only describe, you know, how to fold things. So, that’s what Tess and I have been doing. And she’s sitting beside me right now and she can tell you that I’ve been doing an amazing job at it.

**Tess Knighton:** To be honest I really love to watch you fail because it’s really, really funny for me. It just makes me laugh in the evening.

**Ryan:** So that’s how we do the quarantine. She laughs at me failing. [laughs] I hope you guys are well.

**Riki Lindhome:** Hi John and Craig. It’s Riki Lindhome. I’m just here at home like everyone else. What I decided to do was I took out my idea board, which is just this corkboard I have of every idea. Every time I think of something I just put it on the board. And I looked at it and was like which idea have I been sitting on the longest. And I saw this one that’s kind of been on there for probably ten years. I never take it off because I’m always like, oh, maybe I could crack that someday. And I figured right now is the time to try. So, I’ve decided to tackle it.

And basically I just write first thing in the morning. I wake up. Have coffee. And I start. And I try to write for three or four hours. And then after that I’ve got the rest of the day off and I just watch movies or do whatever. But yeah, so that’s what I’m doing. I hope everyone is staying safe. Bye guys.

**Chris Keyser:** Hey John and Craig. This is Chris Keyser. Thank you for inviting me back to Scriptnotes on this, I guess, somewhat inauspicious occasion. I don’t think I’ve really settled into any kind of rhythm yet to be honest with you. I just got back into town just a few days ago. Top of the week. I was in Boston shutting down a couple of productions and saying goodbye to people which I guess is sort of par for the course now but nonetheless.

And now I’m trying to figure out what to do. I usually begin my day the same way. I have a friend, Glenn Sonnenberg, who has been putting out this kind of newsletter-y thing via email called Notes from the Bunker, which is a combination of stories and suggestions about movies and TV and things like that. And it’s been a great way to actually connect to people and hear what people are thinking about in quite the same way as you’re doing right here. That’s been nice. That’s probably the best thing about everything which is I’ve been spending a lot of time getting back in touch with people from as far as back as high school and college and law school and obviously writers that I know, particularly important because I just got into town, so I have to stay away from my own wife which is kind of strange.

We’ve been arranging virtual dinners with friends. We haven’t done it yet, but I think that will be fun when we get around to it. And I’ve been working somewhat. I’m lucky to have some work left to do on some of these projects. So I’ve been talking to the writers on my show and some producers on the other shows that I’m working on. And that’s been good. Not because any of the work actually needs to get done, but because I just actually need something to do every day and feel like I’m productive.

And then we try to go for a walk about once a day. An hour or so. And then usually at the end of the day we do a FaceTime call with our kids who are far away on the East Coast. And that’s the nicest but also the hardest part of all of this, not being able to touch or see my kids, knowing I won’t see them for months.

But, everyone is safe and fine and trying to be productive and reconnecting and that’s the new life for a while. So, I hope everyone who is listening is OK as well and I appreciate you guys doing this. So, thank you.

**Lulu Wang:** Hi John. Hi Craig. It’s Lulu. I have been thinking about what to say about what I’ve been up to because the truth is I think I’ve mostly just been trying to adjust to this new reality. Except that the reality seems to shift every day, every few hours. And so much develops in such a short period of time.

You know, tonight a friend of mine her sister is a doctor in the ER at a hospital and she and many other healthcare workers have been asked to procure their own masks because the hospital doesn’t have a supply, or enough of a supply. It’s one of the few times that social media has actually been really wonderful because so many people replied to my request for N95 masks that they might be willing to donate. And my friend spent the night driving around the city picking up these donations. And it really made me think about how important it is for us to be creative right now and to think about what skills we might have, what resources we might have that we can contribute because so much of what happens in the next few months in this country is going to depend on the choices that we make as a community and as individuals that make up that community.

Well, thank you. It’s one o’clock in the morning and I hope everyone stays safe and healthy. OK, bye.

**John:** Great. So our editor Matthew Chilelli was the one who cut all that together. Matthew had a big week himself. And so I wanted him to have the last word in terms of things that went down this week. Here’s Matthew Chilelli.

**Matthew Chilelli:** Hi, my name is Matthew Chilelli and this is what my boyfriend Tao and I have been doing during this lockdown. I’ve read a lot of stories about how some people are already running out of shows to watch, or getting bored while practicing social distancing. One activity that I can recommend that is definitely not boring is trying to get married during a quarantine.

So, Tao and I have been together for four years and on Wednesday, March 18, we were planning to get married. It was going to be a small civil ceremony at the Beverly Hills Courthouse with family and friends flying in from out of town. Then a nice dinner. Then drinks with friends at a rooftop bar. We thought this would be a nice, cozy wedding day and that was the plan. Right up until March 12 when things started to change.

Now Tao and I had a lot of conversations back and forth. Should we cancel the drinks? Should we cancel the dinner? Should we ask our family not to come here? We spent so much time going back and forth on each of these questions that a lot of the questions were answered for us. First, the bars and clubs closed. We sent out a sad email to our friends. Then the restaurants closed. We sent out another email. Our family wisely canceled their flights. Instead they asked us to record the ceremony so they could see it. And we promised we would.

The celebration was canceled but the wedding was still on because surely they wouldn’t close down the courthouses this soon, right? Well, on Monday March 16 just to be sure I checked the Beverly Hills Courthouse website and they closed it. And so just like everything else our courthouse wedding was canceled.

Now, when I was on the phone with them they did mention that we could still get married somewhere else if we had an officiant. But finding an officiant right away in the middle of a quarantine seemed impossible. Tao and I spent a few moments just staring into space.

Maybe we weren’t going to get married on the 18th after all. Maybe it was going to be weeks, or months, or who knows how long before we could marry each other. It felt like we had lost. We had tried so hard to get one step ahead of the coronavirus. We pared down the wedding. We limited the number of guests. But the coronavirus was one step ahead of us. All our plans had been canceled.

Now eventually we shook ourselves out of our funk. Tao reminded me that eight is a lucky number in China, so the 18th must be somewhat lucky so something has to go right with the wedding eventually. And eventually something did. I remembered I know an officiant. John Bassinger-Flores works for my alma mater Ithaca College. And in his spare time he’s a professional officiant. I gave him a call and he’s such a great guy that even though this was ridiculously short notice he agreed to marry us on the 18th. We just had to find a place. So we thought instead of getting married indoors we could use social distancing to our advantage and get married outside in a park.

Once again, luck was on our side. We held our ceremony at eight in the morning on the 18th at the Lake Hollywood Park right below the Hollywood sign. So with the sun rising over the Hollywood Hills, the smell of morning dew in the air, and no one but us at the park, Tao and I got married. John performed a wonderful ceremony witnessed by our best friend who also took pictures and video so we could share it with our family later.

This ceremony was so different from the courthouse wedding we were expecting just a week earlier. Instead of a large group there were four of us. Instead of being in a courthouse we were in a park. It wasn’t what we were expecting. It was better. Tao described it to one of his friends like this. Our wedding was so quiet and peaceful. We were able to just enjoy each other and focus on each other during this moment that was meant for just the two of us. At the same time we had all of nature as our witness. It felt like the whole world was just quietly listening while we both said I do.

**Craig:** I mean, my heart. Right?

**John:** Yeah, my heart just breaks. Matthew is one of the kindest, most gentlest wonderful people I’ve met. And I met him through Scriptnotes. So he was coming to our Scriptnotes Live shows. He was a video editor. I had a hunch he could probably cut podcasts so I asked him to cut a demo podcast. He did a great job and he’s been cutting ever since. I’m so happy for him.

**Craig:** Yeah. Congrats guys.

**John:** Matthew was in Japan for a year. They made it through all of that. So it’s just great when great things happen during challenging times, so I’m so happy for the two of them.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. Yes. Love still blossoms.

**John:** All right. Now it is time for our One Cool Things. I listened to a lot of podcasts, a lot of political podcasts, news podcasts, and you’d guess what they’re probably about. They’re about this pandemic that we’re in. And sometimes as I’m walking my dog in the morning I just don’t want to hear more about it. So I’ve started looking for other podcasts I can listen to that don’t freak me out as much. And so one thing I’m starting to listen to is Dead Pilot Society. So this is a not weekly show but an occasional show that goes through and they bring in people that have written pilots that never aired or never sort of got shot, but they were good pilots. And they bring them in and they do readings of pilots that never made it to air.

So, it’s a good thing that has nothing to do with this current moment, but is just good writing from good writers. So Dead Pilot Society is a thing to check out.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s awesome. We’ve been talking to a bunch of our friends to try and get some more dead pilots over there. So let’s see how that goes.

My One Cool Thing this week really is cool. Now, word of fair warning, hopefully you’ve all played the game Codenames. It’s great.

**John:** It’s phenomenal. So describe Codenames for people who haven’t played it before.

**Craig:** Super simple game. You have these cards with words on them. And you make an array, a five-by-five array. So you have 25 cards out on a table. And there are two clue givers and everybody else is a receiver. So you divide everybody into two teams. You have two captains that are giving clues. My job – and I can see on a little grid which one of the words on the table, there’s seven or eight that belong, or eight or nine that belong to my team. And the other clue giver has another eight or nine.

So our job as clue givers is to say one word to our teammates and then a number. That’s the amount of words that we’re asking them to guess on our one clue word. And then they have to figure out which are the words on this table that they are clueing us toward with their one single word.

It’s so much fun. It takes about ten seconds to learn. It’s really fun. And there is a fantastic way to play this now online. But I don’t think that this is some sort of official sanctioned thing. So what I’m asking is if you have not purchased the physical Codenames game do it. Then you can do this. OK? Be fair and kind to the geniuses that made Codenames. The website is horsepaste.com. That’s right. Horsepaste.com.

It works brilliantly. So we’ve already done this once. We’re going to do it again tonight. The best way to play is by combining a laptop with Zoom so you can see everybody and then keep the game running maybe on a tablet. And everybody is all looking at the same words. It’s quite brilliant the way it functions. Super fun. Online Codenames, horsepaste.com.

**John:** Excellent. I’m looking forward to trying that. I like Ticket to Ride the game a lot. I like the board game. And the iPad version is quite good and you can do shared games on that. So we are making some play dates with friends to do a game night with Ticket to Ride and other things like that.

**Craig:** Fun.

**John:** We’ll make it work. And a reminder that our Premium subscribers are going to be listening to me and Craig talk about math after this. But this is our show for the week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Congrats.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Ryan Dunn. 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 transcripts. We try to get them out about four days after the episode airs.

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

I want to thank all of our previous guests who sent in their updates on what they’ve been up to this week. There are a few more trickling in so we might save those for next week. But we love you all. We miss you. And we hope you are doing great.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. See you next time.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** OK, Craig. Math. This is two screenwriters talking about math.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So, I thought about this because over the last couple of weeks I’ve been reading two books by Matt Parker who is a British mathematician and comedian. Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension and Humble Pi. They’re both good. I’ll have links in the show notes to both of those. But it also got me thinking how much or how little I use math on a daily basis. My daughter is home from – she’s obviously doing school at home right now. And she is in algebra 2 honors right now. And she’s doing stuff that I kind of half recognize, but I’ve never done anything like that since high school. What’s been your experience of math as an adult?

**Craig:** Well, and I was a pretty mathematically-inclined guy. Yeah, I was a Mathlete. And I went as far as calculus. I didn’t go any further than that. I other than obviously simple arithmetic, generally I will use geometry more than anything else. Geometry actually does come in handy when you’re measuring things or trying to figure out the distance between things. If you need to know the hypotenuse because you’re like, well, if I hold this up high how long will it go there. Radius and diameter, often very helpful to know. Oh, statistics. Understanding how statistic generally function is a good thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m not sure I use it for much more than simple averaging and ratios, also very useful.

**John:** Yeah. I would say like when we did the Kickstarter for Writer Emergency Pack I had to deal with a lot of big numbers. And so I guess you should probably distinguish between like building spreadsheets of things versus sort of like the real figuring out math and figuring out variables.

Every once and a while I’ll come into a situation where like, oh, this is two equations and two variables. But that’s every like two or three years I’ll come into a situation where like, oh, there actually is an X and a Y and there are two formulas. There’s a reason why this thing in the real world requires this kind of math. I’ve not needed the quadratic formula in a really, really long time. I get it. I know why it works. But I’ve not needed to use it.

Now calculus I never actually had. So I stopped at algebra 2 honors and as a journalism major, this is kind of embarrassing, I never had to take any more math beyond that. So I took a physics for majors class my freshman year of college and it required that you be concurrently enrolled in calculus or already had it, so I kind of faked my way through it. And so I understood that calculus is about rates of change and higher functions, but I never really got it.

**Craig:** So many mathematicians just started screaming. [laughs]

**John:** Well, OK, it’s fair for me to say that calculus is about rates of change. That’s fair.

**Craig:** Yes, I mean, that is definitely part of what’s going on. How do I – geez, I’m trying to figure out how to say it. It is. Certainly change is an enormous part of it. No question. But, yeah, there’s differential and there’s integral and they’re two different things. So integral is more about the kind of growth of variables, quantities and things. And also a huge part of calculus is just figuring out how much is under a curve.

It turns out that–

**John:** That’s complicated.

**Craig:** Yeah. So figuring out the area of a triangle is easy. One-half the base times height I believe.

**John:** Height. Yeah. Because if you think about it a triangle is just half of a rectangle. So therefore you just, yeah.

**Craig:** Half of a – yes, that’s assuming that–

**John:** Half a quadrilateral. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yes. If it’s like a weird scaling one I guess it still works.

**John:** It works.

**Craig:** It still works somehow. But, yeah, I’ve already forgotten that one. But figuring out the area under a curve is hard. Until they came across calculus. But super helpful when you’re working in physics. I mean, really what it comes down to is calculus has great application for people who are mathematicians and it has great application for people who are working in physics.

**John:** Yeah. Or engineers. People who need to send rockets up. All that stuff does track and make sense.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Now people always define themselves as being algebra people or geometry people? I guess I define myself as a geometry person because the thing I got most out of probably all my mathematical education was how to do proofs and just the importance of like what is an actual logical proof and how you sort of make a thing happen.

And I’m guessing that you are also that kind of person because as a puzzle solver that really is kind of what proofs are, isn’t it?

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, proofs, well yes. They are exercises in logic. And it is true that there are a number of puzzles that I’ve thought about are very much like geometric proofs in that they rely on certain axioms. So in geometry an axiom is just something we know is true. Well, in the way that geometry works is every axiom is something that had to be proved first. Really simple. Simple things like A plus B equals B plus A. That had to be proved.

And so everything is built on a series of proofs. So if you’re playing Sudoku you may know, well, if there’s one number here and one number there and you can make a square out of those little pairs that are exclusive and everything else. Then you get rid of the other ones. Yes, it becomes another axiom that you can figure out how to prove. Geometry was fun. I liked it.

**John:** I liked geometry, too. And I think people had a bad experience with geometry because they weren’t introduced to it at the right time, the right speed. They might have had a bad teacher. And so they throw it all out. And I do feel like that sort of rigorous thinking was incredibly important for just being a logical person sort of going forward and recognizing fallacies. And recognizing unsupported conclusions which people can fall into even if they don’t – you might not think they’re gullible people, but they will jump from A to F without actually thinking are B, C, D, and E all really supported along the way.

**Craig:** I mean, I will go out on a limb and say something that is probably going to get me screamed at. But it seems to me that we have inflicted an amount of math upon children that in many cases is just not purposeful. It is incredibly important for any kid who has a general interest or affinity for it even, the STEM subjects, science, technology, engineering, math. But if you’re looking at someone who wants to be a musician, well, I mean there’s some math involved in music I suppose, more on the engineering side. But if somebody wants to be an actor I’m not sure they need math.

If somebody wants to be a salesman, I mean, there’s some math involved. Again, everybody should know basic arithmetic, of course. But algebra 2 where you’re sitting there trying to figure out how to reduce down fractions with square roots in them, that’s simply not relevant to 90% of the children in that school.

And there are other things that we don’t teach that are. And I sometimes think that we are saddled with a kind of system that is that way because it’s always been that way. And it would be better, I think, if we started including things like critical thinking.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That would be incredibly useful to us.

**John:** So while you get all the negative email about your rant there, I’m going to stick up for common core. Because one of the things I’ve noticed when my daughter was going through her public elementary school is that the common core math and English stuff that they were doing was smart in the sense that it built off of each other. And like those critical thinking skills in terms of like is that a supported argument did fit well back and forth together.

Now, the common core math worksheet she got when she was in kindergarten, first grade, some of them were sort of inscrutable. Like why are we doing this thing? But once you understood the underlying logic it’s making sure kids understood numbers are counting things but numbers are not just counting things. That they actually have placeholders. How place values work and all that stuff. They were doing a very rigorous job explaining all of that stuff so that you could get to the other math and you could really have a foundation for understanding the more complicated math.

And I think when people struggle with math it’s generally because some important step along the way just wasn’t made fully clear for them.

**Craig:** Well, and of all the things that kids reasonably say, “I will never use this. Why do I need to learn this,” math is way up there. Because for a lot of it they’re right. I mean, honestly – look, I am glad that I know how to multiply fractions. And I am glad that I know how to add fractions. And if you’re cooking sometimes it comes in very, very handy.

But for a lot of people, especially now, they’re just going to type it into a calculator. And, in fact, they will say it. They will say, “Hey, blankety-blank, tell me what the such and such.” And their favorite PDA is going to speak it back to them.

**John:** Yeah. And I’m not so worried about that. The fact that I will use a tool like that to do division or multiplication or other things just because it’s faster, I don’t think that’s actually a crisis. As long as they understand what the process is that’s going on behind the scenes, that I could do it by hand if I needed to do it by hand, I’m really not so freaked out about that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Neither am I. It’s an interesting thing. And, look, the reason I’m saying this is not because I’m grouchy about – I love math. I legitimately love math. I also recognize that a lot of people don’t. I also recognize that it’s a massive problem for kids who have certain learning disabilities. And it is traumatic for kids that don’t have learning disabilities. They’re just no good at it.

We excuse the tone deaf from music classes. They don’t have to attend. They are not forced to sing in front of everybody. But there are people who are a little bit number deaf and they are forced to go on this somewhat humiliating march.

And when – look, look. I was an excellent math student. And then I got to Princeton and I was pre-med. And one of the deals with pre-med is that you had to take physics 103. Not physics 101, which was physics for poets. Physics 103. Physics for physics people.

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

**Craig:** So off I went. And I’m in the lecture hall where Einstein used to be. And I’m surrounded by, you know, geniuses. [laughs] And for the first time in my life I knew what it meant to be utterly lost. I fought – and when I say I fought I mean I’ve never fought harder academically – fought my way to a B. That’s a B at Princeton, which is basically the equivalent of a C. Right? I fought. But I remember distinctly thinking, oh, this is what it’s like. When the teacher says something everybody goes, “Well of course, but what about this?” And he says, “Great question.” And you’re thinking, no, I’m still stuck on the “oh of course part.” Why is that of course? What are you even talking about? I’m drowning and with every additional sentence I’m further and further behind to the point where I just go limp. It’s scary and it’s upsetting and we have to just be aware that there are a lot of kids that are experiencing that every day. And I’m not sure they need to.

**John:** So my experience in freshman year Physics for Majors, which I took out of pure hubris. I didn’t need to take that science class but I took it. And there was some sort of like physics picnic at the start of the year. And so we were all invited to this thing. And it was at this playground thing and there was a spinning thing. And I thought, oh, centrifugal force. And I got these looks form people like, “Wait, did you just say centrifugal force?” And I’m like, yeah. They’re like that’s not a thing.

**Craig:** That’s not a thing, man. It’s centripetal.

**John:** Yeah. And I’m like, oh. And from that moment forward, oh wow, I don’t belong here. These are lovely people and I’m so glad they have the skills they have, but I’m not one of those people.

**Craig:** Yeah. I just remember thinking, oh god. Because what had happened was I had come out of a high school where the best you could do with math was to get to calculus. That was it. Well, wonderful public high school in New Jersey. And a lot of these kids had come from private schools where they were already taking Calc 2. They were in AP Calc. Their math skills were really far beyond mine. And the thing about math is like you said, it’s a pyramid. You build on it. So, that’s my big sort of plea to the world of education to maybe ease up on the math stuff because the kids that love math and excel at math are going to gobble it up anyway. And if you see a kid drowning, just back off. Back off.

**John:** Or build out classes that are actually practical applications of math. Because, I mean, teaching kids how to balance their budget is much more important than teaching them how to do high level things. And sine, cosine, and tangents, which they will never, ever touch again in their lives.

**Craig:** I mean, honestly, it is a rare thing. The only time I ever think of Sohcahtoa, you know what Sohcahtoa is, right?

**John:** I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** Ok. So you once did. Sohcahtoa is the all-purpose pneumonic for figuring out how to calculate the sine, the cosine, and the tangent. So, Soh, is sine is opposite over hypotenuse. Cah, cosine is angle over hypotenuse. And Toa, Tan, tangent, is opposite over angle. Sohcahtoa.

The only time I ever use Sohcahtoa is when I’m helping either – well, Jack is now, he’s graduated so he’s no more math for him. But Jessica is in 9th grade and the 9th grade math they’re getting into it. That’s why I use it. To help teach my kids. And then I think WHAT IS THE POINT OF THIS? We’re on this wheel. This purposeless wheel. Like they’re learning it, why? So they can teach it to their kids?

**John:** Indeed. So they can share the story with their children.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly.

**John:** It’s a generational gift.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Craig, thanks for the math talk.

**Craig:** Thanks John. Stay safe.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

 

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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)
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