Scriptnotes Transcript

You can find the original post for this episode [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/assistant-writers).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 428 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re going to be talking about best practices for assistants who write and also the state of WGA negotiations on both the studio and agency front. Plus in a bonus segment we will make our final ruling on cats.

**Craig:** Which is what everyone has been waiting for for 420 some odd hours.

**John:** Yeah. Craig has opinions on cats and so I cannot wait to get into what those opinions might be.

**Craig:** Mmm. They’re hard. Hard opinions.

**John:** They are fixed opinions on cats.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** All right. Some follow up. We have a live show coming up. It’s December 12. We have amazing guests. Craig, remind us who the guests are.

**Craig:** We have Kevin Feige, who is the mastermind of all things Marvel. He is in many ways probably one of the top five most powerful people in our entire business. Lorene Scafaria, who is our longtime friend, writer-director of Hustlers, and charter member of the Fempire. We have Shoshannah Stern and Josh Feldman who are the co-creators, co-writers, and co-stars of This Close on the Sundance Channel I believe. They are fantastic. And it’s a live show. A little bit of a twist. Both of them are deaf, so we’re going to have something we’ve never done before at a live show. We’re going to have multiple interpreters so that they can essentially be signed what we’re saying and what the audience is saying and reactions. And then someone else can interpret their signs for those of us who hear.

So that’s going to be interesting. We don’t have anything else I think for that show, but how much more do we need? I will say it is selling out rapidly. We’re already pretty close to sold out, which is not surprising.

**John:** No, not a bit surprising. Also at this live show we will be providing details on the new premium feed which Craig just minutes ago tested out. So, that will be exciting to share. We’ll share what happens.

**Craig:** It works. It definitely works. No, you guys want to totally come to this. I mean, come on. Come on!

**John:** Come on!

**Craig:** Come on!

**John:** So we are recording this on a Friday. On Sunday, so after we recorded this but before you hear this episode we will have the town hall on assistants. So this is a thing that I’m going to be participating in where we gather together a bunch of assistants and we talk through issues that assistants are dealing with. Obviously we’ve talked a lot about this on the show. But that will be a chance to get a bunch of people in a room to talk through those things. So I hope it went great. There was theoretically a livestream. We’ll see how that goes.

There was theoretically audio recorded, so if it’s useful we’ll put that in this feed. If it’s not then we won’t. But I’m looking forward to that conversation/I enjoyed that conversation.

**Craig:** Well, I’m sorry I can’t be there. But I’m sort of now rooting for some kind of riot just because I think it would be amazing to watch. I can say – I can’t really get into specifics – but I have been talking to some people. And things are happening. There are legitimate discussions happening, both from a – how would I put it – a kind of perspective we are going to change the way we are doing things point of view. And there are also interesting things happening where what I’m hearing from individual people is that when it’s time to hire assistants HR and business affairs, their attitudes have changed literally within the last month. Word is getting out.

**John:** Word is definitely getting out. I’ve had a lot of those same kinds of conversations that you’ve had with employers and other folks involved with these decisions. So hopefully as we roll into 2020 some progress will be made. But I believe some of that progress will happen at the top, a lot more of that progress will happen at the bottom. A thing I’m always reminding myself is that the assistants who are sort of leading this conversation right now will grow up to be the people who are running this town.

So, if nothing else were to change, the fact that they are focused on now means that as they become ensconced in these positions of power they will have a perspective on sort of what is appropriate for assistants.

**Craig:** Or, they will abandon their principles.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And turn evil.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s hope not.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, of course. We don’t want that. But if there’s one thing literature has taught us is that people can go bad.

**John:** People can go bad. While we’re talking about assistants, we have had a lot of discussions on different areas in assistant-dom and we really are trying to scope this out to not just be about assistants working in the TV writing space, but assistants overall in the entertainment industry. So anyone who is on a desk, working on a job in order to get that next job, that’s who we’re sort of looking at for these assistant discussions.

But there are some emails that have come in that are very specific to the writer assistant life. And so I wanted to focus on those today. I asked Megana to find some emails that really spoke to this and as always she is going to be our voice to the assistants. So let’s start with an email that Megana is reading.

**Megana Rao:** Peter writes, “Here’s one aspect that I haven’t heard you guys discuss yet. Assistants taking on writing duties. I just wrote my second outline for the show I’m an assistant on. Two other assistants have also written outlines. I get the impression that some feel as though this is the sort of thing that assistants do to prove themselves as ideal candidates for a promotion to the writing staff. And it’s one of those things that some people would say, ‘I’d kill for the chance to do that.’ I understand that. And I understand that I’m fortunate to be in the position that I’m in.

“But the point of view changes when day in and day out you’re the first one in and the last one to leave. You make minimum wage. And if you’re lucky you somehow negotiated a 60-hour guarantee. So once you’re done doing the full day of the non-creative, behind the scenes, keep the machine running duties, and you’re then asked to go home with the notes and write the outline that night, you can’t help but feel shortchanged just a little bit.

“One way to make it better? Maybe through us a story credit or something. I’d be happier being known for the creative contribution, to be able to say I contributed to the process. I’m here because I want to be a writer.”

**John:** Craig, what’s your first reaction to Peter’s email?

**Craig:** Oh Peter, OK, so look. This is not me saying that you’re being treated well, nor is it me saying that you’re not being treated unfairly. However, we have to be really clear about what writing is and what writing isn’t. And we’re going to see in another letter or some input from another person that there are cases where writers are really being ripped off here when it comes to credit. I’m not sure this is one of them.

When you are given notes or you’re told to take notes and then put them into an outline order, I don’t know if that really is a story-creditable thing. Story credit is for the creation of a story. It is not for the organization of other people’s notes or thoughts into a format. There are times when it can be contribute-able. If you’re given a bunch of notes and you’re told make this into a story outline, even though there isn’t enough here for a story outline, and you have to create elements within, yes, then you are creating and you’re writing.

If you’re given the outline and you’re told to put it in prose format out of notes and bullet point into prose, I’m not sure that is something that is creditable as story credit. Our writing credits must be protected very, very carefully. If we dilute them we dilute them for all of us forever.

So, yes, I understand that you feel shortchanged by this. And really what I suspect, Peter, and I could be wrong, is that if you were paid reasonably well, that is to say not minimum wage, and you do have a 60-hour guarantee instead of what you’re getting which is 40 hours to work 60 hours, and if you’re not working all day long and all night long for people who don’t seem to appreciate you then this would be OK. The solution is not to water down the meaning of a story credit. The solution is to pay you fairly and to treat you well.

**John:** Absolutely. A thing that is so challenging about – especially this writer assistant who is in the room who part of their job is to take what’s on the whiteboard and put it on paper, to take the notes that are spoken in the room and put it on paper, that is a very challenging job. It’s not quite writing. And that’s what we’re trying to distinguish, like writing from what that sort of transcribing job is.

What I do want to make sure we don’t overlook in Peter’s email here is that he’s basically doing all this work during the day and then they say, “OK, and when you go home write this up as a thing.” That is beyond your 60 hours. Now when you go home, this is your homework.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s not cool at all. That’s not legit. So, if this is part of your job, it needs to happen during your job time, or you need to be getting overtime for that at home work they’re putting on you. Because if they sent the writer home to do that, well, that’s kind of part of the job. But this is not part of your job, so therefore you shouldn’t have to be doing this work at home.

**Craig:** Totally. Now, we have an interesting version of the same issue but different enough that I think my response is different. I’m kind of curious about yours. It’s from Paul.

**Megana:** Paul wrote, “One my previous show at one of the big streamers the episodic scripts were ‘group written.’ That meant scenes were split up amongst all writers and then compiled into a sort of Franken-draft. Though I had broached the idea of perhaps getting a half a script on this show that ask was rebuffed, which wasn’t a big deal because I had expected that response.

“However, when one of the episodes rolled around I was assigned roughly half of the scenes. This meant I wrote about 30 pages of the script’s first draft, which was about 56 pages in total. No credit was offered and by this point I knew better than to ask. This showrunner had made a point of telling the support staff that the way we needed to show that we cared and were invested was by asking and looking for extra work to take on for free. Writing scenes seemed to fall under that umbrella. And I’ve heard he’s continued to run his room this way.”

**John:** Great. So here he is writing scenes. Writing scenes is writing-writing. And so that is – we’ve crossed this boundary between like these are notes, kind of a vague outline, to OK if you’re actually writing scenes then you are writing scenes in a show.

Now, I’ve talked to friends who are on shows that are kind of group written, where everyone just picks a scene, they paste it all together into a Frankenstein script, and they kind of rotate among the writers on staff who gets credit for it, because basically everyone has been writing on everything.

Here’s the challenge. The role of the union, like the Writers Guild, is to define who does certain jobs. And if you are doing that job of actually writing-writing and you’re not a member of that union that is a problem. There’s a reason why the WGA exists is to protect that job so that not everyone does that job. That said, I am fully mindful of the fact that you are probably aspiring to do that job. And so I want to have a discussion about what are the best ways to let you get some experience actually doing the job you’re trying to do while not getting abused by this system. Craig, your thoughts?

**Craig:** I completely. I don’t quite understand, Paul, what your, well, I think I do understand what your showrunner is doing here. You say, “Hey, how about throwing me half a script? I can draft up half a script, maybe I’ll do it with another assistant, or maybe one of the writers could mentor me and we can co-write a script together and in this way I can actually be hired as a writer and get paid a minimum thing to write a script.”

Now, the showrunner says, “No. No, no.” Which is fine. They’re allowed to say that. I mean, they have a fixed budget for writing. They have other writers to handle who may not want to share credit with you. They may want to get their own piece of credit. Paying you may not be something as easily done as waving a wand because it has to go through a whole thing. And then you’ve got to join the union. And by the way they’re going to charge you your dues. And there goes that money.

Regardless, what happens is they do it anyway. And this is where I get angry on your behalf. Because as you say one of the episodes rolled around. You were assigned roughly half of the scenes. OK. That’s it. You’re hired as a writer. Now, they can’t hire you as a writer without hiring you as a writer. That’s just wrong. And they can say, “Hey, look, we are giving him a shot that nobody else would give him and this is how we find out if he can write or not.” Absolutely not.

No. You know how you can find out if he writes or not? The same way you found out everybody else can write. Ask to read one of his original scripts. There. Now you know. He can write or he can’t. No, that’s just, eh, let’s just get this guy to do free work for us on our show and give him no credit for it because we don’t want to hire him as a writer. We don’t want to go through business affairs. We don’t want to pay him his P&A and all the rest of it. Well, you know, I just think that’s wrong. And I think that for my fellow writers who are in positions to hire other writers, hire them or don’t. And if you feel like being generous and giving somebody an opportunity, do it the right way. If they fail they fail. But at least you weren’t exploiting them.

**John:** I do feel like there’s an opportunity to support that writer without giving him or her full scenes, or like this is all yours to do. And that probably does involve pairing them up with someone who is actually on the writing staff to figure out how they’re going to approach this thing. And if I were an aspiring TV writer I would love that opportunity to prove myself and to sort of go in there and do that work.

But at the point where you are assigned material responsibility for writing scenes that are supposed to be in the actual script itself that does feel like you’ve crossed a line there. And that just doesn’t good or cool or right.

So essentially if you are shadowing the person who is assigned those scenes, that I’m OK with. I don’t know if the union is OK with it, but that feels like the kind of thing which is what you want this writer assistant to have the ability to learn how to do. Beyond that, like you I’m concerned.

**Craig:** Yeah. No question.

**John:** Now, these conversations have been about TV writing which is where I expected most of this to happen, but we got an email that was about feature writing. Let’s take a listen to that.

**Megana:** Leslie reached out with an example from working on a feature. “I worked as a writer’s assistant for a studio feature film. I was kept on even after the writer’s room wrapped and ended up working on set throughout production and post in a writing and creative producing capacity. I was frequently asked to write scenes or ‘turn our notes into scenes.’ Often I was the only person who actually possessed the Final Draft file of the script so I was responsible for all of the writing changes anyways. Sometimes the writing was very tightly based on notes, and other times they’d leave a lot of room for me to actually write the scene.

“Because of all of this I asked if I could be credited in some way. I was told I could have a consulting credit, or essentially some type of staff writing credit. However, about a year later as they were actually finalizing credits I was informed they could not give me this credit officially, but that I was welcome to use it on my resume.”

**John:** Craig, talk to us about Leslie and the situation she finds herself in.

**Craig:** Well, this nightmare is the result of these feature rooms, which I hate. I just won’t do them. And they come up every now and again and I always very politely, because it is polite, I’m not angry about their existence. I just personally cannot reconcile the job of writing a feature, which I feel is an individual authorial act, with being in a room with a whole bunch of people, which feels like something that is more about episodic television where you’re not being authorial to a specific closed-end narrative but rather churning an ongoing hopefully endless narrative. So here we have one of these films that have these rooms. So it’s not being written by a writer. It’s being run like a big old TV show.

And it seems like here once again Leslie is in the same spot Peter is in. It’s not here’s a bunch of notes, please put them in outline format, meaning organize them and turn the bullet points into prose. This is turn the notes into scenes. She’s being asked to write scenes. At this point I have to say not only is she being abused and exploited and treated unfairly, but the writers who are asking her to write scenes are literally ripping off the studio. Because the studio didn’t hire Leslie to write those scenes for that movie. They hired those writers to write the scenes for this movie.

And this is where they make us all look bad. They really, really do. I find this behavior reprehensible. I do. You don’t want to feel like you’re always angry at your own people, but you know when your people screw up you feel it more. You just do, because you’re embarrassed. This is embarrassing to read. And then even worse, when Leslie says, “Hey, can I be credited in some way,” they tell her you can have a consulting credit, which doesn’t exist. The Writers Guild will not allow those for the reason that people would hand them out like candy. Or essentially some type of staff writing credit, which does not exist in feature films.

**John:** There’s no such feature credit.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** So they either were lying to her, or literally just didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. Either way, either way, this is just wrong. Really just disappointed to hear this.

**John:** Now, I’ve not been involved in one of these feature room situations. But reading Leslie’s letter got me thinking back to some movies I’ve been on that have had so many writers back to back, where like a writer is on for a week, a writer is on for a week, a writer is on for a week, that essentially there was always an assistant who was kind of the keeper of the script, who was the person who was like making it all make sense. And I’m thinking of one specific example where she ended up becoming a really great writer herself and god bless her.

So there are situations where there is a person who is responsible for sort of keeping the script kind of intact and ends up doing – I mean, I’m trying to distinguish the clerical work of getting those scenes in there and actually making Final Draft make sense and sort of the weird production stuff from the writing-writing. And I do feel sometimes a person in that position ends up kind of doing the writing because they’re making the editorial choices about what’s actually going to make it in and what’s not going to make it in. Or situations where like you’ve described being on a set where you run through the scene, this is not working. You and the director and maybe an actor figure out what’s going to happen. And then you, Craig Mazin, talk about your kit and how you sort of get those pages up and right.

We all know of movies where the person who ends up actually typing up that scene is not really a writer-writer, but is basically the person who is putting down on paper what the actor and director and whoever else figured out what was going to be the scene that we’re going to shoot in an hour.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s not really writing, but it’s frustratingly all confusing.

**Craig:** There is script coordination. And somebody who is figuring out how to fit everything into one master document and making sure the revision levels are accurate and the scene numbers stay correct. That is a job. It’s not writing. But it is a job. Somebody who is taking dictation and typing things down into script format, it’s not writing, but it is a job.

Now, I tend to – not tend to – insist really on being the sole person who does that. I like being my own script coordinator. I maintain the files. I handle the revisions levels. I do all that stuff because, well, I trust myself to do it. And I don’t like handing my baby over to anybody else.

The thought of somebody making editorial decisions in a coordinator position is terrifying to me. I mean, that’s our job. And whoever is in charge of that movie, theoretically the producer, if the producer has lost that kind of level of supervision over the creation of this stuff then I don’t even know what to say. This is just shocking to me.

So, yeah. You know, I think that when it comes to features we should be in charge of doing our jobs for god’s sakes. Look how every other union is.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, go ahead and try to move a C-stand on a set.

**John:** Ha-ha.

**Craig:** But apparently we like it. Apparently there are some writers who enjoy other people just sort of casually writing and not receiving credit or payment or acknowledgment. It just makes no sense.

**John:** Now, if some of these examples had murky aspects to them, I think this one is the least murky of them all. Let’s take a listen to our fourth and final letter that we’ll look at today.

**Megana:** Derek writes, “My first big break was as a writer’s assistant for a dramedy. It was a mini-room with only four writers, two creators, and one sort of showrunner. There were also two non-writing producers who would sit in on the room sometimes and consult. Since the room was so small they were really open to my pitches, which was great. I offered a lot of story and dialogue ideas and I felt like my contributions where welcome.

“When it came time to write the final episode of the season the two creators offered me the opportunity to do the first draft. This was partly because they liked and trusted me, but also because they were focused on revising other episodes and time was running out. I was thrilled to have the opportunity and didn’t want to mess it up by negotiating the details. There was also the very real issue of time pressure.

“I was offered the script in the morning and literally had to start writing that night after the room broke. There also wasn’t a formal outline for the episode, so I was working off of basically a paragraph of ideas. I wrote the entire episode in two evenings after working as a writer’s assistant in the room during the days. I delivered the script to the room and the other writers really liked it. They put their own polish on some of the dialogue and then we passed it onto the studio and network where it was received positively.

“After the whirlwind died down I decided to focus on how to get credit for my work. I talked to the show-runner who was very supportive of me, but didn’t think it likely that the creators would willingly share credit. She also didn’t feel like she had the social capital to throw her weight behind me.

“The episode aired a month ago with large chunks of my original draft intact. I had crafted entire scenes that made it all the way to my television screen, but no one would ever know.”

**Craig:** OK, John, well how are you going to handle this thorny, well-balanced moral conundrum?

**John:** Yeah. I want to go through here with a highlighter and sort of mark like problematic, problematic, problematic. Let’s start from the beginning. A writer’s assistant for a dramedy. It’s a mini-room with only four writers, two creators, and one sort of show-runner. And two non-writing producers who would sit in the room sometimes and consult. So, from this we have this tiny, tiny staff of which Derek is really kind of a staff member because he’s being asked to pitch on things. He’s being included in stuff. And I’m sure this is exciting for Derek because this is an opportunity.

But ultimately it becomes clear that he’s being treated as the staff writer, not as the writer’s assistant. And so when he’s assigned a script you are assigned a script. You should be hired as a writer. That is just – that’s absurd. And so the minute you were assigned a script you were assigned a script and that is completely WGA covered work.

Now, if we go back through the Scriptnotes transcripts and back episodes you will see that some of the people who had those first breaks, really important steps in their career, they kind of got that script and that became the thing. I don’t want to sort of diminish what a great opportunity that is. But it’s also this is your chance to be recognized as a writer on a show. And the fact that Derek was not recognized as a writer meant that he wrote this script that became the script in the actual series and he’s not credited as the writer and has no ability to arbitrate for credit on this thing that the wrote.

**Craig:** Yeah, this is just a shame. I mean, to be clear if you’re in a situation where you aren’t a writer, you’re an assistant, and you volunteer ideas, you volunteer pitches, thoughts, ideas, well that’s on you. In other words, just because you say them doesn’t mean anyone is obligated to pay you or employ you. And they may even use one of them. But, you know, again, you volunteered that. So, that’s OK, something to think about. If you notice that the things you’re volunteering are getting in there you can say, “Hey, if you like the free samples I’ve been giving you would you enjoy paying for a subscription?”

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And then find out if they’re interested. Then you find out exactly how much they like your work. Because if they say, “Actually no. What we really like is the way you get lunch correct and how you’re here in the morning and here in the evening and you type well,” well then you know that OK I guess maybe I had an inflated understanding of the value of my pitches, because they basically seem to be saying we don’t need those actually.

But if they love them, then that’s an opportunity for them to step up and hire you as they should. The two creators offered me the opportunity to do the first draft. Now, for those of you in Derek’s position listen carefully because here’s what has to happen. You may think as a new person in Hollywood or somebody that’s kind of on a lower rung on the endless ladder of success that when the two show creators or the somebody producer or the somebody executive comes to you and says I’m going to offer you an opportunity, you may rightly think that the person in charge has offered you an opportunity. It is also true, however, that of the 14,000 people that act like they’re in charge in Hollywood about 12 of them are. And the rest are full of crap.

So these two – I picked out this detail. There are two creators and one sort of showrunner and two non-writing producers. I’m already suspicious that these creators may not actually be in charge. So the question is who is really in charge. Did they know I’m being offered a script? Or not? Because if you end up going to the person who is in charge and they say, “Whoa, no, no, no. Did not authorize,” then there’s a real problem.

So if somebody offers you a script then what you have to do is go to one of the producers that you know is involved in business-y stuff and say I’ve just been asked to write a script. I assume there’s some sort of paperwork I need to sign for a writing employment deal. And if they say, no, we’re not employing you as a writer then you’re not writing the script.

**John:** That’s what it is. So, I think what Derek needs to say is Yes And. So basically say yes. Say enthusiastically yes, you’re so excited to do this, and what do I need to sign so that you don’t get in trouble later on. Nothing gets weird and murky. So not you, Derek, but you as creators. You as the show get in trouble later on. Because you are so excited to do this and what do I need to make this legit so that everything goes smoothly?

**Craig:** I mean, Derek, just so you’re aware, you could hire a lawyer and sue the production company that put that out there because they don’t own the material you wrote. So when we’re hired as writers we’re hired as employees. And we are work-for-hire employees, meaning the copyright of what we do is not ours but rather the company that employs us. That’s why they can put it on the air. They own it.

But they don’t own what you wrote.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** You can just say, oh, by the way, you guys infringed my copyright. It’s not that you could have used that material anywhere else because it’s a derivative property of their copyright, but they don’t own your unique fixed expression. This happens. And this is the only way to wake people up. I’m not saying you should do that necessarily, because you may think well there are reprisals associated with that and there probably would be. But on an ongoing basis I hope everybody listening understands if somebody asks you to write a script find an adult, not them, but an adult that works on the show, who works in the money adult section. Let them know you’ve been hired and ask them to go ahead and generate an MBA writing agreement, a WGA-covered writing agreement that you could then submit to a lawyer, have them review it, and then you sign. And now voila you’re a proper writer.

**John:** And they would pay you scale. They would pay you the absolute minimum they could pay you, but guess what? For an assistant that’s great money. And more importantly, it’s credit.

**Craig:** Credit.

**John:** It’s credit and it’s also you’re getting paid to do the job that you want to be doing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Hurrah.

**Craig:** Hurrah.

**John:** Hurrah. So, let’s try to figure out any takeaways from these four emails we listened to–

**Craig:** Burn it all down! [laughs]

**John:** So a thing that’s very clear to notice here is that this is writers treating assistants poorly and asking them to do writing that they should not be asking them to do in some cases. And we see this sort of continuum of like you know what taking those notes and putting them into outline form, it was probably not story and it’s probably actually the job you were being hired to do. Once you start writing scenes, once you start writing scripts, then you are doing WGA-covered work. You are really being a paid – a professional Hollywood writer. You need to be paid as a professional Hollywood writer. And it needs to be done under a WGA contract.

**Craig:** 100%. And to our listeners who are writers and I assume there’s many of you, just don’t do this. Don’t do this to other human beings.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Why, by the way? You know, it doesn’t take much, honestly, to do the right thing. And I know enough people who do the right thing and who don’t suffer from it and who probably sleep a little bit better than you. Why don’t you join their ranks?

**John:** If you’re one of these people who actually does run a show and you want to slip a note to me or to Craig to tell us your side of all this, that would be great. Because Craig and I are not in the business of employing a lot of other writers, so you may actually be able to come to us with some best practices that we’re not even considering about sort of how you both protect the role of the professional writer and provide opportunities for these writers who desperately want to be doing this job in the room. So help us out here.

If you are listening to this saying like oh Craig and John got it wrong, tell us how we got it wrong

**Craig:** Tell John. I don’t care.

**John:** And we’ll have Craig read that aloud and he’ll read it in a funny voice.

**Craig:** [laughs] As always. I’m so reliable.

**John:** You are. All right, let’s get onto our next topic. Negotiations. So we talked a lot about agency negotiations, but a new phase of negotiations is also coming in. Every three years the Writers Guild renegotiates its contract with the AMPTP. These are the people who produce movies and television shows, so basically the big studios and other production entities. Over the history of this podcast we’ve talked about this a zillion times. We’re always talking about the run up to the negotiation and this and that. And a strike authorization vote and all these things. In fact, Craig and I really first got to know each other on the picket line back in 2007/2008 when we were going through that whole labor drama.

**Craig:** That was really the primary benefit of that strike.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You and I met each other.

**John:** We did. So let’s sort of set the table before we get into things to talk through kind of the timeline of like how this all goes because sometimes it gets confusing where we’re at in things. So, generally what happens is a year before the contract is about to expire the WGA begins meeting in small groups with screenwriters, showrunners, other folks to hear sort of what the issues are. So, the contract is up in May. So, a year before they start talking with certain people and that has happened.

And then they put together a negotiating committee, and so this negotiating committee is the people who are in the room talking with the people from the studio side about the issues. And I have been on the negotiating committee. Craig, you have been on the negotiating committee, too, in the past, right?

**Craig:** I have.

**John:** And it is not often thrilling. It takes place in the Valley.

**Craig:** It’s punishing.

**John:** It’s long days.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s long days and people talk at length. You listen at length. And then you don’t go into the room where things actually happen. It’s really one of the most punishing forms of guild service there is.

**John:** It is. And so I’m going to be doing it again this time.

**Craig:** Lucky you.

**John:** They announced the negotiating committee. I’m on there. A bunch of familiar names are on there. Michele Mulroney, Shawn Ryan, and Betsy Thomas are heading up the negotiating committee. Looking through the list there’s five members who are predominately screenwriters, so me, Michele, Dante Harper, Eric Heisserer are there. There’s a lot of wide representation of TV writers as well. So that part of the process has started, so the negotiating committee begins meeting and talking through strategy and other issues.

Part of what they are basing that strategy on and what the issues are is based on a member survey. So that survey is still active as we’re recording this. As I guess it closes on Wednesday. So if you’re listening to this episode on Tuesday and you got an email saying take the survey that survey is there waiting for you to look at.

And I thought Craig we might talk through this survey is pretty short but basically asks you to rank your top four issues that you want to focus on out of a list of 14 items. So I thought we might talk through in a very broad sense what are 14 things that the guild was asking about interesting he survey.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Pension and health is always there. That’s a given. Pension and health is always a thing that is part of this negotiation. First off, addressing TV mini-rooms like we just discussed in the emails today. So TV mini-rooms are where you get together a bunch of writers to break a series, break a season, sometimes write a bunch of episodes, and then everyone goes away. Then they come back when things are actually produced. A challenge with TV mini-rooms is that often it pushes people’s pay down very, very low because they are getting paid minimums for the time that they are in the room writing, and then they’re dragged out as producers for a very long time after that. So it’s an issue that is affecting a lot of folks working in TV these days.

**Craig:** People seem to both not like them and also that’s all that everyone is doing. It’s weird. I mean, it seems like some of these things we’re kind of weirdly complicit in. I mean, I always just – it’s worth saying, we’re the ones in charge. We’re in charge of TV. The people that are running these mini-rooms, that’s us.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Then we have establishing a foreign box office residual for feature films, which would be great. So right now if you’re credited as a feature film writer you receive residuals for the reuse of your work here, but you don’t get it for the release of a feature film in foreign theatrical markets. I think that means like theatrical release.

**John:** Theatrical release. Yeah.

**Craig:** So I do and you do receive monies if for instance they’re rerunning one of our things on a channel in France. But television episodes receive additional residual compensation in foreign markets I assume for the first airings of things. We do not. That would be cool. I mean, I don’t know how we’re going to get that. [laughs] It’s just sort of like, hey, can we have a lot more money? No. Oh, OK.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a weird parity thing. I think it’s, you know, I think foreign theatrical didn’t use to be a big revenue stream or as big a revenue stream as other things were. But now as Asia gets built out with movie theaters, as China gets built out with movie theaters, it’s worth more now.

**Craig:** I guess. It seemingly has been worth – people have been talking about how much the foreign market has been worth for features since I got into this business. I mean, I just–

**John:** But as theatrical?

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember there was like a freak out in like 1995 when people were like, oh my god, there are movies that are making more overseas than they do here. Yeah, no, it’s always been an enormous thing for us. I mean, yes, the China thing is different. Right? I mean, that’s a kind of thing where one market can actually be more than the domestic market. But, no, I mean, generally speaking what was the rule of thumb? 60/40. Some movies were 50/50. Even if it was 70/30, the point being that’s a huge amount of money. As a feature film writer who feels very much like our segment of the union has gotten short shrift over many years, this is a lovely pie in the sky thing to ask for. But it’s not really – I would much rather see some more practical things occur. My personal point of view.

**John:** All right. Point three. Establishing minimums for comedy variety series on streaming services. Right now there are no minimums for comedy variety series made for streaming services. That feels like it needs to be fixed.

**Craig:** Yeah, no. I mean, there should be minimums for everything I would think. Makes sense. We have improving the 2017 MBA span provision for writer-producers. So this was something new that we got in 2017 in our last negotiation which protects writers that are paid on a per-episode basis who are then their episodes are spread out over a long amount of time, right. So if you’re paid for an episode, a per-episode basis, and you’re supposed to write three episodes over the course of a normal amount of time, well that’s how much money you get for this amount of time.

But if they spread those episodes out over the course of a year suddenly your annual income has gone down to nothing and the fact that you’re held exclusive to that company means that you can’t go work somewhere else. It’s a real mess. So what happened was we got additional compensation for the extra weeks that writers and writer-producers were spending on these things. So I guess we’re trying to improve that.

**John:** Next, improving compensation for staff writers by adding script fees and/or eliminating the “new writer discount.”

**Craig:** Huh.

**John:** So this is a situation where if you are a staff writer on a television show, the money you’re getting paid for your weekly gets counted against the script that you’re actually writing, so you tend to not get actually paid for the script you’re writing as a separate fee. Just the money you’ve gotten along the way sort of buys them a free script out of you. That doesn’t feel great.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** There’s also this first 14 weeks thing, this new writer discount. So addressing that.

**Craig:** I mean, that should just be like number one. Just editorializing. I believe when we talk about like hey somebody who has a huge movie that made $400 million in China, can we get them more money? I go, uh, OK. Or, this nonsense where the companies are punishing our most vulnerable and newest members who are making the least. That should be like job number one of the union is getting rid of crap like that.

So, hopefully we can.

**John:** When you took your survey did you park that as number one?

**Craig:** I don’t recall how I ranked anything. But it was definitely something that I checked off. I mean, to be honest with you I was probably shading towards features because we get screwed over so much.

**John:** I get that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Improving diversity and inclusion in hiring. Well, this is an evergreen. Again, I have to point out we’re the ones doing the hiring.

**John:** Often we are the ones doing the hiring. Next, improving feature roundtable minimums.

**Craig:** Ooh. This sounds familiar.

**John:** Yeah. This sounds familiar. Craig is – I would say it’s not a hobby horse. Sounds like the wrong thing. This is an issue that you focus on a lot and you focus on a disagreement on how things are interpreted. If there were good strong language on this that raised the minimums on that I think I’m guessing Craig Mazin would be happier.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, right now there is I think the studios are abusing an inapplicable part of our agreement that says that they don’t have to pay a whole week, which should be the minimum unit of payment to us, but rather they can actually pay one-fifth of that, a day rate, for these roundtables that happen on all sorts of movies. Because what happens in those roundtables are people are actually doing real work. They’re contributing things that are creative. That’s why we’re hired for them. We should all be paid the weekly minimum, which frankly is not that much more than some of them pay anyway. But again this is something where it starts to put money in people’s pockets.

It may help – if it helps one person hit the health minimum for the year so that they can provide health insurance for their family it would warm my heart. There is no reason that we shouldn’t be able to get this. This feels incredibly doable. And I have no reason to believe we’ll get it anyway. [laughs]

**John:** Well, speaking of getting more money into people’s pockets, this is a thing that’s been a long time frustration of mine. So improving minimum compensation and terms for writing teams in TV and features.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So as far as like I know I think we are the only union in which two people have to share minimum on something, which is nuts. And so if you’re a writing team you get paid a minimum as if you are one person even though you’re two people. That is why you’re so attractive sometimes for TV rooms because they get two brains for one salary. Something has to be improved there because it’s not fair and it makes it harder for those people to qualify for insurance. It makes it harder to make a living. So, we need to make improvements on how treat teams.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s going to be a bigger issue in features than in TV because the minimums are so much larger.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So that’s something to take a look at. But it does hurt us. And I think maybe there is, well, there’s a fairly obvious compromise, right? I mean, they have never paid two people on a team the price of two individuals. But perhaps they could pay two people who are working as a team 1.5 times the individual rate. I mean, there’s an answer. So hopefully we get there.

**John:** I think there’s an answer as well. Improving options and exclusivity protections. So this is something that first occurred in 2014. I think I was on the committee at the time we got this in. It limits the ability for companies to basically hold people away from employment while they’re figuring out whether there’s another season of the show. And this was a thing that really was generated by writers saying like this is crazy. I’m being held out of work because they can’t make a decision about whether they’re picking up the next season of the show.

**Craig:** Yeah. And so this is a great thing for us to have. It applies in a nice way to those of us who are making less. Right? This is a good example of the union protecting the people who need protection the most. And obviously the way you improve this is by raising the ceiling and defining upwards how many people something like this covers.

**John:** Agreed. Next, improving residuals for original TV and feature programming on streaming services. Residuals on streaming services is complicated, because residuals are by definition when you when you take something that has had one life and you put it on to a new platform, and so the residual value being captured is a different thing when it’s only existing in one ecosystem. And yet these things clearly do still have residual value. That is why these companies are making these things because people still watch these things. So how we figure this out is complicated.

**Craig:** It is complicated. However this is one of the terms that is not writer-exclusive. This is something that would be industry-exclusive. In all likelihood meaning 100 million percent chance the DGA is going to be negotiating ahead of us. This is the kind of term that will likely be set by them.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Improving TV weekly minimums. So it’s how much writers and writer-producers get on shows that they’re writing on weeklies.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t see improving feature minimums. It’s weird. Funny that.

**John:** Funny that.

**Craig:** Guess we forgot again. [laughs]

**John:** Paid parenting leave.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** This feels on trend for the world. And so right now what we have in our agreement, and this is fairly new, is eight weeks of unpaid leave. So really all that says is if you give birth to a child, and this is a – I don’t know, is this for both genders or just–?

**John:** Both genders.

**Craig:** That’s nice. So if you have a child, a new baby, you get eight weeks to be with them without being fired. But they’re not paying you, right? There are obvious ways to improve that. I’m not sure length is the answer. I suspect it’s some reasonable financial agreement there, too. And we should not – in most developed civilized nations there is some kind of paid parental leave.

**John:** Next up, requiring at least a two-step deal in theatrical contracts.

**Craig:** Yes. God, yes. Yes.

**John:** Yeah. I would say even more so than raising minimums this is what puts more money in the pockets of feature writers who are working near – especially who are working near the minimum.

**Craig:** This is my real hobby horse. This is something that’s I’ve been banging on them about for years. And the way it should work is similar some of the other television provisions that apply to people who are earning under blankety-blank amount of money. I don’t need a guarantee of two steps, and neither do you. But if somebody is earning near scale or even twice scale, frankly, they need to get two drafts because with only one draft in place they are not only losing money, they are being exploited and having to write two drafts anyway. And it is exacerbating practically every problem we have within that system. And if I were in the room the argument I would be making to our friends across the table is that this is a way for them to rest creative control back from some of their producers who simply develop stuff into terrible places.

**John:** I agree with you. Finally, script fee parity across platforms. So, trying to make sure that you get the same rate whether you’re writing a one-hour for premium cable, basic cable, SVOD, you know, whatever service. It’s the same script and trying to get parity no matter which platform you’re writing it on. This has always been a goal. I believe even to this moment like CW pays less than other places do. It’s madness. This is, again, an evergreen goal, but I think it’s heightened by this time that we’re in where there are so many platforms. And you’re like who am I even writing this for? And it’s not been clear what venue this thing is going to go on.

**Craig:** This one is an uphill battle, again, because the DGA has a – I doubt that they’re going to be getting directing fee parity across platforms. So this is a tough one. But, sure, why not? As long as we don’t get parity downwards which is, you know, there’s a certain Monkey’s Paw aspect to these negotiations. Sometimes–

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

**Craig:** You get something and then you go, oh no. I mean, very famously the guild struck over definition of foreign cable pay something or another in early 1980s. And the directors did not and took the other definition. And we won. We won. We got the definition we wanted and then later realized that the one the directors had was actually better. So then we went back and said actually, no, we don’t want this thing anymore that we struck over. We want theirs. And to that day and to this day the companies have grinned and said, no, no, no, no, remember, you guys struck for that. That’s yours now.

So, you know, fun.

**John:** Fun. So these 14 points everyone is surveyed on. That information feeds into the committee. The committee meets to discuss, prioritize, set things. Ultimately they will come up with a sort of pattern of demands. Basically they’ll list these are the things that are most important. There’s generally a membership meeting where they talk through those things. They talk through what’s going to be happening. Generally it’s a vote on the pattern of demands, saying these are the things we’re going into these negotiations with. And ultimately a negotiation starts happening.

That’s still a ways down the road. But I wanted to sort of lay out the overall timeline of how this stuff goes because I would say over the last couple weeks – maybe over the last month – I’ve been hearing this slowly banging gongs, like oh there is going to be a strike happening. And none of what I’ve just laid out here to me indicates that reality.

So, I just want to put a bucket of cold water on a little of that talk right now because what’s actually happening is what’s actually happening which is that right now we’re voting on which of these things are most important to us.

**Craig:** But, you know, to be fair regardless of what is true or real, everyone apparently that employs us is convinced there’s going to be a strike. And they are acting accordingly. So, if we want them to stop acting like that I suppose we could do something. We haven’t done any of the things that would make them stop thinking that. And so they’re going to continue to think that. And they’re going to continue to behave in accordance with that, which means almost certainly that they will do predictably what they do when they think there’s going to be a strike. They’re going to hire a lot of people, rush, rush, rush, set dates for delivery before the termination of the agreement. And then if there is a strike then there is. And if there isn’t, then they’ll just whatever, deal with that backlog like they did when we almost struck in 2014.

**John:** Talk me through what you think the WGA would do if they wanted to make people not be saying those things.

**Craig:** Yes. I can think of a number of ways. I probably shouldn’t just blab them here on a podcast. Happy to have that conversation with you off mic, because you don’t want to just walk out there and say, “We’re never going to strike.”

**John:** Yeah, that’s not helpful.

**Craig:** But on the other hand clearly as a result of the rhetoric surrounding the agency campaign and the general tenor of membership meetings the companies have decided reasonably or not that we’re hell bent for leather. And that this is all part of a larger plan that all of this is wrapped up in one big total war against everyone. And that’s how they’re going about it. And we can giggle all we want but in the end if they are convinced, they’re convinced.

And one of the great dangers of them being convinced that we’re going on strike is that they will precipitate the strike.

**John:** Yeah. That’s the danger.

**Craig:** That’s the problem. That they’ll say, look, they’re going to strike no matter what. What we can’t do is come in there, offer them something reasonable and have them spit on it and go on strike, because then they’ll never take that and we’ll have to come up with something better. Therefore let’s just go in there, offer them a bucket of crap so that they’ll do the strike that they were going to do anyway, and then we’ll negotiate a real deal, which is kind of what happened in 2007.

**John:** So if you are summarizing this for Deadline, or basically just transcribing this for Deadline–

**Craig:** Ha-ha.

**John:** I think Craig says like Craig advises studios, “Don’t offer a bucket of crap.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Please don’t offer a bucket of crap. I would say to the studios don’t presume we all are going on strike. Because I actually don’t think the union does want – I mean, union leadership. I don’t really see it. I don’t see this like we’re striking no matter what. Of course we’re going to drive a hard bargain. That’s what we do. And of course we want things and of course there are things that are always strike-worthy. I mean, if they come in with rollbacks and stuff like that, you know, I’ll be out there waving the red banner. That’s fine.

But this current belief, this inherent belief that we’re going on strike, while I understand it from a certain point of view I often feel like I have to translate this strange political machinery of our own union to other people. I actually don’t think we are hell bent for leather and going on strike and I think we would much rather prefer, as per usual, to get a deal that follows the pattern of the DGA but addresses certain writer-specific things that we need to have addressed. Most primarily I will add the area of features which have been neglected completely for well over a decade.

**John:** I would say that’s probably a Craig priority.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** In this negotiation.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So you brought up earlier the agency stuff, so let’s talk a little bit about the agency stuff which we haven’t talked about for a bit. So, some stuff that has happened in the meantime, Abrams Agency, Rothman Brecher both signed the new franchise agreement. It’s similar to the existing franchise agreement. Packaging fees got sunsetted through January 22, 2021. There are new modifications that allow an agency to have up to a 5% ownership interest in an entity engaged in production or distribution. So that is 5%, basically you can own 5% of a production entity is a new thing in this latest round of stuff.

Craig, I know I’ve been holding you back from talking about this so let’s get some Craig Corner time here. Tell me what you want to tell me.

**Craig:** I don’t know. What’s there to even say? I mean, if it takes us seven months to sign Rothman Brecher, uh, then by my calculations to sign UTA, CAA, William Morris, and ICM it will take us 14,980 months. So I don’t know what’s – I just think in general whatever our strategy was, if we had said to the membership in the beginning FYI if we all do this then we think in seven months we will at least have the Abrams Agency and Rothman Brecher. I think you would not have gotten a 95% vote.

This has not gone the way we would have hoped. And at this point I don’t see any reason why it would. I think the large agencies have essentially said, “Yeah, no, no, we’ve moved on. We’re going to figure out a way to live without you.” And they are.

And our unilateral disarmament is going to have grave costs for us. But there’s nothing I can do about it. And it’s going to continue this way. And I think the general feeling among a number of members I’ve spoken to is just a kind of, oh well, that’s that.

**John:** All right. So frequent listeners of the podcast know that one of the frustrating patterns we always get into is like Craig says something and I say like oh I would want to respond more fully to you but I can’t because I know things, because I’m on the negotiating committee, because I was on the board and such. And it puts us in this weird place. And so a thought I had is that because I know things that you don’t know there’s a frustrating mismatch of stuff. And I can’t tell you the things that I know, but an opportunity might be for me to type up like four facts that I know that let me perceive the situation very differently than you perceive it. Because I think we’re both very rational people.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Fundamentally.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so I think it probably is frustrating for you recognizing that John seems to be a rational person yet he’s responded to these things very differently. So I thought maybe I could type up these four facts, put them in a document, and encrypt the hell out of it with a long password.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And then so I’m going to send you this document after we record this.

**Craig:** And I have to guess the password. [laughs]

**John:** And when this is resolved, when this is resolved–

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** In which we obviously have different timelines of when we think this is going to be resolved, then I will send you the password–

**Craig:** 14,000.

**John:** So it’s somewhere between tomorrow and 14,000 years from now.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I will send you the password. And you will open up the document and you’ll say, huh. And I’ll be curious then sort of what perspective would be on this conversation we had just now. Because I think I feel the frustration of the audience sometimes in the sense of like how are they seeing these things so very differently.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** And it might be a way to sort of bridge a little of that gap, honestly only for my sanity.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Not for yours.

**Craig:** No, I understand. That makes sense. Because you don’t want people to think you’re irrational. I mean, here’s the thing. I fully acknowledge that I do not know the things that you know. What I do know is that for a long time you and others have said that you know things that we don’t know. But actually nothing has happened. Nothing that I would call significant and let me just define it as always as CAA, UTA, ICM. I’ve given up on William Morris Endeavor.

And so because we have heard a lot of versions of we’re real close, things are happening. In the election one of the things that people kept throwing out there was that the people who were daring to fulfill their constitutional obligation to the union and volunteer to serve by running for office were undermining the union because there was a major agency that was moments away from signing a deal and because of this challenged election they were not doing it.

I have to assume one of those was the Abrams Agency or Rothman Brecher. I don’t know what else to say. Well, that was the big prize. Eh, you know. So we’re just sort of stuck here not knowing. All I do know is it’s been the longest – I don’t know, I’d call it a labor action – by this union that I’ve ever been in. It’s approaching the longest it’s ever done. I think eight months is the limit.

**John:** So, winding back through time, there was a moment at which you were running for the board. You hadn’t decided to run for vice president. And I was so excited that you were running for board because I knew you would get elected and I knew you’d be on the board and actually have the information. And I was thinking, oh, Craig will now actually know what I know. And it will be great. And so that didn’t come to pass and many things happened in the meantime.

There’s a scenario in which you had stayed running for the board and you could have known these things and I would be fascinated to have these conversations with you.

**Craig:** No question. And I know this must be frustrating for you, too. But I do wish that the leadership of our union would recognize that there is a serious cost to not informing us of anything. We know nothing ever. I mean, this is different than an AMPTP negotiation. We know when we’re negotiating with them. It’s a thing. And there’s only one of them. It’s a thing, right?

This stuff where we’re just sitting here going oh good, I’m so glad they took weeks to refine their agreement with Rothman Brecher. That’s really just about the fact that whatever 90% of us were represented by four companies. And those four companies are still – we’ve heard zero. And I can certainly what they say is that there’s absolutely nothing happening. And that could be a lie. But it would be nice if it were a lie for our side to prove it. But we don’t hear anything. All we get are these overly rosy announcements that we have made a major breakthrough with some company that just doesn’t rise to that test of being a major breakthrough. I don’t know what else to say.

**John:** I hear what you’re saying. And I look forward to being able to send you this document. Here’s something I would propose we do. We got a question in about moving to Los Angeles. I’ll read the question. And I think weirdly you and I are not the right people to answer it, but I think some of our listeners are the right people to answer it.

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** So let’s read the question and then invite people to write in, for a change not about assistants. Mark from New York asks, “This podcast has taught me nearly everything I know about screenwriting. More recently you’ve even inspired me to make the move from New York City to Los Angeles and pursue a career in writing for TV. I fly out at the end of January and I want to hit the ground running. What advice would you give to someone who is about to make the move to Los Angeles? Other than securing an apartment and transportation, what should I prioritize once I arrive? Is there anything I could be doing in the months leading up to the move to increase my chances of finding work? Finally, if each of you could do your first years in Los Angeles differently, what would you change?”

**Craig:** Great questions.

**John:** So these are great questions. And for me and Craig it’s more than 20 years ago and I just feel like so much is different. But I think for a lot of our listeners that is a very recent thing. And so if you are a person who could help answer Mark’s question I’d love to hear it. So if you have moved to Los Angeles in the last, you know, five, ten years and could talk to him about what you did and what you would do differently, I think that would be a great help to Mark.

**Craig:** Do you remember, I bet it was this way when you got here, too, because we were about the same. When it was time to rent an apartment there was a fax number that you could call and you would get faxed a sheet of available apartments and rents and phone numbers.

**John:** I remember going to West Side Rentals where you’d actually on Tuesdays and Fridays I believe you could pick up the Xerox packet and it would be there exactly at noon and it was a race to get those apartments.

**Craig:** Yes. [laughs] Yes. Yes. I mean, you’re absolutely right. We are not. We are old. I mean, we’re – I mean, I don’t even know if the temp agency I applied to even exists anymore.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Well, it probably does.

**John:** I’m sure it’s an app now.

**Craig:** It’s an app. Everything is an app. It’s a robot. Everything is a robot.

**John:** All right. Let’s do our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is something that other people have used as a One Cool Thing, but it is genuinely really amazing. So, this is a solar mirror breakthrough. So solar power can happen in various ways. You can have the things where they’re shining on the photo voltaic cells. This is more the classic kind of thing where you have a bunch of mirrors pointed at one area and you’re making it super-hot. And it goes all the way back to the idea of Archimedes’ mirror where people had to polish shields and they were burning a ship. It’s that idea but done with computers that can precisely manufacture these mirrors and precisely aim them.

And the breakthrough that happened this last week was they were able to hit a thousand degrees Celsius.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And when you get something that hot you can actually unlock a bunch of industrial processes that are really helpful, like making concrete, or splitting water up to make hydrogen and oxygen. So it’s potentially a really great breakthrough. I’m sure there’s lots of other things you can apply that kind of energy generation to. So, anyway, it was just a good example and actually clear to follow things. Because so often when you look at sort of technology and energy it’s just really complicated. And here you can see like, oh, I get it. The mirrors are pointing at that thing and it’s making it really hot.

**Craig:** Make stuff hot.

**John:** Make stuff hot.

**Craig:** Make stuff hot is how we generate energy. I mean, if you can make stuff that hot using mirrors then you should be able to heat up a whole big bunch of water into steam to turn a turbine and make power.

**John:** Chernobyl was heat to generate steam.

**Craig:** Yeah. They all are. Every power plant we have, whether it’s a dam, or coal, or nuclear, or gas, it doesn’t matter, that’s all of them. That’s what they all do.

**John:** Well, that’s actually not true at all.

**Craig:** What? Which one does something else?

**John:** I mean, a dam is just using gravity to generate electricity.

**Craig:** No, but it’s spinning.

**John:** It’s spinning but it’s not heating anything up.

**Craig:** Well, that’s true. You’re right. You’re right. My point is it’s spinning a turbine.

**John:** Yes. Exactly. Turbines.

**Craig:** Turbines.

**John:** For sure.

**Craig:** I mean, it’s photo voltaic. Goes directly to electricity, but if you’ve got these mirrors all pointed at something to heat it up it feels like it could be pretty cool. I could be wrong. A bunch of physicists are going to write in and tell me. You know what? I don’t care.

**John:** Not a bit.

**Craig:** I don’t care.

**John:** Well, one thing I love, when you fly out of Los Angeles sometimes and you look out the window you can see the big solar array sometimes. And those are so cool.

**Craig:** Yes, they are. And the wind farms.

**John:** Oh, I love me some wind farms.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know Trump thinks they cause cancer.

**John:** I think the worst things that happens with windmills is they do kill some birds, but you know what?

**Craig:** They do. They kill birds. I mean, I eat birds.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Chicken is good.

**John:** Chicken is good. Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** I do. So it’s not necessarily something you’re going to want to go out and buy immediately, but the promise for the next year I think is quite good. So like you I purchased the new MacBook Pro. 16-inch screen. I believe you feel it is too large for you, which makes total sense.

**John:** It’s too large. I returned it.

**Craig:** Makes total sense. And I like you had been working with a 13-inch MacBook Pro. It is quite a bit bigger. That’s, you know, I’m getting used to that part. But the part I’m really happy about is the keyboard. So Mac sort of infamously changed their keyboard a few years ago for their portables to this, what do you call it, Butterfly switch thing? Is that what it was called?

**John:** Yeah. From scissor to butterfly.

**Craig:** From scissor to butterfly. So the key had much less travel. It was kind of a more hard feeling. I got used to it, like everybody else. The problem was that they were not very reliable. And I like many people had to bring my laptop in to get the entire keyboard replaced because some tiny little thing broke somewhere. I mean, they paid for it, but at this point now they’re replacing tons of keyboards. It was a huge problem. And, honestly just didn’t feel great to type on that.

I thought it did at first, and then it got annoying. So, this one they’ve gone back. And it’s joyous. I can only presume that for a company that so rarely admits it made a mistake and really would prefer that the rest of the world catch up to them, in this instance they have essentially admitted they made a mistake. And therefore in the following months and days the smaller MacBooks, the smaller laptops, the ones that aren’t quite as expensive as the MacBook Pro, they will all start getting this new keyboard. So, new keyboard coming, it’s inevitable. We should be all fine in just a few years.

**John:** Yeah. So I am still using my old 13-inch MacBook Pro. I don’t even know what year it’s from. It still has like the large USB ports and such. I love it. But I’m ready for a new computer. So once the 13-inch version of this comes with this keyboard I’ll be in heaven.

**Craig:** Yes, you will be.

**John:** All right. Stick around after the credits because we are going to be talking about cats. But for now that’s our show. As always it’s produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Michael Carmen. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send your assistant stories or your advice about moving to Los Angeles.

For short questions, on Twitter I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We love to answer your short questions there.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you find transcripts. We try to get them up about four days after the episode airs.

Come to our live show. There’s still some tickets left as we’re recording this. You should come join us there for the live show. So in addition to those guests there’s always some sort of game stuff.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**John:** And you get to see me and Craig in our natural habitat.

**Craig:** I might wear some reindeer ears or something this year. I might be festive.

**John:** You haven’t sung a song for a while, either. So maybe some singing would be in order.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know what? Maybe we’ll do a song.

**John:** Maybe we’ll do a song. I’d love to do a song.

**Craig:** I wonder like I’ll do a song with maybe Kevin Feige and I can do some sort of duet.

**John:** Perfect. Do it. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**BONUS**

**John:** Craig, cats. I’m happy to talk about either the musical Cats which could include the film Cats, or talk about the actual furry beings called cats.

**Craig:** You know, I’m not – I was never a huge fan of the musical Cats. I’ll just say it. I love Broadway. I love Broadway shows. And I’m not one of these people that’s a snob against Andrew Lloyd Webber. I think Evita is amazing. And, you know, Jesus Christ Superstar is amazing. And I really love Joseph and the Technicolor Dream Coat. I just never loved Cats because I think it suffers from the structure that it came from which was just a bunch of episodic poems about individual cats. And so it just sort of, you know, you meet a cat, you meet a cat, you meet a cat. It was just never my thing.

That said, Memory is in the what, top five Broadway songs of all time?

**John:** Yeah. A remarkable song.

**Craig:** It’s incredible.

**John:** I have never seen Cats. And so I know kind of what happens in it. I know it’s largely plotless. It’s a bunch of people just auditioning to die in a way. So, never having seen Cats, but I’m always curious to see things, so I’m going to see the Cats movie and I’m going to go into it with my heart open and ready to be impressed. So we’ll see about that.

Having discussed Cats the musical, now let us discuss the actual beings called cats. They’re small furry creatures who sometimes live with us. Craig, what is your opinion of cats as a species?

**Craig:** I mean, how did this happen? How did this happen? I understand dogs and their value. They show affection and they have utility. And they protect you. And they watch over you. And if you are sight impaired they guide you. They’re remarkable. They’re remarkable creatures. And I don’t understand how cats even became a thing. They just seem to me to have no more value than, I don’t know, rabbits. What do they do? What do they do?

**John:** So to stipulate, you and I are both dog owners. We are both dog lovers. You have an amazing dog named Cookie, I have a great dog named Lambert. Dogs are wonderful. But I don’t want this to be a cats versus dogs discussion. Let’s just talk about cats on their own merits.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So as a person who loves dogs I also love cats, but I love cats at a distance because I’m very allergic to cats. So I’ve never been able to invite one into my home. My daughter has been advocating very hard for us getting a cat. It won’t happen, because Mike is just never going to allow a cat into our house.

**Craig:** God bless him.

**John:** But I enjoy other people’s cats. And I actually like other people talking about their cats and here’s what I think I find so fascinating about it. Whereas dogs are wolves who sort of came very close to us and ultimately we changed them into being a thing that is useful to us, that’s why we have such a codependent relationship with our dogs, cats never really quite there. They’re domesticated in the sense that they are comfortable living around us, but they are still small lions. They are still wild creatures who just happen to be in our homes. And I think that’s what people find so fascinating about them is that they are not just even mercurial. If we were to die they would eat us.

**Craig:** Oh, within seconds. I mean, my feeling is that if you fall down and you are dying, a dog is going to in a moment of clarity attempt to dial 911. Like it will have its finest moment. A cat will start eating you before your last breath. I don’t understand them. I don’t.

**John:** But in some ways maybe you don’t understand them the same way you don’t understand people who do things that risk their lives to do. People who are climbing without ropes. Like free-soloing.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** That to me is sort of like the emotional aspect of having a cat. You know it’s not actually – it doesn’t care about you, at least not in the same way that a dog or a person would care about you.

**Craig:** How many people have we just lost? I mean, of the amount of people that listen to our show?

**John:** Most of our listenership, yeah.

**Craig:** 40, 50, 70%. Gone. Permanently. People are very emotional about their cats. So I want to acknowledge that I’m really joking. I mean, it’s not that cats are evil or bad. And nor do I doubt the depth of affection people do have for their cats, and people do. And I have all sorts of – Lindsay Doran who is one of my most dearest of friends, who I love very, very much, is obsessed with her cats. She loves them. And, you know what? And I love her. So, I accept that. I don’t understand it, but I don’t have to.

That said, you and I are right. [laughs]

**John:** So, I’ve had two cats in my life. One was this tiny little kitten. Tiny little black kitten showed up on our driveway. It was a Friday afternoon. There was no parent around. So, we took the cat in. I started feeding it. And we ultimately found it a home. But the cat lived with us for about a week. And so I called the cat Friday. And I will try to post a photo of Friday the cat because this was ten years ago. I was reminded as I was looking through photos. And Friday was a great little cat but ultimately could not live with us.

The best cat I’ve had the chance to meet though is a neighbor’s cat named Raleigh. And so it’s an actor who lives two doors up, and her cat will just kind of wander into our yard sometimes. And this cat is the most – not dog-like cat – but the most sociable cat. Will hop up and just sort of hey you eating lunch, that looks good, let’s take a look.

That is a cat that made me appreciate sort of what it’s like to have a cat who is in your life a lot and where you could see what the cat was thinking. It was sort of an alien thought process. It wasn’t sort of – I couldn’t quite put together what its thoughts were. And it did suddenly scratch me. But it was intriguing. So I can definitely see the value of a cat like that.

**Craig:** Expressionless faces with their dead eyes. The closest I ever was with a cat was Melissa had a cat named Tiggy. And so when I first started dating her and I went home to where she lived I met Tiggy and Tiggy was apparently vaguely brain damaged or something. It had never weened and it had been hit by a car. I don’t know what the excuse was. All I know was that Tiggy would jump on you and then sort of I guess cats have this instinctive behavior of kind of kneading with their paws if they are nursing.

So it would just knead you with its paws, and its claws, which hurt. And drool. So it would just sit on you, and hurt you, and drool on you. That was it. That’s actually the most affection and, yeah, interaction, physical interaction I’ve ever had with a cat. Usually they just stare at you like you’re something on the bottom of a shoe.

**John:** Yeah. That’s cats. Last point I will make is why cats haven’t had the tremendous influence on human civilization the way that dogs have, we would not be humans if we hadn’t sort of domesticated dogs the way we did. Cats did and probably do still perform an important function of like getting rid of mice and vermin, other things which would be unpleasant around us. So they have a utility certainly and in rural places especially.

**Craig:** Yes, for sure. And don’t forget that they do steal babies’ breath. So they help thin the population.

**John:** Absolutely. Like babies you don’t want. Only the evil babies.

**Craig:** Jerk babies. That’s how you find out your baby was going to be an idiot. A cat just, you know. None of that is true. Old wives’ tales.

You know what cats do do? They actually do create huge health problems for pregnant women because of toxoplasmosis, which is–

**John:** That is not good.

**Craig:** The nasty little thing that they poop out in their weird litter box.

**John:** Yeah. Litter box, again, a thing which cat people are willing to deal with. Litter boxes.

**Craig:** I mean, what?

**John:** And they’re saying, “You’re picking up your dog’s poop. Is it any different?”

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yes. It is. Because it’s not inside my house. How about that? It’s not sitting in a bunch of weird gravel.

**John:** All right, Craig. I’ll be back with you next week with whatever listeners we have left.

**Craig:** None.

Links:

* Buy tickets for our [Live Show](https://www.wgfoundation.org/events/all/2019/12/12/the-scriptnotes-holiday-live-show) Thursday, December 12th with Kevin Feige, Lorene Scafaria, Shoshannah Stern, and Josh Feldman!
* [Professionalism in the Age of the Influencer](https://johnaugust.com/2019/professionalism-in-the-age-of-the-influencer), read the full text of John’s speech
* Watch the [Assistant Townhall](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5x_jDCftkg&feature=youtu.be)
* Learn more about [Agency Affiliates](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaXQ84Hn6_Y)
* [Solar Mirror Breakthrough](https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a29847655/heliogen-solar-heat-mirrors/)
* [Archimedes’ Mirror](http://www.unmuseum.org/burning_mirror.htm)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_428_assistant_writers.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/the-new-one-with-mike-birbiglia).

**Craig Mazin:** Hi folks. This is Craig. Today’s podcast episode will contain some salty language. So if you are with kids in the car or people that just don’t like that kind of talk, go and put the headphones on. Or pull over and stop.

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 427 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast it’s a new round of the Three Page Challenge, where we look at writing samples sent in by listeners and discuss what’s working and what’s not. To help us do that we’re excited to welcome back Mike Birbiglia. He is the writer-director-performer of Sleepwalk with Me, Don’t Think Twice, and The New One now playing in Los Angeles and coming to Netflix very soon. Welcome back, Mike.

**Mike Birbiglia:** Thanks so much.

**Craig:** We got the Bigs.

**Mike:** I’m Patient Zero on the pod. I was one of the first listeners.

**Craig:** You’re the only person that calls it The Pod, by the way. Nobody else calls it that.

**Mike:** Really?

**Craig:** You’re the only one.

**Mike:** First of all, I love The Pod. And then second of all I plug The Pod.

**Craig:** Really?

**Mike:** When I did the tour, The New One, in DC and went back to Georgetown to my screenwriting class taught by John Glavin I told the students, “You should listen to every episode of Scriptnotes or at the very least the top 20 recommended ones.” It is a great public service that you’re doing for free—

**Craig:** Well, I’m doing it for free. John has been paid very well. [laughs]

**Mike:** But that it’s a great service and it is as good, I believe, as any film program in America. If not better.

**Craig:** Correct me if I’m wrong, not free?

**Mike:** No, they’re quite expensive.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re quite expensive.

**Mike:** Hundreds of thousands of dollars.

**Craig:** So if you could have something for free, or something that’s like it but not as good for $50,000 a year?

**Mike:** I’m going to go with free.

**Craig:** You’re going to go with free.

**Mike:** This is the ad. It’s a 30-second spot. We’ll run it on Fox Business.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** Right. Do we have our own personal 800 number so that we know to give credit to Birbiglia for these subscriptions?

**John:** Absolutely, yes. So use the promo code Birbiglia to save 100% on your zero dollar—

**Mike:** Use that easy-to-spell hashtag Birbiglia.

**Craig:** Yeah. But take out most of the Is, but not all of them. Keep the one that matters.

**John:** While you’re searching for Birbiglia on Scriptnotes you could listen to Episode 121 and Episode 261, your early ones on the show. So thank you very much for coming back the third time.

**Craig:** It’s his third time. You’re going to get a jacket soon.

**John:** The fourth episode.

**Craig:** I think the fifth. SNL does a five-time club.

**Mike:** Wow.

**John:** Craig, we have a live show coming up. We can plug the live show. December 12, it’s a Thursday, in Hollywood. People can get their tickets right now. They should get their tickets right now. Craig, why is this the episode they should come for?

**Craig:** Well we have fantastic guests. One I think is going to be a big draw particularly, but the other ones should be equally as big. We have Lorene Scafaria, who is fantastic, and recently wrote and directed Hustlers, which is a big hit. And she is a wise individual.

**Mike:** She was great, one of the times I heard her on this show was tremendous.

**John:** She’s amazing.

**Craig:** By the way, didn’t seem to realize that it was going to be a live show. Yeah, she just said, “Wait, this is live?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yes it is Lorene. We also have Shoshannah Stern and Josh Feldman who are the co-creators and co-stars of This Close which is on Sundance Channel.

**John:** It’s a fantastic show.

**Craig:** Amazing. I met Shoshannah on a panel for the TV Academy. She was remarkable. Super funny. Really smart. Just one of the – you know sometimes you meet somebody and you’re like, oh yeah, yep, your brain, my brain, we’re the same kind of screwed up.

**John:** In a world of coincidences, Josh Feldman was assigned to me by the Sundance Labs to – I’m his mentor. And so I’ve been meeting with him for the last year.

**Craig:** Shoshannah has selected me as her mentor now.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, yeah.

**John:** Our mentees are going to battle it out live on stage.

**Mike:** I think what’s special about the live event, because I did one in Austin with you folks once.

**John:** That’s right.

**Mike:** Is that the level of nerd in the audience is so beautiful.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

**John:** Oh, just wait till this one.

**Craig:** Wait.

**Mike:** And, no, hold one. But I believe that the level of nerd is so strong that I think, especially if you’re single, perfect place to find your life partner.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** That’s beautiful.

**Mike:** Another screenwriter.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We have not had a Scriptnotes wedding yet. I think that is a goal for–

**Craig:** We might have.

**John:** We might have.

**Craig:** No one has told us.

**John:** Tell us if it has happened. But first tell us who the fourth guest is.

**Craig:** If you wanted to increase the concentration of lovely dorks, our kind of nerds in the audience, what better way could you do than have Kevin Feige, the head of Marvel, the chief creative officer of Marvel.

**Mike:** That’s pretty over the top.

**Craig:** Show up. So Kevin is a producer. Kevin is a studio executive. Kevin is sort of also a writer of a kind. He’s the puppet master of all of these Marvel movies, all of which have done remarkably well. So Kevin is going to be joining us. And I have a feeling that we’re going to bring in different nerds. I mean, we have our nerds. And I think we’re going to get some new nerds.

**Mike:** Do you have Scorsese coming by?

**John:** Oh my god. We should get them together.

**Mike:** I would love to see that conversation.

**Craig:** You know what we’ll do? I will be Martin Scorsese. I’ll do my Scorsese impression. I’ll be Scorsese. It’ll be great. I’ll be Scorsese doing a Birbiglia impression.

**Mike:** What you do isn’t cinema.

**Craig:** You’ve got to go really fast. So the thing is, the thing is, when you look at the movies, when you look at all the films, when you look at the great films, you’re talking about like The Searchers. And Marvel, I’m not taking anything away from them. They’re great movies. They’re great movies. People love them. But is it cinema? Is it cinema? It’s not cinema.

**Mike:** Oh my gosh.

**Craig:** It’s like Martin Scorsese is here.

**Mike:** It’s pretty good.

**John:** It was really good.

**Craig:** It’s not as good as my Birbiglia.

**Mike:** No, but that’s strong. What’s your Birbiglia? What’s your Birbiglia?

**Craig:** The Birbiglia, this is all I have so far. So Jenny and I were doing great. We were doing great. We were talking to each other. We were having a great time. We were sharing the sofa. Everything was going great. Everything was amazing. And then one day she said to me, “Hey, I think I want to have a kid.” And I said, oh no.

That’s it.

**Mike:** I think it’s OK.

**Craig:** It’s not bad, right?

**John:** But it’s not fantastic.

**Craig:** Your assistant thinks it’s F-in amazing.

**Mike:** Peter, yeah.

**Craig:** Peter is all over that. Two thumbs up from Peter. You’re so angry.

**Mike:** The vocal quality isn’t right.

**Craig:** Well, I’m not that kind of impressionist.

**Mike:** It’s kind of a summary of some stories that I’ve told. A summary of the stories I’ve told.

**Craig:** It’s a style. It’s a style. I think what it is, is it’s fast and the stop and then the heartfelt.

**Mike:** I think it’s more of a [pray-see] than a precise.

**Craig:** Correct. It is an imprecise [pray-see].

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Correct. But if you are not feeling well tonight, because you have a little bit of a cold, and you need me to just do it. I’m not sure 100% of the audience will know.

**Mike:** I’ll call Bill Hader.

**Craig:** Right. If Hader says no.

**Mike:** And then if Hader says no, I’ll call you.

**Craig:** Then you call me. That’s what they do on Barry, by the way.

**Mike:** Hader does one that’s menacingly mean. One of the things about the SNL folks, Fred Armisen does, too. One of the things about the SNL folks that people don’t often realize is that not just can they do impressions of famous people, they can do them of their friends. And they’re pitch perfect. And they’re mean. They’re mean-spirited and they make you feel bad.

**Craig:** I hope that mine didn’t make you feel bad.

**Mike:** No, no, no, that was fine. But one time I did a show with Fred Armisen at a college in New Jersey and he just got on stage and he did five minutes of me.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**Mike:** And it was hilarious, but like impressions are mean. I mean, you basically pull out a thing that’s notable and then you put it times ten.

**Craig:** Here’s a non-mean. Have you ever heard Tig Notaro’s impression of a clown horn? It’s really great. It’s like – it’s really good. I like that one.

**John:** Good stuff. Other bits of news. The premium feed is going to be coming pretty soon. So we’re setting up the new thing that’s going to replace the old thing, which was bad, and janky, and broken. But in fixing some stuff we had to change some pipes behind the scenes. So if this episode did not show up as you expect it to, just go and re-subscribe in whatever service you’re using.

**Craig:** How would they know if it didn’t – how would they hear this?

**John:** So what I’m saying is if it’s been a while and you’re like I can see this episode on iTunes, but it didn’t show up for me, you should actually just go ahead and re-subscribe because something got broken. I think it’s going to be OK for most people, but people are on weird players sometimes.

**Craig:** And is my share of the revenue going to increase?

**John:** All of those details are going to be announced at the live show.

**Mike:** There’s a lot of news at the live show about your revenue streams, Craig.

**Craig:** I think we know what’s happening.

**John:** But one of the things I want to test out, were going to do a trial run today, which is to have a bonus segment after the credits. So just like Marvel movies have a little bonus segment afterwards, so in our bonus segment today after the credits I want to talk about scams.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Because you and I have both encountered scams this past week.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. And, Mike, for a while that was your main source of income was just running scams.

**Mike:** Yeah, yeah, that’s what I do.

**Craig:** On the streets of Brooklyn.

**Mike:** Yep.

**John:** Finally. A bit of follow up. We’ve been talking a lot about assistant pay. One of the ideas that came in from listeners was to have a town hall. That is actually happening. So Sunday November 24 at 3pm at the SAG Building there’s going to be a town hall. The venue is pretty small, so we’re going to try to live stream it as well. Details are going to be in the show notes for this episode or just check my Twitter. This is not an official Scriptnotes event. I’m going to be there, but it’s really the folks behind PayUpHollywood and the Young Entertainment Activists.

**Craig:** How much are you charging assistants to show up?

**John:** That is a free show.

**Craig:** Oh, you’re not charging them? [laughs] How great would that be? We’re charging assistants to come to a town hall about improving their pay.

**Mike:** That’s Hollywood in a nutshell, by the way.

**Craig:** That is kind of how it works, isn’t it? Have you been following assistant – Peter, have you been following along? Oh, yes, yes, Peter is pulling his credit card out right now for us. Excellent.

**Mike:** To buy a ticket to the assistant pay event.

**Craig:** Oh, Hollywood.

**Mike:** I’ve only been following it a little bit. I saw a few threads that John I think had retweeted that I thought were very powerful. And I think it’s a good movement.

**Craig:** Hopefully it’s an effective one, too. You know, one of the other ideas that we had heard was the notion of some kind of pledge, and we don’t know necessarily what the details of it would be, but a worthy topic for the town hall. A pledge that is essentially a kind of minimum, where you can say as an employer, whether I’m a show runner or I run a large company, whatever it is, I’m signing onto this pledge and promising I will never pay an assistant less than this dollar amount per week. No matter what the hours are, this is the base pay. I’m not going under it.

And in that way people could look and see, oh, here are the people that are at least not terrible. It may not be necessarily people that are great. But if we could remove terrible from the equation it would be a huge improvement.

**Mike:** I think that’s great.

**Craig:** We’ll see.

**John:** Mike Birbiglia, you’re in town because you are at the Ahmanson doing The New One, which is a new show. What do you actually call that thing that you are doing? Because it’s not standup. It is a one-man show, but it’s not a one-man show in the way that other – what do you call what you’re doing?

**Mike:** People call it many things. And I have no problem with whatever people call it. Some people call it standup. Some people call it a solo play. Some people call it a one-man show. Some people call it a monologue. It’s something that, you know, I did four of them now with my director, Seth Barrish. Sleepwalk With Me, My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend. Sleepwalk With Me, which became a movie. My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend which is on Netflix and maybe right now on Prime. Thank God for Jokes which is on Netflix. And The New One, which comes out November 26 on Netflix. And they are, you know, they take about three or four years to develop. I develop them in front of audiences. I tour the country with them. They have a story to them. They have a singular story that contains stories within them. They form an arc. They sometimes have emotion, depending on how the audience experiences it.

Some people love them. And some people are perplexed by them. I think the same way that some people loved and were perplexed by Hannah Gadsby’s show that won the Emmy, which I loved. But some people were like, “Wait a minute. It’s not jokes the way I understand jokes to be.” But I’m proud of that. I think the same way that Hannah is. And other people who do these kinds of shows are.

**Craig:** I listen to standup all the time just on Slacker on Internet radio in my car, just to keep up. I like to keep up with comedians. And there is a set that Janeane Garofalo did and at some point she said someone came up to her after one of her sets and said, “I really enjoyed your talk.”

**Mike:** Your talk.

**Craig:** Here it is. That’s it. That’s what I do. That’s it. I do a talk. But there is something very writerly about it. You are maybe writing this thing in slow motion because I assume you’re amending and—

**Mike:** Every night.

**Craig:** Every night.

**Mike:** Every show. Even now when it’s already in the can.

**Craig:** So every show you’re—

**Mike:** And when people hear this I believe Monday there will be eight more performances at the Ahmanson. I’ll still be making changes and it’s already in the can coming out next week.

**Craig:** I think I’m seeing maybe like your second to last show or something like that.

**Mike:** It will be a good one.

**Craig:** You know what? Maybe don’t do one more after I do it.

**Mike:** OK.

**Craig:** When I’m there you’re done.

**Mike:** Wow. This is a real power move. I’m going to bring this up at the assistant event.

**Craig:** Well you’ll have to pay your way into that.

**Mike:** Yeah, $40.

**Craig:** It’s a lot.

**John:** So all four of these shows are autobiographical. And we had Lulu Wang on last week talking about the autobiography that was in her movie. To what degree as you’re developing this are you being absolutely faithful to the sequence of events, how they happened, versus what actually works on stage?

**Mike:** Well it’s funny because, you know, David Sedaris who does this I think as well as almost anybody, if not anybody, people ask him that a lot. How true is this? And his answer makes me laugh. “True enough for you.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah.

**Mike:** And I think that that’s part of it. What you want to do is tell a story that has an arc and makes people feel and experience something. You also want people to believe that it happened. And so does it have to be true to a police log? No. It doesn’t.

**Craig:** But true enough to the spirit of what you felt and—

**Mike:** Absolutely. And it absolutely is that.

**Craig:** I always think about, especially when someone is telling stories about their own family, and you’re telling stories about your wife, at some point she’s going to say, “Yeah, that’s not true enough.” Do you get that from her a lot?

**Mike:** Sure. Constantly. Jen wrote this show with me and this is a very specific thing. At a certain point I reached this point where I was – the spirit, if people haven’t seen the show, the spirit of the show is the first half of the show is about all of the reasons no one should ever want to have a child. Second half of the show is about how I had a child and how I was right. And then in the emotional twist how I was wrong. And that sort of is like one little tease of the ending, of like, oh, OK, there’s hope for this person.

Because it’s dark. It’s a very dark comedic show.

**John:** Looking at yourself as a character, you’re not entirely sympathetic through a lot of this.

**Mike:** No. Absolutely not.

**Craig:** Ever. Even on this podcast. Ever.

**Mike:** But at a certain point, you know, my wife is a poet and I would say like, “Hey, could you tell me what it was like? What did it feel like – because she’s such a character in the show – what did it feel like when our daughter was dealing with different milestones, crawling,” and you know, and so for example she showed me – she goes, “Well, I wrote this poem about her crawling.” And I read that and I just go, well, that’s better than anything that I could write. And so I thought I’ll just read this on stage. And so then she became a credited additional writer on the show.

And so it really became – to Craig’s question of how much do you sort of vet the stuff – with this one it’s like I’d say every line in the show is vetted. And to the point where like, it’s funny, I won’t spoil – Elizabeth Banks came last night and she was – which is a huge honor, because I’m a huge admirer of hers. And she was laughing about there’s this line where I admit something about myself that maybe I’m not pulling my weight around the house quite enough. And she was like, “Oof, that moment is so devastating.” And I said to her, I go, “It’s not true. I actually do, do that thing.” And you take one for the team as an autobiographical writer because the drama wants conflict.

**John:** Yeah.

**Mike:** And the drama wants the protagonist to be wrong.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** So that the protagonist can grow and change and do all of these things.

**Craig:** And there’s a great tradition of this. I mean, you know, very famously Dean Martin would host all of these wonderful roasts and be drunk off his ass and everybody loved him because he was old Drunk Dino. And he didn’t drink at all.

**Mike:** That’s hilarious. I didn’t know that.

**Craig:** It was apple juice. Because you can’t function at those things and have timing and be funny if you’re literally lit. So he just faked it.

**Mike:** That’s fascinating.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s just what we do. I mean, not on this podcast.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** 1.5 glasses of wine.

**Craig:** 1.5 glasses.

**John:** For a morning show like this 1.5 glasses of wine is perfect.

**Craig:** 1.5 glasses.

**John:** Talk about the writing process. So, the idea for doing The New One. Obviously you’re having a kid. A natural life event that’s happening. But what is the start of writing and when do you have stuff on a page that you’re starting to put in front of people to listen?

**Mike:** So for years I had – Jen and I had talked when we got married. She’s an introverted poet. I’m more of an extroverted comedian who talks about my life on stage. And we talked about when we get married I’m going to talk about us on stage. That’s sort of the nature of what I do. And I don’t know what to do. We talked that through.

When we had our daughter, when Jen got pregnant she was like, “I don’t want you talking about this.” And so I was like, OK. And so I wrote Thank God for Jokes which has nothing to do with me really. It’s about the concept of jokes and context really. And at a certain point we were at the Nantucket Film Festival for my movie Don’t Think Twice, and the director of the festival said there’s a storytelling night and the theme is jealousy. And Jen in the car looked at me and goes, “Well you’re jealous of our daughter Una. You should talk about that.”

**Craig:** Oh, you got the green light.

**John:** Yeah. OK, great.

**Craig:** You cracked the seal. Watch what happens now.

**Mike:** Yeah. Yeah. So I was like, OK, great. I’m going to talk about this. And it killed.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Mike:** I told a story about being jealous of our daughter because the premise being, and this ends up being a line in the show, which is my wife and daughter love each other so much and I’m there, too. I’m the pudgy, milk-less Vice President of the family. And that became essentially the thesis of the show The New One, which is about how Jen and I were two people who were one. And then at a certain point another one came and I was on the outside of that group. I was the one and they were the two. And then ultimately the communion of the ending of the show is that three becomes one.

**Craig:** Theme, my friends. Unifying theme. It works for everything. And it does elevate everything. And you mention Don’t Think Twice. So now I have to ask, because I was there during the early midwife-ing of Don’t Think Twice.

**Mike:** You were in my living room, on the couch, which I reference in the show, in the special.

**Craig:** And I thought the movie turned out beautifully.

**Mike:** Thanks.

**Craig:** And I’m of course, greedy audience member that I am, I’m wondering, OK, when is the next big cinematic Birbiglia experience coming? Or are you out of it?

**Mike:** I’m writing it.

**Craig:** Oh, you are? Are you?

**Mike:** I am. I am. There’s a few things I’m writing. I’m writing something for the stage that I’m very excited about. And it’s different from anything I’ve ever done. And I’m writing something for the screen that’s very different from anything I’ve ever done. And then Jen and I just finished a book called The New and Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad with poems by J. Hope Stein that merges comedy stories and poetry. That comes out for Mother’s Day.

**John:** That’s great.

**Mike:** So those are the three writing projects I’m working on right now.

**John:** Very cool. That’s a lot.

**Craig:** The Birbiglia industries are humming along.

**Mike:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Craig:** Beautiful.

**Mike:** Well Bill Gates asked me if I could raise productivity.

**Craig:** Right.

**Mike:** And so said well I have to.

**Craig:** Well as a – I mean, I own quite a bit of stock in – what’s the stock symbol? BRBG?

**Mike:** Yeah, that’s what it is.

**Craig:** BRBG. I own a ton of BRBG. Yeah, so please. Faster.

**Mike:** Keep up the—

**Craig:** More and faster. More and faster.

**Mike:** If I could plug one thing, if people like what I’m doing, if they watched the special on Netflix, sign up for my mailing list on Birbigs.com. And what you’ll get is I’m doing a pre-order of my wife and my book, which comes out in May, and if you order that you’ll get a card, like a holiday card from me, and then my wife’s poetry book Little Astronaut, which is gorgeous.

**John:** Cool.

**Mike:** It’s spectacular. And this is actually – it’s a subject of a special that I’m working on for a couple years from now, but I’m increasingly a huge fan of supporting what you like. If you like the local pizzeria, go to the local pizzeria. If you like the local bookstore, go to the local bookstore. If you like small movies, see it in the theater. And I feel that way about my work. Like I so appreciate my fans. Because I’m not supported by a studio or network, it’s just people signing up for my mailing list and pre-ordering things. And that makes me able to make more things.

**Craig:** And what percentage of that money do I get?

**Mike:** Wait, you don’t get any of it.

**Craig:** Again? Is there any revenue stream I share in?

**Mike:** I think that you—

**John:** Chernobyl DVDs.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. I get a little something from that.

**Mike:** The way that Elizabeth Warren feels about you, Craig.

**Craig:** I’m the problem. I’m the problem. I know. I know. I know.

**John:** I have a question about a specific technique I saw you do in the show, and I’m wondering sort of how you get to it. There are moments where you’ll finish a thought and sort of blunt cut to a completely different thought. And it feels like there’s a ticking clock you have to get back to to tie it back in in a short period of time. But it was the first time I ever noticed you doing it, but it works really well. It felt like in a weird way kind of a cinematic technique where you cut to something different, and like got to get back to how this is going to fit in. Can you talk about that?

**Mike:** It’s funny you should say that. The show in a certain sense is a spoken film in a certain way. Like my director, Seth Barrish, and I would always think in terms of pictures. You know, it’s like, you know, it’s more evocative to talk about sitting on the couch than just to talk about a conversation between me and my wife. Lying on the couch together, sharing hot and sour soup is more evocative than just talking, etc.

And yet in terms of like the driving force of the show, my director and I talk about a lot, is all about intent. And that the audience knows that we’re going somewhere. I’m digressing about how people with kids are like zombies. And I do like a flourish of four minutes of comedy about that. I come back to ultimately what I’m really saying is Jen says to me, “I think that if we had a kid I think it would be different.” And there’s a focus in the part where I’m saying Jen said this that I bring my voice down. The lighting designer does a nice job of coloring it in a way and focusing the lights so that the audience knows like pay attention to this part. Because this is actually the spine.

**Craig:** It’s kind of a nice mirror of who you are. Because you are very, like you say, you’re effusive, you’re outgoing, you’re funny. And so there is a lot of stuff coming out of you. And then I think sometimes you stop and go, wait, hold on. I’m in trouble.

**Mike:** Sure.

**Craig:** Or I feel a certain thing. And it reminds me – you get the best of all of it. And it’s a natural separation I think for you.

**Mike:** Thanks. Exactly. I would say the free association quality of the show is an outgrowth of my personality and how I communicate, but it’s essentially honing that thing. Codifying that thing.

**John:** So, in a traditional standup set you can sort of jump to another thing and there’s not expectation that everything has to circle back around. Because it is meant to be a dramatic piece it all comes back together at the end. You have to build a trust with the audience that you really are going to get back to this place.

**Mike:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Three Page Challenge. You’ve listened to the Three Page Challenges before on this podcast. So what we do is every once and a while we invite our listeners to send in the first three pages of their script. It could be a pilot. It could be a drama. It could be a – kind of whatever. Some of these are web series apparently. But we take a look at them and give our honest feedback. So this is all voluntary. Everyone who signs up for this knows what they’re signing up for. If you want to send in your Three Page Challenges you go to johnaugust.com/threepage. If you want to read these Three Page Challenges there will be links in the show notes to them.

All right, our first Three Page Challenge is called F.T.S, Episode 1, Menstrual Pain, but Danielle Motley. Mia, late 20s, sits in the large stall of her workplace restroom facing a period stain on her pants as an automated air freshener spritzes in her face. Mia asks Siri on her phone to call a contact named Fuck Boy before two women enter the bathroom and Mia hangs up before the call connects. Mia responds to text messages from Fuck Boy, who is annoyed that she called if she couldn’t talk.

Mia waits for the women to finish their conversation and leave. Mia then calls her sister, Bug. Mia begs Bug to bring her a change of clothes. After teasing her, Bug says she’ll be there in 30 minutes. Stuck in the stall until Bug comes, Mia hears a tiny girl enter the bathroom and explode the next stall. The air freshener stops working.

That’s where we’re at at the bottom of three pages. Mike Birbiglia, we’ll start with you. So, all four of the Three Page Challenges we selected this week are comedies or comedic. What was your first impression looking at F.T.S.?

**Mike:** So what I like about it, and this is a challenging thing for me. You guys do this all the time. I listen to it on The Pod.

**Craig:** Cast. [laughs]

**Mike:** It’s hard to be critical, because I want all writers to know the thing I tell myself is keep writing, essentially. And so it’s hard to be critical. What I like about it is it’s personal. And it’s sensitive. It’s writing from a place of pain, literally, which I think is great. And I think it’s a good place to start comedy from. I always think that’s a great place to start comedy from.

I flagged like one thing just as a rule of thumb in comedy which is there’s a character named Basic Bitch and I think that that’s a trope of some kind. Basic Bitch. I think it’s someone else’s joke maybe. Or not. Or just it’s a trope. And I just think if you’re writing comedy whenever you have something that is a trope just think of three alts for it. What else could it be other than Basic Bitch? Because I think that your equity with the audience, your trust from the audience, is that you don’t use tropes. As a comedian, the moment when I’m watching a comedian use a trope I go like I’m not sure I trust the writer anymore.

**John:** There’s some tropes in some of these pages and I think we should point them out when we see them. Craig, your first impression of these three pages?

**Craig:** I struggled. I struggled. I want to talk through where I thought things were going well, Danielle, but also where I think you ran aground.

Let’s start just with what you want me to see and how you present the thing you want me to see. Because there is a moment here right off the bat. And right off the bat what you’re telling me is that this woman is not just simply going to the bathroom. She’s a surprise period, right. So, it’s gotten on her clothes and she has a huge problem. In disbelief she says, “This is bullshit.” That’s terrific. I like that opening because that felt very real to me.

The problem is I’m going to read back to you, here’s what I get. I am in a woman’s bathroom in a corporate building. I’m not sure how I would know it’s a corporate building just from this woman’s bathroom, but that’s fine. In the largest stall, the one that’s supposed to be reserved for those with disabilities, Mia, late 20s, sits on the toilet, pants and underwear at her knees. Her neat braids pulled tightly into a chignon, regrettable college tattoos hidden under expensive clothing.

I’m already frustrated. I can’t see those tattoos. Why are you telling me about them now? And then you say she is without a disability, by the way. Also cannot know that at this point. And then you say she is not, however, without a huge period blood stain on her silky green panties and brown slacks. That’s how you would relate that maybe in prose, but what’s happening here is I’m seeing this person. I’m seeing her looking at this. Then you’re showing it to me and she’s saying, “This is bullshit.” And the problem with that is that means she’s been staring at it long enough to have already said this is bullshit.

This is a weird thing to go through, because it’s so logic intensive and it feels picky and annoying. But I promise you it actually is the essence of what makes things funnier not on film. If you show me this woman in a stall staring down and she says, “This is bullshit,” and then you show me what she’s looking at, then I will probably laugh. But if you show me what she’s looking at and then she says, “This is bullshit,” it feels very stilted. So there’s a rhythm and an order thing that you have to kind of consider.

The other issue is I think Mike is 100% right. Chatty Bitch and Basic Bitch means that you just don’t know. And by the way there’s nothing – Basic Bitch wasn’t any less chatty than Chatty Bitch, so I wasn’t really sure what the difference between the two is. There was sort of a faux attitude there. So your character names are implying an attitude that will not come through because they don’t have name tags on that say Chatty Bitch or Basic Bitch. And their discussion that these two women are having just felt like water treading to me. It just didn’t matter. It could have been just wah-wah in the background while she’s trying to figure out at the same time how do I solve this problem.

I’m not sure why she calls Fuck Boy as opposed to her sister first. But, you know, so be it. But I don’t also quite get a sense of her – I know you want me to think that she is in trouble, but it doesn’t seem like she’s in trouble. It’s weird.

**John:** There’s a lack of urgency to it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, your comment about it feeling a little bit like prose, like novel writing versus screenwriting, I agree with you. Because there were some stuff that was really smart and funny but it’s going to not really work on a screen. The example being the deodorizer thing. There’s probably a way you can shoot that where you actually the little spray. Because it pays off nicely at the end. But it felt more like a novel kind of joke. Because since we can’t smell anything on screen we’re not getting the hit of it, which you could describe it in a book version.

**Craig:** When it first comes in, let’s see. Where does it first show up?

**John:** It first shows up on page one.

**Craig:** Ah, yeah, right there, the “automatic air freshener mounted on the wall above her eeks,” that’s misspelled by the way, “ekes out a puff of scented aerosol spray. Rolling Meadow scented to be exact.” That is prose. It doesn’t matter to me – that’s cleverness that I can never get credit for. But what I can get is if she says, “This is bullshit,” and then the next thing in the action is a buzz above her and air freshener squirts out some horrible smell that’s slightly better than the smell in the bathroom. Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. And then, buzz, again. You can just have buzz, puff. And then we would know that there’s this sound, you know. Something…

OK, and then last thing here. Danielle, there’s a certain focus that we have when we’re doing body comedy, so any kind of comedy that surrounds bodily functions there is a cumulative effect. It can be incredibly funny. God knows I’m not above it, clearly. But what is really hard to do is two kinds of body comedy on top of each other. Monty Python had better blood jokes than anybody. So people would be bleeding, squirting blood.

**Mike:** Incredible.

**Craig:** it was the greatest. But they wouldn’t also have somebody shitting at the same time. It’s like you get one body function at a time. In this case it’s period blood. I don’t think we can handle the shitting.

**John:** Mike, you do a lot of body comedy in all your acts. So Sleepwalk With Me obviously—

**Mike:** There’s a lot of physical maladies that I discuss in my shows.

**John:** And so you’re trying to create a visual, visceral reaction to it which makes us sympathetic to your situation but it’s not sort of the main point of it. It’s to be able to talk about something else.

**Mike:** Yeah. And I think that one of the things in my show is I sort of go out of my way to phrase bodily things in a way that I’ve never heard them be phrased before. And I think that that’s sort of the key to comedy because – one of the keys to comedy – because you want to surprise people. We’ve all seen things that have shitting in them. We’ve all seen things that have period blood in them. But it’s like what’s your take? What comes to mind when I think of period blood. I think of Superbad had that really memorable period blood in it. And I think what was – what was so memorable, like they’re dancing or something.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Mike:** And there’s something about it and it’s very subtle. And it’s very like all of a sudden you’re like, oh, I see what’s happening here. The filmmaker, Greg Mottola in this case, is sort of clearly thinking about the ways that period blood have been depicted in cinema historically and then he’s making a choice to do it. I’m going to do it this different way. Because bodily functions are so much a part of the human existence that you have to think about how has it been done, how am I going to do it differently?

**Craig:** And there has to be more than just it. Right? So if you’re going to be doing a joke about someone having their period and surprise period, then it can’t just be, “Argh, blood.” You know? And if you’re going to do a joke about somebody shitting it can’t just be shitting noises, right? They’re crazy. There has to be a context to it of some kind or another that makes it, I don’t know, just more panicky, more funny. We just can’t rely on the fact that it exists. In and of itself it’s not that funny.

**John:** Wrapping this up, I want to emphasize some things that I really did like about these pages. And so on the bottom of page one Basic Bitch shakes the locked door to Mia’s stall. Twice, underlined. Mia, “Really?” Like that twice moment was a very specific thing. Like when someone doesn’t rattle it once but rattles it twice, like you didn’t get it the first time? That tells me that Danielle is noticing something about what that situation is.

I like the idea that Fuck Boy is called Fuck Boy. I didn’t buy using Siri to call it. That’s not a thing I believe. She’s in the stall. There’s no reason why she needs Siri to do it. So I didn’t quite get that.

We talk a lot about texting in movies. It’s absolutely a valid thing to do and to show. In this case I would have probably bolded those texts just because I think there’s the risk that people are going to skip over those texts because they’re not seeing them as crucial dialogue kind of information.

And here’s an example of a confusion that happens. On page three, the door opens again and a tiny woman in clear discomfort rushes into the stall furthest from the one Mia is in. Mia jumps as she slams the door. The she and Mia is confusing. So you’ve got to be looking at your sentences to make sure there’s not a confusion there. Because you read it twice, you’re like, wait, did Mia slam the door? So just always be looking for ways that people could get confused.

**Craig:** And where’s the camera? I mean, I’m with her. She’s talking with her friend. And then are we cutting out of the stall to see this woman running in and running into a different stall, pause, pause, pause, pause, go back into the stall and her whisper yelling, like she had to wait for the camera to leave the stall. Just why?

**John:** Yeah. Really thinking about it as what we’re going to see on screen I think will help this.

**Craig:** Yeah. Geography.

**John:** I think Danielle actually has a sense of what’s funny and what can work. It’s making it cinematically funny is going to be the next step.

**Craig:** You know what? I agree. And I would say to her this is very common. This kind of comedy is really hard to do. And you’re going to need passes at it. Just like imagine yourself as a 3D printer. You’ve laid down your first. Now you have to lay down the next layer. The next layer. The next layer.

**John:** Craig, do you want to talk us through Dunked by John Bickerstaff?

**Craig:** Bickerstaff. This is Dunked by John Bickerstaff. Inside a beautiful church we watch as a line of handsome young teens, first a young man, then a woman, submerge and emerge from their baptisms. Behind them stands 16-year-old pudgy and scared Simon. Simon receives a kiss from his girlfriend Emma before stepping into the tank and into Pastor Roy’s arms.

Pastor Roy tries to gently lean Simon into the pool, but Simon won’t budge. He says he can’t swim. So Pastor Roy reassures him and applies more pressure. Simon resists, even using his mouth to hold onto the lip of the tub. When Pastor Roy finally does dunk Simon, Simon reaches up and slaps him across the face.

Later we find Simon sulking in the bathtub before his mother barges into the bathroom. She feels guilty that since she home-schooled Simon he never learned to swim and she’s bought him swim trunks.

Well, John, why don’t we start with you on this one?

**John:** So, there’s a lot here I liked. And so I want to talk about two scenes that we see here. There’s the baptism scene and then there’s the bathroom scene with his mom. Let’s talk about the baptism. Totally valid idea. It gets you into the crux of what this story is about right away. We see that he’s obviously a kid in a religious setting. There’s going to be a baptism. We have a sense that after these first two kids are being dunked that there’s going to be some problem. Just a natural sort of setup/payoff kind of thing that happens in comedies.

And the way he resists going underneath the water – I can see the joke happening there and I can also see when you’re on the day shooting that thing you can try a bunch of different ways and it can be really funny. So I can see that all working.

I had bigger problems in the second scene, which is the dialogue between Simon and his mom. There was a lot of stuff in there that I wanted to cut. And I also sort of want to discuss with you guys about tone and voice. “Cheese and Rice Ma!” felt too impossible even for the world that I think we’re supposed to be in.

So there’s a lot of stuff here I enjoyed. I didn’t think it all worked.

**Mike:** Also, Cheese and Rise, Ma, so that we don’t think that we’re in Cheese and Rise Massachusetts, one of my favorite towns in America.

**Craig:** I mean, bad drivers. Great food.

**John:** Just the absolute best. Other things I’ll point out. Simon, 16, tubby and terrified. Great. I get tubby and terrified.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** Emma, 15, his girlfriend.

**Craig:** That’s it.

**John:** Period.

**Craig:** Girlfriend.

**John:** Girlfriend.

**Craig:** Oh, I know how to cast that. Let’s find…girlfriend.

**John:** We’re looking for…girlfriend. So, all we know is that she’s one year younger. Who dates a tubby and terrified 16-year-old? That’s a fascinating choice. So you’ve got to give us something specific about this, because otherwise we don’t know who this is.

**Craig:** Girlfriend.

**John:** Craig, what are your–?

**Craig:** Similar issues. Just as an interesting thing that happens right off the bat is a question of perspective. So we have our main character, Simon, and he is terrified of being baptized specifically because he’s terrified of going into the water. He thinks he’s going to drown, I guess. I mean, that’s sort of implied here.

Well, then his perspective matters. I want to see him looking at that water. I want to feel his fear of that water. Right now what I’m getting is a handsome guy and another handsome guy and Pastor Roy, 45, rugged but nebbish, which is an impossible combination.

**John:** Good luck, casting director. Find rugged but nebbish.

**Craig:** Well, we looked through every single person on the planet. There is no one. So, that’s not a combination you can do. But that guy guides him out of the tank. He brings in a teen girl into the tank. And meanwhile it’s just happening. And then we show this guy and he’s nervous. And I don’t know why. I don’t know that he’s nervous because of the water. I need to know he’s nervous because of the water because otherwise he’s just vaguely terrified of nothing. And his girlfriend says the weirdest thing in this moment, which I kind of thought was remarkable and could be amazing if I understood why she said it. She says, “I love you.” Why? Why is she saying that? Is she saying it because she knows he’s terrified? Is she comforting him? It could be great.

And the physical comedy of this I think could be really funny. I would make it bigger. So I don’t know if you’ve ever seen what it looks like – one of the things if you’re training to become a lifeguard they teach you – you have to be really careful because drowning people will try and kill you. They are in a full panic. They will try and kill you.

**John:** Fight or flight kicks in.

**Craig:** 100%. If I go in that water I’m going to die, therefore I have to fight you. And I want this to just get bigger.

**Mike:** That’s a really smart point.

**Craig:** And Pastor Roy is big. And Simon is probably not in great shape. And this could be a great – and also the idea of getting beaten up by a pastor in a church while this organ music is playing is really funny.

**John:** And also remember that as an audience we have an expectation that something is going to go wrong, so you have to meet that expectation but also exceed that expectation. And still continue to surprise us even though we knew that something like this could happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. The only other thing I would say is I agree with you, tonally in that second scene, and I’m kind of curious what you think about this, too, Mike. Everything was sort of fine. I mean, even like Cheese and Rice is sort of like well maybe they’re Mormons or something, even though they’re not. But where I tripped up was Mom says, “Si, what are you doing in there?” Which is a weird question also since he’s just in the bathroom taking a bath. It’s not that crazy.

And he says, “I’m baptizing myself. In the name of the humiliation, the mortification, and the condemnation. Amen.” So I don’t believe that. I just don’t know where that line is coming from.

**John:** That line does not exist in a reasonable world.

**Craig:** Sometimes John what we’ll say is that line feels really written, meaning, OK, you might be super proud of the combination of words there, and they are smart. But they just don’t belong coming out this person’s mouth, so you don’t get credit for it.

**John:** Mike Birbiglia, talk us through.

**Mike:** Yeah. It’s funny you should mention that, in the name of humiliation, mortification run, because I didn’t have the exact note you did, but I found myself reading it three or four times. Because I kept thinking – and that’s what you don’t want. You don’t want people in their head as the reader going, “Did I miss something? I’m going to read this again. Wait, did I miss it again? I’m going to read it again.” Like you want people going, going, and going, and they’re in. And I found myself out at that point.

I think that what I liked about the pages is that I found it immediately visual in a way that understood in one page, which is impressive. To do anything in three pages is very hard. In one page I understood the dunk tank and I understood what was happening. And that’s impressive and a lot of potential for comedy in it, which I think is great and original. I haven’t seen it.

And then what I liked was title card, Dunked, pivot to the tub water, which to me feels cinematic and it feels like it has a vision. It’s presenting a visual language. And to me I’m reading someone’s pages who is trying to make a film instead of just a comedy.

**Craig:** Right.

**Mike:** They’re not just trying to make me laugh. They’re trying to tell a story with pictures. And so immediately I go, oh, OK, what is the relationship between the baptism and him in the bath. This is going to be what this is about, but in a way that I don’t understand yet. But I’m intrigued.

**Craig:** I agree with that. It seems like there’s potential for this to be a really interesting story. Just needs to be some sort of – you know, it’s the same thing. Just rigor. Apply rigor to it. And at no point should anyone hearing any of this feel like they’ve failed. This is what writing is.

**Craig:** To John’s point about girlfriend being a generic, there’s this great story from an interview I think years ago I read of Noah Baumbach where he was saying like when he wrote Squid and the Whale, one of my favorite movies, it was on hold for so many years that he rewrote it from all the different character’s perspectives. He’d do a pass for, you know, the Jeff Daniels character. He’d do a pass for the Laura Linney character, etc.

**Craig:** There you go. Yeah.

**Mike:** And then what you end up with something so layered that you could never in a million years think of those characters as girlfriend, or boyfriend, or mother, or father.

**Craig:** Also, you couldn’t in a million years write that all at the same time. So that’s sort of my—

**Mike:** To your layer point.

**Craig:** Yeah. Make sure that as we go through this that you guys give yourselves breaks and understand that this is part of the process. You can’t get it all right all at once.

**Mike:** Yeah. And you guys have said this on the show a lot, and I’ll say it even again, both of my movies, Sleepwalk with Me and Don’t Think Twice, I’d say 12, 13, 14 drafts, full drafts, is what is on the screen.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I gave you a little bit of a high colonic on—

**Mike:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** On your last one.

**Mike:** You crushed me.

**Craig:** I didn’t crush you.

**Mike:** You gave me really tough notes that were very helpful.

**Craig:** I mean, yeah. Well I’m glad they were helpful.

**Mike:** They were.

**Craig:** But they’re the only ones that matter, I guess. You know? It’s like you just have to kind of – you have to go through it. Everybody does. I’ve gone through it a billion times. Never let Scott Frank do it to you, by the way.

**Mike:** Oh, I can’t even imagine. I’ve heard him on the podcast here and holy cow.

**Craig:** I wrote a script once. I showed it to Scott Frank. He spoke about it with me for about two hours. I took the script. I put it in a drawer. Literally never looked at it again.

**Mike:** Oh my gosh.

**Craig:** It’s gone. I purged it from my mind.

**Mike:** Wow.

**Craig:** Yeah. No one could have killed something with more – it was actually – his killing of it was far better than the script. I should write a script about what he said.

**Mike:** One time I was trying to explain to my wife who Craig was, because she had just met him once in our living room after a reading. And she goes, “Is he the guy who was shouting at you after the reading? With the beard?” Oh yeah, that’s Craig.

**Craig:** I can’t imagine I was shouting.

**Mike:** No, I don’t think so.

**Craig:** No, you see what happened? That’s true enough.

**Mike:** True enough.

**Craig:** That’s true enough.

**John:** I want to talk about Karen on page three because while I want to get rid of some stuff on page two that she does, her voice is actually really interesting and passive-aggressive. So I do like, “Well, you shouldn’t be doing anything you need a locked door for anyway. What if there’s an emergency? I’m not strong enough to break down a door.” She’s going through the list, well I might need to break down this door.

Also, we do a cut of dialogue here which is good and appropriate, so people just take a look at it. She says, “Which I don’t think is entirely true. I can’t. But I home-schooled you.” So when characters interrupt each other, that’s a thing that happens a lot. And so you’ve done a good job here on page three interrupting in a way that is actually helpful and sort of conveys more information. So I did like that.

Finally, I didn’t buy the floral bathing trunks at the end. It just didn’t feel like they would have to exist. It felt forced to me.

**Craig:** Yeah, like a prop joke.

**John:** Yeah, a prop joke.

**Craig:** Ha-ha, flowers. No, she could have bought any bathing suit theory.

**Mike:** Or they could have done the floral trunks and they don’t even mention it.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Mike:** And you don’t hang a lantern on it, so as to tell the audience to laugh.

**Craig:** You just have the kid, you can have Simon just look at it like WTF mom.

**John:** Excellent. Do that.

**Craig:** Good point.

**John:** Let’s stop there on the Three Page Challenges. I think those were two good different examples.

**Craig:** Terrific.

**John:** And we have a listener question that comes in from Akiva Schaffer.

**Mike:** Oh gosh.

**Craig:** Here we go. It’s a good one.

**Mike:** Heavy hitter.

**Craig:** So Akiva wrote this in. Avid listener of the podcast.

**Mike:** Podcast, yeah. Who I have made a film with. I played a small role in Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping.

**Craig:** Never Stop Never Stopping.

**Mike:** Never Stop Never Stopping is the subtitle.

**Craig:** So great.

**Mike:** From The Lonely Island. Brilliant director.

**Craig:** Akiva is one of the – yes, along with Andy Sandburg and Jorma Taccone who is another friend of our show, and your neighbor. Your wall neighbor.

**Mike:** Was my wall neighbor. We just recently moved down the street.

**Craig:** Oh, to get away from Jorma.

**Mike:** Which by the way, the—

**Craig:** And Mari Heller.

**Mike:** And Marielle Heller, whose Mister Rodgers film is tremendous.

**Craig:** I hear that. And she is also starring in Scott Frank’s, the aforementioned Scott Frank’s—

**Mike:** I know. I know. She’s a great actor, too.

**Craig:** You know what? Scott never showed me that script. I never got a chance to yell at him over that script.

**Mike:** Oh wow.

**Craig:** He knows. This is what Akiva writes. He says, “Hey, I have a bit of Hollywood umbrage.” Nice. He does listen. He listens to the show.

**Mike:** Well done. Well done.

**Craig:** “And it’s so petty and privileged that I don’t know where to put it.” We’ll welcome you in, Akiva. “So I thought maybe you were the show that would have the platform or correct showbiz audience where it could be appropriate. It’s about screeners, specifically the waste.”

**Mike:** Yes, this drives me nuts.

**Craig:** Yeah, so let me just back up for a second for those of you wondering. Around the award season, which is—

**John:** Starting now.

**Craig:** Roughly now, around Golden Globes, Academy Awards, the Writers Guild Awards, the DGA Awards, SAG Awards, the companies that have movies and shows that are up for these things will start mailing you at home a DVD of them if you are in one of those groups. God help you if you’re in all of them. Because you will get one of these for all of them. So you will get eight – I think the most I got was like eight versions of Us. For whatever reason in the last Academy cycle, or last award cycle I got eight Us DVDs. I don’t know why.

So, what he says is, “First we have the materials themselves. The paper, the cardboard, the DVDs, the huge boxes, the random photo presentations or posters.” Mrs. Maisel is a huge—

**John:** Oh man. The wrapping paper. The poster.

**Craig:** Crazy. “Then there are the duplicates. Last year I received three copies of most movies because I’m in the DGA, the WGA, and SAG. There are the trucks that deliver them. For the TV screeners it’s even worse. There are bigger box sets.”

**Mike:** It’s endless. It’s endless.

**Craig:** “It’s a ridiculous waste and no one uses DVDs anymore. Can’t we be more eco-conscious?” I’ve abridged this slightly.

**Mike:** He’s absolutely right.

**Craig:** He is.

**Mike:** It’s infuriating. And also you can’t to my knowledge – I researched this last year because I had the same frustration. You can’t really recycle DVDs.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. You can’t.

**Craig:** They live forever.

**John:** Because they’re metal and plastic.

**Craig:** So, I’m sure John you are in the Film Academy.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I am now in the Television Academy.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Mike:** Wow.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s right. I’m in an Academy now.

**John:** He’s an Academy voter.

**Craig:** I suspect that one of the things we would hear if we brought this issue to our respective Academies is, “Uh, yeah, no one uses DVDs anymore under the age of blankety-blank, but we have a lot of voters who are over that age and they do use them.” What do we say to that?

**John:** It’s the first mover problem. The first studio that stops sending DVDs is going to feel like they’re at a disadvantage for awards.

**Craig:** Yes. Of course.

**John:** That’s going to happen. So I know the studios aren’t supposed to collude about stuff and get together to meet about things, but I think an outside group could bring them all together perhaps and say like what if you all agreed to send out DVDs, then I think we could do it. Because honestly the digital codes they do send out for some things, they work, and they actually help prevent privacy because they can see how many times each of those have been downloaded and stop a URL from downloading again if they need to.

**Craig:** I would love for them to stop this. It does seem absurd.

**John:** I think I want to give Warners credit. I think Warners was the first one to have a good For Your Consideration app that installs on Apple TV that you can register it.

**Craig:** That just sounds so much better.

**John:** It is better. So the devil’s advocate, like there are times in which you are off the Internet and there are people who go to their cabin in the woods and watch a bunch of screeners. I’m sorry. That’s going to be more difficult now.

**Mike:** There’s also an upon request version of it.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. Like I need a DVD. Send me my DVD. But otherwise, yeah. Default to it. I think the Academies actually could just say we’re going to make the rules that if you send physical screeners by default you’re not eligible for an award. How about that? Problem solved.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And a lot of angry art members. I will be an art member soon.

**Mike:** I work as an actor on the show Billions.

**Craig:** Of course. Yes.

**Mike:** And it’s a much more eco-friendly set than I’ve worked on in the past.

**Craig:** Brian Koppelman is 100% recyclable.

**John:** [laughs] Indeed. It’s really compostable, but it’s really the same idea.

**Mike:** Actually if you recycle him he actually comes out as Scott Frank.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Funny how that works.

**Craig:** Levine, not recyclable. Cannot–

**John:** He’s like the Terminator. You have to melt him down.

**Craig:** David Levine is one of the nicest people ever and his face – his face just implies that he wants to murder you. He has—

**Mike:** That’s true.

**Craig:** He has such an intensity about him.

**Mike:** And he’s in great shape.

**Craig:** He’s in amazing shape.

**Mike:** Very intimidating thing about him.

**Craig:** He’s tough as nails. But he’s nice. He doesn’t want to murder you.

**Mike:** Yeah, very nice.

**Craig:** But his eyes say take a step back, I might murder you. Whereas Koppelman, you know, 100% recyclable.

**Mike:** Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

**John:** All right. It’s come time for out One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a thing called Spleeter. It’s an open source music separation library. What this actually means is it can take a track of music and split the vocals out from the—

**Mike:** Oh my gosh. Really?

**John:** It seems like a magic trick. So I’m going to play this here for you. So here is a demo. Here is Lizzo’s Truth Hurts.

[Truth Hurts plays]

All right, so that’s the vocals. But useful, more useful sometimes is getting the actual backing track so you can do your–

**Craig:** Do some karaoke.

[Truth Hurts Plays]

**Mike:** That’s incredible.

**John:** So it’s machine learning that does it. So basically they’ve just—

**Craig:** That’s terrifying.

**John:** They’ve gone through thousands and thousands and thousands of clips and are able to figure out like oh this must be voice, this must be background, and then it’s filling in the pieces that are missing.

**Craig:** It’s terrifying.

**John:** Yeah. So it’s the same thing that enables people to do face swaps essentially.

**Craig:** I just took a DNA test. I’m 99.5% that Ashkenazi Jew.

**Mike:** Oh wow.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s how Jewish I am. That’s how Jewish I am. I just drew a target on myself for racists, again.

**John:** Craig, One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** Sure. So I probably talked about this before. One of the great mysteries of medical science is why do we sleep. We don’t really know why, or at least we didn’t really know why. And this goes across all mammals for sure. It’s not that we sleep because we get tired. Something is going on. And if you prevent people from sleeping they will go crazy.

**John:** And die.

**Craig:** And then they will die. So what is actually happening? So there is a new study out from Dr. Maiken Nedergaard, a professor of neurosurgery at The University of Rochester, and an author of a study in Science. And basically what they found was they know that as our brain works and metabolizes and does things throughout the day there is a creation of harmful toxins. There are proteins and plaques. These things eventually can build up and cause dementia and Alzheimer’s in old people if they can’t be cleared out.

How do they get cleared out? Well they get cleared out by cerebral spinal fluid. What they found is during sleep the flow of cerebral spinal fluid in the brain increases dramatically, essentially washing away harmful waste proteins that build up between brain cells during waking hours. It’s washing our brains. We have to sleep so that our brains can wash themselves.

And they’re doing this literally in a kind of cyclical way like a dishwasher. Brain cells when we sleep actually kind of shrink, making easier for the fluid to kind of go through and move in and out. It’s bananas.

So we may – and by we, I’m not one of the authors of the study. But we humans may have finally figured out why we have to sleep and what’s actually going on.

**John:** Now if you’re intrigued by this topic I think I may have made this a previous One Cool Thing, a book I read a couple months ago, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker goes into more detail not only about sort of the cleaning up of proteins but also why we have the two kinds of sleep, the REM and NREM sleep and sort of the specific functions that they’re trying to do in those things. And you need both kinds of it. So one of it is for more physical stuff, one is for memory formation. And if you interrupt those things – basically you read through this book and it’s basically a bunch of horrifying studies where they keep waking people up and up and up and up.

**Craig:** And this I assume is of some specific interest to you because you very famously have a fairly rare but serious sleep disorder.

**Mike:** I have a sleep disorder, and like you’re saying, it’s a field of study that people don’t know the answers to the questions. Why do we sleep? Why do people sleepwalk? You know, and there’s researchers who are doing tremendous work. But yeah, it’s endlessly fascinating.

**Craig:** Well maybe based on this in ten or 15 years you can take those mittens off when you sleep. Your sleep mittens.

**Mike:** Indeed.

**Craig:** You should sell sleep mittens.

**Mike:** I’ve thought about selling a lot of things, Craig.

**Craig:** That’s birbigs.com.

**Mike:** There’s a sheet that you’ll see in the show that I sleep – instead of sleeping in the sleeping bag lately I created a fitted sleep sheet that fits me into my bed with a hole for my head.

**Craig:** Oh wow.

**Mike:** Yeah, and it’s pretty inventive.

**Craig:** Like a nun.

**Mike:** And the reason – and people always say you should sell that, you should sell that. There’s something about the medical liability.

**John:** Oh of course.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**Mike:** That scares the lights out of me. This idea of like what if someone is hurt or injured or god forbid dies trying to do this thing, and it’s like Mike Birbiglia’s sleep sheet killed them. Look, man, I’m just trying to make a living out there.

**Craig:** You sell that thing and literally 98% of people that use it die.

**Mike:** Yeah. With my luck.

**Craig:** Exactly. It wouldn’t be just one rare case that you have to deal with. It’s almost everyone.

**Mike:** So my One Cool Thing harkens back to something I was saying earlier which is – it’s something Mark Duplass had tweeted recently which is supporting local. Supporting local bookstores. Supporting local pizza. Supporting your local cinema.

It’s in some ways, you know, in my case I live in Brooklyn. We buy all of our books from Books are Magic. It’s a tremendous bookstore run by an author. Her name is Emma Straub. And she opened her own bookstore. And I feel like in some ways this local movement is political. It’s a political response to the wealth disparity in society right now. There’s people with billions, there’s people with nothing. And I feel like let’s support the people who are making good food, who are selling good groceries, or selling good books and putting a lot of heart and soul into their work.

**John:** Buy local, buy Birbiglia.

**Craig:** Buy Birbiglia. The guy has no store. You will. His death sheets are currently on sale.

**Mike:** Oh my god.

**John:** We’re going to make our own death sheets and we’re going to put your face on them.

**Craig:** I’ve got thousands of these things. I don’t know what to do with them.

**Mike:** Oh my god. This will be the end of me.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Mike:** And you, for $19.95.

**Craig:** I mean, I’ve been waiting for the end for a long time. Bring it on.

**John:** That’s our show for this week. A reminder to stick around after the credits because we’re going to talk briefly about scams. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by James Launch and Jim Bond. 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 are @–

**Mike:** @birbigs.

**John:** Nice. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. You’ll find details about the town hall, about Mike’s show, all sorts of stuff. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We get them up about four days after the episode airs. And you should come to our live show which is December 12.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, you got to come to that. We’re the Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts, so you do need to get your tickets immediately. They will sell out.

**Mike:** Jon Bon Jovi now or Jon Bon Jovi 1987?

**Craig:** Always. Just all Jon Bon Jovis.

**John:** Let’s talk some scams. So Craig and I both got hit up by serious scams this past week.

**Mike:** Oh wow.

**John:** Craig, summarize what happened with you and the Amazon thing.

**Craig:** Very strange. I received a package addressed to me from Amazon which happens all the time. I buy things on Amazon all the time because I spit on Mike Birbiglia’s buy local theory. No, no, I love buying local, just sometimes there are things that are not available locally.

**Mike:** Sure.

**Craig:** So I get them on Amazon. But I open this package and I did not recognize any of the items as something I had purchased. There was a toy car. There was a selfie stick. And there was a vibrator. The vibrator was not called Selfie Stick, but I’ve been thinking that that would be a great name for a vibrator.

**John:** That is a selfie stick, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a kind of a selfie stick. So I said, hey Melissa, did you buy a toy car, a selfie stick, and a vibrator. And she said no. And I believed her. Because of the toy car. So I called up Amazon and I’m like what do I do with this. And they’re like, oh, it must just be a mistake. You can just keep it or throw it out. So we kept the vibrator.

Then the next day another package shows up with junk in it like hemp oil and a phone case. This happened like seven or eight times. And I got more and more angry. And what basically the scam is this. This is what we found out. Either they get ahold of a credit card that isn’t theirs, or they have their own credit card they’re using, or gift certificates. They purchase these items and they create an account using your name and your address, but they register it under a phone number that isn’t yours.

**Mike:** Terrible.

**Craig:** And then they send these things to you and because it has been delivered to you on Amazon they’re able to now review their own product as a verified purchaser, which moves the product up in the algorithms. It’s called brushing. And Amazon appears to be one billion miles behind this problem. Like they are nowhere near solving this. They’re barely acknowledging it exists. And the more I read about it, the more it seemed like it was everywhere. Like this is going on constantly. Yeah, it was a real bummer. But we seem to have shut it down. For now.

**John:** So my scam that happened is we ordered from Door Dash a pizza delivery and so the guy picks up the pizza, calls us and says, “Hey, there’s a problem. The wrong Door Dasher picked up your pizza. I’ll stay here and I’ll get the order refilled. Sorry about the hassle.” And so we’re like, oh, this is a very helpful guy.

But then he sort of keeps calling, and that’s where something is not right here. And says like, oh, so you need to call Door Dash and cancel the order and that way they can refund your money because this is taking too long. I was like, yes, we can do that. And through the app you can cancel the order. And then Door Dash calls and says like, hey, did you cancel this order. And I’m like, yes, but we think the food is still on the way.

It gets really complicated. But the guy then calls and says, “Hey, I’m nearly at your house. I’m here.” So I go down and meet him on the street. At this point I’m already suspicious. Something is just not right here. And essentially the scam is that they get you to cancel the Door Dash order and they say, oh, I paid for it myself and so you can pay me all of the money. And they try to use Apple Pay so that it feels like it’s a legitimate thing happening through the app, but they’re not really using the app at all.

**Craig:** How did they know how to get in between you and your pizza?

**John:** So he was – he genuinely did work for Door Dash. And so he picked up the order and then pretended that it had been canceled. So I don’t think that’s a scam with long life to it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But what I was impressed by is he had very good social engineering on the phone and in person. Like when I actually met him I was like, oh, you’re one of those people who is trying to pull the gold ring scam in Paris. Like you just have a whole pattern of how this whole thing works.

**Craig:** I mean, to pervert pizza, which is something that you and I both feel so—

**Mike:** It crosses a line.

**Craig:** It really does.

**Mike:** It slices right through the line and divides it into eight slices.

**Craig:** Delicious slices.

**Mike:** Perfect, perfect triangles.

**John:** So Mike, do you believe in the goodness of humanity?

**Craig:** Not anymore he doesn’t.

**Mike:** Well, we talk about that quite a bit in the show. I think people are fundamentally decent and trying.

**John:** Yeah. That’s good. That’s a good approach to it. I genuinely do believe and trust people because I feel like in the absence of trust and the absence of the ability to believe that this thing will happen and this person is going to be a good actor society just breaks down. But I will say it was incredibly – it rattled me. For a good two hours afterwards I was just like down on humanity.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. I mean, that’s how I am every day. So what you experienced there briefly was my life. I generally trust people when I sense that there is a baked in component of mutual benefit. So I trust that somebody is going to stay stopped at that red light when I go through the green light because that’s to their benefit to do so.

**Mike:** That’s right. Defensive driving, so to speak.

**Craig:** Yeah. If there’s a situation where somebody is going to benefit for sure more than I am, then I don’t trust them. I don’t trust salesmen. Why should I? I know for a fact that the entire point of sales is to manipulate and lie to get you to give them money. That’s how it works. I’m not even angry at them for it.

You talk about how expensive the sofa was, right? And when I was a kid I worked at a clothing store. And they were like you have to try and sell these today because we have too many of them. The specials.

**Mike:** The same thing when I was a waiter. Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a lie. The special is literally the opposite of special. So you just have to be aware of that. So I just – caveat emptor – I don’t blame people for it. I don’t think it’s necessarily immoral on those kinds of levels. It’s just people have to survive and they’ve got to do what they’ve got to do. And also sometimes, you know, we all have to do it to some extent to get through the day. Although, I don’t know, as writers we don’t really do that. We don’t have an opportunity to do that, do we?

**John:** If we – there are very few scams that we can pull, because ultimately our name is on it. So that’s the thing, this Door Dash was sort of anonymous but sort of not anonymous. So ultimately when I reported him I could say like it was this person and this was the phone number I got a call from. But I was relying on this faceless entity who I didn’t know, this company, to be doing the work of actually stopping him for doing this to other people.

**Mike:** This might be off-topic, but the subtle scam of show business I find – and this is not all personal managers, but some personal managers are essentially taking on too many clients. They’re managing 30, 40 people.

**Craig:** Sure.

**Mike:** In the hopes that one of them hits it and then their 10% of that fortune. If five of them hit it then they’re blah, blah, blah. And so I dealt with this in my career where I worked with many managers over the years where they’re basically pretending that they value me in a certain way and see my trajectory in a certain way, but secretly they don’t think that.

**Craig:** I think it goes both ways, too. I mean, listen, I know that no matter what your agent says to you about how much they love or care for you, if you start sucking and you can’t get work, they’re going to dump you. And similarly no matter how much you say to your agent, “I love you and you’re so wonderful,” if the best agent in the world shows up and says, “I’m ready to take you on,” then you’re gone. It’s going to happen. Because it’s not – that is a business relationship and I don’t even think of that necessarily – that to me is sales. It is a little bit of like it’s in the zone of sales.

**Mike:** Right. You have to be a better consumer. A smarter consumer.

**Craig:** Caveat emptor and caveat vendor. Right? But there are very few scam-scams that writers can pull on you. I guess the closest is there are writers who take on too much work.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** Knowing fully well that they can’t do it all, or can’t do it all well. So that is a kind of a scammy sort of theft thing. It’s just it’s not self-sustaining.

**John:** Yeah. So you and I both know – I’m not going to actually say his name – but there was a writer who was notorious for like taking on a bunch of projects that he was not himself actually writing.

**Craig:** Mike Birbiglia.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, I wasn’t supposed to say.

**John:** So he would have a team of young writers who were actually doing all of the work. But I don’t hear about that anymore, I think because it doesn’t happen, but maybe I’m being naïve.

**Craig:** No, I mean, there are people that still do these things, or people sometimes take on a weekly assignment which is very highly paid thing to get and then they just don’t deliver, which you know, like I say even if it’s not a scam, even if it’s just, I don’t know if they got tired or they weren’t right for the job, the point is it’s not a self-sustaining thing. Because everyone talks and it is so hard to get on the list of people that they give weekly assignments to, and it is so easy to get booted off of it. Like just don’t take the job. It’s going to cost you more in the long run to take one of those jobs and not do it right then it is to just do it right.

**John:** Do it right.

**Craig:** Do it right.

**John:** Thank you, sirs.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Mike:** Thanks guys.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/toughlove).

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

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’ll discuss when you need to be tough on yourself and when you need to back off. Plus, we’ll have lots of follow up discussion on Austin, television, assistant pay.

Craig, it’s so nice to be back with you. You were in Austin all by yourself last weekend. But that’s not really true because you were there with a huge panel of people for the live Scriptnotes show. I listened to it. I thought it was great.

**Craig:** Oh, thank you. I’m so glad. You know, I’m very nervous when I’m without you. I’m nervous that I’m going to do a poor job and then I’m nervous that I’m going to do what I think is a good job, then you’ll get angry. [laughs] So, this is how I view you as a parental figure. So, I’m glad you liked the show. We had a great time. The audience was probably the most ruckus I’ve ever experienced in all of our many years doing a show there. So good on them for being ruckus. And we had a terrific panel. I thought it was a fantastic mix of people.

**John:** Agreed. And it was very interesting for me to listen to you running it by yourself because you definitely seemed like you wanted to keep the trains running on time. And when there are that many people on stage sometimes it is awkward when both of us are there because it’s hard for two people to cohost that many people. And so it was great – I think it was honestly probably better that it was just you up there trying to wrangle those people into talking about things.

My frustration though as a listener I don’t get to chime in. And so I was listening to your discussion on television seasons and the model where you drop all the episodes at once versus week to week. And people made really good points, but the point I kept waiting for someone to make and no one was making is the benefit creatively for dropped in all at once and the downside in a marketing sense for dropping them all at once.

So two anecdotes I would have shared had I been there on stage. Susannah Grant has a new show out called Unbelievable on Netflix. It got rave reviews. But one of the things she pointed out on another interview was that Toni Collette who is one of the biggest stars in the show doesn’t appear until the second episode. And what Susannah was saying was that it was very helpful for all those episodes to drop at once because people might not, you know, actually know that she’s on the show if you had to wait till the second week for her to show up.

So, them all coming out at once was really helpful. She felt like she would have gotten noted early on that like, oh no, that actor has to appear in the pilot episode had it been a traditional drop of series.

**Craig:** Well, that’s an interesting point. I mean, the fact is I had that precise issue with Chernobyl. While we had Jared Harris briefly in the first episode, but Stellan Skarsgård and Emily Watson did not appear until the second episode.

**John:** It worked out OK for you.

**Craig:** Well, HBO never gave me any flack about it. And basically what we all did was just make sure that the marketing materials put everybody front and center so people understood that those people were coming. And I don’t know necessarily where Toni Collette sits on the spectrum of actors that demand people’s attention but it seems like she’s kind of in the same zone as an Emily Watson or Stellan Skarsgård.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** So it didn’t seem to hurt on our end. But I understand the nervousness. Certainly when it’s time for, you know, the ongoing awards season, the never-ending awards season with 4,000 awards, you will occasionally have to submit and say I want you to read or watch one episode. For the Emmys I could send in all of the episodes, I think. But when we have to choose one episode, typically we’ll send episode two because it is more of a traditional episode with our actors and all the rest of it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I kind of understand it. But, I don’t know, I don’t think it hurt us.

**John:** It didn’t hurt you. It worked out OK for you.

**Craig:** Yeah. Worked out OK.

**John:** The other thing I would say that is a benefit towards the more traditional weekly release schedule which I think we talked about before, I think did help Chernobyl because the conversation kept building, is I would argue is almost like a disease model of television which is that you are trying to infect as many people in the world with watching your show. And if you are only releasing it all at one time you have a very limited window. And you could infect everybody with your show, but they will have less opportunity to spread the virus to other people. And by releasing week after week you’re continuously re-infecting those people and getting them talking to others. Getting them to go online to talk to others.

So I do feel like it is a great way for a show to build and snowball in ways it’s very hard when you release the entire thing at once.

**Craig:** I agree. I mean, look, pretty clear where my interest lies. I like that model. It worked really well for us. You’re right. You do get to infect people slowly and people can spread. And what happens is when somebody catches up to you and infects you by saying, “You have to watch this show,” what you don’t have is that feeling of, oh god, I have to watch all of a show. No. Maybe you’re going to get there and you’re like, OK, I just need to catch up. I’ve got three episodes or two episodes and I’m caught up and now I’m on the wheel.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Of whatever that show is. So I think that that makes total sense. I agree.

**John:** A show that people could catch up on for three episodes is Watchmen, the Damon Lindelof show. And, Craig, you are now hosting a podcast about Watchmen. Tell us about this.

**Craig:** I’m hosting a podcast. I’m hosting the official Watchmen Podcast. Because, you know, the Chernobyl Podcast was this – if Chernobyl the actual television series surprised HBO with its performance, I think the podcast really surprised them. Because they had no interest in podcasts whatsoever before that moment and they were kind of legitimately taken aback. 10 million people listened to the Chernobyl podcast, which is nuts.

So they were talking about, you know, we need to do more of these. And I said, you know, I would do one with Damon for Watchmen. And they were like, “Really?” I said, yeah, I would do that, why not? And then he said, “Really?” And I said, yeah, why not? And we did it.

So, it’s a little different than the Chernobyl Podcast for a couple of reasons. One, it’s not a nonfiction show so there’s a little bit less science and history going on there. And we also only do one episode for every three episodes of the show. So we have stuff built up to talk about. But our first episode airs this Sunday right after episode three of Watchmen. And I think it’s really good. Damon really is a great articulator of his own process and intention.

And I find the show fascinating. I mean, I love that show. And I’m a fan of the graphic novel as well. So we got into everything. We talked about everything. And I think if people like Watchmen they’re definitely going to like that podcast.

**John:** Fantastic. Now, another thing that happened in Austin that I was not there for was that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss had a panel where they talked through Game of Thrones. People in the room seemed to love it a lot. People on Twitter did not seem to love it as much. We have two people writing in, at least two people wrote in with comments about it.

So, Jason Kabala from Austin wrote, “I was hoping you could address the backlash that Dave and Dan have been getting in the days following their panel at the Austin Film Festival. I was fortunate enough to be in the room and hear them speak and I just don’t understand how the media and Game of Thrones fans across the Internet could further vilify these two talented individuals based on some paraphrased snippets on one person’s Twitter feed.

“It is incredibly disappointing and disheartening to see this kind of lunacy unfold in real time, especially when I feel it contradicts what I heard with my own open ears.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Brief summary from what I could tell, because I was not at their panel but I read the comments. They were saying things that they’ve said many times that are a reflection frankly of their humility. They are generally humble guys. They don’t go on a panel and explain to you how brilliant they are and why their show got 50 million to people watch it year after year after year. And why it became a phenomenon and the biggest TV show in history basically. They don’t do that.

Instead they tend to lean more towards self-deprecation and humility and that somehow has become a problem. So, as far as I can tell the argument that sort of came out on Twitter, and it was one person writing it and then everybody kind of glomming on to that one person’s account, it seemed to rest on a lot of bad math or strange math to me. It goes like this. They’re saying that they kind of didn’t know what they were doing. Therefore they didn’t know what they were doing. Women and people of color, writers of color, never have an opportunity to get a job where they don’t know what they’re doing, therefore Dan and Dave are incompetent and bad.

And I read that I thought, well, OK, rebuttal. A, everybody watched the show. It was a huge success. That should be the end of that discussion. Literally. We should just end at A. The show was great. It doesn’t matter if they’re being self-deprecating or humble. The show was great. And people can argue about the last season or the last episode and I understand that. But for whatever, if you didn’t like Season 8, and hey, you didn’t like Season 7, fine. There were six seasons of essentially undeniably brilliant television.

They were complaining also that Dan and Dave said we mostly wrote everything ourselves and we didn’t have a writing room. Amazing. That’s mind-blowing to me. It’s incredible that they were able to do that. And that’s probably why for so long the series was so consistent and consistently brilliant because it was part of one unified authorial voice.

So, that’s A. B, let us stipulate that female writers, writers of color, would maybe not get the chances that those guys had after their first pilot, which was not good, or they wouldn’t have been allowed to learn on the job. OK. Let’s stipulate this as true, and honestly I think it probably is true. What does that have to do with them? I mean, that’s not their fault. Now we’re talking about corporations that hire people and give people chances. Why are we angry at them for that? I mean, if anything what they’ve proven if you believe their self-deprecation and humility is that second chances turn out great sometimes. And they do.

And so really all we’re saying I guess then is that second chances are good. But what’s underlying all this I think is anger at very, very successful people. And I think this is connected in part to anger at the last season. Literally. I think what’s happened is a lot of really hardcore fans who are hardcore fans of the show because of the work that Dan and Dave did were upset with the last season and now hate them. And that’s just sad.

**John:** I think it’s a symptom of our time, though. That sense of turning on the thing that you once loved. Yes. We get it. We sort of know how that happens.

One small element here that we should acknowledge is that in some of the discussion I saw on Twitter about it, it made it sound like Dan and Dave just stumbled off the street and pitched it to HBO and said like, “Hey, will you do this thing.” And they’re negating sort of like the tremendous track record they had before this, especially David Benioff who as a feature writer at the time was as hot as you could possibly get.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So for HBO to land him to do a series for them was a big get. And so I think people don’t actually acknowledge what careers these gentlemen had before this all started. And that’s worth remembering.

**Craig:** It is. And listen, David Benioff, and full disclosure, Dan and Dave are my friends. I presented them with their award, absurdly at the same festival where one of the people in the audience was complaining about them, they were also in a different event receiving the 2019 Outstanding Television Writing Award from the Austin Film Festival. And I presented that award to them. And if it makes people feel better, my speech was 90% making fun of them, and 10% praising them because they deserve that. But partly I can do that with them because, yes, David Benioff is really tall, and good-looking, and he was born rich. I mean, there’s a lot of reasons, sure, to say, yeah, I’m going to throw a tomato at this guy.

But, he works so hard. They uprooted their lives and their families for nearly a decade back and forth from Los Angeles to Ireland to Iceland and Dubrovnik. And they did this tirelessly and they got so much right and we loved their show collectively as a culture. And I’m talking about the world. This was a global phenomenon. And, you know, it does inspire strong emotions. And I understand that people get upset if they don’t like that final season or if they feel that characters were betrayed. And so they’re going to latch onto things these guys say as evidence of some disease that was always there. But, no, they’re incredibly decent people, hard-working people who did a brilliant job. And for the life of me I don’t understand how people can love something so much that they forget they loved it. That’s the part of this that’s so strange. They forget.

And people are going to yell at me for this because this is emotional to them now. They are invested in the notion that these guys are villains and they’re not. They’re writers who wrote a terrific show that we loved. It really doesn’t go much deeper than that. Is there a reason to say that our business doesn’t give non-white male writers more chances and deserved chances? Yes, that’s right. And hopefully our business gets better at that and fixes it. But I have no idea what that has to do with the fact that the business did get this one right. This is not like they gave two mediocre idiots a second chance to make a mediocre show and then kept pushing it in our faces even though we didn’t want it. We loved it. It was huge. What else can I say?

**John:** Well let’s leave it with Nate who wrote in to say, “What’s most frustrating about this for me is that it seems to further reinforce incorrect notions that creative pursuits spring fully formed from the instant the creator gets the spark of their idea, like a muse gifting an artist with a story. Instead of the actual truth which sees artists having to fail countless times in figuring out the best way to bring their stories out into the world.

“In other words, if you’re lucky enough to be labeled a genius it only comes through never-ending process of trial and error.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you know because you did Big Fish on Broadway so you know that process, which is designed ultimately to seem like one day you went, “Oh, I know,” and then out comes this perfect crystal of a show. That’s not how it works.

**John:** Not a bit.

**Craig:** I mean, it is a constant reimagining and reconfiguring and rethinking and re-staging and recasting. And that’s the way movies go. And that’s the way TV shows go. And we’re partly to blame as artists because we are peddling the illusion of intentionality. We always meant it to be this way. But, you know, it’s not. And I just, again, don’t understand why anyone is angry about the fact that they fixed it. I mean, that’s what happened. I saw that pilot. It was bad. I told them it was bad. They agreed it was bad. Everyone agreed it was bad. They redid it completely. I saw that. And it was awesome.

**John:** That’s what you want for every writer to have the ability to go back and fix these things.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. Exactly. I want that for everyone.

**John:** That’s what we’re saying.

In hiding the work, we’re only seeing the end result, which is great for most audiences. The audiences don’t need to see all the work. But, that work was there and to not acknowledge all the work was there is a disservice to the artist and the final product.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, listen, when writers go out there and say things like, “We didn’t know what we were doing,” they’re being humble and they’re being self-deprecating. I assure you they knew what they were doing more than most people. Because most people can’t do that. Almost no one can do that. It’s really hard to be the people that come up with the biggest TV show of all time. I’m pretty sure it was just them that did it. And from their point of view, of course, they must feel stupid and like they don’t know what they’re doing, just like I felt stupid and felt like I didn’t know what I was doing when I was making Chernobyl, or everything I do, because that’s kind of my anxiety. I mean, have these people never heard of–

**John:** Imposter syndrome?

**Craig:** Imposter syndrome. I mean, all of us have that. So you have these two guys being very human and vulnerable up there and sharing their imposter syndrome and I guess the answer is, “And therefore they’re imposters.” Well who made the show that you loved? I’m so confused by the math.

But, meh.

**John:** All right. Here’s a simpler thing we can resolve. So, in a recent blog post I had to spell out the word writers room. So television is written in a writers room. We all agree to that. What I said is completely accurate and clear until you actually have to spell the word writers and decide whether it has an apostrophe or not an apostrophe. So I asked a poll on Twitter about apostrophe/no apostrophe. But, Craig, I want to know what your opinion is. Writers room – apostrophe or no apostrophe? And where does the apostrophe go?

**Craig:** I struggle with this myself. Probably technically I think I want there to be no apostrophe and just it is the room with writers in it.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** However, the problem is when I look at that it looks wrong. So then I do want it to be possessive. I want it to say that this is the room that belongs to the writers. But then that’s plural. And that’s a bit goofy looking. So, the most pleasant looking is the least right one, which is that it is a room that belongs to just one writer, which I just don’t think applies. So my suggestion, and I’m excited to hear where you’ve landed on this, but my suggestion is we just dump the term entirely and call it the writing room. And then problem solved.

**John:** Yeah. So the room of requirement. Yes. So I did it with no apostrophe with the logic that it is the room full of writers rather than the room owned by writers because in a possessive sense technically the apostrophe goes after the S because it’s a plural. I agree that also looks weird. It looks like you’re leaving something out. Apostrophes in English are just a kludge and, you know, it’s weird we have the apostrophes. We pretend we have the rules for them. We really don’t have good rules for them. So I’m doing it without the apostrophe.

The poll results were 55% with S’, 45% with no apostrophe. I didn’t give the ‘S as an option. That split tells me that both are really common and therefore we should not rend our garments over which spelling we use. They’re both good. They’re both acceptable. They both make sense. And we should focus on what is happening in that writers room and not how we’re going to punctuate writers room.

**Craig:** I’m going to still push writing room and we’ll see how far I get. We know I’m not getting far at all, but I’m stubborn, you know. I’m stubborn.

**John:** Yeah. You are stubborn. We like that.

All right. Let’s talk about the people inside that writing room. We have a lot of discussions about assistant pay over the past few weeks. Brad wrote in to say, “I’m a principal consultant to a large corporation in a major US city. My blood pressure was running high by the middle of episode 422. Similar to how we set professional expectations in the wake of #MeToo, no dinner, no drink meetings, no hotel meetings, is it time to reset the role and responsibilities of an assistant?” Would that it would be so simple as to do that. Basically there’s a clear concise way to say that an assistant does exactly this and nothing more. Brad, I get the instinct. It’s not going to be just a simple job description listing I think that’s going to fix this problem for me.

**Craig:** Agreed. Would that it were so simple. We all use assistants in different ways and also the word assistant is covering many, many different kinds of assistants. So for instance John just referred to the sort of assistant that’s in the writing room. Ha, I did it.

**John:** Keep trying. The more you say it.

**Craig:** Selling it. But of course there are personal assistants that don’t work in a writing room. They are there to work for an executive or somebody and they’re really just there to do personal things. Then there are assistants that are more like executive assistants. They’re there to work for someone at a desk, at a studio, or an agency. There are all sorts of different kinds. We’re going to struggle to codify what that word means. And I don’t necessarily think we need to as long as the people doing the hiring are disclosing fully what the nature of the job is before people accent it.

What we do need to do is set a floor for how much people are paid.

**John:** Agreed. I think part of the challenge, this term assistant which means one thing in all other industries, it means kind of a different thing in Hollywood, is that the assistant position is kind of an apprenticeship. Ideally it’s kind of an apprenticeship. It’s where you get to learn how the industry works. And that’s why we had people write in talking about working as an assistant at an agency even though they had no intention of working at an agency ultimately for their career because it was a great place to learn the business.

And so that apprenticeship is broken. It is busted right now for issues that are beyond just how pay is working. But it is a fundamental nature of how this all happens. It’s why most people who are working in the industry did have a job as an assistant at some point in their careers which is different than a lot of other industries. So it is a natural place for people to get started in this business. We just need to make sure that it’s paid properly.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And in future episodes we’re going to talk more about what assistants should be doing. Because some of the email that has been coming in has been talking about sort of, “My boss has me write scenes and stuff, is that OK?” It’s like–

**Craig:** No!

**John:** Complicated. Yes. Partly that is a thing that you aspire to do, so in some ways it’s great that that person is involving you in the creative process.

**Craig:** Paying you as a writer would be great.

**John:** It would be.

**Craig:** I think that you’re right. It is a broken apprenticeship. Although I suspect it’s always been broken. I mean, I assume that throughout history here in Hollywood the percentage of assistants that have gone on to become the things that they wanted to be is rather small. Because the percentage of everybody becoming the thing they want to be in Hollywood is very small. But if we are going to have this brutal system where 10 million people are competing for three jobs, three dream jobs, then while they’re here competing and working on desks and picking up lunches and dry cleaning and answering phones they should be treated like human beings, meaning not abused, and paid a reasonable wage that allows them to live in Los Angeles while they do this job.

**John:** Agreed. So this week on Assistantdom I thought we would talk about showrunners and the holidays. So, this past week I put up a blog post that went through some of the letters we’d gotten in about how showrunners were stepping up for their assistants, especially writing room assistants, to make sure they were getting paid enough. So, I’ll point to that blog post. We’ll have a link to that.

But there were also some additional letters that came in and I thought we’d have Megana read through them. She’s our voice of the assistants. So producer Megana Rao can read a little bit more from what some people had to say about their bosses stepping up.

And I really want to focus on some of the strategies that these showrunner bosses used. This first one really speaks to understanding and sort of selling the value of that assistant. Let’s take a listen.

**Megana Rao:** Bianca writes, “Before going to the studio about a number the showrunner discussed it with me first, making sure I was OK with that rate. We shot a pilot in Croatia this past spring and the showrunner advocated for me to go with him and be bumped to script coordinator with a higher rate. When the script coordinator job finished as our pilot wrapped the showrunner asked the studio to keep me at that higher rate as a raise. There have also been several times when I was supposed to wrap but he asked the studio to extend me by telling them how important I am to his writing process.”

**John:** Great. So I think this is a really strong example of the studio is more willing to pay for somebody that is deemed vital to the production. And if the showrunner is saying, no, no, this person is vital to my creative process, they’re going to listen more carefully. They’re not going to argue like this is a disposable cog, that anyone could do this job, if you’re telling them, “No, no, most people couldn’t do this job. This person is special,” you’re more likely to get them the salary they deserve.

**Craig:** Yeah. In a very broad way I think that the studio is probably waiting for the showrunner to say something. If the showrunner isn’t necessarily advocating for something then the studio doesn’t have to worry about it. I mean, they’re the ones who are paying this. They don’t want to pay more than they have to. But if a showrunner says, “I need this person. That’s that,” generally speaking, assuming that the show is going well, that’s going to be honored. They don’t want to cause a problem there. And I think in this case there’s a pretty interesting thing going on here. Whether or not the showrunner was coming up with these ideas or whether Bianca was coming up with these ideas, I suspect Bianca had a plan.

So if you’re an assistant and – let me take that back – if you’re an employer and you’re concerned that your assistant isn’t getting paid well enough, ask them what their plan would be. I bet they have one. They’ve just either been hesitant to share it with you or they didn’t think it could ever come to pass. But they’ve probably thought this through and know more about their situation than you do.

**John:** So next strategy is for the showrunner to have business affairs deal with them, the showrunner, rather than dealing directly with the assistant. So it’s a case where you sort of intercede early in the process to make it clear like, “No, no, this is how much I want this person to be paid,” rather than having to come back in later on to negotiate it. Let’s take a listen to that.

**Megana:** Kaitlin writes, “For season one of the show I currently work for my boss actually negotiated my pay on my behalf. I never needed to negotiate for myself in person with the studio. I believe this was an outlier experience because she was a first time showrunner who had the time and the drive to go bat for us before the show actually got rolling. The way this worked was I gave her the number I planned to ask/negotiate for with Netflix, asking if she’d be willing to back me up when I did. And she said she would.

“The she reached out to me telling me that she herself had asked Netflix to pay me that amount and they came in a teeny tiny bit under. Would that be OK with me? It certainly was because I had asked for higher than I planned to receive. She totally had my back.”

**John:** Great. So this was a first time showrunner, so this was not a person who had experience doing this negotiation, but had the time and had the energy and sort of the pluck to step up and say this is what I want this person to be paid. Didn’t quite get all the way there, but got much further than this assistant would have been able to by him or herself. So that feels like progress.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And maybe it’s because that this person was a first time showrunner they were kind of fresh and new and had a healthy attitude about how this should all work. I could see how after your 30th year running TV shows you didn’t want to also add on this extra aspect of being an HR person for what is now the 4,000th assistant that has come that has kind of gone through the system. But hopefully if we can kind of get things better then individual showrunners won’t have to.

The more you do it as an individual showrunner the less likely it is you’ll have to do it next time because there will be a reasonable base pay for assistants and you won’t have to personally advocate. It will just be there waiting for them.

**John:** Yeah. Business affairs will see you on the phone. OK, this showrunner is calling to get this person bumped up. It’s a thing that happens every time. It’ll be OK. So maybe they won’t even have to make the phone call because it will just default to a higher level.

**Craig:** Correct. That’s the plan.

**John:** So the next strategy for showrunners is to keep hammering. Let’s take a listen.

**Megana:** Andy wrote in, “My boss had to lobby for me to superiors on four separate occasions. I’m fully aware that not everyone is willing to do that for their employee and can put him in an uncomfortable position with his superiors. I’m very grateful to my boss and feel very lucky. I will say my mental health has benefited the most. Constantly being stressed out about money is such a burden. It affects your relationships, your mood, and you feel like you are carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders. I feel so much better and can see a future for myself in this industry which wasn’t always the case.

“It’s kind of crazy what a huge difference something like that can make. But keep in mind this was all for just a $5 an hour raise.”

**John:** Yeah. So a $5 an hour raise is not a big deal probably in the course of the show, but it’s a huge deal for someone like Andy who is in that situation. And so for the showrunner who has a thousand other things to juggle, to keep coming back to, OK, and I’ve got to get Andy an extra $5 an hour is a lot. But it is really important to Andy. So that not sort of giving up at the first no is crucial. And believe me, that showrunner wasn’t taking no on a lot of other levels as well.

So, to keep hammering, to keep pushing for what Andy needed was crucial.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I had to do quite a bit of that when I was making a deal and I wanted to make sure that my employees had health insurance. I had to fight. What I am sort of shocked by, but I guess I shouldn’t be, is how weirdly pennywise and pound foolish business affairs and studios can be. They will fight you tooth and nail on these things, like a $5 an hour raise, which they can afford, and isn’t a huge deal. Maybe because they’re just terrified that they’re going to end up having to do what you and I want them to do, which is give everyone a pay raise across the board who does that job. That seems to be the big fear. That’s what they’re scared of the most.

So they are acting like McDonald’s, which will lobby against increases in minimum wage everywhere they are because that’s what they pay and they have to multiply it times every single employee they have. Well, tough. We’re just going to keep doing this because that’s what needs to happen.

**John:** So the last strategy a showrunner might consider is really focus on the total dollars. So, not focus on how much they’re getting paid per hour or how many guaranteed hours, but how many they’re bringing home on a weekly basis. Let’s take a listen to that.

**Megana:** Margie wrote in about kit rentals. She says, “I was a director’s assistant during post on a Netflix movie in 2016 to 2017. Part of Netflix’s policy for kit rentals for laptops is that they’ll pay up to $500 for however long you’re on the project. It was a great extra $50 a week on my paycheck for a couple of months. Then, when I hit the $500 max and I stopped getting paid to bring my laptop in, well, $50 extra a week is a huge deal for me. Losing $200 a month in salary would hurt a lot of people.

“I asked the accountant if I could renew the kit rental or if they would provide me a work laptop. And I got a curt email from Netflix production restating that $500 was their max policy and said I should have asked them for a work laptop from the start. So, they wouldn’t budge. The post supervisor knew all about this and wouldn’t do anything to fight for me. He was afraid of and loathed the producer. I got so fed up I approached the director and asked if he would talk to the producer about increasing my weekly rate to compensate for the loss of my kit rental.

“He did. And the producer upped my rate for the remainder of the project, which was nearly ten months.”

**John:** Great. So what I like about this is it’s not being hung up on the principal of like, no, no, her rate needs to be this versus that. It’s how much is she bringing home. And so she was getting this extra $50 a week as a kit rental. Once that ran out, how do we get her an extra $50 a week? Bump it someplace else. If they had to make up an excuse for it, or they’re going to rent something else of hers, great. But really for Margie what made this job survivable was that $50 a week. And so how do we get her to that number rather than figuring out exactly what this hourly rate needed to be?

**Craig:** Right. And as we go forward in this discussion I’m going to keep coming back to the notion of the bottom line, because we know now after listening very carefully to so many people over so many weeks now that the employers can play a ton of games about how they pay you. They can change your hours. They can change the amount of overtime hours. They can change how much they pay for overtime. So when you get a number, a blankety-blank per hour that actually isn’t the bottom line. They can make that rather elastic actually.

What really matters is what is the bottom line. How much money do you get per week? That’s what matters. So that’s what we’re going to concentrate on whether it is a question of improving an hourly rate or improving guaranteed hours, or improving kit rentals. Whatever it is. The bottom line is we need to find a reasonable amount per week.

**John:** Agreed. So in the weeks ahead I think we need to have a discussion about what is the amount per week that is livable and survivable on in Los Angeles and see if we can get something approaching consensus on what that is and then figure out how to get people that money.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So that’s our goal. A small goal for the New Year.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** But before we get to the New Year we’ve just crossed through Halloween, which means that it’s now the holidays. It’s now the official holiday season. We can now play All I Want for Christmas for the next two months solid. But, a thing that’s come up quite a bit in the letters that have come in to the mailbox is that the holidays are actually a really tough time for assistants because many assistants are not paid during those holiday weeks. And so in some cases it’s two weeks off, or a week at Thanksgiving. There’s real problems for assistants in a period where they should be excited to have vacation it’s actually much worse for them because they are not bringing in the money they would normally bring in.

So, Michael Greene, a showrunner, has a Twitter thread from a couple years ago that we’ll link to that talks through his recommendations for how a writing room can figure out how much to give as a holiday bonus to the assistants who are working for that show. And it’s very clear simple math based on what position you are how much you kick in in order to get people paid so they can make it through those holiday seasons well.

So, that is a first step I would point people towards.

**Craig:** Yeah. Nothing says Christmas spirit like telling people this is a time of year where you have to buy extra stuff. Also we’re not going to pay you. I mean, how about this just as a simple bottom line. Pay people. Every week. If you have an assistant they should be paid every week. They should get a couple of weeks of vacation time and they should get holidays off. And you should also pay them for those.

On top of that – on top of that – you should be giving some sort of Christmas bonus or gift, presuming that the employee is somebody that you’re not, you know, in the process of getting rid of, because that’s what freaking Dickens tells us. I mean, honestly how many versions of A Christmas Carol has this town made? 400?

**John:** We’re doing some more, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. And they keep coming. And yet – and yet – it’s just Scrooge all the way down. And it’s not fair. It’s wrong. It’s kind of anti-progressive. It flies in the face of everything we say we care about. It’s just wrong. Boo.

**John:** Boo.

**Craig:** Boo to Scrooge, you know? Like people should be paid. So you shouldn’t be looking at Christmas as a time of tension because you’re going to have to drive an Uber for two weeks. I mean, this is wrong.

**John:** Yeah. It is wrong. Also, the holidays are a time where you theoretically should be able to travel back to visit your family.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so that’s what this holiday spirt is about. Have movies taught us nothing? That the holidays are for getting back with your family and coming to appreciate your family as an adult. And we are not allowing these assistants to go travel back to their families and appreciate them as adults and have awkward conversations about their Hollywood careers. That’s why we need to give them holiday bonuses.

**Craig:** Let’s not get crazy. I mean, let’s not necessarily that we have to go back to see our families at Christmas, right. I mean, can’t a few of us get waivers on that one? I need a waiver.

**John:** Some sort of waivers will be allowed.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Let’s end this segment on some good news. Matt wrote in. He was a key set PA on season two of Fresh Off the Boat. I won’t read the whole story, but essentially because of how their schedule was working they were going to be off a week at Thanksgiving and then more time at Christmas. And it became really tough to figure out like how are we going to survive with only three out of four weeks’ pay. It was stressful. So they went to their ADs. The firsts. The seconds. The seconds-seconds. They voiced their concerns. They went to the UPM and the producer. And successfully got them to carry them through Thanksgiving and one week at the holidays.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** And so–

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** That’s an example of a show stepping up and recognizing we are putting an undue burden on the people who have really stepped forward to bear it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, we shouldn’t necessarily be giving the Fresh Off the Boat people too much credit for doing what I think should just be the base right thing. But, you know, tip of the hat because a lot of people are not even doing that. So, everybody – everybody – should be paying their employees for that stuff. I mean, come on. Come on. When you were a kid did you think that my dream is to grow up and deprive my employees of pay during Christmas? Who wants that? That’s just wrong.

**John:** Your college roommate wanted that.

**Craig:** Oh god, did he ever – oh, what a disgusting person. Ugh. Did you see him at the – well, you don’t watch sports.

**John:** But I saw a photo of him wearing the Astros outfit at the game.

**Craig:** He’s the reason they lost. I’m telling you.

**John:** He’s a curse.

**Craig:** He puts on any team’s uniform and that’s it. It’s just that all the wheels come off. Ugh. What a repugnant person. Anyway.

**John:** Anyway. Let’s do a last bit of follow up. This is from a stuntman named Kevin who writes, “I just did my 20-year anniversary working as a stuntman in LA. I emailed you guys once before and said Craig is right, stunt people don’t punch each other in the face.” That was in relation to a Three Page Challenge we were looking through.

**Craig:** Oh, yes, yes, yes.

**John:** He says, “I also loved the Seth Rogan episode. His perspective on stunt people and how they process pain got me thinking. It reminded me of a conversation I once had in a [trans-mo] van from set to base when someone in the van asked me and another stunt guy doesn’t it hurt. And the delivery had the tone of why on earth would you do this. Right then I had a moment of clarity. Explained it in a way that still encapsulates how I feel about what I do. I said, ‘It hurts more not to pay the mortgage.’”

**Craig:** Well, Kevin, I don’t believe you. Because here’s the thing. There are a lot of ways to pay the mortgage. But you’re a stunt guy. And you’re a breed of people. I mean, listen, I always describe all of us collectively as show folk. I mean, we’re show folk. We’re carnie people, right? We’re in the business of putting on things. And so we’re special. And stunt people are a special brand of show folk. And they – you have to like it. You have to. You can’t – there’s no way you go to work and you’re like, “Oh my god, I approach falling down the stairs with the same trepidation as everyone.” You do not.

So, I’m going to push back a little bit and actually say, Kevin, no. There’s more to it than that. Every stunt person I’ve ever met on set and talked to has a certain kind of thing. And it’s awesome. And I don’t have it at all. But I’m glad that they do.

**John:** Cool. All right. Time for our marquee topic which is tough love versus self-care. So this is inspired by a Chuck Wendig blog post over this past week where he talks through the dueling notions of sort of do you buckle down and sit in that chair and get all those words written when you’re hurting, or do you take a step back and practice some self-care. And he’s really looking at the trap you can fall into where you’re just self-caring all the time and you’re not actually doing the hard work. And as we head into NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, which is where I started Arlo Finch, I thought it was a good time to look at the dueling instincts to you’ve got tough it out versus relax and be easy on yourself.

**Craig:** Yeah. I loved this. I thought it was really smart. And the reason I really appreciated it is because there are two positive ways of thinking about things and one positive way is I need to take care of myself and be gentle with myself and not beat myself up because that’s going to be counterproductive. And there’s another positive thing that says I need to apply myself and motivate myself and push through difficult things and be resilient in order to get things done.

The problem with both of those things is that bad sentiments can easily masquerade as those things. That’s kind of the part that I thought he really put his finger on brilliantly is that the two things I just said are correct and good, but here’s something that can masquerade as tough love: a kind of brutal self-loathing and self-denial. And here’s something that can masquerade as self-care: just fear and withdrawal and a sense that engaging isn’t worth it. So, I thought it was really important that especially now because we do concentrate so heavily on self-care that somebody said, “Just watch out. There are these two imposters that will wear the clothing of these two things and neither one is going to help you.”

**John:** Yeah. Let’s go back to that tough love, because you know someone who is advocating tough love will say, “Yeah, so what? Writing is often hard. You’re not digging a ditch.” And to some degree writing is exercise and it’s just like working out. You get stronger sometimes by pushing through the pain. And you’ve got to rip those muscles a little bit so that they can get stronger. I don’t know if actually physical science would hold that up to be true.

**Craig:** That is – you did it.

**John:** All right. So, and I get that. And writing for all of us, actually sitting down in the button chair and getting to that thousand words or those three pages can be really tough sometimes. It’s hard to string the words together. We’ve talked about this a lot on the show. But, what Craig describes as that imposter is a real thing where sometimes it’s your romantic notion that art must be suffering. That writing must be hard and so therefore if writing is hard then I’m doing the right thing because that’s what writing is supposed to be like. That it’s supposed to hurt and it’s supposed to be torture every time you do it. That’s probably not true. And that’s not a healthy way to be approaching the craft that you’ve chosen for yourself.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you can easily get into a trap where you think of yourself as stupid or lazy because it just didn’t happen that day. You can try and try and try. There are days where it’s not going to happen. And the healthy thing is to say that is normal. I am not perfect. Not every day is going to be optimum. But that imposter dressed in the clothing of tough love will say, “You suck. You’re weak and lazy and dumb and a real writer would have gotten it done. You’ve just failed.” Well that’s not helpful at all.

**John:** Let’s look at self-care because you and I are both dealing with shoulder pain and part of the recommendation for that is, well, take it easy on your shoulder. Don’t do things that are going to hurt your shoulder. And that really is a form of self-care. And so if you are encountering a lot of mental anguish and other things in your life that makes it hard for you to write, possibly pushing through and forcing yourself to write is going to make that mental anguish worse. And so to be mindful that there could be a good reason why you should step off the accelerator and give yourself a little bit of a break and not be pushing yourself so hard.

Chuck was writing from the perspective of he’s a guy in a shack who is writing books. I’m reading his book right now. His book is really good. He wrote a big giant tome called Wanderers. It’s sort of like The Stand. It’s as long as The Stand. It’s a big tome that drops down. But Chuck is a guy writing by himself out in the woods. He is not in a writing room. I’m going to keep using that word as much as I can.

**Craig:** Good for you.

**John:** He’s not in a writing room in a social environment with other people. And so therefore he only has himself to turn to. And so some of his advice can be a little bit different about self-care when you are surrounded by a group who can be pushing you, or also be supporting you.

**Craig:** Yeah. The self-care thing is interesting because we didn’t really have it until a few years ago. Of course it existed and people would come up with different names, but the notion of self-care and the popularity of it is a relatively modern phenomenon. And I think it is important for somebody to kind of, you know what happens is there’s this backlash where people say, “Problem is all these snowflakes with their self-care, ergo self-care is stupid.” By the way, the people that say that never use the term ego. But whatever.

That’s not correct. Self-care is actually crucial. What is correct is that self-care can be used as a name for something that isn’t self-care at all, but a different kind of self-abuse, which is hiding. And we can when we are afraid sometimes put on the clothing of somebody that is trying to take care of themselves, when really we’re just scared. And people might think, well, how exactly is writing scary. Well, when you don’t know what to say it’s terrifying. It really is. It’s as scary as a dream where you have to go on stage and give a speech but you haven’t prepared one. That’s what it kind of feels like.

**John:** Yeah. There’s a natural anxiety that happens. Like am I going to be able to do it? If I can’t do it then it’s going to suck and I’m going to be embarrassed. Even if I’m the only person who is going to see that I can’t do it it’s going to be embarrassing. So, yes, there’s a whole cycle that can stat about should I sit down and actually start writing today.

**Craig:** Correct. And you can wear the clothing of modern parlance and say, no, today is a self-care day. It is worth taking a real clear moment when you say today is a self-care day to say, “Or is it?” It doesn’t mean you’re lying to yourself. It just means let’s really ask and evaluate first. Then if everything checks out, then yes, it’s a self-care day.

**John:** So I put together a list of five questions that I thought would be a starting place for looking at is this a time for self-care or is this a time for some tough love with myself. So, let me read through here. Craig, I suspect you’ll have other things to add to this checklist.

So first I would say is check the facts. And basically that’s a chance to sort of step outside yourself and just look at the situation you’re in. Is this a situation where you’re dealing with some big stuff that anyone in your situation would say like, OK, given what you’re going through, like the loss of a family member, a big breakup, you’re moving, there are some real reasons why you are not equipped at this moment to be doing this stuff. So just check the facts. Like independent of your emotions, what are the actual facts about this situation?

I would ask are you taking care of the basics. I would ask are you taking care of the basics. Are you actually eating properly? Are you sleeping enough? Is there some basic survival function that you’re not doing a good enough job at and is that the thing you really need to fix rather than worrying about how much you’re writing on a day.

I would ask can you take smaller bites. And by that I mean rather than committing to three hours of sitting writing can you just write for 20 minutes, or an hour. Can you do a little sprint to get you through some stuff? Can you write 100 words rather than forcing yourself to write 1,000 words at a sitting?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Can you lower the stakes? And this is where I come back to Aline Brosh McKenna’s method of getting in the ocean. I don’t know if you remember her describing this at some point. But this is how Aline describes starting to swim in the ocean. Is that you sort of step on the sand and you get your toes wet, and then you get your ankles wet. Then you splash a little water up on your shins, and then your knees. And eventually you’re in the ocean and you’re swimming and you don’t even realize that you started swimming. And I always loved Aline’s visual for how she gets into the ocean, because it’s sort of true. It’s scary to jump into the ocean, but if you sort of just wander in there like, oh hey, I’m in the ocean, I’m swimming.

**Craig:** It’s literally how every Jewish woman I’ve ever seen gets into a pool. It’s like every Jewish woman slowly like wets the arms, wets the legs. It’s so careful. Maybe it’s just my family. Maybe it’s just the women in my family. I don’t know. But it’s such a weird stereotypical thing.

And I guess as far as stereotypes go fairly harmless. Because it is a smart way of acclimating to a new environment. And I think lowering the stakes is a brilliant point of view on this. Because there are times where you may say, “Listen, I think today is a self-care day. You know what? Today is a self-care day. That said, what if I did some writing on a self-care day? It doesn’t even count. It’s like free calories. Because it’s a self-care day. So if it happens it happens. And if it doesn’t it doesn’t. I’ll just try it now with like zero stakes attached because it’s a self-care day. I don’t have to sit there grinding my teeth because it’s not happening.”

I think that’s really smart.

**John:** Katie Silberman when she was on the show recently she talked about how when she starts a project she’ll write scenes and scenes and scenes that aren’t going to be in the movie that are just the characters talking. Perfect. Those are kind of throwaway scenes. It doesn’t matter. You’re just getting a sense of the voices. There’s no demand that those actually have to be the real scenes in the movie. So try writing those. You’ll be surprised. Some of those will end up in the movie. But it’s lowering the stakes. The world isn’t going to come crashing down if those scenes are not perfect.

**Craig:** There you go. Yeah.

**John:** Last I would say can you define what you’ll need to be able to do in order to get back to work as normal. And so if you say like this is a self-care day, I can’t do it. Great. What are the criteria you need to meet for you to be able to get back to work? And if you can be just a little bit more concrete about that. OK, I need to be able to sit for ten minutes without bursting into tears. Great. So that’s a thing. If you can do that then you’re on your way to being able to do the next thing.

I need to be able to focus on one thing for 20 minutes. Give yourself some real criteria, benchmarks that you need to hit, so that you can actually say, OK, I’m in this state or I’m not in this state. There’s a sense that there’s an end date to it. That it’s not going to be a permanent condition for you.

**Craig:** Those are five great questions to ask yourself. I really only have one other one to suggest. And it is simply is the biggest problem on this particular day your writing. Because if the biggest problem, the thing that is taking the most wind out of your sails, the thing that is making you the sickest in your gut is the work itself, it may not be a self-care day. It may be a day where you just have to kind of re-approach your writing and think about what’s not working.

Because otherwise you could hide forever from that.

**John:** Yeah. When I was writing the Arlo Finch books, so the third book is in and done, so I’m essentially done with them, it was a lot more regular writing than I’d ever had to do. So it’s been four years of like really regular writing to get those books done. And the word counts were just so much higher and the workload was so much higher than before. And so I did have to be little tougher on myself in terms of like, yeah, I don’t necessarily really want to do it today but I kind of need to do it today and I’m going to do it today. And I would schedule like even family vacations I would say, OK, I need an hour this morning to write. And I’m not being selfish. It’s what needs to happen. And so I would plan for, OK, I’m writing during this time.

And then once I got that writing down I was just free in a way that was great. It wasn’t looming over me because I knew I’d gotten that work done.

So I bring this up because sometimes writing actually is what you need to do.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Sometimes writing is a really important way to get healthy again because it lets you step outside of yourself, outside of your own internal narrative into a different narrative. And really focus on that for a time. So, it can get you out of your head with the right project.

**Craig:** That’s such a great point. And I’ve got to tell you, that’s me. There are times where I needed a day off or even a week off because of extant circumstances. Things that are going on in my family. My son has surgery. Do you know what I mean? Like you got to deal with life as it comes and there are days where you just can’t do your work. But in all honesty 90% of the time when I am feeling miserable it’s because something is wrong with what I’m writing. And the only way to fix that is to solve that problem. So it doesn’t mean I have to write the solution. Sometimes I just have to take a long walk or a long shower. Sometimes I just don’t know the answer and I have to sit in that discomfort. But that is still a work day to me.

My fingers may not be moving on the keys, but I am thinking. I’m trying. And I know exactly what you said is correct. When I do solve it and when I write that solution the pain that I’m feeling will go away. Therefore I can’t self-care that. That can’t be self-cared away. That has to just be worked away. And it’s a really smart distinction that you’ve made there.

**John:** Cool. So we will link to Chuck Wendig’s original blog post which we thought was terrific. Chuck Wendig also writes a lot about writing and the writing process, so if you’ve not read any of his books on writing you should do that as well because he’s a very smart, clever guy and talks really honestly about the frustration of writing but also what’s cool about writing. And has a very good voice. So I would encourage you to check out his books as well. We’ll put links to those in the show notes.

Also, it is time now Craig for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Neato.

**John:** And I see you have one.

**Craig:** I do. What a shock. This one came from my old friend Craig Perry who is part of an exclusive club of people: Craigs. And it was right down my alley. This is an article in The Atlantic written by Olga Khazan and it is entitled The Therapeutic Potential of Stanning. And it’s about superhero therapy, which I did not know existed, but I think it’s amazing.

And basically, I mean, people can read it for themselves, but the basic idea here is that there are psychologists who are engaging with their clients and having their clients kind of imagining themselves as superheroes in their own lives. And processing their issues and their problems as superheroes encountering obstacles. Using people’s natural desire to interact with the world through narrative to help them unwind their own personal narrative. And obviously it’s not delusional. Everybody understands they’re not really a superhero. But it’s this kind of interesting geek therapy. And it seems to be working.

And I’m not at all shocked. Therapy has always been about kind of looking at your life as a story. What caused you to get this way? What was your beginning? What was your middle? How would you like your end to be? So this doesn’t surprise me at all. I just thought it was really fascinating that it was happening in kind of a codified way. So check that article out. The Therapeutic Potential of Stanning.

**John:** Yeah. I really liked this article a lot. And the idea behind this therapy. When I give my Arlo Finch talks to grade school kids part of my discussion is about what we mean by hero. And hero is the one who grows and changes. The hero is the one the story is about. The hero is the one you’re rooting for. And I flip it at the end saying like in real life you are the character who the story is about and in real life you are the person who has needs, hopes, dreams, and wants. You are the character that you’re rooting for. And if you look at yourself as the hero in your story that can be really helpful. It gives you a different way of looking at the obstacles in front of you. It gives you a different way of looking at who are your allies because very few heroes don’t have allies, someone who is on their side.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Everyone in these stories is an ally to somebody else. So gets you thinking outside of yourself. So to put it in a superhero context makes a lot of sense, especially in this Marvel moment that we’re living in. Smart.

**Craig:** Every superhero seems to have an origin story that is built around some kind of trauma. Well, a lot of them do. So, it’s just a natural thing to connect to. What about you’re One Cool Thing this week, John?

**John:** My One Cool Thing is a thing you’ll enjoy very much as well. It is called One Page Dungeon. It’s by Oleg [Dolya] who goes as watabou on the internets. It is a machine generated D&D dungeon, sort of like a one-page map for a dungeon that sort of is algorithmically generated. So each time you click it it’s building up a new little map of this place. It’s really great-looking little dungeons that you could imagine in any sort of published module. And sometimes the encounters are built in there. But I just really loved that it could procedurally generate these great little D&D maps that look so much better than anything I could ever draw on graph paper. So, I just loved it. It inspired me to just generate one and then build a one-off one-night encounter for some of my friends.

**Craig:** This is really cool. I also like the – they do – they look beautiful. And I like the titles that get generated as well randomly, one presumes, like this particular page. Let’s see, I’ve got Monastery of the Silent Dragon. And Secret Maze of the Dread Master. That’s pretty great.

**John:** I’m looking at Subterranean Monastery of the Red Titan. And I’ve got some rooms with some pillars in them. I’ve got different encounters. It looks great. So I just thought it was a cool way to use, you know, machines to generate some really paper and pencil kind of results.

**Craig:** Fun.

**John:** Fun. And that’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also did our outro this week. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions and feedback on things like assistants and other such.

But for short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust.

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

We have exciting news coming out very soon about the future of the premium show. But you can find all the back episodes for now at Scriptnotes.net. You can also download 50-episode seasons of the show at store.johnaugust.com.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.