Scriptnotes Transcript

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

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is Episode 404 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig is off this week, but he will be back next week. Luckily I have somebody really remarkable to talk with about things. This is Charlie Brooker, the creator-writer-executive producer of the remarkable anthology series Black Mirror, the most recent installments of which dropped on Netflix this past week. Charlie Brooker, welcome to the show.

**Craig Brooker:** Hello. It’s a pleasure to be here.

**John:** I want to talk to you about so many things about the individual series, individual episodes, bigger questions such as what is television, what is reality. So…

**Charlie:** Yeah. I might not have answers to all of those things. I’ll try.

**John:** I’ll give you about 30 seconds. I’m going to plug the live show one last time.

**Charlie:** OK.

**John:** So be thinking.

**Charlie:** 30 seconds. Right.

**John:** Our next live show is this Thursday, June 13, and the Ace Hotel. It’s a benefit for Hollywood Heart. Our guests include Melissa McCarthy, Ben Falcone, Alec Berg, the showrunner of Silicon Valley and Barry, Rob McElhenney, the showrunner of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and his new Apple show, Kourtney Kang of Fresh Off the Boat.

Oh my god, we have too many guests. I don’t know how we’ll fit all that in, but it’s going to be a remarkable show. So come see us this Thursday, June 13, at the Ace Hotel. They released some more tickets so you can still get a seat if you would like to see that live show.

If you’re there at the live show there are going to be some games, there’s going to be giveaways, there’s going to be cool stuff that you can only encounter at the show. So, please come out and support a great charity, Hollywood Heart. Craig and I will be together on stage. Craig’s head will be immense from the success of Chernobyl. But, you know, he has still graciously agreed to participate in this live show.

**Charlie:** He’s lowering himself. You see, he’s lowering himself to take part.

**John:** So someone on Twitter this last week asked, “Have you and Craig ever had successes at the same time?” Because Craig has Chernobyl and I have Aladdin. And I said, no, not that I’m aware of. And so I think we’re going to become insufferable.

**Charlie:** You can’t call each other out on it.

**John:** No.

**Charlie:** Because you’d both be right.

**John:** So it’s going to be a really interesting live show. So there could be some fireworks.

**Charlie:** But you’re not going to listen to anyone. You’ll just be monsters. You’ll be like Godzilla.

**John:** Craig’s rider for just this live show has been crazy. It’s been months of negotiation. But I think we finally got through most of it. We’ll try.

Charlie Brooker, welcome to Los Angeles. People by your accident might guess that you do not live in America.

**Charlie:** No, I don’t.

**John:** I did not know anything about you or your show until I was on a live show for Slate Culture Gabfest with Craig. We did a little crossover episode. And Natasha Lyonne as her sort of endorsement, her One Cool Thing essentially, said you have to watch this series Black Mirror and I didn’t know what it was. I wrote it down and I started watching it immediately. It is a remarkable program. And I would have assumed that you had done nothing before that, but then I checked your credits and you’ve done a tremendous amount. You have credits all the way back to ’99.

**Charlie:** Yeah.

**John:** And most of them seem like comedy things that are related to cultural moments. Rewind your–

**Charlie:** That’s fair enough. I mean, I’ve had an odd kind of accidental career. I started out I was a cartoonist at one point when I was a teenager. Then I became a video games reviewer. Then I started doing a website that had sort of topical – it was extremely vicious satire of television on it. And that led me to get work. Simultaneously I started working for a topical comedy show in the UK. And I got a gig writing TV reviews for The Guardian.

So most of the stuff that I’d done until about 2008, in fact everything I’d done until 2008 was comedy. So all the TV stuff I’d done was comedy. And in the UK I sometimes present shows. So I do a show intermittently now that’s kind of Daily Show esque, I guess you’d call it, which was called Screen Wipe. It was about TV. Then we did News Wipe, which was about the news. Started doing annual 2016 Wipe or whatever you’d call it.

And then I sort of developed a parallel career I guess, 2008 we did a show called Dead Set which was like a zombie series. It’s kind of like a prototype Black Mirror in a way in that it’s an absurd premise that we then play straight. So a zombie apocalypse happens and the only people who survive are the participants in a series of Big Brother that’s going out in the UK. And they’re 10 people who have been chosen to not get on.

So, yeah, and then myself and Annabel Jones who is my sort of co-conspirator on all of this stuff, we were asked would you like to do something us. And we’d always been a fan of shows like The Twilight Zone, Tales of the Unexpected. I don’t know if you’ve got that over here.

**John:** No.

**Charlie:** It’s like Roald Dahl short stories. Really creepy. And Hammer House of Horror was another show, don’t know if you ever saw. And the show we came up with was Black Mirror and we that was in 2011. At the same time as we were doing Black Mirror we were also doing a show called A Touch of Cloth, it’s like Naked Gun. So polar opposite stuff.

So in the UK I guess up until 2008, 2011, I was mainly known for doing comedy stuff.

**John:** So talk to me about that initial conversation about the idea of Black Mirror. Going in they say how about an anthology series. What is the discussion that leads to the specific idea for Black Mirror and what does it look like in those meetings? What are you describing to them?

**Charlie:** Well, initially it was slightly different in that it was – there wasn’t going to be a focus on technology so much. It’s become sort of shorthand for that in a way. It was very much just going to be an update on Twilight Zone style stories. I’d read a biography of Rod Sterling. I felt that at the time those kind of things were missing from television. And when I was growing up – I didn’t see The Twilight Zone until I was a teenager, but the BBC used to put on really strange one-off controversial, thought-provoking, high-concept plays that would always generate a lot of controversy and often be quite horrifying.

And I felt that that sort of thing at the time was slightly missing on television. And then when they rebooted Dr. Who, which was about 2006 or so, I thought well maybe – because that’s almost an anthology show.

**John:** It is. Yeah.

**Charlie:** I thought well maybe there’d be an appetite for this. So that was what we – originally the pitch was it was going to be eight half hours. I was only supposed to write like two of them or something. And it said, I think originally it definitely mentioned technology might be one of the themes, but the idea was just to look at shows like The Twilight Zone and where they would be doing an episode about McCarthyism or something like that we’d be doing terrorism say.

And then because we were only doing three we ended up – the technological stories seemed to be the most interesting ones. Although actually I’d written a whole completely different episode first which we were about to start shooting that, again, didn’t have any technological element to it at all. It was incredibly earnest. And then a new head of Channel 4, the Channel that put it out in the UK, a new head of Channel 4 came in and she did not like this script. I have to say probably in retrospect she was right. They were going to pull the plug on it and if this wasn’t going ahead basically the whole show wasn’t going ahead.

So, there was some panic going on on our part. So I had a meeting with her where my job was to try and persuade her that this was a good idea, that this very earnest episode we were doing about the Iraq War was well worth her time. And if she wasn’t going to go for it, in my back pocket I had the idea for the national anthem episode which is the one with the prime minister and the pig. And I thought well if she doesn’t go for this I might as well pitch that because what have I got to lose.

**John:** Absolutely. Something versus nothing.

**Charlie:** Exactly. So, I ended up pitching that and luckily for me she laughed. Her first question was does it have to be a pig.

**John:** That’s a classic development note question. Does it have to be a pig?

**Charlie:** [laughs] Well, and we went through all the different things it could be there in the meeting. At one point I think I suggested a wheel of cheese or a frozen chicken. And then we went, no, a pig is probably best.

**John:** It has to be a pig.

**Charlie:** Yeah. And I went off and wrote the first ten pages or so, just to try and persuade her. And it was a parody of 24 that I was basically writing. And luckily for us she went for it. So, I mean, that episode is obviously one of our most divisive ones and I think in the UK it’s received slightly differently than it is say here, because I was known for doing fairly unusual comedy stuff.

**John:** Absolutely. So people could see the joke of it played differently there than it does here.

**Charlie:** Yeah.

**John:** But I want to get back to this idea of you talk about Twilight Zone, we had Tales from the Dark Side which sounds like a similar kind of thing, generally they’re self-contained stories that ask a question and there’s always a fantastical element or big sci-fi element that lets you focus on differently. In your case it’s technology and it’s a what-if on technology but a generally a very near technology. Things that are almost possible today. And how early in the process of these first three episodes of this first season – so the first three episodes are The National Anthem, which is the one with the pig, Fifteen Million Merits which is the prison-ish situation, and The Entire History of You. So those last two are much more clearly near future technology things. How soon did you know that that was the unifying theme?

**Charlie:** I guess it was, so Fifteen Million Merits had been written but so had this other earnest episode. As soon as that one was – the one that we were going to do was sort of scrapped, The National Anthem I realized there was a sort of drumbeat of social media going throughout it. And I thought, well hang on a minute, and we’d already been speaking to Jesse Armstrong who wrote The Entire History of You which was the third one. And so we realized well all three of these are about technology. And then we realized that, well, really we can use technology in the same way that The Twilight Zone would use the supernatural to tell a story. We can have fantastical things happening. And a lot of the technology we show is impossible, but because of the era we’re living in you kind of go along with it. As long as it looks grounded enough, and it looks like it functions the way you imagine it should, you kind of go with it. So, I think it was then. And then once we’d done that first – I think it must have been by the time we were finishing Entire History of You I thought well this is the way forward for the rest of the season.

It’s strange though, because then looking at the second season one of the episodes there is White Bear which – it looks like it’s a comment saying aren’t people on phones zombies. It’s a zombie movie with people filming things. So I think that was – sometimes we like to remind ourselves it’s not a sci-fi show basically. On the show itself we can lose sight of that.

**John:** Let’s talk about, as you’re figuring out an episode, because with an anthology show like this where each show is about a thing, are you starting with what the one-hour of entertainment is going to be about? Is it the idea or is it the character? Because ultimately the character has to drive that thing. But in this anthology that is so idea-driven you have to be able to sell that idea. So where was the push and pull between those two?

**Charlie:** Yeah. And that’s something that I think I got better at now. There’s certainly – when we’ve done weaker episodes it’s because the story is dictating what happens. It really depends. So sometimes – sometimes the story idea comes about from as you were saying a what-if, some crazy scenario that you imagined. You think, OK, that’s interesting. The different ways that could play out, I’m immediately interested in that. Other times it really depends – something like San Junipero which was – actually I’m going to rewind a bit. Actually Be Right Back was probably – Be Right Back was an interesting one.

So Be Right Back which is in season two, and I think it’s – I feel it’s one that’s slightly unjustly overlooked as an episode. It’s one of my favorites. And Owen Harris directed it who also did San Junipero. And that had stemmed from an experience I’d had that was in the ‘90s a former flat mate and friend of mine had died. And then it was one of the first times that somebody I knew had passed away. And then a couple of years after that, if you remember at the time when cell phones had limited memory and you could only store like a set number of phone numbers in there.

**John:** Oh, of course, yeah.

**Charlie:** And I was trying to make room for a new phone number in my phone which meant I had to delete old ones. And I scrolled through and I saw the name of this friend of mine and thought I can’t delete that. Even though it’s just a number I literally can’t ring that ever again. And there was something very strange – unexpected and strange about that moment. And so I knew I wanted to do a story that sort of spoke to that strange connection you can feel with – a very impersonal piece of technology can throw up something, an incredibly personal moment.

**John:** So I want to clarify that. So that leads to an idea that can be the premise of an episode, but it’s really an emotional spark. It’s like I have an emotional connection to this thing that I know is not the actual person. It’s just all of my memories is embodied in this slot in the phone.

**Charlie:** Yeah. It’s a little souvenir. It’s like one of the few reminders I had of this person. I didn’t have photos of this person. That was the one thing I had. And I was suddenly struck by it.

And then as is often the case, I think, with our episodes what happens is you’ve got an idea like that or really not an idea just a feeling, you’ve got that, and then I got really interested in the world of sort of psychics and mediums who purport to be putting people in place with their loved ones who’ve passed on. And these two ideas sort of glommed together and I was sitting up late one night. We’d just had our first baby. And I was doing the sort of night shift, which incidentally was weirdly a brilliant motivator because I knew I could only work in short bursts.

**John:** So many writers I’ve talked to say productivity actually soared because they knew they only had little windows of time.

**Charlie:** Yeah. It’s like Pomodoro technique or something that screams at you. And you can’t go outside. You can’t go anywhere. You’ve got nothing else to do. And I was on Twitter or something like that and I just saw updates from people scrolling past and I was just struck by what if I was the last person on earth, all these people were dead, and these messages were being generated by some kind of AI. And then you sort of remember these other ideas you had and you go, OK, I’m starting to see a story here.

Now, at that point I thought, so then you sort of end up creating the characters. I’m not sure the process by which I sort of thought who would find this the most upsetting possibly, if there was something that could generate text based on someone’s personality. Who would find that most upsetting? And the answer was a sort of recently bereaved widow who is expecting a baby, sort of my port of call, and so I think this is a very rambling answer I’m giving here.

**John:** I like it though.

**Charlie:** And that’s an odd one, because that episode I didn’t – at that stage in doing the show I hadn’t learned to plan things either. So I would write scripts as I went along.

**John:** You were just doing it by feel.

**Charlie:** Yeah. Just. Which meant that I ended up making all sorts of errors.

**John:** What’s an example of an error you would make by doing it that way?

**Charlie:** Ooh, in the original National Anthem there was a whole subplot involving the government picking up anyone who had ever been on some sort of terror watch list and trying to beat a confession out of them that tonally went – I was trying to play for comedy. It was like somebody gets beaten to death in an interrogation room and it–

**John:** Did it shoot?

**Charlie:** No. No it didn’t. So there was one scene in National Anthem as well that tonally, there’s a porn star he meets in National Anthem, there’s a guy they rope in to try and perform this act. There’s a moment when the two of them, the prime minister and the porn star meet in the corridor in the original script, and the porn star gives him the only good advice he gets all day long about how to deal with what’s about to happen. And we dropped it because just tonally it was very much at odds – but sometimes, White Bear I completely – White Bear is a good example of something where I totally messed it up. I wrote the whole – that was the next episode.

Now it’s one of my favorites because it’s got a really horrific twist and it’s a bit – I was trying to channel things like the Wicker Man and like there’s a short Spanish film called, I think it’s Spanish, called La Cabina. Have you ever seen that?

**John:** No, I don’t know La Cabina.

**Charlie:** Look it up. I won’t tell you anything about it except it’s about a guy and a phone booth. That’s all I’m going to say. It’s about 15 minutes. I was trying to channel that sort of thing. And I originally wrote that script three times. We were about to shoot it. I had written this thing, I had this notion about if you’ve seen White Bear there’s a story they tell the main character in it about–

**John:** About what’s actually going on.

**Charlie:** About what’s going on. And they say there’s a symbol appeared on all the TVs and everyone is behaving like zombies effectively. In the original script that was–

**John:** The actual premise.

**Charlie:** That was the actual premise. There was just this mysterious symbol appeared that made 30% of the population act like psychopaths and 30% act like bystanders. And 30% were the quarry. And I wrote it – it was very confused. But we had to shoot it because we were running out of time. We were literally scouting locations we were trying to work out, because I’d written in all these complicated locations, and we were based on a sort of former maybe US Air Force base in the UK. And we were looking for places to shoot the locations that were mentioned in the script. And one of them, it said it was a shop, but we couldn’t find a shop, but we could find this gas station.

And the location guy, we were looking around, and he said well you’ll have to film this way because there’s a fence around this whole place. So we can’t ever see in that direction. And I thought well a fence around the whole, that’s actually – oh, hang on a minute. And suddenly had a much more interesting idea. And just went off and rewrote the whole thing. Like just threw it away and rewrote the whole thing in like two days or something.

We had a director on board already, so we had to say to him, Carl Tibbetts, I had to say to him, sorry, I’ve totally rewritten the entire script. And luckily he was – but that happened because, and I’m in two minds about that. That happened because I hadn’t been doing any planning, I’d just been trying to write this story from a slightly confused premise. And then because I was forced into a corner suddenly I was in a position where literally I saw this fence around the thing and suddenly I sort of had a eureka moment and realized I could sort of dig myself out of the hole. You can’t dig yourself out of a hole, can you?

**John:** Well, you can dig a different hole to–

**Charlie:** You could dig some stairs?

**John:** Yes, you could use your shovel to maybe dig your way up to something.

**Charlie:** Yes.

**John:** That’s probably. You dug yourself out of it in a way.

**Charlie:** I dug myself, I stood on the shovel.

**John:** What it sounds like though is you’re trying to both plan for what you’re going to need, but also be flexible for better ideas as they come up.

**Charlie:** Yeah.

**John:** And so you were ready to be lucky. If you had felt confident about the episode that you’d written you probably would have ignored the fence and stuck with what you had.

**Charlie:** Yes. Definitely.

**John:** Because you allowed yourself to feel some insecurity you could say, oh, OK, there’s a better idea. There’s a way of containing this. Because I mean what you’re describing sounds like a completely different episode. Because I love White Bear. I think it is great. And it relies on that twist at the end about what’s really going on. And it sounds like if you hadn’t planned for the episode to be one way that twist never would have come.

**Charlie:** Absolutely. And that was why, I mean, I just knew it was – it was like sort of realizing at the altar you had married the wrong person or something. This was happening and I knew it wasn’t right. And everyone basically knew the script wasn’t right. And then so suddenly to have had this moment was such a relief, but it was also terrifying. And then on the next episode of that season, which was the Waldo Moment one, that’s where I really ran out of time. And I was kind of not happy with my finished script. I think there were lots of good ideas in it but I didn’t – weirdly it should have been a separate thing. It should have been like a separate miniseries or something like that. I should have had more time to develop.

**John:** Absolutely. It didn’t feel like it wanted to be in one hour of time.

**Charlie:** Yeah.

**John:** And let’s talk about that though because the format of an anthology series is about an hour long for episodes, although you’ve gone past those boundaries now. You have to set up your premise very quickly, or at least your world-building premise. Like this is what is possible in this universe of this episode. And people have a general expectation about what kinds of things can happen in a given episode, but there’s a pretty wide range.

You need to establish your characters very, very quickly. And you though have to decide at what point do you let the audience know what the episode is about. And that feels like a fundamental choice you’re making pretty early in the process or not?

**Charlie:** Yeah. I mean, White Bear was a good example of something where I guess in a way, I haven’t really thought about it, but because I had a story that I then was going to throw out but was going to use as the fiction they tell her within the episode, it meant that I had to sort of cover story that I could tell the viewer for about 75% of the running time. And then in a strange way, once you know what it is you’re hiding and you’ve worked out how long you’re going to hide it, it curiously makes some things easier because it actually limits your range of options. It sort of forces your hands on all sorts of decisions I guess. Which I hadn’t really thought about.

I mean, I found the stress of doing White Bear, it nearly falling apart and then me feeling like I hadn’t really done a good enough job with the Waldo Moment meant that when we did the Christmas one and that one I planned like meticulously. And that was interesting because that was another story where there was this big sort of reveal. We knew there was going to be a big reveal. Once you know that it sort of means you can spend, yes, and I’m always slightly worried that the audience is going to get there first. That they will – San Junipero, I thought people were going to get that in the first instance, like when they first – there’s a moment early on where Mackenzie as Yorkie is trying on different outfits. And it looks like a sort of a montage that you’d see in a John Hughes movie or something like that. Owen who directed that as well is a huge John Hughes fan and wanted to sort of channel all these things.

And in the script what it’s saying is that she – at one point it says she sort of magically changes outfits. And look. And Girlfriend in a Coma is playing on the radio at one point. And I thought everyone is going to immediately twig what is going on here. And I was pleasantly surprised when people didn’t. Although that’s again something – the other thing I guess I’ve learned is that I think that the most important draft in a way of the script is the edit. So myself and Annabel spend a lot of time in the edit and it never ceases to amaze me how much you can continue to tweak and change – you can rescue things that haven’t worked and you can bring in new things you didn’t notice yourself. And when you’re playing – when you’re revealing something that’s also crucial because that’s how you – you’re trying to gauge at what point people are going to understand exactly what’s going on.

White Bear actually there’s little flashbacks in that as well which I thought, oh, people are going to guess this.

**John:** And they don’t.

**Charlie:** And they don’t.

**John:** So White Bear is an example of sort of a two-stage reveal. First that the world is not what she thinks it is, and that we think we have good insight into who this character is or sort of that we’re seeing it through her eyes. And she’s a trustworthy narrator to some degree but there’s more going on. Shut Up and Dance is again that sort of same situation where we think we understand the premise quite early on that he’s being compelled to do these things and we don’t realize that there’s more to him than we sort of knew at the start. And looking back it’s like, oh, that is what that first scene was and we don’t know that’s why he was chosen.

**Charlie:** That was another one that changed actually. So Shut Up and Dance originally, so there’s like Kenny who is the young kid and Hector who is the older guy who he meets, and originally there was a reveal that Hector who Kenny – they’re both being blackmailed. For people who haven’t seen the episode they’re both being blackmailed by anonymous hackers. And originally the reveal was that Hector had been waiting for an underage prostitute in the room. And so the story was he’s sort of guiding Kenny along and he’s forcing Kenny into doing the more unpleasant aspects of this sort of horrible game they’ve been sent on.

And I came to the end of the script and we’re like it just doesn’t – you sort of know he’s a bastard from the first time he turns up and that’s not very interesting. Well, what if Kenny has got that secret then? That’s more interesting. And, oh OK, we care about him from the first time we see him. Then you can go back and you can go, well OK, what’s a good way of making us care about Kenny. Well, we’ll show him doing something that seems kind. So in just about the first scene you see him handing – a little girl has left her toy behind and he goes and hands it to her. And of course on the second watch that takes on a very sort of sinister – it’s actually Annabel’s daughter.

**John:** Oh no.

**Charlie:** Well no one wanted to put their own kids forward for that. [Unintelligible] She won’t mind me saying that. Her kids are all – they’re in lots of the episodes actually. And so afterwards you realize so that I realized was the beauty of knowing what the ending was. I’m so amateur. I realized that it’s helpful to know what the ending is when you’re writing the bit at the start. Because you can start kind of doing all of that stuff.

**John:** But everyone listening to this episode would assume though that you start at the ending. Like a mystery story where you sort of start with the ending and work your way forward. It doesn’t sound like that really is the process for you.

**Charlie:** Sometimes it is. Sometimes – I mean, when I get very excited about and episode, when it works at its best is when I sort of see what the end scene is. And sometimes then when you’re writing it that changes. San Junipero, good example where originally I did write a sort of story treatment for that. And, again, originally, I should say these things in order. So originally I’d written a short story treatment and it was a man and a woman. And the reveal was, oh, they’re old people. That was sort of the extent of it. And it ended at the point one of them meets the other one in real life and sees that they’re paraplegic. That was the ending.

And then I was sort of thinking, well, isn’t this more interesting – and they were going to get married in it, but isn’t this more interesting if they’re getting married – if we make it a same sex couple they can get married in 1987 which wasn’t possible in 1987 and that in itself is sort of more interesting. I started writing the script from this sort of rough outline I’ve got. And when I got to the point where they meet in real life in the script I thought, oh, I’ll keep going then. I don’t want it to stop here. I wonder what happens when they do get married then. So I sort of just kept going.

So from that point on it was much more – that was me sort of feeling my way along to the end. And then what that meant was, and I never used to believe it when people would say, “Oh, I started writing a scene and the characters just did this and I didn’t know where it…” I used to think you liar. And but that’s what happened. There’s a scene where Kelly and Yorkie have a kind of confrontation and you find out what is going on and what’s Kelly’s deal basically. And why she doesn’t really want to put roots down in San Junipero. A backstory with a husband and daughter. And that kind of just came out – and I don’t think that really changed at any point. And it was sort of like, you know, it’s one of the most powerful moments in the episode.

So, that was a good combination I guess of the two approaches, sort of planning it, thinking I knew where the ending was going. And then I went for a run in the middle of it, because like any basically dying mammal I now have to do exercise just to stay breathing. And I was going running and Spotify was on. And I was listening to ‘80s music because the thing was set in the ‘80s. And Heaven is a Place on Earth came on.

**John:** Perfect.

**Charlie:** And I was like, oh, that describes, and I liked the rye joke that they’re in a server basically on earth. And then I was immediately worried that we weren’t going to be able to clear it. And so I came back and wrote the ending really quickly. And so the whole script was one of the fastest ones I’ve written. It’s Sod’s Law that it’s turned out to be one of the most popular. It’s typical.

**John:** Now, after that season you went on – so season four had USS Callister, Metalhead, Black Museum. USS Callister sort of stands alone as just a great science fiction – it’s a remarkable episode.

**Charlie:** Oh, thank you.

**John:** Congratulations on it. But talk to us about the genesis of that because it’s obviously a very clear appreciation and reaction to a certain kind of Star Trek type TV show and, again, you established the premise really early on and yet our central character who seems like our point of entry ends up becoming the villain of the story. How does that develop as you’re working through story on that?

**Charlie:** That was, I can remember very clearly the genesis for – the whole story came about, we were shooting an episode for season three called Play Test and we were on the set and they were setting up for a scene involving special effects which we hadn’t used many of. And I said wouldn’t it be good, now that we’ve got this sort of tool, we can use special effects, why don’t we just do a space episode. That’s quite often how we think our way into episodes is how can – because we’re sort of almost – it helps oddly for me to imagine what’s the Black Mirror version of a space opera basically.

**John:** Sure.

**Charlie:** So, we knew we wanted to do an episode set in space and I’d also – somewhere along the lines been thinking what if you had – this is a horrible story – have you heard of Josef Fritzl? Do you know Josef Fritzl?

**John:** I don’t know who it is.

**Charlie:** He was this horrible man who kept a family in a dungeon. There was a guy in America who kept women in a dungeon. And so there was a sort of well what if you had someone who is a tyrant but they’re wielding ultimate power over a bunch of people who are copies of real people. And so those two ideas sort of glommed together and you think, OK, you could do – immediately there was something appealing about the idea of a world in which you have the captain of a spaceship who you think is the hero and then you realize none of this is real and he’s a madman effectively. Within this world he’s a horrific tyrant.

And then you think well why is he a tyrant in this world and then it’s like, oh, OK, he’s kind of – he’s enacting his grudged from his daily life where he feels powerless. And it’s office coworkers. And immediately there there’s a sort of comic gulf between the two worlds. That was an interesting example of, again, the first draft of that actually didn’t have the 1960s element in it. And I was thinking it would be fun if it had something else. I think it came about from an idea like well what should the spaceship look like. And I was like I’d love it if we did a Black Mirror episode that opened and it looked like Star Trek from the ‘60s. That would really confuse people. And then you think actually that’s quite interesting.

**John:** And appropriate.

**Charlie:** It’s a great look and also the power dynamics within there that now look dated, even though Star Trek was an incredibly progressive show, Kirk is going around the universe sort of trying to romance green women half the time. So, yeah, so that added an extra element. When we came to the – the original script that we shot, it was much clearer early on that Daly, there was something wrong with him. And I remember this was one of the times we got a note back from Netflix on the first sort of loose cut they saw where – so very early on Daly is in the office Nanette Cole comes in and they meet and he clearly – he’s delighted that somebody is being nice to him and seems to admire him.

And then Walton played by Jimmi Simpson comes in and sort of whisks her off and he’s very slick. And you see Daly looking sort of jealous. Now originally it was written in that you see his fist clenches. And Netflix said I don’t know that you need that actually. It’s really more interesting if you don’t know how you feel about him. And we cut it out and immediately it was much more interesting because it meant that the reveal that, oh, this guy is a bastard came just a few minutes later. You see him walk it onto the deck of the ship and grab Walton by the throat. And you realize he’s a monster.

So that’s a good example of something where losing something that I thought was a clever bit of a foreshadowing delayed the reveal to such a degree that it just had a lot more power I think for people. Because you really – people sympathize with him at the start because he seems – we also cut some dialogue, there was a bit where Michaela Cole’s character is talking to Cristin, who is Nanette, and she says, “Oh, Daly is a bit of a creep basically.” And we toned that – we cut – again, there was something in there that made it more apparent. She was like he’s creepy. She went into more detail. And again it gave too much away.

That was really good fun writing that episode as well because it meant we got to do all the stuff that we thought we could never do in Black Mirror. So it ends in a sort of chase through an asteroid belt towards a wormhole. All of that was just really good fun.

**John:** So let’s talk about, many of these episodes, I’m thinking of USS Callister, fresh example, is there’s a bit of magic hand-waving. You have to accept this is part of the world. And that’s true also in features. Like most features are based on sort of a premise concept that you have to accept that this is a thing that we’re going to say is legitimate in this. And so in the case of USS Callister it’s not only can he build these virtual worlds but he can just off a piece of DNA recreate the entire person.

**Charlie:** Yes.

**John:** So that doesn’t actually make sense and yet it is so fundamental to the premise that you are willing to accept it.

**Charlie:** Well that’s a very good point actually. Because we did spend, again, I’d forgotten this. This is one of those where you repress a memory. I’d forgotten that we spent a long time in the original draft, it was co-written with Will Bridges. And we spent a lot of time trying to explain why when Nanette wakes up on the ship she has all her memories in place. If she’s a clone she wouldn’t know anything.

And actually so in the original draft there’s a whole bit of business that involves – there’s a piece of technology from Season One/Episode Three, Entire History of You, the Grain, that records all your memories. So what we had, we had a whole explanation of that. Everyone has these memory grains and Daly has hacked her memory grain and he’s uploaded. And it was like well why would he do that? What’s the point? And also why do we have to establish that?

And I knew some people would go, “Well that doesn’t make sense.” There’s a line in it where somebody starts explaining, I think that Dudani starts explaining why they’ve got their memories intact. And Michaela Coel’s character just tells him to shut up.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Charlie:** And you kind of get away with it. I remember when we did Dead Set, the director of that was a guy called Yann Demange, and he used to wave away bits – I sometimes get very caught up on the logic of things. And he’d go, “It’s a movie moment. It’s a movie moment. It doesn’t matter. It’s a movie moment.” And he was right. I spent days arguing that it wouldn’t rain in San Junipero. Days. Because Owen wanted to shoot a scene in the rain and I was like, no, no, it wouldn’t – why would they make it rain. It’s paradise. Why would they make it rain? And he was like, “No one cares about that. It will look lovely.”

**John:** Yes.

**Charlie:** And he was right.

**John:** Rain can be nice. It can rain in paradise. One of the strange things about Black Mirror is that you’re writing about culture that is constantly changing and because you have become – because your shows have entered the cultural conversation people say like, “Oh, this is such a Black Mirror moment.” What does it feel like to be reflecting culture that you’re also changing? And to what degree are you aware that, you know, like these three episodes that are dropping right now, they’re going to enter the cultural conversation and change thoughts on that.

Are you mindful of that now in your success with the series?

**Charlie:** You can’t not be, I guess, to an extent. But you have to try. I mean, I just find that a terrifying thought. There’s something about that that’s absolutely terrifying. Because also it means that you’re – we generally try to give away very little about our episodes in advance because we want them to be a surprise. But we also know that, yeah, and I suppose also with an anthology where you’re – one of the things that, you know, we became known for was doing incredibly brutal endings and wiping all hope from the universe for a moment. Which I love doing every now and then. And sometimes we kind of almost deliberately overdo it, like Crocodile was a deliberate – well that’s a whole story actually.

So, you’re aware that – there’s a large subset of people who are coming to your show who want that. They want that horrible sort of feeling. But if you give it to them every time you’re not doing your job, I think, of the anthology show – of our anthology show we’re trying to be as varied in tone as we can within the… – I wanted to do an Airplane style episode.

**John:** Great.

**Charlie:** And I was talked out of it. I was talked out of it. I’m still not sure. I vacillate on that. I’m not sure whether it was a good idea or a terrible one. I really wanted to do one. I’ll have to do it under some other guise.

So there’s a weight of expectation I guess and I think – I mean, it’s very flattering when people go this is a bit like Black Mirror. Oh, that thing they’re doing in China, that’s quite Black Mirror. Oh, have you seen the news? It’s like an episode of Black Mirror. It’s flattering, it’s free publicity. It’s also terrifying as a mammal. It’s just frightening to think that the worst case scenarios that we’ve often been describing that those are reminding people of things they’re seeing in everyday life.

It’s something we don’t tend to – Annabel and I, we never really know whether the show has that much impact because we’re so busy. Because it takes so much time basically. Because they’re all – they’ve all got individual directors and individual casts. And a lot of the crew is completely different. We literally don’t really often get to go out and speak to people. [laughs] So it’s quite jarring when, I think last time I came to the US I was at immigration. They said what are you doing here. And I said I’m doing a thing, I’m doing a show. And they said what is it, and I said Black Mirror, and they’re like, “Oh!” And they called someone else over and said this is the guy who does Black Mirror. That’s really surprising and frightening because you think I’m going to just inevitably at one point going to let these people down.

I am now resigned to the fact that because we try – I think because we try to make the episodes as idiosyncratic as possible, when people inevitably compile their lists of which ones are their favorites you get some which are always near the top, but generally speaking I’ve read people hating on episodes that other people have loved. So you know that you’re never going to please everybody. And I think that’s sort of – hopefully that means we’re doing our job. Or at least failing in the right way.

**John:** I mean, you’re kind of unique in the realm of showrunners, and we’ve had many showrunners on the show, Aline Brosh McKenna, Benioff and Weiss, Damon Lindelof, who have been running these long time shows that have these huge fan bases who are invested in characters who they’ve seen over the course of years. And you don’t have that baggage. Every episode is its own thing and starting its own moment. So you don’t get the benefit of returning characters who can do stuff where you don’t have to set them up from scratch every time. But you get the freedom from expectation. A very limited set of expectations placed on any given installment of Black Mirror.

And I want to talk about Bandersnatch in relation to that because it’s billed as a Black Mirror experiment, a thing. Was it originally going to be a normal episode? When was the decision to make it its own event moment thing?

**Charlie:** Well originally it was part of season five. So we actually shot, so the season that we’ve just – they don’t like you to say dropped apparently. I was about to say dropped. No, no, no, it’s fine. I mean, I say dropped all the time. They say, “Don’t say dropped.” But I don’t think they gave me another word to say.

**John:** OK.

**Charlie:** So, what? Appeared?

**John:** Launched? No. Season five…debuted?

**Charlie:** Slithered? Slithered out?

**John:** Yeah.

**Charlie:** So Striking Vipers which is the first of the three, we’d already shot that. Smithereens had been written and there was some overlap with the filming of that with Bandersnatch.

Bandersnatch was always going to be interactive and that was an idea that – so Netflix had said to us, I think we were over for some season four stuff, and they said we’d like you to do an interactive story.

**John:** Oh, great.

**Charlie:** And they showed us how this tech worked. And me and Annabel both nodded and were very polite and said that looks great. And then we left the room and went no flipping way are we doing that because it’s going to be a gimmick. We don’t want to do it. And then a few weeks later we were having a – so the way it works – so I generally write all the scripts but I’m always working with Annabel, bouncing ideas off her. We have a healthy disrespect for each other, so she will not be shy about telling me that she thinks an idea stinks.

And so we have a sort of back and forth conversation. And during one of those conversations I had – I wanted to do another episode set in the past. And I wanted to do something about vintage computer games. That was–

**John:** Because that’s your background as well.

**Charlie:** Yeah. And so there’s a lot of real nostalgia for me in Bandersnatch. And then I had this idea which was, oh well, what if you’re controlling – it was about somebody starts receiving messages from their computer. And then I remembered the interactive thing they’d just shown us. And I was like well what if that’s you and then so he becomes aware that you’re there. Oh, that’s interesting.

And also, and I didn’t realize this at the time, but I’ll get onto that in a minute. Sorry. Because there’s a thing about interactive stories that’s just interesting generally. So that was it. Then we went back to Netflix and said, OK, we’ve got an idea. Originally it was much more simple. And then I started – so in trying to work out how to literally just write the story outline for this, I started out literally we were in the office and we had a whiteboard and I started with the flow chart. And then you quickly go on. I need a bigger whiteboard because I’ve run out of room. And then it was like, OK, there’s some software that does a flowchart for me. Maybe. No, actually, I need it to track what’s going on and remember what’s going on. And Netflix were also saying please test as many different things as you can.

So, then somebody said you should use Twine which is this interactive fiction software. And I looked at it and I thought I don’t have the time to learn that. That just looks complicated. It’s like html basically. And I used to do a bit of html stuff years ago.

**John:** But then you have to mark which characters are there and if there are any items that would carry through.

**Charlie:** Yeah. But what was useful, I ended up going back to Twine because it worked like flowchart software. So you’d make a cell and you’d type something in it and then it would automatically do the sort of piles that joined up. And as I did that it got fun. Planning it got fun. And it kept growing out into – so it kept expanding sort of length ways and width ways. And then suddenly you’d sort of think oh I can add a whole branch where this happens. And before you know it, you’ve of course fractionally it all expands out. So I did that. And then what I think what we realized I think was that it’s useful – if you’re doing an interactive story I think it was – what we stumbled across that I think was useful was because the main character of Stefan is separate, he understands that these commands are being given to him. It’s not like something where you’re just telling him what to do and he just does it. Because it’s hard to keep him consistent if you do that.

So I was playing Red Dead Redemption 2 which I think is a very, very good open world game. It’s great. There’s a scene in it early on where you go and sort of have a conversation with one of your lost loves. And it was like quite well done. He has a conversation with this ex love of his on the doorstep and it’s quite poignant. And the turns away, gets on his horse. And then I accidentally like ran into a pig and then thought, oh, I’ll get off. I think the pig ran at me. So I shot the pig, sort of by accident. And then like somebody came running after me. And I thought what sort of character is this guy now? Murders a pig on the doorstep of his lost love. He’s a psychopath.

Whereas when there’s some sort of narrative distance it means that no matter how successful people found Bandersnatch or didn’t, it meant that hopefully Stefan was always a troubled young man reacting to a problem. And so he would start to resist what you were telling him to do.

So that was interesting. And then I learned a lot – there was one big thing that we had to cut out, and it’s incredibly hard to cut things out of an interactive story. That was the other thing I discovered. So originally the whole thing was structured a bit more like an escape room. So there was a central puzzle that you had to work out, which we have a bit of it down one branch. There’s a bit to do with the phone number. The psychiatrist’s phone number.

It was originally structured so you would always come to a point where he was trying to remember a phone number and he couldn’t remember it. And the idea was that the first time you encountered this you’re like well how am I supposed to know what the phone number. I can’t possibly. And so you’d get frustrated and it would sort of loop you back. And then by the time you’d failed in two different ways you’d realize that these recaps it was showing you–

**John:** Had new information.

**Charlie:** Were telling you the number. We had to massively simplify it because people just did not – I mean, we shot it. But people just did not understand what was going on.

**John:** Well ultimately you’re making a show about a guy developing a video game and the end product is sort of like the video game. It has to be tested and played like a video game to see whether people can actually get it. It’s not normally audience testing. It’s literally like can you – and people aren’t necessarily expecting a puzzle.

**Charlie:** No. They’re not expecting a puzzle, although weirdly – well, we did get some feedback afterwards. People did understand, one thing which was terrifying was that it was appearing quickly that people couldn’t remember a number. It was a five-digit number they were given and they couldn’t remember it for more than like 15 seconds. That was one of the first big boulders in the road we discovered.

Then we had a problem with translation. Because I hadn’t really thought that through. The numbers were buried in dialogue. So there were numbers like two which were just it’s two, what, but obviously when you translate that around the suddenly you can’t do it. So that was a problem. And you can’t predict what – people did understand that it was a puzzle and it was interesting that they said that people appreciated the fact that there was a puzzle involved and they enjoyed that. That was something they came back and said they enjoyed. But they also found it quite confusing and baffling.

So I don’t think that’s something we quite nailed.

**John:** You couldn’t cross that gap.

**Charlie:** Yeah. And another thing was there were some things – there was one branch of it, this is one thing that frustrates me about it. There’s one branch of it where we completely break the fourth wall and you can tell the main character that you’re watching him on Netflix.

**John:** I really liked that moment. It’s absurd and also–

**Charlie:** It’s ridiculous.

**John:** And it makes you feel like, OK, I’m aware that there’s a comedy happening here.

**Charlie:** Exactly. Well, that’s the comedy. Totally upends it and it turns it into a comedy. The thing that I can’t quite – originally that was not accessible on your first go through. And then we were sort of concerned – it was one of these things where we were concerned that people would just get down to a more normal real world ending so to speak, certainly a less fourth wall breaking ending, and would miss that. And that was probably a bit of insecurity on our part to make that accessible from the start. But what that meant was that when it came to that point and it gives you two options, frustratingly slightly more people pick the Netflix branch because they didn’t quite understand what the other one was. It was like a symbol.

And so I think for some people that meant that their first experience of getting to a sort of fairly meaty ending broke the fourth wall and therefore sort of possibly undermined the drama of everything else in a way. So I’m not sure – I’m in sort of two minds about that. It was also a lot of business to do with dreams. Like you have to – where he goes through the mirror and stuff. There was such a logistical nightmare going on. Yeah.

And we ended up having to cut a couple of endings out because we just – it was just getting unwieldy.

**John:** Do you get data back showing which paths people took most?

**Charlie:** Yes. We had a whole sort of postmortem debrief they did where they showed us – or we don’t get numbers, of which I’m delighted about because there’s just such relief. But they did tell us – the one that really stuck in my head was when it comes to why the chopping up the body or burying the body it was exactly the same percentage split as Brexit in the UK. It was 52 to 48. Which surprised me actually because I thought most people would not want to – it was 48% wanted to chop the body up and I thought that would be much lower than that because that seemed such a gruesome option.

But generally speaking most of the sort of percentages were kind of roughly where we thought they would land. There were a couple of exceptions. There was a certain amount of stuff we could tweak because the whole thing was obviously weird because having done – just to rewind a bit – having done the story outline in Twine I then started – I realized that I couldn’t find tools that did this, that let you write screenplays in this interactive way. I just couldn’t find something that did that.

So, we ended up realizing, OK, what we need to do is assign a sort of number to each of these cells, at 1A, 2B, and so then I used Scrivener to create this confetti of individual little scenes. Wrote those up. And then had to export those into something else. Paste them back into Twine. So there was this convoluted route we went to. Because we had to get to a point where we had a script that you could read and it would say if you want to do this turn to page such and such.

And also you could read on an iPad and literally click on it and it would take you there, which sort of made life a lot easier for actors. But because the tools weren’t there it was one of those things where you end up with about five different applications open. Then Netflix built a tool for the edit which then managed to import – they imported my Twine thing directly into the edit which made life a lot easier. But it would crash. There would be things where it would be like, oh no, Colin is alive. He’s meant to be dead.

**John:** Yeah. Your episode crashed Netflix probably. The entire system probably.

**Charlie:** The outline crashed. The outline would crash. There was this whole thing where Colin Whitman can jump off a balcony and if he does he’s dead for the rest of the story. And sometimes he would just pop up again and we were like what’s going on?

**John:** What’s happened?

**Charlie:** Which was quite in character for him actually. That was why I kept adding more Colin Whitman. As soon as we knew we had Will Poulter I kept adding more and more Colin Whitman as well because he’s great.

**John:** We have questions from listeners and I picked a few that I thought might be good for you. Chelsea from London asks…

**Charlie:** I’ve come all this way to hear from somebody from London. And they’re called Chelsea.

**John:** “I watched Searching the other night, a film that’s basically all social media, and towards the end I found it was asking too much of me in terms of suspending disbelief. As writers, how can you tell when you’re asking too much regarding the suspension of disbelief? Obviously genre plays a large role in this, but for a film set in the real world how do you know where to draw the line?”

Suspension of disbelief. So, within your shows you are establishing the fundamental premise of sort of like what happens in this world. But do you struggle with suspension of disbelief in your episodes?

**Charlie:** You’ve cited a couple of examples. There’s a good example in USS Callister where we sort of hope you’ll just go with it. Striking Vipers, the new one, there’s a whole thing that they can do in this game that they shouldn’t really be able to do. But we just think you’ll go with it. So sometimes you just sort of gauge it that way.

I haven’t seen Searching so I don’t know specifically what it is. I often find that with the depiction of computers still a lot of the time in movies or TV they are shown doing things they can’t possibly do in the present day. And that’s often quite frustrating.

I think we do spend a lot of time kind of on product design as well to try and make it look like all the technology is just very functional, like quite sleek. A lot of the time we’re sort of trying to remove technology from the backgrounds as well. So there will only be a couple of little devices. And hopefully that makes it feel more grounded.

And there’s also generally that rule that you can withstand one fantastical thing happening.

**John:** Exactly.

**Charlie:** As long as that’s – I think as long as people enjoy that enough. That’s the other thing. As long as people enjoy that enough they’ll go with it. And if two impossible things happen. That’s the famous Speed example. The bus jumping in Speed where you don’t really believe it could do that.

**John:** No.

**Charlie:** Yeah.

**John:** So you get that fundamental suspension of disbelief that is part of the premise. And so I think your episodes tend to do that. It sounds like what Chelsea is reacting to is choices that characters have made or twists that are revealed that she’s not believing the characters are really doing that thing.

**Charlie:** Right.

**John:** It didn’t feel real to the rest of the world that she’d set up.

**Charlie:** I mean, well that is a trickier one. Because that is – and that’s just done to how authentically you think the character is reacting. I mean, in Black Mirror really quite often, and this is something that sort of depresses me when I look back at it, we’ve got in our episode somebody – it starts out somebody slowly realizes they’re in a trap. They start struggling. It gets worse. The end.

**John:** Yeah. [laughs] There’s a premise!

**Charlie:** So in a way we often don’t let them escape which is one of the reasons why hopefully people go with it. I don’t really know. I think a lot of it is just as long as you feel that the characters are reacting authentically to the moment then you will go with it. And in terms of the concepts, again, as long as you’re only trying to do one crazy thing at a time, again, people will hopefully go along with that.

It’s a difficult one though because, yeah, that is a tricky one. I mean, we’re lucky as well in a way that we don’t often I guess, because our stories are shorter, we can kind of burn all the characters up and the scenario up really quickly before the logic would strain it too much.

**John:** Well also the universes that you’re creating and because they’re only a single episode we can assume that this technology exists and we are seeing it in the context of this one story. And we don’t have to worry about like, wait, if you could do that your entire universe would be very different. I look at Westworld and Westworld is a show that has to grapple with that because there is technology that exists in Westworld and you’re like would it really be used in this way?

**Charlie:** Right.

**John:** And so if it is used in this way, what does the world outside of Westworld look like? And that’s what they’re dealing with in the third season of Westworld.

**Charlie:** See, now I deliberately haven’t watched Westworld because I’ll get crippling professional jealousy. I tend to avoid things that I think might be – and the number of times we’ve gone, “Oh, it would be great to do a Black Mirror western. Oh, hang on, Westworld exists.”

So another good example I guess, so Be Right Back. Actually so Be Right Back is a good example I guess of something where when writing it I was aware that – so it starts off she starts communicating via email, a messaging app, with her deceased husband. Then it sort of escalates and she’s talking to a synthesized version of him on the phone. Then he says would you like to meet me. And at this point I thought people are not going to go along with this. That there’s a sort of android version that shows up.

And there were two things that helped. One was the story was deliberately set in the middle of nowhere. So they were in an isolated farmhouse. She was on her own. So you’re not thinking does somebody down the road have one of these? And there’s a scene we cut out. There’s a woman who originally recommends this to her. And originally there was a scene where you see Martha phoning this woman up and going why did you do this. And you see that this woman is in bed with a robot of her own. I think we actually shot that and we cut it out.

So, we isolated them so you’re not thinking too much about the outside world. And so hopefully those logical questions don’t come into it.

**John:** That’s Westworld as well. Westworld is on a ranch.

**Charlie:** Yeah. The other thing we weirdly lent into the absurdity there, so when she gets this thing it literally comes sort of packaged up like a rubber man. And she puts it in a bathtub and drops nutrients into the water. And meanwhile she’s got Donald Gleason in her ear telling her how weird this is and weirdly acknowledging that it’s weird and it’s crazy.

**John:** You’re hanging a lantern on it to make it clear that this show is acknowledging that this is an odd moment.

**Charlie:** So you’re not sitting there going, well, come on, this wouldn’t happen. Because somebody onscreen is saying that. Saying isn’t this strange? So, I think hopefully, yeah, those are two tricks we got away with there. We quite often tend to isolate our characters generally because it means you’re not considering the whole of society.

Jesse’s original script for Entire History of You had loads of really great extra details about the world in which everyone is recording everything all the time. But it was just too much. Stuff for a whole movie or a series in its own right.

**John:** Brett asks, “As a musician transitioning to a writing career I’ve been wondering given the power of streaming in both music and film is this the best time or the worst time to get a foot in the door?”

So we are clearly in a really strange, interesting time. This is also a moment where I can ask, “What is television?”

**Charlie:** Yeah. I don’t know. I really don’t know what it is. And I don’t know what constitutes. I mean, if I look at, obviously Bandersnatch, what is that? I don’t know what it is. It’s sort of a game. It’s sort of a film. It’s not on a gaming platform.

**John:** But it could be. I mean–

**Charlie:** It could be.

**John:** If it weren’t filmed, if it were done all just with CG characters then it literally would feel like a game.

**Charlie:** The number of times I was like it would be so much easier to do, when we were filming it, would have been so much easier. Yeah, I don’t know. And then things like, so Roma I watched at home, because I’ve got two young kids, really busy doing the show all the time. Never get to go out to go to the cinema. So I watched Roma at home and I had such limited windows in which to watch it. I watched it over three nights in sittings, divided up, like it was a series I was binge-watching, which I was perfectly happy to do. Which makes me a huge philistine.

So like we don’t even know quite what, like Black Mirror is an anthology show, but then sometimes we do standalone one-offs. I think we’ll probably do more of that sort of thing as well in the future. So, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t even know. I know we got some stick for when we did San Junipero it was like 61 minutes long and it got entered into the Best TV Movie category. And I know that annoyed some people. But tough luck.

I mean, I was delighted that we won, but I sort of thought, well, hopefully that means if we can be entered in that category and then people liked it enough to vote for it, well, you should get extra points shouldn’t you for taking up less of people’s time in this day and age? Like the shorter the better.

Something like Russian Doll, I really loved Russian Doll.

**John:** Oh my god, l loved those episodes were so short.

**Charlie:** 30 minutes long.

**John:** Going back to Natasha Lyonne again.

**Charlie:** And, well I met her the other night because I went to a Russian Doll event and I told her my favorite thing to say to people who I admire their work, and it’s true, I said I liked Russian Doll so much it made me angry.

**John:** Oh, me too.

**Charlie:** I was furious that I hadn’t thought of this show and I hadn’t written this show. And obviously there were certain things that it had in common with Bandersnatch. It was brilliant. And it was short. Don’t you wish sometimes you could sort things by length? Make life easier.

Sorry. So the question–

**John:** The question is–

**Charlie:** Is it the best time or the worst time? I would say it’s surly one of the best times.

**John:** I think it’s one of the best times, too.

**Charlie:** Because there’s so much. I mean, there’s a sort of probably unsustainable mountain of stuff being made that that means by just logic would dictate that there’s a need for more stuff. The machine needs more coal being shoved into it. So, it’s a pretty good time to do that. And also I guess technology is at the point – the thing that sort of changed my whole career, so he talks about transitioning from one career into another. So I was a video games reviewer. And I did sort of comic strips. And I felt I was in a sort of ghetto. And I wanted to be doing TV comedy and things like that. And the way – and this was like 1998 – and the way I managed to make that jump was by doing this small little website that was sort of I guess uniquely mine. It was a small thing I was doing on a deadline that meant people were noticing it. And now the technology exists for you to make – you only get two chances to make your own stuff in your career. One is at the very beginning and then sort of near the end.

**John:** Yes. You’re either a nobody or JJ Abrams.

**Charlie:** Exactly. So you might as well, so you have the means to produce stuff. Write a script. Make a short film. Just do anything that is uniquely yours. And then hopefully people can see it. The problem is of course you’re up against everyone else who is doing the same thing. That’s the downside.

**John:** Absolutely. The firehose problem is that there’s so much content it’s hard to pull those things out. So there’s at least three series that I have sort of backed up, like I really want to watch those things because I know they’re fantastic. I just have only the same 24 hours.

**Charlie:** It’s like being air traffic control, isn’t it? These things are taxiing round and round and round. Well, I mean, even something like Game of Thrones which is like the most – was it the most popular show in the world? Still, you know, I watched it all. Most of the people I know haven’t seen it. It’s the most popular show in the world. This is the only period in history when – I was watching a reality show not that long ago in the UK and one of the contestants his job was described as TV Presenter and Barman. And I thought this is the only period in history where those two – that’s two valid careers that one person can have. Because there’s so much content around.

**John:** I think the other reason why this is the best time is that with the globalization of things your show and any show is available everywhere to the culture at once. And so when I was in Scandinavia doing Arlo Finch press I was talking to one of my publishers and she said, “Oh, what are you watching?” And I said there’s a few things I really want to watch. Haunting Hill House. And she’s like, “I love that.” And it had just dropped. Sorry, we can’t say dropped anymore.

**Charlie:** Oh, you can say dropped. No. Say dropped.

**John:** It had debuted worldwide. So she was watching it in her own language. I was watching it in English. And we could have this conversation in ways that never happened before. So that globalization of things is a unique moment now.

**Charlie:** And you can watch – so I binged watch – I mean they’ve given a terrible title in English, Money Heist. Have you seen Money Heist? It’s called La Casa de Papel which I guess translates as the House of Paper, or something. So that’s probably too close to House of Cards. I guess that’s why they changed it to Money Heist. It’s ridiculous. It’s absolutely ridiculous. But it’s incredibly addictive. It’s basically 24, it’s Spanish though. It’s 24 about one bank heist.

**John:** Great.

**Charlie:** I mean, it knows it’s ridiculous. It gets so ridiculous. And it’s something that I probably wouldn’t have stumbled across if it hadn’t been for streaming platforms. Yeah. And that’s one of the most popular shows in the world I think outside of the US and Britain. It’s amazing.

We never thought Black Mirror would travel, because it seemed so idiosyncratic to us. But it’s very odd when they drop it. I’m going to say drop it. When they drop it. Drop it. What are they going to do? Delete it? They’re not going to delete it now. It’s too late.

When they drop it on the service it is a really weird sensation that you start getting feedback from around the world in a sort of wave as it goes through time zones.

**John:** So one thing I do want to point out that’s different though is Netflix, let’s hope it goes on for 100 years, but likely it won’t. And so at some point the episodes that you’ve made will exist somewhere? So traditionally there’s been a way to find old episodes of things and you can find those things, or a movie exists. We talked before about movies used to be on DVDs so you could at least like always find a movie. Sometimes you can’t find a movie. Something like the Bandersnatch episode without a server to run it on it doesn’t exist as a thing people can enjoy.

**Charlie:** But then someone will build a 2019 Netflix emulator. Emulation. I’ve got massively into emulation which is probably apparent from Bandersnatch. So hopefully the emulator – the emulation community will save the day.

**John:** Well, we’re already in a simulation.

**Charlie:** We are.

**John:** There will be emulation within the simulation.

**Charlie:** Yeah.

**John:** It stacks nicely.

**Charlie:** Which is something–

**John:** Turtles all the way down.

**Charlie:** We wanted to do that in the episode, have a bit in it where he’s playing a simple game and you actually – like a Frogger type game. But we didn’t have time.

**John:** I get that. It’s time for our One Cool Things though.

**Charlie:** OK.

**John:** My One Cool Thing, so I was back in Colorado this last week which is why Craig was hosting by himself. And we’re listening to Colorado Public Radio and there’s a voice and I’m like wait that’s me. And it was the only time in my life I’ve encountered my voice twin. I’m used to hearing my voice on the podcast. And this person sounded exactly like me. And so I listened enough so I could find out what his name was. His name is Matthew Zalkind. He is a cellist living is Colorado. And it was just a really odd moment for me because I almost only get recognized for my voice. I’ll be out at a Trader Joe’s paying for something and I’ll say something and they’re like, “Oh wait, you’re John August.”

**Charlie:** Right.

**John:** It’s almost entirely by my voice. So it was so odd for me to be hearing someone else’s voice. I could give this person a script and he could read it and be like, oh, well that’s John. If I do get hit by a bus Craig could just bring this person on to do my job.

**Charlie:** Well, and presumably the technology to do that anyway is five seconds away if it’s not already.

**John:** Oh clearly.

**Charlie:** I think it’s partly in existence. So it’s nice that you’ve discovered that voice just before the tidal wave.

**John:** And going back to some of your previous episodes, I think I brought this up on the show before is that I’ve taken all of the text from Scriptnotes, because we have transcripts for all of the episodes and broken them down into Craig and John, everything we’ve said separately. Run through a Markov chain generator. So I do have a little bot that can generate Craig sentences and John sentences and have them talking to each other. So at some point there will just be–

**Charlie:** Auto-generated–

**John:** Of Scriptnotes. We’ll have one episode that is just generated dialogue for me and Craig talking about things.

**Charlie:** It will be like, there’s a short Roald Dahl story about that. About an automatic writing machine. Because he was writing it in the ‘70s or something, it’s got literally foot pedals. He steps on a pedal to make it a bit more erotic and accidentally steps too far and stuff. So it’ll be like that. You’ll be able to just generate it constantly like 24-hour, an unending loop. What if it’s better?

**John:** What if it’s better? I mean, what is reality? Going back to your first episode of this new season which is the question of like who is the real person and what is reality if you know somebody only in a virtual way.

**Charlie:** And does it matter? If it’s as compelling as they’re finding it in that episode, yeah. Sometimes when we do stories like that it’s like I am no clearer on really – I don’t know that you always need to know the answer to the question you’re raising in a story, because I think it can be hopefully interesting if you literally do not know the answer to what’s going on entirely in that episode. I think that in terms of what that means is as confusing for me as it is for the characters I think. Maybe that’s just a weakness on my part and I should have just worked it out properly. Oh, you never know.

**John:** We’ll see. Craig could tell you because Craig wrote Chernobyl and he knows the answers to all–

**Charlie:** He does. But I have got to watch that. Literally everyone is telling me to watch that. And then I spoke to my wife last night and she was like, “I want to watch Chernobyl.” I’m like, all right. Yeah.

**John:** You’ll get home. You’ll watch it.

**Charlie:** Well, the government will make me watch it at this rate. It will be issued to me by the government. I have to wait. There’s an odd sensation. I have to wait. So I can’t start watching it now until I get home and watch it with my wife. We have to watch a nuclear meltdown together or my life won’t be worth living. And I’ll have to wait. I’m going to save that up. I’m going to save the Chernobyl disaster up to make my life better.

**John:** Charlie, what’s your One Cool Thing?

**Charlie:** My One Cool Thing is a game called Baba is You.

**John:** Baba is You.

**Charlie:** Baba is You. You can get it on the Nintendo Switch and I think from Steam and probably on other things. It’s a puzzle game and a logic game the likes of which is almost impossible to describe, but it basically involved – you’re a little white like a gerbil or a rabbit, I don’t know quite what you are in it. But you’re Baba. And you scurry around and you can push – how can I explain this? There are blocks of rules, so Baba is You could be one rule. Door is Shut would be one.

Now, you can shove the word shut out of the way and you can put You in its space and then you are the door.

**John:** Oh, fantastic.

**Charlie:** If you see what I mean. And so from that sort of – it’s quite a mind-bending premise in itself. And then it spins out these incredibly clever and mind-mangling puzzles. And my 7-year-old is obsessed with video games and I played it with him and had one of those incredibly humiliating moments where I was – because you can sit there sort of your brain sweating for hours as you try and solve one of these things. And we had one of those things where I was insistent that I knew the answer and I was trying to do something. And he eventually wrestled the joy pad from me and solved it in 10 seconds because that’s the future.

Just that. I’m obsolete. All of us becoming obsolete. But it’s brilliant.

**John:** Great. Baba is You.

**Charlie:** Baba is You.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It was edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Mackey Landy. 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. I believe you are on Twitter. Do you want people to reach you on Twitter?

**Charlie:** Well, they can. I don’t often – I generally use it now for shameless promotion and then I don’t look often.

**John:** But that’s how I reached you.

**Charlie:** That’s how we met. See, I sometimes use it. It’s for DM’ing. But I tend to skulk I think is the word. Skulking. Yeah. Because I figured it was bad for productivity and general mental well-being.

**John:** I think that’s often likely the case. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We try to get them up about four days after the episode airs so we can Markov chains so that Craig and I can be talking in perpetuity for all time.

Some folks do recaps of the show and discussion on the screenwriting Sub-Reddit. So check us out there. Tell us what you think of the Charlie Brooker episode. I keep trying to drop your R.

**Charlie:** I constantly get that in America. Constantly I’m Booker. Everywhere I go. Is there a famous Booker here?

**John:** Well there’s Cory Booker. He’s running for–

**Charlie:** I’ve never heard of him. Who is he?

**John:** He’s running for President.

**Charlie:** How would I have heard of him? I’m from Britain. I’ve heard of Trump.

**John:** Oh my god.

**Charlie:** Of course I’ve heard of Trump. I had a proper argument with an Uber driver the other day because I got in the car, here, and he said, “Well they’re really rolling out the red carpet for Trump back in your country aren’t they?” And I said, no, people hate him. People hate him in London. And there was immediately an argument. Anyway. How did I get into that?

**John:** Because you have an R.

**Charlie:** Yes. There’s an R. And also I would like to make the case for like quite often I see people writing quite accurate parodies of Black Mirror where it’s my accent going, “What if, what if your mum run on batteries? What if you could 3D print an egg? Some British dude saying what-if.” And I think that is accurate, but I find it disturbing that Americans call the show Black Mir-Or. It’s not Black Meer. That sounds like a place. Black Meer sounds like a place. Blackmere. It’s Black Mirror.

But how do you say Mirror in–?

**John:** Mirror.

**Charlie:** You said it properly. Why do people keep saying Black Meer?

**John:** Because we live in slightly different countries and languages are constantly evolving.

**Charlie:** I feel churlish now. I feel like I’ve really – yeah, sorry. [laughs]

**John:** Well you’re coming from a land that often does glottal stops instead of syllables.

**Charlie:** We just can’t talk properly in my country.

**John:** That’s fine.

You can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net or download 50-episode seasons at store.johnaugust.com.

You may want to check out the Scriptnotes Listener’s Guide to hear which episodes our listeners liked most.

Come to the live show. The live show is this Thursday at the Ace Hotel. Amazing people will be there. Also, I think by the time this new episode comes out Highland 2.5 will have shipped which has revision mode in it which is remarkable, so it’s what I’ve used to write all my stuff recently. You can have stars in the margins. You can use it for writing your next Twine episode.

**Charlie:** Yeah. I like the sound of that.

**John:** I’m going to send you a beta right now.

**Charlie:** OK.

**John:** Charlie Brooker, thank you very much for being on the show.

**Charlie:** Thank you. Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes LIVE](https://theatre.acehotel.com/events/scriptnotes-live-podcast-taping-benefit-hollywood-heart/) this Thursday, June 13th at the Ace Hotel with Melissa McCarthy, Ben Falcone, Alec Berg, Rob McElhenney, and Kourtney Kang, buy your tickets [here](https://www.axs.com/events/374457/scriptnotes-live-tickets?skin=acehotel)!
* [Black Mirror](https://www.netflix.com/title/70264888)
* [La Cabina](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065513/)
* [Russian Doll](https://www.netflix.com/title/80211627)
* [Money Heist](https://www.netflix.com/title/80192098)
* [Matthew Zalkind](http://matthewzalkind.com/) John’s Voice Twin
* [Baba is You](https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/baba-is-you-switch/)
* Order your Scriptnotes 400 shirts, sweatshirts, and tanks [(Light)](https://cottonbureau.com/products/scriptnotes-400-light#/1506766/tee-men-standard-tee-heather-white-tri-blend-s) and [(Dark)](https://cottonbureau.com/products/scriptnotes-400-dark#/1506818/tee-men-standard-tee-vintage-black-tri-blend-s)!
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Charlie Brooker](https://twitter.com/charltonbrooker) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Mackey Landy ([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_404_the_one_with_charlie_brooker.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

Craig Mazin: Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin and this is Episode 403 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

On today’s show, something we have never done before. It’s just me. No guest. No John. He’s off visiting family I believe in Colorado. So it’s just me today. And we’re going to do something that I’ve been looking forward to doing for a long time. I’m going to be talking to you today about structure and character. I’m kind of giving you my whole theory on how to write a movie.

I know it sounds like a lot. And it is a little bit of a lot. It’s a talk that I’ve done at the Austin Screenwriting Film Festival a number of times. I haven’t done it in a while. And I feel like their exclusive right to it has ended, so now I’m giving it to you. This is sort of my how-to write a movie.

But before we get into that we do have a little bit of business to go through. And it’s about our live show. Our next live show, we’ve talked about this before. It’s going to be on the evening of Thursday, June 13 here in Los Angeles at the Ace Hotel which is a beautiful venue. And it is benefiting Hollywood Heart. We do this every year. It’s a great charity.

We have probably the best guest lineup we’ve ever had. We have Alec Berg, the showrunner of Silicon Valley and Barry. We have Rob McElhenney, showrunner of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. We have Kourtney Kang, writer of Fresh Off the Boat. And we have Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone. And by the way that’s – Melissa McCarthy and Ben – I’m not talking about other Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcones that you don’t know. I mean the ones you know. Those.

It is just about the most comedy firepower I think we can ever assemble on one stage for this show. You’re not going to want to miss it. Tickets I believe are still available but we’re getting close to running out, so take a look at the link in the show notes and get your tickets.

All right. Let’s get into it. So when we talk about writing a script a lot of times we’re talking about structure. There are, I don’t know, four million books about structure. I went online and I looked for just images based on screenplay structure and what I saw was kind of mind-blowing. There are these long narrow lines with little ticks on them and then there’s a pie chart. And then there’s a swirly thing that kind of looks like a snail shell. There’s a triangle. There’s a diamond. I think there’s a parallelogram. And if there’s not a trapezoid maybe one of you can get on that.

All of this is designed to help you learn how to structure a screenplay. Here’s the problem. All of it is done from the wrong end. All of it. It’s all done from the point of view of analysis. They look at things, they take them apart, and then they say, look, all these pieces fit into this swirly shape, or this diamond. The issue is that’s not going to help you actually write anything because when you write you’re starting from scratch. You’re not breaking something apart. You’re building something out of nothing. And when you’re building something out of nothing you need a different set of instructions.

I can think of a doctor who takes bodies apart. That’s a medical examiner or a coroner. That’s not the doctor you want to go to to make a baby for instance. It’s just a very different thing, right? So we’re going to come at it from the point of view of making babies and your baby is your script. Don’t worry, we’re going to keep this safe for work.

So, structure. Structure, structure, structure. Screenplay is structure. You need to know how to do your structure. Structure I’m here to tell you is a total trap. Yes, screenplay is structure, but structure isn’t what you think it is. Structure doesn’t say this happens on this page, this happens on that page. Here’s a pinch point. Here’s a stretchy point. Here’s a midpoint. Structure doesn’t tell you what to do. If you follow strict structural guidelines in all likelihood you will write a very well structured bad script.

Structure isn’t the dog. It’s the tail. Structure is a symptom. It’s a symptom of a character’s relationship with a central dramatic argument. Take a moment. Think about that for a second. I’ll repeat it. Structure is a symptom of a character’s relationship with a central dramatic argument. Structure isn’t something you write well. It’s something that happens because you wrote well. Structure is not a tool, it is a symptom.

When we think of rigid structural forms I have to tell you there’s nothing honest about them. There’s nothing true about them. They’re synthetic. There’s never been one single great writer who created one single great screenplay following a structural template. Not one.

What real writers follow are their characters. And what great writers follow are their characters as they evolve around a central dramatic argument that is actually meaningful to other human beings. Let me stop for a second and tell you that we are going to get into real practicals but for a bit now we’re just going to talk a little bit of philosophy. First, let’s consider what we call basic structure. There’s a Syd Field point of view. You have your three acts, your inciting incident, act break escalation, magical midpoint character shift, third act low point, and kick off to climactic action.

We also have the Chris Vogler Hero’s Journey, ordinary world, call to action, refusal of call, acceptance of call, and blah, blah, blah. Save the Cat is a lot of stuff.

There’s a lot of what to do but where’s the why? Who came up with this stuff in the first place? Why is it there? Why are there three acts at all? Why is there a low point? Why do we like it when there’s an inciting incident? Why do we like it when there’s a low point? If we don’t know why those things are there how are we supposed to know how to write them? Because we process the world through our consciousness and our consciousness is sort of a natural storyteller, all of us are actually walking around doing this right all the time. We just don’t know it. We’re narrativizing our own lives better than most who try and do it on purpose on Fade In or WriterDuet, or Highland2. I don’t know any other software.

Right now you’re sitting there, you’re riding along in your car, you’re being passive. You are accepting this structure talk, wondering when I’m going to get to the practicals. And I will. But later if someone asks you about this experience you’re having you will naturally, without thinking, create a story. You won’t have to consult a graph or a chart or a swirly thing. You’ll just tell the story.

Here’s a story. I listened to a podcast. It was on the following topics. Reasonable people could agree or disagree. Anyway, I’m the same. That’s not a very good story, is it?

Here’s another story. I was listening to a podcast and it was OK, it was sort of a little boring, but then the person said this one thing and it reminded me of something else I’d heard once and that tied back to this moment in my life where something really interesting happened. And now I’m wondering maybe if I was wrong about that thing and I should be doing it this way instead. Huh. There you go. And that story has character, meaning you. That story is about you and maybe it’s about me. It’s about a relationship that we’re having right now through this podcast, for better or worse.

And if you were to relay this story, this experience, you might share some parts of this that you thought were interesting or some parts that you thought were stupid, but you will naturally contextualize it as such. This moment in time did or did not help you in your desire to change. We live our lives this way, but when we sit down to write we somehow forget. You know who never forgets? Actors. They have to get it because they are the characters and we are experiencing them as the characters.

So there’s that old cliché line: what’s my motivation? Well it’s not a joke. Believe it or not that is the key to structure. What is the purpose of all this storytelling that we engage in, all this narration? Well, narration helps us move through a changing world. And story is about a change of state. There are three basic ways your story changes. And this applies I think to every possible story.

The first way is internal. This is what is going on inside the character’s mind. This is the things they’re thinking, they’re feeling, their emotions. And this axis goes all over the place. It zigzags up and down. Then there’s interpersonal. That’s the main relationship of your story. It has a start, it has an end. It usually begins in a kind of neutral way. Then depending on how your story unfolds it can dip and then rise and then plummet and then spike. And finally you have the external axis. That’s the narrative, the plot, the things that are going on around you. And that generally is just a straight line. Start to end.

All of this is made up of scenes. And within scenes we’re doing something that follows the Hegelian dialectic. Calm down. You don’t need to look it up. I’ll help you out. The Hegelian Dialectic basically is a way of thinking about how we formulate ideas and thoughts and arguments. You take a thesis. That’s a statement. Something is true. And then you apply to that an antithesis. No, that’s not true and here’s why. Those things collide and in theory what results from that is a new thesis called the synthesis. And that starts the whole process over again. That synthesis becomes a thesis. There’s an antithesis. A new synthesis. That becomes a thesis. Constant changing. Every scene begins with a truth, something happens inside of that scene. There is a new truth at the end and you begin, and you begin, and you begin.

And who is the person firing these antitheses at these theses? You.

So, as we go through this talk never forget this one simple fact. At any given moment as you begin a scene you have a situation that is involving those three axes and you are going to fire something at at least one of them to make something new. That is all story is. But what is the glue that holds all those changes together? What’s the glue that you the creator can use to come up with your antitheses and get your new syntheses and do it over and over again?

And that brings us to theme. Theme is otherwise known as unity. Unity is a term that was first used by Aristotle in Poetics and this is one you actually should read. I know you’re like, Aristotle? Hegel? Hegelian guy. Calm down. It’s fine. In fact, Aristotle was really a contemporary writer in his own way. Poetics is an easy read. It will take you about 30 minutes. It’s a pretty good bathroom book. And in it you’ll find a lot of things that we hear today, like for instance the worst kind of plot is an episodic plot. Well, that’s pretty much true.

What did he think of unity or theme? Well basically theme is your central dramatic argument. Some of those arguments are interesting. Some of them are a little cliché. And the quality of the argument itself isn’t necessarily related to the quality of the script. For instance, you can have a really good screenplay built around you can’t judge a book by its cover. That’s OK. The theme itself doesn’t have to be mind-altering or, I don’t know, revolutionary. It’s your execution around it that’s going to be interesting.

But the important thing is that the argument has to be an argument. I think sometimes people misunderstand the use of theme in this context and they think a theme for a screenplay could be brotherhood. Well, no. Because there’s nothing to argue about there. There’s no way to answer that question one way or the other. It’s just a vague concept.

But, man and women can’t just be friends, well, that’s an argument. Better to be dead than a slave. Life is beautiful, even in the midst of horrors. If you believe you are great, you will be great. If you love someone set them free. Those are arguments.

Screenplays without arguments feel empty and pointless. You will probably get some version of the following note. What is this about? I mean, I know what it’s about, but what is it about? Why should this movie exist? What is the point of all this?

Now, it’s really important to note you probably don’t want to start with an argument. That’s a weird way to begin a script. Usually we think of an idea. And that’s fine. But when you think of the idea the very next question you should ask is what central dramatic argument would fit really well with this? And ideally you’re going to think ironically. For instance, let’s talk about this idea. A fish has to find another fish who is somewhere in the ocean. Got it. The animators will love it. Water. Fish. Cool.

OK, let’s think of a central dramatic argument. How about if you try hard enough you can do anything, even find a fish? That’s a bit boring, isn’t it? How about sometimes the things we’re searching for are the things that we need to be free from? Well, OK. That’s an interesting argument. I’m not sure how it necessarily is served or is being served by this idea of a fish in the ocean. How about you can’t find happiness out there, you have to find it within yourself? That could work. That’s sort of Wizard of Oz-ish.

But let’s go really ironically. How about this one? No matter how much you want to hold onto the person you love, sometimes you have to set them free. Well, that is pretty cliché but it is a great central dramatic argument to pair with a fish needs to find another fish. Because when you’re looking for somebody out there in the deep, deep ocean you the writer know that what you’re promising is they’re going to find them and then have to let them go anyway. And that is starting to get good.

All right. Let’s get into some practicals, shall we? Because this is thematic structure. This is going to help you write your script. In thematic structure the purpose of the story – and listen carefully now – the purpose of the story is to take a character from ignorance of the truth of the theme to embodiment of the theme through action. I shall repeat. The purpose of the story is to take your main character, your protagonist, from a place of ignorance of the truth or the true side of the argument you’re making and take them all the way to the point where they become the very embodiment of that argument and they do it through action.

So, let’s talk about how we introduce. We begin in the beginning with the introduction of a protagonist in an ordinary world. You’ve probably heard this a thousand times. But why? Sometimes movies don’t start ordinarily. You probably saw Mad Max: Fury Road. If you didn’t, do so. Well, there’s no ordinary beginning there. I mean, it’s crazy from the jump. Ordinary doesn’t mean mundane. Although sometimes it can.

What ordinary means here is that the protagonist’s life essentially exemplifies their ignorance of the theme, of the argument that you want them to believe eventually. In fact, they believe the opposite of that argument. That’s how they begin. Typically in the beginning of a story your main character believes in the opposite of the theme and they have also achieved some kind of stasis. There’s a balance in their life. In fact, their ignorance of that theme has probably gotten them to this nice place of stasis and balance. It doesn’t mean they’re happy. What it means is that without the divine nudge of the writer-god their life could go on like this forever. It’s not a perfect life. It’s not the best life they could live but it’s the life they’ve settled for. Their stasis is acceptable imperfection.

If we’re going to circle back around to my favorite fish movie, Marlin can live with a resentful son as long as he knows his son is safe. That’s acceptable imperfection. I get it. Nemo resents me. He’s angry at me. He feels stifled by me. That’s OK. He’s alive. I can keep going this way.

And then along comes you, the writer. Your job is to disrupt that stasis. So you invent some sort of incident. Ah-ha. Now we know the point of the inciting incident. The point of the inciting incident is not to go, “Oh god, a meteor!” The point of the inciting incident is to specifically disrupt a character’s stasis. It makes the continuation of balance and stasis and acceptable imperfection impossible. It destroys it. And it forces a choice on the character.

OK, but why? I’m just going to keep asking that question. But why? But why? But why? Why do you have to do this to this poor character? Because you are the parent and you have a lesson to teach this person, or animal, or fish. Your motivation is part of your relationship to your character. You don’t write an inciting incident. You don’t write push character out of safety. That gives you no real guidance to let something blossom. What you write is an ironic disruption of stasis. Ironic as in a situation that includes contradictions or sharp contrasts that is, and hear me out, genetically engineered to break your character’s soul.

You’re going to destroy them. You are god. And you are designing a moment that will begin a transformation for this specific character so you have to make it intentional. It can be an explosion, or it can be the tiniest little change. But it’s not something that would disrupt everyone’s life the way it’s disrupting this person’s life. You have tailored it perfectly and terribly for them.

So, what’s the first thing your character wants to do when this happens to them? Well, it they’re like you or me they’re going to immediately try and just get back to what they had. They have to leave their stasis behind because you’ve destroyed it, but everything they’re going to do following that is done in service of just trying to get it back. Shrek doesn’t have his swamp, so he has to go on a journey so he can get his swamp back. The point here is that the hero has absolutely no idea that there is a central dramatic argument. They’ve made up their mind about something and their mind has not changed.

Your heroes should be on some level cowards. I don’t mean coward like shaking in your boots. I mean coward like I don’t want to change. I’m happy with the way things are. Please just let me be. And underlining that is fear. And fear, especially in your character, is the heart of empathy. I feel for characters when I fear with them. It is vulnerability. It’s what makes me connect. Every protagonist fears something.

Imagine a man who fears no other man. He doesn’t fear death. He doesn’t fear pain. But, ah-ha, fill in that blank. But the point is it has to be filled in. You can feel it, right? Like he’s going to have to fear something. Because fear is our connection to a character. And a fearful hero should have lived their lives to avoid the thing they’re afraid of.

You, are taking their safety blanket away. So I want you to write your fearful hero honestly. What do they want? They want to return to what they had. They want to go backwards. And believe it or not that is the gift that is going to drive you through the second act. The second act.

Oh, the thing that’s so scary. No. No, you should be excited about it. Let me take a break for a second and say that everything I’m talking about here is mostly to serve the writing of what I would call a traditional Hollywood movie. That doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean cliché. It doesn’t even mean formulaic. It just means it’s a traditional narrative. So, I don’t know, if you’re looking to be a little more Lars von Trier about things, well, I don’t know how interesting or helpful this is going to be. But I’m presuming that most of you just want to write a general kind of movie that conforms to a general kind of movie shape.

So this is how we’re going to help you do it. And the second act is the part that I think freaks people out the most. They get scared. But I think you should be excited about pages 30 to 90 roughly. Please do not quote me on those numbers. But first, are you getting it? Have you stopped thinking about plot? Have you stopped thinking about plot as something to jam characters into? Because when you do that that’s why you run out of road in your second act. You ran out of plot because it wasn’t being generated by anything except you.

Ah-ha. But when you start thinking of your plot as not something that happens to your characters but what you are doing to your characters that’s when you can lead them from anti-theme to theme. How do we do it?

First, we reinforce the anti-theme. That might sound a little counterintuitive but hear me out. You’ve knocked your hero out of their acceptable stasis. They are now on the way to do whatever they need to do to get back to it. The hero is going to experience new things. And I want you to think about making those new things reinforce her belief in an anti-theme. Because this is going to make them want to get back to the beginning even more. Oh, it’s delicious. We’re creating a torture chamber basically. Keep thinking that way.

Imagine your hero is moving backwards against you and you push them forward and they push back. Ah-ha. Good. Design moments to do this. You’re going to keep forcing them forward, but you’re also going to put things in their path that make them want to go backwards. That’s tension. That’s exciting. And more importantly when they do get past those things it will be meaningful. You want to write your world to oppose your character’s desires.

So, you’re going to reinforce their need to get back. Ah-ha. So, let’s see, Marlin wanders out into the ocean. His theory is the ocean is really, really dangerous. What should the first thing be? Maybe let’s have him meet some sharks. And actually, oh, you know what, they’re not scary at all. Oh god, yes they are. The ocean is in fact way worse than he even imagined. That’s what you need to do. He needs to get his son back really, really soon so he can return to stasis. And then when you’ve done that you’re going to introduce an element of doubt.

Something or someone lives in a different way. Someone or something in your story is an example of the life of theme rather than the life of anti-theme. So remember, your hero believes in one side of the central dramatic argument. It’s the wrong side. You want them to believe the other one. OK, but they believe the wrong one. They need to run into someone or something that believes in the right side of it. This element of doubt creates a natural conflict for the protagonist because of course I believe this, you believe that. But it’s also attractive to them on some level because – and again, really important. Your hero is rational. This is a critical component of a good hero. You are dealing with somebody that probably lives irrationally, fine, but they have to have the capacity to see that maybe there is a better way.

You’re living things maybe the wrong way but you need the capacity to see things going the right way. It is fear that separates the irrational hero from their rational potential. And because they’re rational when they get a glimpse of this other way of being they’re going to realize there’s value to it through circumstance or accident or necessity or another character’s actions. These are all things you’re inventing, but here’s why – the hero is going to experience a moment of acting in harmony with the right side of the central dramatic argument.

This could involve their own action or it could be something that they watch someone else do or something they experience passively. But this is why the magical midpoint change occurs. See, now you know why. You’re not just doing it because a book said. These things generally happen in the middle of the movie because our hero’s belief system has been challenged. There is an element of doubt. There is not a willingness to go all the way and believe the other side of the argument yet. They may not even understand the other side of the argument.

There’s only a question that maybe for the first time they have to wonder if their side of the argument that they started with, the anti-theme, maybe it doesn’t explain or solve everything. Have I been living a lie? That’s what’s happening in the middle of a movie.

So, remember in Finding Nemo there’s a moment where because Marlin has to rescue Dory from this field of jellyfish he invents a game. She forces him to do something that he normally wouldn’t do. Play. He’s doing it for the old Marlin reasons of neurosis, but it’s working. She’s following him. And as he’s doing it he gets a glimpse of what it’s like to live without fear. He gets a glimpse of what it’s like to be carefree. To not worry so much. To be, well, a little less conservative with your own life. And he loves it.

And then what happens? She gets stung. Oh, glorious. And that gets us to this reversal of theme. The very moment your hero takes the bait that you put there to think about maybe switching sides – maybe switching sides of the argument – you need to hammer them back the other direction. The story has to make them shrink back to the old way. Dory almost dies in the jellyfish. And why? It happened because Marlin decided in a moment out of necessity to have fun and then forgot himself, forgot his fear. And what’s the price of forgetting fear and not being vigilant? Pain and tragedy. The tragedy of the beginning is reinforced and the hero retreats once again.

Ah. It’s good stuff. And it means you have to be kind of mean. Sadistic really. But it turns out that these are the kinds of things we want out of our narrative. It’s the essence of what we call dramatic reversal.

I’m going to put aside the examples from Pixar for a second and I’m going to talk about somebody real. There’s a guy named Jose Fernandez. This is a true story. Jose Fernandez is born in Cuba and at the age of 15 he escapes Cuba with his mother and his sister and many others, all packed in a very small boat. And during the difficult village he is awakened to the sound of someone yelling. That someone has fallen overboard.

And Jose, 15 years old, doesn’t hesitate. He dives into the choppy water to save whoever it is. And it’s only when he drags this person back onto the boat does he realize he has saved his own mother. Wow.

Jose Fernandez grows up, he’s a hell of an athlete. He goes on to pitch. Major League baseball pitcher. And he’s really good. In fact, he is the National League Rookie of the Year. And he’s an All Star. His future isn’t just bright, it is glorious. Jose Fernandez is living the American dream and I don’t know how much you know about baseball but ace pitchers they get paid hundreds of millions of dollars.

But at the age of 24 Jose Fernandez dies. He doesn’t die from illness. He doesn’t die from violence. He dies in an accident. But not a car accident. He dies in a boating accident. A boating accident. Now, do you feel that? Do you feel more than you would if I had said he died of a blood clot? Well, why? I mean, death is death. Why does this detail of the boating accident make you feel more?

Because it’s terribly ironic. Because this is a guy who saved his own mother from water and then he dies in water. It implies that there’s a strange kind of order to the universe even when that order hurts. And this is where we start to pull irony out of drama. This is essential to your choices when you decide how you’re going to push back against your hero. How you’re going to hammer them back. How you’re going to punish them.

Think about that Pixar Short, Lava. And I talk about Pixar all the time because it’s just pure storytelling and they’re really, really good at it. So he thinks he’s alone. He’s a volcano in the ocean. He thinks he’s alone. And then he discovers he’s not alone. But when he discovers that he also discovers that she’s facing the wrong way and she can’t see him. And he doesn’t know how to sing anymore. So she doesn’t even know he’s there. Oh, that’s terrible. It’s unexpected. It’s contradictory. And it’s ironic. And that’s exactly what you want to do.

So, consider the irony that’s involved with Marlin. Marlin is worried that he has lost his son. Every parent who loses a child, even for an instant in a mall, is scared. But that’s not enough. Let’s talk about what the people at Pixar understood they needed to do to this character from the very start to punish him so that his journey would be that much more impressive. It’s not enough to say, look, you love your kid, your kid is lost, you’ve got to go find your kid. Everybody loves their kid, right?

OK. But they go a step further. They say, you know what, there’s no mom in the picture. Mom died. It’s just you. You’re a single dad. You’re the only parent. You’ve got to find your kid. No, that’s not enough. How about this? How about your wife and all of your other children were eaten in front of you because you couldn’t protect them? And the only kid you had left out of all of that, the only memory you have of your wife and your happy life before is one tiny egg. One kid.

And that is still not enough. And this is why Pixar is so amazing. Because they knew that the further they went the more we would feel at the end. It’s not enough that he only has one kid. When he looks at that little egg he can see that the one kid that’s left is disabled. He has a bad fin. Now it’s enough. Now you have created the perfect circumstance for that individual, you cruel, cruel god of story.

Now I know why he’s so panicked that that kid is somewhere out there in the ocean. When you’re designing your obstacles and your lessons and the glimpses of the other way and the rewards and the punishments and the beating back and the pushing forward, keep thinking ironically. Keep thinking about surprises that twist the knife. Don’t just stab your characters. Twist the knife in them. If someone has to face a fear make it overwhelming to them. Don’t disappoint them. Punish them.

Make your characters lower their defenses by convincing them that everything is going to be OK and then punch them right in the face, metaphorically.

So, sorry to tell you that as a writer you are not the New Testament god who turns water into wine. You are the Old Testament god who tortures Job because, I don’t know, it seems like fun. And when you’re wondering where to go in your story and what to do with your character ask this question: where is my hero on her quest between theme and anti-theme? Or I guess I should say between an anti-theme and theme. And what would be the meanest thing I could do to her right now? What would be the worst way to do the meanest thing right now? Then do it. And do it. And do it again until the hero is left without a belief at all.

So as the demands of the narrative begin to overwhelm the hero, the hero begins to realize that her limitations aren’t physical but thematic. Think about Marlin. I promised that I would never let anything happen to him. But then I suppose nothing ever would happen to him. That’s what Dory says. And Marlin knows she’s right. He knows that if all he does is basically lock his kid up to prevent anything bad from happening to his kid nothing good will happen to his kid. The kid won’t have a real life.

So, now what? Well, the answer is obvious, right? If you love someone let them go. And I’m sure that at that point in the movie if you ask Marlin that he would say, “I suppose that’s the thing that I’m supposed to believe.” But they can’t do it. Not yet. In fact, you’re going to want to have a situation where they have a chance to do it. And they fail at it in some important way because they don’t really accept the central dramatic argument you want for them. They just lost the belief in their original point of view. They’re trapped between rejection of the old and acceptance of the new. They are lost. Their old ways don’t work anymore. The new way seems impossible or insane.

Shrek doesn’t want his swamp back anymore. He wants love, but he is also not willing to do what is required to try and get it. He’s trapped. And this is why they call it the low point. It’s not random. It’s not the low point because the books say page 90 is the low point. It’s the low point because your character is lost and in a whole lot of trouble.

Their goal in the beginning, which was to go backwards to the beginning to achieve stasis, to re-achieve stasis, that goal is in shambles. Their anti-thematic belief, whatever it was that they clung to in the beginning of this story, it’s been exposed as a sham. And the enormity of the real goal that now faces them is impossibly daunting. They can’t yet accept the theme because it’s too scary. When your core values are gone and when you aren’t ready to replace them with new values, well, you might as well be dead. And this is why people go to movies.

So, granted, we love the lasers, we love the explosions, we love the ka-boom, and we love the sex, and we love the tears, but what we need from drama – and when I say drama I mean the drama of comedy and the drama of drama – what we need are these moments where we connect to another person’s sense of being lost. Because we have all been lost.

And that’s why the ending is going to work. Because without this there can be no catharsis. Catharsis comes from the Greek word for vomiting I’m pretty sure. So just think of a lot of your plot as shoving really bad food down the throat of your hero because that’s how you’re going to get to this catharsis.

Now, I want to say that these approaches don’t help you map out a second act. What these approaches do is help you develop your character as they move through a narrative. And that narrative is going to impact their relationship to theme. And when you finish that movement of this character interacting with story so that their relationship to the theme is changing from I don’t believe that to, OK, I don’t believe what I used to believe but I can’t believe that yet, suddenly you’ll be somewhere around the end of the second act.

And here is the big secret. John and I have said this many, many times. There are no acts. So you can’t really be scared of the second act. It doesn’t exist. It’s not some sort of weird wasteland you have to get through. It’s just part of one big piece. There’s one act. It’s called your story. And now we get to the third act, sorry, end of your one act. And this is the defining moment. Your character needs to face a defining moment. And this defining moment is their worst fear. It is their greatest challenge. This is the moment that will not only resolve the story that you’re telling but it will resolve the life of your character. This moment will bring them to a new stasis and balance. Remember synthesis, thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Here we are again.

But what are you going to do? You have to come up with this thing. This is the difference between what I’m saying to you now and what a lot of books say. Books will say, “Defining moment goes here.” And I’m saying, yeah, but how? What makes it so defining? You’re going to design a moment that is going to test your protagonist’s faith in the theme. They need to go through something where they have to prove that they believe this new theme. They have to prove it. It’s not enough to say, OK, I get it. What I used to think is wrong. There’s a new way that’s right. That’s not enough.

They have to prove it. And they have to prove it in a way where they literally embody the point of that idea with everything they have. But before you do that don’t you want to torture them one more time? Of course you do.

The relapse. A nice ironic relapse. You want to tempt them right before this big decision moment. Right before the defining moment. You want to hold that safety blanket up and say, “Go ahead. Go back to the beginning. You get it. The thing you wanted on page 15, I’m giving it to you. Don’t go forward. Don’t change. Go back.”

And what do they have to do? They have to reject that temptation. You design a machinery where they have to reject that temptation and then do something extraordinary – extraordinary – to embody the truth of the theme. And now you get acceptance through action. The hero acts in accordance with the theme. Specifically by doing so they prevail. They have to act.

So let’s go back to Marlin. It’s not enough for Marlin to say, “I get it now. I’ve heard the wise turtles. I’ve seen the way Dory is. I’ve learned my lesson. I’ve got to let you live.” That’s not enough. What Pixar does is create a perfect mechanism to tempt and then force action. Dory is captured. And Nemo says to Marlin, “I’m the only one who can go in there and save her.” And this is a great temptation. This is where Marlin has to reject the old way. We’re saying go ahead, you’ve got your kid, we’re giving him back to you. It’s all you wanted. On page 15 you just wanted your kid. Here he is. Get out.

But he has to act in accordance with the theme. So he rejects that and he says, “No. Go ahead, son. And try and save her.” And that simple decision is how he acts in accordance with theme. And it is terrifying. And now you get one last chance to punish him. Briefly. Go ahead. Let’s see Nemo coming out of that net and let’s think that he’s dead. And let Marlin hold him. And let Marlin remember what he was like when he was in that little egg. And let Marlin kind of be OK with it. Because that’s what it means to live in accordance with theme.

If you say, look, sometimes if you love someone you have to let them go, that’s one thing. Actually having to let them go is another thing. Letting them go and seeing them get hurt is yet another. That is the ultimate acceptance of that idea, isn’t it? And that’s what he sees.

But then, of course, faith in the theme rewards. And Nemo is alive.

So then you get this denouement. What is the denouement? Why is it there? It’s not there because we need to be slowly let down and back out in the movie theater lobby. It’s there because we need to see the new synthesis. You have successfully fired a billion antitheses against a billion theses and come up with one big, grand, lovely new synthesis. Please show it to me. So we now see that the after story life is in harmony with theme.

And here’s the deal with the first scene and the last scene of a movie. If you remove everything from the story except the introduction of your hero and the last scene of your hero there should really be only one fundamental difference. And here it is. The hero in the beginning acts in accordance with the anti-theme and the hero at the end acts in accordance with the theme.

Now, this should all help you create your character. When you’re creating character I want you to think of theme. I want you to imagine a character who embodies the anti-theme. You can be subtle about this. You probably should be. It generally works better if you are. And I want you to think of your story as a journey that guides this character from belief in the anti-theme to belief in theme. Remember you’re god – angry, angry god. You have created this test. That’s what your story is. In order to guide your character to a better way of living, but they have to make the choices.

Oh, if you’ve heard, “The worst character is a passive character,” that’s why. They have to make the choices or you’re making it for them. And then, well, it just doesn’t count, does it?

If you can write the story of your character as they grow from thinking this to the opposite of this, and guess what, you will never ask well what should happen next ever again. You’ll only ask how can I make the thing that I want to happen next better. That’s a whole other talk. Maybe I’ll do that one in like five years or something.

I hope that you found this interesting. It was kind of fun to do. I mean, I’m not going to do it frequently because it’s scary. I mean, John really does run this show. But I’m all here all alone. But I kind of liked a chance to at least talk to you directly about all this stuff and I hope that you got something out of it. If you did, great. And you can let us know.

And here comes the boilerplate. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by, well, I don’t know. But it’s a surprise and we’ll let you know who it was the week following.

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

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

Some folks have also started doing recaps and discussion on the screenwriting sub-Reddit. If that continues, terrific. You can check there.

And you can also find the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net or download 50-episode seasons at store.johnaugust.com.

And I get none of the money.

You may want to check out the Scriptnotes Listener’s Guide at johnaugust.com/guide to find out which episodes our listeners recommend most.

And with that, I bid you all good luck. Go torture your heroes.

Links:

• Scriptnotes LIVE on June 13th at the Ace Hotel with Melissa McCarthy, Ben Falcone, Alec Berg, Rob McElhenney, and Kourtney Kang, buy your tickets here!
• Aristotle’s Poetics
• José Fernández
• Lava, Pixar Short
• Finding Nemo
• Order your Scriptnotes 400 shirts, sweatshirts, and tanks (Light) and (Dark)!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/how-do-you-like-your-stakes)

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 402 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the program we’re going to be talking about the idea of stakes, what it means for a writer, and what it means for a character. We’ll also talk a little bit about Aladdin, fandom, and of course some agency stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But first we got to hype up our live show again. That’s coming up really soon, June 13, at the Ace Hotel. It’s a Thursday night.

It is a benefit for the amazing charity called Hollywood Heart. Our guests include Alec Berg of Silicon Valley and Barry, Rob McElhenney of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and his new Apple show, but also we’ve added Kourtney Kang of Fresh off the Boat and a new show coming up. She is fantastic. I got to work with her on a project. So we’re so excited to have these TV moguls up on stage with us.

And there will be more stuff to do too. We have some prizes. We have giveaways. We have special shirts we’re making just for that night so people buy your tickets if you have not bought your tickets yet.

**Craig:** Yeah. And correct me if I’m wrong, and I’m not wrong so you can’t correct me.

**John:** You’re never wrong.

**Craig:** I’m never wrong. Not about these things. And we have McQuarrie on a loop saying, “I hate to say it but Craig is right.” Hollywood Heart, which is the charity that this benefits, is a legal charity. Meaning if you buy tickets you can deduct them from your taxes.

**John:** I suspect that’s true. Because – and the actual value you’ll receive is just knowledge and joy.

**Craig:** And power.

**John:** Power. Yes.

**Craig:** And love.

**John:** We’re giving away power. Yeah. Love.

**Craig:** Yeah. So I mean why wouldn’t you come to this? It’s a great cause. And you know what? We’re in a bigger place. We got ambitious here. We need to fill a bigger venue so we need you listeners. If you are in the Los Angeles area–

**John:** We need your physical bodies in that space.

**Craig:** Yeah, we need you.

**John:** So that we will feel together.

**Craig:** I mean, look, in all seriousness, you know me. I’m perfectly happy talking to an empty room. In fact, I’m happier talking to an empty room. In fact, no one come. But really here’s the thing: it’s for charity. We’re trying to help kids. So, that’s why you need to show up. It’s not so much for me. Show up for John and the kids.

**John:** Yep. And our guests because our guests are phenomenal.

**Craig:** And our guests.

**John:** And there could be one or two more coming, but we can’t say that yet.

**Craig:** We’re always full of surprises.

**John:** Great. So hyping is done. I had my showing up at a place experience this week. This was the premiere for Aladdin. So Aladdin came out this past weekend in the US and most of the world. So I went to the premiere on Tuesday and it was weird. So I don’t think we’ve really talked about movie premieres so I thought we could spend a few minutes talking about what it’s like to go to a premiere as a writer.

So I guess, let me start how the day begin, because obviously I don’t need hair and makeup because I look just the same no matter what.

**Craig:** Well, makeup. [laughs] You could use a little makeup.

**John:** I get a little blush – no, I do nothing. So basically I get in a car, the studio sends a car, so me, Mike, and my friend Dan, we all went to the premiere together. We hop in a car. We got to Hollywood. This is at the El Capitan. They block off streets around it because they actually have blocked off all of Hollywood Boulevard for this premiere. So it’s actually difficult to get there.

They try – the publicists try to get you there so early. So the premiere started at 6:30. They wanted the car to leave my house at 4:30.

**Craig:** Oh god. Come on.

**John:** I’m like 10 minutes away. And so I said, no, 5:30 at the earliest. So we get in the car there. We get to the place where they’re dropping us off. There’s a greeter there who was fantastic. She took us around and did everything. And I specifically said that I wanted to skip the red carpet, so we’ll get into why I wanted to skip the red carpet, but Craig what’s been your experience when you do a premiere and doing the red carpet? Do you actually answer questions along that red carpet?

**Craig:** I have. It’s only been for certain movies, but I have. It’s weird. Definitely – it was less weird for Chernobyl because they seem to want to ask a writer questions in television. [laughs] When you’re in the movie business, so you walk down this red carpet and all these – you know, people have seen this I suppose in movies. The red carpet and all those people have their cameras and they’re like, “Look over here. Look over here.” And then the writer walks down and it gets real quiet all of a sudden.

**John:** Yeah. So there’s usually a handler beside you saying like, “This is Craig Mazin, the writer of the film.” Or they point to specific people who are already going to be asking you questions. Sometimes there’s little video crews.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Sometimes it’s just a person with a microphone there to talk with you. And, hey, can you tell everyone at Cat Fancy Magazine about Frankenweenie? And it’s like, are there any cats in Frankenweenie? I’m like, yes, there is. Let me tell you about Mr. Whiskers.

**Craig:** Yeah. And sometimes you speak to people who are from other countries. And, look, it’s all part of the machine. I mean, the thing to remember about these premieres, which I think a lot of writers don’t quite get early on, is that the purpose of the premiere is not to celebrate you, or the director, or the cast, or the movie. The purpose of the premiere is to sell tickets. It is designed to create stuffing for magazines and websites.

And so the parts that get the most stuffing generated that’s where they care. Meaning typically actors.

**John:** Yeah. Because those are the ones who are going to actually move copies of magazines if there were still magazines, but like clicks on websites.

**Craig:** Correct. Like if Will Smith for some reason was not able to go that day, because he had something else going on, they would move the premiere. [laughs] You know, it’s like he’s the thing that’s going to get all of the attention, right? I mean, he is the biggest name. So, it becomes that.

I mean, I watched it first hand at The Hangover 2 premiere. It was extraordinary. And it was right across the street. So Disney runs its family premieres at El Capitan and across the street you have Mann’s Chinese where a lot of big premieres take place. And they close off the street and it’s madness and people are there to see – they’re there to see Bradley Cooper.

**John:** Yeah. They’re not there to see Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** No! No. No one even in my house is there to see Craig Mazin.

**John:** So, approaching this premiere, this is a movie that I had worked on, very hard. I had stopped working on the movie. I had seen it several times. I had given notes on it. But it was not fundamentally my movie. And I knew I did not want to be answering a lot of press questions along the way because I can smile and sort of like, “I’m so excited to be here,” give those generic answers. But it was just going to be awkward and weird.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And I didn’t sort of want to give some honest answers on certain things. And so I said like, OK, I will go but we’re going to skip the whole red carpet thing. And my handler was fantastic. She whisked me through this little back way so I didn’t have to do any of the red carpet stuff.

And then you get into the theater, which the El Capitan Theater is beautiful inside.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Intimate but beautiful. And there’s like two other people inside the theater. And so even after delaying going there so early we had about an hour to kill.

**Craig:** I know. I know.

**John:** For everyone who was on the red carpet to start it.

**Craig:** I know. The timing of it all is so weird. At some point they start yelling at everybody to go into the theater, but no one is going in. I’ve got to be honest with you. I do not like these events at all. And if I can avoid them I do. If I don’t have credit on a movie but I’ve worked on the movie and I get an invitation to go–

**John:** I don’t go.

**Craig:** I can’t remember the last time I went. I do not like premieres because they’re actually not fun ways to see a movie. It’s so much of a hassle. And I just care about the movie.

**John:** I’ll take that back. The one time I did go was the first Iron Man. And it was a fun premiere and I was happy for everyone involved. And so I was there to celebrate them, but I just loved that it was not about me at all.

**Craig:** And, you know what? I’ll take it back, too. There was one. I went to Hail Caesar, because I was just really excited. I wanted to see it early. And you know what? I was not disappointed at all. I love that movie.

**John:** That feels like a good movie to see with a big crowd and with a group around you. And that is actually genuinely the fun of seeing these movies is because in the previous incarnations where I’d seen Aladdin I’d seen it in a screening room by myself, or nearly by myself, and so I’m watching this thing that is supposed to be a comedy and it is not funny to me because I’m sitting here scribbling into a notebook about things that I would encourage them to work on.

And then to see it with a crowd it’s like, oh, yeah, those are jokes that I wrote. And those jokes are getting laughs. And you actually get spontaneous applause at moments. Yes, the crowd is sort of extra hyped up because they know the folks involved and they’re applauding people’s credits as they show up. But it’s also a joyous moment because also it’s new for people because none of them have been spoiled by reviews or other bits of spoilers that have come out about what actually happens in the movie. So it was genuinely fun to see it with that group.

I met one of the composers who did the great new song for it, so that was cool. So, I’m glad I went to the premiere of Aladdin is the short summary.

**Craig:** I’m glad you went, too. It’s good. I’m glad. You know what? We’ve got to stay positive.

**John:** We got to stay positive. And it looks like, you know, we’re recording this on a Friday but it looks like the movie is going to do pretty well for the weekend and that’s a good thing, too.

**Craig:** It’s Aladdin from Disney.

**John:** It is Aladdin from Disney. That was kind of built in to the whole thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean not to take anything away from the accomplishment, but we’re talking about degrees of success at that point. There’s no chance that people aren’t going to show up. It’s Aladdin. It’s A Whole New World. For You and Me.

**John:** Basically thank you everyone who went out to see it over the weekend. I hope you enjoy it. I’m happy it actually turned out in sort of the right kind of PG. It’s truly a PG that you can take younger kids to. And I’m happy with a lot of how stuff went in the movie.

**Craig:** How many murders, onscreen murders, do you get before you get bumped into PG-13?

**John:** I don’t know. There is one onscreen murder that I really, really argued to cut. Sidebar here for a moment. It’s a thing that you encountered in so many different cuts of movies you’ve seen before where there’s a scene that is wedged in there to establish a character and it breaks the flow of everything else around it. Just like, oh no, this guy is a bad guy. See how bad he is? And I really, really wanted that scene to go and they didn’t listen to me.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, you know, this is – it’s what happens. You see, I mean–

**John:** It’s a collaborative medium. Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a collaborative medium and maybe – I think what you should do is maneuver yourself into a position where you don’t have to collaborate that much. [laughs] And I’ve said this on the show many times. There is a way of doing something where you are going to do it mostly by yourself. You are going to make mistakes but the mistakes will be consistent with everything else because it all came from one brain.

It’s the mix and match of it all. Somebody may have a great idea. You know what the problem is? That character we’re supposed to be scared of him, but we haven’t seen him do anything bad. We should establish how evil he is. Great idea. Execution-ally there’s no chance of success because that came from somewhere else. It’s like throwing some weird instrument into the middle of another song.

**John:** And that’s a thing that happens in the writing stage all the time, too. Even what I’m writing right now, there’s a scene that I would kind of love to establish a little bit earlier in the script but like there’s no place to put that without breaking everything else around it. So, you know what? I have to do the hard work of figuring out, OK, if it is coming in at this later moment how can I make it work as this later moment beat. Because it’s not the same scene that would be happening earlier in the movie.

**Craig:** This is the life of the writer.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Writing and editing. They’re closely tied together.

We need to talk about the WGA and the ATA. But I would propose Craig, because last week it went on a long time, maybe could I set a three-minute timer and when the timer goes off we’re just done talking about it?

**Craig:** I need ten seconds.

**John:** All right. I’m starting three minutes, but if it goes less than that that’s great. And go.

**Craig:** Well, last week I was praying to the skies that everybody get back to the table. And they’re getting back to the table. Can’t claim causality there. I’m just happy that it happened. I’m optimistic and I’m very hopeful that you guys in leadership and the agency people can find a deal together.

**John:** Craig, you said you prayed to the skies and heaven, so this is a religious conversion for you is what I’m hearing. That you now understand that there is an all-powerful creator behind these things?

**Craig:** Sort of. By the skies and the heavens I’m referring to myself. So I’m the member of a new religion. The religion of–

**John:** Craigism?

**Craig:** It’s Craigism. And our lord’s prayer, “I hate to say it, but Craig is right.” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Yeah, wouldn’t it be so funny if your first disciple was Chris McQuarrie?

**Craig:** My only disciple.

**John:** We should also briefly mention, because we have two minutes left on this time, which we didn’t even need. So another thing that happened this week was – I saw you single this out on Twitter – a writer who had been represented at Gersh shows up for a meeting at Fox. They say like, “Oh, no, your meeting was canceled.” And Gersh confirmed that they had canceled the meeting after he had fired them. That was not a god look for that agency.

**Craig:** No. That’s just dishonorable behavior. And even worse it is ignorant. This is not – in theory this will have an end. And we will want to return to agencies. And new writers are going to want to go to agencies. And Gersh will be one of those agencies, except now if anybody were to ask me about Gersh I would say they’re not great because as an institution they thought that would be a good idea. That’s a terrible idea.

That implies a poor sense of judgment. And that’s shameful. Shameful and stupid.

**John:** I knew almost nothing about Gersh, but this is the only thing I’m associating with Gersh right now is this incident. And so that ain’t great.

**Craig:** Just a huge error on their part and petty. And revealing. This is the problem. You reveal something about yourselves. Why in god’s name would they have done – what did they think they were going to accomplish? It’s the judgment thing that makes me – so it’s not a question of like, boo, you’re anti-writer. If they want to be anti-writer and somehow manage to be successful at the same time I guess OK. But there’s no successful strategy encased in that move. None.

**John:** Nope. None. And also it speaks to the question of who owns a meeting. And so if a meeting is set up between a writer and the studio, to my thinking is a social contract between the two of them that is not a thing that the agency owns in any meaningful way. I don’t think you can own an intangible thing. That’s the frustration to me, too, is that they felt that they controlled that meeting rather than the writer.

**Craig:** I’m sorry. It’s so arrogant. And you’re Gersh. No offense—

**[Alarm timer sounds off]**

Whoa.

**John:** I literally set a timer. That’s three minutes. We’re done. We can’t talk anything more about it.

**Craig:** That’s good. The people at Gersh are so happy. They literally got saved by the bell. [laughs]

**John:** Literally saved by the iPhone bell. Let’s get to some questions from listeners. We have not answered listener questions for a bit.

**Craig:** Somebody at Gersh was like shorten that timer. All right, listener questions. Are we doing listener questions or we doing stakes? What would you like to do first?

**John:** Well, our first listener question is about stakes so I thought we might start with this. Why don’t you take Vera’s question here?

**Craig:** Sure. Vera from Germany, welcome Vera, asks, “How do I raise the stakes in a true story? I’m involved in writing a feature film based on real events. Our producers are worried there may not be enough personal jeopardy in the story and I worry there may not be enough potential for it. The story is about young researchers who learn something of global consequence. They are ridiculed once published and their lives changed drastically after, but they didn’t know that beforehand.

“Almost all our main characters are alive today and still relatively well-known. We’re even in touch with them and they’re supportive of our project. So we can’t make their past selves look worse than they are and wouldn’t want to. They were good. How can I raise the stakes for the characters beginning early in this story?”

John, what do you think?

**John:** Well, first off, Vera, this is a fantastic question because it’s the kind of thing you’re going to face all the time. You have the extra difficulty of having real life people in there so you can’t manipulate backstories in ways that sort of get to reverse engineer what you want them to have.

But let’s talk about stakes overall, because we’ve talked about stakes in previous episodes but it’s good to have a refresher about what we mean by stakes, what development executives mean by stakes, why you hear this term used so much, particularly in features. You hear it some in TV, but you really hear it in features.

I think there’s two main questions you’re asking when you talk about stakes. First is what is the character risking by taking this action? By making a choice to do a thing what are they putting at risk? The second question is what are the consequences if this character or these characters don’t succeed? So it’s both the action that they’re taking and also the consequences of failure. How bad is the failure if they don’t succeed?

Chernobyl, of course, has remarkable stakes throughout the three episodes I’ve seen so far. Characters are faced with these kind of stakes questions all the time. Craig, anything else about the definition of stakes we want to tackle before we get into it?

**Craig:** No, it’s a very simple concept. What are you risking and what happens if we don’t succeed? It’s as simple as that.

**John:** Yeah. So you’re trying to pick the answers to those questions and to me what’s so crucial and so often missing is proportionality. You have to pick stakes that feel right for these characters, this world, this situation. Not everything can literally be life or death. Not everything is the end of the world. And so often I think especially in our blockbusters we try to make everything be the end of the world. Superhero movies especially have to sort of be saving the whole world and they probably shouldn’t be so often.

If you think about the world of the characters, it could be the end of the world to those characters. And so then you have to carefully define, you know, what is their world consisting of. Is it their social grouping? Their standing? Is it their family? Is it their dreams, their hopes, their wishes, their goals? What is at risk for them that isn’t necessarily of global consequence?

**Craig:** Yeah. We are currently in a state of stakesflation in Hollywood where everything gets upped. It’s not enough to destroy a planet, now you must destroy the galaxy. No, now you have to destroy multiple galaxies. Now you have to destroy half of everything that is alive which I assume at some point someone is going to say, “Well, we have to move that up to next time Thanos snaps his fingers it needs to be three-quarters.”

But when you think back to the first blockbuster, generally Jaws is considered to be the first blockbuster film, and the stakes in Jaws are there people on an island that are being eaten by a shark. And our heroes have to stop the shark before it eats another person. That’s it. That’s it. And it captivates to this very day because the stakes there are really not so much about random people getting chewed up, it’s about a man who has a certain sense of self and purpose and that self and purpose is being challenged to the extreme by a creature that seemingly is beyond his ability to handle. That’s stakes. It’s personal. I love it.

**John:** That’s stakes. So obviously when we talk about stakes our key focus has to be our hero, our protagonist, and what are the stakes for that character. But it’s important to remember that there should be stakes for most of these characters and they don’t have to be the same stakes. In the case of Jaws there’s the stakes of if we do this then we could hurt tourism. If we acknowledge this problem there could be issues.

I’m thinking to Chernobyl. So, we have your scientists explaining, no, if we don’t do this thing the next thing is going to blow up and it’s going to be worse. And we have another scientist who is saying if we don’t figure out exactly what happened these other reactors could blow up. But we also have government officials who are saying we can’t let this get out because if we do let this get out then there will be a panic.

Everyone has a different sense of what the stakes are and they’re taking actions that match their own understanding of what are the most important stakes.

**Craig:** Yeah. For some characters in the show the stakes are love. I want to be with the person that I love. I don’t want to abandon them, even though it puts my own life at risk. For other people the stakes are I have to keep this government together. And if I fail to then there’s going to be chaos. Right. Everybody had their different competing interests. And in those moments, for instance in Chernobyl there’s a moment in Episode 2 where Jared Harris and Stellan Skarsgård’s characters are on a helicopter and they’re approaching the power plant. And they both have stakes.

One guy is I have an order from the supreme leader of the Soviet Union. That is somebody with nearly absolute power. And I have to fulfill that because if I don’t I understand that my life and my position and my authority and everything I have is under severe threat. And the other character’s stakes are that’s going to kill us. Don’t go there. We’ll all die.

Competing stakes. Always a good thing to have.

**John:** And ultimately the helicopter pilot has to decide.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Who does he need to listen to in this moment? And he actually reverts to sort of a lower [unintelligible] hierarchy of needs to sort of get to, OK, I don’t want to die in the next two minutes and so therefore I’m not going to fly over this thing. I’m going to listen to the other person.

But I think that actually points to really the root of stakes which is needs and wants. I mean, wants are generally sort of the better way of thinking about it. But what is the character going after? And is the thing they’re going after a really primal survival kind of thing? In some movies it absolutely will be. In some movies it is life or death. It’s cliffhanger. It’s those movies where at any given moment you could die.

But for most characters in most movies it’s a little bit higher up the chain. So it’s about comfort, family, stability, self-realization, self-actualization. Their sense of identity is at stake if they don’t succeed in this venture and that’s the risk that they’re taking.

**Craig:** All these levels of things, what it comes down to is what can you make me believe. And when it comes to stakes I don’t really as a writer have to do much to make you believe at home that saving the planet from a space alien is high enough stakes. It’s just sort of baked into the scenario. Strangely, and this is something I wish our friends in the executive suites had a stronger grasp of, that reduces our interest because there isn’t much of a challenge to that question.

John, a space alien, is threatening to blow up the world, and we need you to solve it. OK. I mean, I’m on the world. What am I supposed to do otherwise? I don’t really have a huge choice there. But if I say to you, John, you have a dream of something that means a lot to you but to pursue it will put your relationship with your own family at risk. That is stakes that now I’m leaning forward in my seat and thinking, ooh.

**John:** So Craig let’s talk about another recent movie that did a great job with stakes and obviously this is a movie that had huge end of the universe kind of stakes but also had very personal stakes which was Avengers: Endgame, which I thought did a really brilliant job of blending the two. Because obviously it’s going to have these big superhero stakes. Half of civilization, half of all living things have been eliminated with a snap. And yet there were very clear personal stories that they focused on. The choices of – we see Hawkeye losing his family and sort of wanted to get his family back and so that was so important. But I thought what they did with Tony Stark and Tony Stark being reluctant to even pursue going after this solution because he didn’t want to risk this family that he’d been able to have in this intervening time. It was really smartly done.

**Craig:** Yeah. Markus and McFeely are experts at working what I would call understandable, empathizable, if that’s a term, stakes into movies where the apparent stakes are ka-boom and blech and pow, right. What they say is even something as dramatic and huge circumstantially as half of every living person dying in the universe they narrow it in. It’s like they kind of force you to tunnel into a relationship to that event through individuals.

What does this mean for me and the man I love? What does this mean for me and my brother? What does this mean for me and the sacrifices I’ve made in my own life to get to this point? All of it is – they just tunnel you into that so that the two things are enmeshed. And that is super important. I just think these broader stakes of something is going to blow up is ultimately irrelevant. There’s no Die Hard unless there is a man trying to win his wife back. It just doesn’t matter. I don’t care.

**John:** It doesn’t matter.

**Craig:** I don’t care about who is in the Nakatomi Building. I want John McClane to kind of earn some redemption and get his life back. That’s, you know, what I’m hoping for.

**John:** Yeah. And even movies that have similar kinds of plot devices the nature of the stakes is so key in why they work differently. So think about comparing the first Charlie’s Angels to a Mission: Impossible movie. They both have some of the same beats and sort of plot mechanics and sort of set pieces, but the Charlie’s Angels fundamentally like will this family be torn apart. Will they be able to save their father figure character? That’s a very different dynamic than what you see in a Mission: Impossible movie.

It gets down to those really granular details about what is the relationship between these characters. What do they really want beyond just the plot wants?

**Craig:** Yeah. And this kind of fine-tuning and understanding, this is where unfortunately we do drift out of the area of craft and into the area of instinct which isn’t really teachable. But what I would say to Vera is, in just garnering what I can from your question, Vera, it seems to me that you’re wondering if you have to make them look bad to create stakes and I’m not sure that that’s ever necessary. Those two things aren’t really connected. I think if they were good people but you understood watching it, and you may have to adjust, that they were risking something really important to them to put their research out into the world. And really important it can’t just be my job. Nobody cares. You can get another job.

It has to be how someone they love or admire looks at them. Or how it might disrupt their pursuit of somebody that they love. Or how it might affect who they think they are as a human being and what their value is. It’s got to be something I can feel in my stomach, you know? Then there are stakes. And, by the way, perfectly fine to create a movie with stakes and have a character “bet it all” and lose. That sometimes is the most interesting story at all.

**John:** Yeah. I think back to Erin Brockovich which this is based on a true life story. This character intervenes in these water poisoning situations. But it was the specificity of like what was in turmoil in her life that made it such a compelling story. And Susannah Grant had to look at all the possible stories to tell and pick the one that had real stakes for that central Erin Brockovich character. And her stakes were not the stakes of the people who were drinking the contaminated water. Her stakes are personal. They’re about her relationships. They involve her kid, her boyfriend, sort of the dynamics of her life.

So I would say look at the characters, the real life people you have in this situation. Try to mine for some interesting ways that they either fit together or that in taking the actions they are doing they’re not just disrupting their own lives or risking their own – I say lives, not their physical lives but their own status or place – but is going to have repercussions on those around them. And the degree to which they understand that, those are stakes.

**Craig:** Yeah. 100%. I think that that’s kind of what we’re dancing around here as we talk through all this. We’re really talking about character. I think sometimes this notion of stakes gets separated out by people who are analytic or – and by analytic I mean producers and executives who are trying to come up with something easy for us like, “Well what are the stakes?” And the truth is if the character is working, you’ll know what the stakes are. The character and the stakes should be embedded with each other. It should just be one in the same.

In the same way that the character and the story should be embedded with each other and be one in the same. And the dialogue and the character should be – character is the hub. Character is the hub of the wheel my friends. And stakes is just one more spoke emanating out of it. It’s all baked into character.

In the case of adapting real life, Vera, it’s OK to make changes in order to create some stakes. Sometimes you have to alter that but do it within the spirit of what you know really happened. And if in the spirit of what really happened there are no stakes at all, maybe it’s not a thing. But I suspect that there are some there.

**John:** I think there are. The last little bit I want to add on stakes is there’s a second kind of stakes which is not this overall story/character arch-y kind of stakes, but is very specific to a scene or sequence. And so an action sequence is the easiest way to think about that where if the character doesn’t succeed in this moment these are the consequences or the possible consequences. In those cases it is a little bit more craft, where you actually have to understand that the audience needs to be able to see what could go wrong or what the downfalls are of a mistake or a less than perfect performance in that moment.

When we had Chris McQuarrie on to talk about – on Episode 300 – to talk about the Mission: Impossible movies, he gets a lot into that. Which is basically how can this possibly end well. And to get the audience asking that question you have to make it clear what the jeopardy is. And sometimes as I’ve rewritten my own stuff or rewritten other people’s stuff it’s because it wasn’t clear in that moment, in that scene, what was the thing that could tip one way or the other.

So making sure that in those moments that is really clear to an audience.

**Craig:** Every scene is its own movie. And that means every scene has its own stakes. And all of that is connected back to a simple question: what is it you want? What do you want? Even if the scene is if that fiery gasoline trail hits that fuel tank then all those people are going to die, well, I want to stop that. It still has to come back to somebody wanting something. And ideally there’s somebody else saying, “No, I want it to explode.” And now we’ve got ourselves a scene. But even if the scene is I’m sitting down to tell someone that the nature of our relationship is changing there are stakes.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So it’s always there.

**John:** All right. Let’s move onto another question. This is from Daniel in Israel who writes, “I’ve been offered to write a TV pilot episode for a local production company. The thing I’m supposed to write the pilot around is essentially only a main plot point. Something someone might call an inciting incident. What I am lacking is the protagonist. Not his identity, but what he wants and what he needs in his life. What I’m trying to figure out is how to create this protagonist in light of this ‘inciting incident.” How would you construct a screenplay and its protagonist when all that you have to work with is this main plot point?”

So, a related question here really. Here Daniel is facing a situation where the plot of it, or at least the start of the plot is really clear. He’s trying to figure out who is the character to drive through this doorway into a story.

**Craig:** Great question, Daniel. And first of all, if we’re in a situation where somebody was just sitting around the house and thinking, “Oh my gosh, I have a great idea for a plot, but how do I come up with a character?” I would say you don’t have a great idea for a plot. Start with character.

But this kind of thing where somebody comes to you and here are your own stakes – there’s money. You’re trying to earn money as a writer.

**John:** There’s money, yes.

**Craig:** And they’re giving you an assignment. You have to figure it out. This happens all the time. I cannot tell you how many times I get a call where someone says, “We’ve got a script. It needs a little bit of work. Story works great. We just need characters. We need character work.” And I just think the story can’t be that great. If the characters aren’t good how is the story good?

So, Daniel, here is I guess the only practical advice I have for you is take your main plot point and ask this question: to whom would it be most interesting for this to apply? Because any random person can go into a situation and be confronted by a problem. But there are certain people who the nature of their lives and the position that they’re in and their past and what they want – they’re the best people to do this to. And typically it’s because this is the thing that will torture them the most. So, think of who that is and you may be off and running.

**John:** I agree. I think back to the How Would This Be a Movie segments we’ve done and they fall into two camps. There’s ones that have a really fascinating character and then you have to figure out like how would you actually build a story around that character. The other ones are the sort of plot machines. Oh, that is a really crazy thing that happened in the real world and you have to then approach it with like, OK, who is the character that should really be driving that story. So, it might be a real life event and there’s myriad characters around it, but you have to figure out whose point of view is actually the interesting point of view.

And I think Craig nailed it. It’s the character for whom the story is especially suited. Either because they are perfect for it, like they are the one person who could be the expert in the situation, or more often and more interestingly the person who is the least well-equipped to be doing this and is out of their element. And that is going to give you more conflict, more comedy if you’re going for comedy. It’s going to be the person who is relatable to the audience because they’re probably a good proxy for the audience in that they don’t have the information or the expertise to be grappling with this situation.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s call it the A side of things. In movies we talk about the A side and the B side. It’s sort of like an editorial term. Like the stuff that happens before, the stuff that happens after. So that’s the A side of it. And then the B side of it is for whom would the resolution of this plot point be the most interesting and satisfying? Think about it from forward and backward and you just might have yourself a solution there.

All right, let’s move along to Alex from New York, shall we?

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** All right. Alice writes, “I’m in a script writing class and I’m trying to pitch a story where there is no three-act structure. My professor responded by saying that for this class we can only make something that follows the structure. She then pulled out a book with the title How to Write a Great Screenplay.” [laughs]

“And said our script had to contain the six key moments. Of course there are many great movies that follow the three-act structure, but I also know that many of my favorite movies don’t – Boyhood, Nashville, A Serious Man come to mind. I guess my question is do you need a three-act structure to write a great movie or is this a sign that I should drop out of this overpriced school?” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] I love people who answer their own questions. Obviously the answer Alice is you’re not in a very good screenwriting program. But I want to sort of move past that moment to talk about this idea of how you teach writing. Because it occurred to me this last week, my daughter for her English class has to write these five-paragraph essays. And Craig you remember these five-paragraph essays.

**Craig:** I sure do.

**John:** They have to have–

**Craig:** Thesis.

**John:** The thesis and then you have to–

**Craig:** The examples.

**John:** Exactly. Each paragraph has to be about a different thing of those things and has to summarize and have the evidence within them and then a conclusion. And I find it just a torturous form. And I want to push back against it, and yet I do feel like it’s important that she learn how to write this ridiculous form now so that she understands what it is and will hopefully never have to write it quite the same way again.

A thesis is important. A thesis, you know, a central idea behind which all of your essay hangs together – that’s important. And for screenplays an understanding of a three-act structure I think is important. That sense that movies do have beginnings, middles, and ends. And there is a natural flow through which you move through story.

But I don’t want to be as an adult be forced to pay money to take a class where someone holds up a terrible screenwriting book and says that you have to follow this template.

**Craig:** Someone has written a book How to Write a Great Screenplay. I’m going to go out on a limb here. Because I have not heard of this book. Therefore my conclusion, this is just supposition, is that the individual who has written the book How to Write a Great Screenplay has not written a great screenplay. What else do you need to know?

Now, when it comes to surviving classes and things like that, you can take any movie and slap a three-act structure on it. If you put a gun in my mouth and say, A Serious Man, divvy that up into three acts. I’ll do it for you. No problem.

**John:** Totally. Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s also a sign that it’s useless. It is a very fundamental thing. It’s a little bit like in math class when you were moving ahead and your teacher said, “No, sorry. You need to show all your work. You need to show me the 15 plus 24 equals, carry, the whole thing.” Can’t I just do it in my head? “No.” OK, fine. So that’s what it is. It’s a little remedial.

Our script had to contain the six key moments. Hey, Alice from New York, I don’t know what those are. John, do you know what those are?

**John:** I don’t know what they are.

**Craig:** Well, we’re doing all right. [laughs] You got Aladdin out. I got Chernobyl running. Things are going OK. Somehow we made it without not only reading How to Write a Great Screenplay. We’ve never even heard of it.

**John:** So, here’s what I will try to defend about this idea about teaching people this template-y thing. if the teacher were requiring you to just do an outline, like a one or two-page outline that talked about your story in those beats or like come up with a new story and make it fit those beats, that I could see being a valuable exercise because it might get you to think about whatever these elements are I suspect they are, you know, what is that transition between the first act and second act, which real life screenwriters do talk about. Where you’re really – you’re not in Kansas anymore moment. Where a character has crossed a threshold into a new part of the story. That does tend to happen in most places.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** One of these other elements could be kind of a reversal where the thing that looks like it was close is now actually much further away. That things have gotten much worse. That is probably a meaningful beat. And so if it was an outline thing, but to make you write and entire 100-page screenplay following this template I don’t think is a fair thing to ask.

**Craig:** No. Perfectly fine to suggest that this is how beginners can learn. This is an intro to screenwriting. But if somebody like you says, “Listen, as a paying customer of this institution I would like to attempt to do it this way.” Why in god’s name would they tell you no? Listen, do it that way. And if it stinks, and by the way, higher probability it will stink, because you’re trying something – you’re doing like a degree of difficulty dive here that’s different than the other dives – then people will tell you it stunk and you’ll learn something and you’ll move on. It doesn’t mean that three acts are going to save you from stinking, nor does it mean that not three acts condemns you to stinking. It’s just part of the learning process.

But I would say to your professor stop that. Just cut it out. That’s just bizarrely pedantic.

**John:** I agree. Chris writes, “I recently swapped scripts with a writer friend. Instead of offering me story notes he called out formatting ‘errors’ in my first couple pages such as how I bold slug lines, reference a song, italicize dialogue for emphasis instead of underlining, etc. I explained how I was under the impression that all these things were stylistic choices rather than hard and fast rules. That a writer should use anything to better paint a movie in the reader’s mind.

“As an underwriter he argued that script formatting must be much tighter so as not to give anyone reading it a reason to throw it away. Is this true or is my friend simply being overly nitpicky on things that are really a writer’s choice? I’ve read dozens of screenplays at this point and feel no two really format exactly the same way.”

Craig, where are you at?

**Craig:** This is guy is swapping with his friend. You know who likes that?

**John:** That guy, yes. That guy.

**Craig:** Sexy Craig. So we’re talking about swapping, huh Chris? You going to swap?

**John:** Apparently they’re talking.

**Craig:** Get out of here, Sexy Craig. You can’t answer this question. Angry Craig can answer this question. Umbrage Craig is here. How many times do we have to kill this? This zombie won’t – we shoot it in the brain. We cut off its head. We light its heart on fire. What do we need to do to stop this from happening, John? I’m at my wit’s end. What do we do?

**John:** I don’t know. So I feel like a lot of people do listen to the show, but I’m also aware when people like Chris writes in that not everyone listens to the show.

**Craig:** Wait, what?

**John:** There are a few people who don’t listen to the show, although I’ll say that I had some meetings this past week and I was just surprised like folks who aren’t writers who listen to the show. So shout out to those folks who are not writers who listen to the show.

But, yeah, I don’t know how we’re going to win them over. I think all we can hope to do is to our listeners remind them that, listen, the standard screenplay formatting is helpful. It’s helpful because it creates an expectation about how stuff is supposed to look and if you go wildly off of it we are going to wonder does this person really know what they’re doing. Even as we do the Three Page Challenges when we see things that are like that’s not how it’s done we will comment on that because it is useful because it can slow a reader. It gives a reader an excuse for putting it aside.

I don’t think that’s what you were doing, Chris. The things you were singling out are reasonable choices. Some bold slug lines. I like to bold slug lines. I didn’t always, but now I do. So I use italics fairly liberally. It’s OK.

I think we just need to always remind folks that the standards are there because they’re helpful and they’re sort of standard but they’re not hard fast rules. And anyone who tells you otherwise probably doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just stop giving your friends scripts. They’re useless. Sorry. Your friend is useless. I don’t know how else to put it. I mean–

**John:** Also, your friend is useless because your friend did not give you constructive notes about the actual story.

**Craig:** Exactly. Correct. All they did was demand that you conform to a system that they insist is real but I can assure you is utter nonsense. Nonsense. That’s what they did. You were looking for advice on the story, the characters, the theme, the dialogue, and they came back and said here are a bunch of things you’re doing that are incorrect factually.

And the only person that was doing something factually incorrect is your friend, who maybe shouldn’t be your friend anymore. Because, I’m sorry, I bold slug lines. And like you, John, used to not bold slug lines. I reference songs all the time. I italicize dialogue for emphasis all the time. I also underline. I use We See. I do all these stupid things.

And your friend, I guarantee you, is going to say, “By the way I heard on Scriptnotes that they were bagging on me, but you know what? They only say that because they’re successful. But if you’re not them then…” this is how he sounds by the way. “And then you’re going to send your script to readers. They’re going to throw it out. If they see that you italicize dialogue they’re going to throw it out.”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this. And all I can say is no. No, I’ve been doing it this way since I began when I was nobody. Nobody cared. You know what they cared about? Oh my god, I like a script finally. This month of just sifting through one desperate, soul-crushing failure of a screenplay after another and finally something showed up that was, I don’t know, at least mediocre. It made their day. [laughs] That’s all they care about it. That’s it. They don’t care about the rest of this. For the love of god.

**John:** So I’ll say if people don’t trust my authority as a screenwriter on this, let me go back to 20 years to when I was a professional reader. My job was to read screenplays. And I would read two a day and I would write up coverage on them. So I read 200 screenplays. And it was my job to be that reader who passed things up or said no to things. And not once – not once in 200 scripts – did I ever single out for formatting. Oh, it’s a really good story but warning executives it’s not formatted exactly the way you’d want.

No one cares about that. If you’ve never seen coverage – it’s only pedants who say this.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. Yes. Oh, you know what? John, that – the guy that I was just listening to there, I’m going to call that, that’s Victory John.

**John:** Victory John.

**Craig:** Victory John. He knows when he walks into a room victory is assured. Victory John was great there. Nice work Victory John.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** Chris, get rid of your friend.

**John:** Craig, let’s take one last question. Can you read Garrett for us?

**Craig:** Absolutely. Garrett asks, oh god, do we have to do this one?

**John:** I think we can – it actually goes into an interesting place.

**Craig:** Let’s do it. Fine. Garrett asks, “So many fans are furious about the conclusion of Game of Thrones. I am nowhere near dealing with this problem personally, but how do writers surprise insatiate rabid fans who spend all their time figuring out where a series or movie will go? It seems as though super fans will be disappointed whether the ending is too predictable or completely out of left field.”

All right, John, dig in.

**John:** Garrett, I think you are correct. Again, I like people who ask a question and then answer the question within their question. There was no way to land that plane that would keep everybody happy. Some people were really upset by how it ended. Some people signed a petition to redo the whole season. That ain’t helpful. That’s not going to happen.

We’re in this weird time where a fan’s ownership of a piece of material and sort of their sense that the culture belongs to them is really challenging and somewhat problematic. As a person who loves the show I was excited to see the show do what the show wanted to do. And I was excited that the creators got to do what they wanted to do. But that’s not going to be to everyone’s taste.

Craig, how do you resolve Garrett’s question?

**Craig:** I think that the shocking part of it all is that it is impossible to get that angry about an episode of television unless you love that episode or that series. You love it. And the only way you can love it is if the people who made that episode made what you love.

This isn’t a case where some other showrunner came along and took it over and everybody goes, nah, they don’t have the magic. That’s fine. I get that. But in this case Dan and Dave who made this thing you loved, not for one episode or one season, but for years, and who gave up years, a decade of their life, while their children were being born and raised, moving back and forth between Los Angeles and Ireland over and over and over. Doing all of these things and throwing their heart and soul into all of this and keeping a massive cast together and a storyline that involved god knows how many characters. I wish I could impress upon people how many decisions are required to make one episode of television. It is insane.

And they did it into the 70s of episodes of television and they did it in the highest level. And the very same creative ambition and bravery that led them to this material in the first place and allowed them to do it in such a remarkable way in the first place is the very same creative bravery and ambition that led them to deliver an ending that they thought was right.

And if you don’t like it, that’s OK.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** But why – the part that blows my mind, and this is where I agree with you Garrett, it’s a huge problem – is why people would suddenly say things like they’re bad writers. How dare you. How dare you. Not on the level of being insulting to Dan to Dave. They’re geniuses and they’re doing just fine. How dare you insult logic in such a crass and outrageous manner. To say that they are bad writers because they didn’t write a good episode of a show we love because they’re good writers.

I mean, get help. Listen, I get it. You can be super angry in an episode. I’ve seen episodes of things of shows that I love where I watch the episode and said I don’t like this. I don’t like the choices they made. But what I would never do is say because they’re bad writers.

I’m sorry, no one is going to bat 1,000. How about be happy for the good times and the joy they brought you, which is a decade of joy. Can’t we celebrate that? It just bums me out.

**John:** I don’t know who proposed this, but someone was pitching that HBO should film a reality show, sort of like a Project Greenlight, where they bring together eight of the biggest petition signers about wanting to do a new season and get them all together to write a new final season. And just film the whole thing.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** And what that process is like. Because that would be–

**Craig:** What a cruel, cruel joke to play.

**John:** That would be pretty amazing.

**Craig:** And I do. I see things where people say, “I figured it out. Here’s what they should have done.” And they’ll stick it somewhere and then people go like, “Yeah, amazing.” And I’m reading and I’m like that would have been the stupidest, lamest, who cares episode of nonsense in history.

Remember, again, they are somewhat victims of their own success. This is a show where people would spend a lot of time and energy trying to convince each other that Bran was really the Night King. And that level of engagement is amazing. You don’t get to it if the people making the show haven’t done an incredible job. And they did for so long. And to turn your back on them because you didn’t like the last – well, they betrayed us. No. No, you betrayed them. You betrayed them. You bought into that show. You loved it. You cared about it. You told them how great they were. Because they were. And then the minute they do something that’s slightly a – I mean, oh my god, people lost their minds because Jon Snow didn’t hug his dog, sorry, direwolf. Well, guess what? He does later.

And then I hope people go, oh, oh, if he had hugged him there then this hug wouldn’t have meant as much. Yes. Have a little faith.

**John:** That’s probably true.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I’d probably [cut] myself – I’m going to get petitions now to have my head chopped off. I don’t care.

**John:** Back in Episode 296 I sat down with Damon Lindelof. So we talked through Lost.

**Craig:** Lost. Sure.

**John:** We also talked through The Leftovers. And interesting to compare the response to those two endings because they’re both kind of big puzzle box shows and people were incredibly frustrated by the ending of Lost. People seemed to generally love the ending of The Leftovers. And I do wonder if some of it was expectation management. I felt like on The Leftovers Damon did a very good job from season one saying do not expect that you are going to have one answer that will completely resolve everything about what happened and why it happened. That will not come. And I think that softened the – conditioned things a little bit better. And so that may be one of the things that showrunners unfortunately now have to think about is not only how do I get this plane up in the air but how do I land this plane in a way that is going to – basically how do I tell everybody right while the plane is going up where I expect to land the plane and condition them for what they’re going to be getting into.

**Craig:** It’s hard to stop, especially when the joy of something is in the process of it. I mean, I’m a Game of Thrones fan. I’ve seen every minute of every episode of Game of Thrones. Including every minute of an episode that no one else has ever seen. And I’ve loved the journey. And to me the joy was the process. It was the unfolding of this story over time and the collision of characters and things.

Ending is essentially counter to the purpose of the entire venture. So, of course people are going to be a bit confused or put off by some aspects of it because it goes against the DNA of what that show is. That show, the joy of it, is in that it doesn’t end. The world gets bigger and crazier and wilder as things smash together and the stakes grow higher. That’s the joy.

So, I mean, guys, it’s almost as if you would have preferred that, I don’t know, a piano had fallen on them and there was no final season. Is that what you really want? I shouldn’t have asked that question. Now there’s going to be a petition to drop a piano on them.

**John:** So, I would say if you are considering writing into me and Craig and telling us why we’re wrong, I would urge you to first listen to Episode 235. That is the one where Benioff and Weiss came on our show at our benefit for Hollywood Heart. They were gracious to fill in for Lawrence Kasdan when he could not make it. And they talked about the making of Game of Thrones and Craig’s involvement in that early pilot process. And how this is mostly Craig’s fault.

**Craig:** Like most things.

**John:** Actually, you’re somewhat to blame, Craig. Because if you had not intervened when you had intervened maybe Game of Thrones wouldn’t have become a thing and then we wouldn’t have been frustrated by the events of the end of the last season.

**Craig:** That’s such a – you know what, John? There you go. You want to save yourself disappointment folks, stop watching things. Stop falling in love with things. Stop opening your heart to things because it’s much better to have never loved than to have loved and lost. Is that what you are saying? I’m sorry. No one can deliver it perfectly. And if you point me to something and say, “Well they did it perfectly,” I’m going to say to you no they didn’t. Because they didn’t. There’s no way to do it perfectly. You just do it.

And years later people will come – I swear to you people will come back to this years later and say, “Well actually, here’s a think piece about why it’s brilliant.” That’s just how our culture works. Inevitably.

**John:** Yep. Those are the stakes of making a high stakes show.

**Craig:** Oh wow. Segue Man, that’s beautiful.

**John:** Got to bring it all back around. It’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a book I read this last week which I really enjoyed. It’s by Ryan North. It’s called How to Invent Everything. And the premise of the book is that you are a time traveler, whose rental time travel machine, has broken and this is the manual that comes in the little machine. And so, OK, you’re stranded in the past. Here’s how you have to invent all the things that get you back up to modern civilization.

So it goes down from basics of agriculture to metalsmithing to inventing logic. It’s just a very comprehensive guide to how you would get back up to as close as you can do modern day civilization if you were to be stranded in prehistoric times.

**Craig:** Before being eaten.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** That is a very smart idea for a book. I like that. My One Cool Thing is also some reading material, but as you know big puzzle buy over here. So there’s a magazine. It’s an online magazine called PANDA Magazine which is short for P and A which is short for Puzzles and Answers. It is published by a gentleman named Foggy Brume. That is his real name.

**John:** I would not buy that as a character’s name. No–

**Craig:** It’s his real name.

**John:** I reject the premise of Foggy Brume.

**Craig:** Foggy Brume. Very nice guy. I’ve had the joy of puzzling with him myself a few times. And he puts out a monthly edition. And I think this is true frequently he does these big puzzle boats once a year where it’s like a big mega puzzle to do. And then each issue has a little sort of mini mega puzzle where you solve, in this case in this month’s issue there are 12 puzzles that are difficult and each one gives you an answer that you plug into one big puzzle to get a big answer. PANDAMagazine.com is where you can find this if you’re big into that sort of thing. It’s a good challenge.

Each magazine comes with a whole bunch of puzzles where he provides the answers so you’re not miserable. And then there are some that are more of like a contest where he will eventually publish the answers once the submission date comes and goes. So, PANDA Magazine. Foggy Brume. A good subscription for the puzzler in your life.

**John:** I love it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. Edited by Matthew Chilelli who also wrote our outro this week in the style of Chernobyl.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** Who did your Chernobyl music? It’s a woman with a hard to pronounce name.

**Craig:** So her name is Hildur, well I’m going to pronounce it like an American. She is Icelandic. So the cheap pronunciation is Hildur Gudnadottir. In fact it is like Gudnadottir. I can’t do it because I’m not Icelandic and I think Icelandic is the hardest language in the world to learn and speak or something. It’s hard.

She is brilliant. You’re also going to be able to hear her work in Todd Phillips upcoming movie Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** So she’s amazing. And, good news, I believe that – so HBO has confirmed they are releasing her original soundtrack for Chernobyl for download and other versions of it. And I think it’s coming May 31. I think that’s when it will be available. I believe given the quality of the work she did on Chernobyl that that original soundtrack, that original score, is going to become a staple in editing bays.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** It’s going to be one of those temp scores that’s going to confound other composers for years to come I hope. Because it’s unique.

**John:** Nice. If you have an outro you’d like us to play you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. They go up about a week after the episode has aired.

Some folks have started to do recaps and discussion on Reddit so you can head over there and see what people are talking about for this episode.

You can find the back episodes of this show at Scriptnotes.net or download 50-episode seasons in the store at johnaugust.com.

You may also want to check out the Scriptnotes Listener’s Guide at johnaugust.com/guide to see which episodes listeners recommend most.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

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

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 401 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, a brand new feature. We asked you to record your brief pitches for movies and series. Today we’re going to listen to five of these and share our honest first impressions. We’re also going to talk about a development in the agency negotiations. And my most pressing question about Chernobyl.

But first we have to promote our live show which is coming June 13. It’s a Thursday night at the Ace Hotel. It is a benefit for Hollywood Heart, which is a fantastic charity. We can now announce two of our guests. Craig, who are two of our guests?

**Craig:** And this is going to dislodge quite a few tickets. I mean, I feel like people are going to start buying. So, number one–

**John:** Well, people have started buying. I think the rush on the box office will begin right now.

**Craig:** Correct. The Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts will begin right now. Our first guest that we can announce is Alec Berg, showrunner of Silicon Valley and showrunner and co-creator of Barry. Terrific show that I think is the most critically acclaimed show on television, of all shows.

**John:** After Chernobyl maybe.

**Craig:** No, no. No. New York Times did not like Chernobyl.

**John:** Oh, I’m sorry.

**Craig:** No, no, I can’t get The New York Times to like anything I do.

**John:** Ah, Craig, I’m sorry. I had no idea.

**Craig:** Well, listen, we’re doing really well. Don’t get me wrong. We’re like in the 90s, which for me is like in the billions because of where I’m from.

**John:** The logarithmic scale of Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** The New York Times review was bad. Not bad in the sense of they didn’t like the show, but bad in the sense that it was just a bad review. It was poorly written. I thought it was stupid. I’m not helping–

**John:** Let’s get back on topic. Let’s talk about how great it is that Alec Berg is going to be joining us on the show.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** And I already have started writing questions for him because I watched this season of Barry and I have so many questions. Not even like plot spoiler questions, but how do you in a writers’ room figure out how you’re going to do that thing. So I’m excited to talk with him.

**Craig:** He’s a great person to ask those questions for because he does have one of those remarkable clockwork minds. And then we have Rob McElhenney, showrunner of longest running sitcom in history, It’s Always Sunny, and a new Apple show that is going to be out at some point. And, by the way, you know who is – I mean, I can’t talk about a lot of the actors that are on the show, but it’s a great cast. But do you know who is number 16 on the call sheet?

**John:** Craig is it you?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Ah, Craig. So not only are you making television shows, you’re now starring in television shows.

**Craig:** Just so people know, like on the call sheet every day there’s a list of all the actors that are in it. And number one on the call sheet means you’re the star of the show. And then it kind of goes down from there. On this show number 16 is really low. I’m barely in it. But, still, I’m in it. But I’m in it.

**John:** That’s going to be amazing.

**Craig:** And Rob is a great, great guest. A terrific guy to have on the show.

**John:** So he was actually on a previous one of these live shows that I was not at. So, you and Dana Fox hosted a show where he was a guest. I missed that. So this will actually be my first time meeting him. I’ve talked with him on the phone before, but this will be my first time asking him questions about all the stuff he’s working on.

So, we have two showrunners who are coming on. We have more guests that will be announced soon.

**Craig:** Oh yes.

**John:** I think they will fit along that same thing, but we don’t want to tease too much. So you should get your tickets now. There’s a link in the show notes for where you can get your tickets to this big event. Thursday, June 13, at the Ace Hotel here in Los Angeles. There will be games. There will be giveaways. You should absolutely come.

**Craig:** And, again, benefits Hollywood Heart which is a wonderful charity that our friend John Gatins is involved with and it helps kids who are at risk and kids with HIV. It’s a great thing. Come on, I mean, what else do we have to say? Alec Berg. Rob McElhenney. Us. Helping people. And more guests to come. Buy your tickets, folks.

**John:** You should buy your tickets. You should also buy t-shirts. T-shirts are up for sale now. They don’t kind of go down at any point. This isn’t one of those things where they’re limited times. You can buy them kind of whenever you want to buy them, but you should buy them now so you can wear them to the live show. These are the sort of VHS-inspired ones. They go all the way back to when Scriptnotes was distributed by tape, so sort of underground rings that would copy tapes and put them around.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** So really it’s a celebration of the origins of Scriptnotes after 400 episodes.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’ve always been in our late 40s.

**John:** It’s remarkable how that works.

**Craig:** We’ve always been the caretaker. Yeah, that’s my favorite shirt by the way. I love that shirt design.

**John:** Last week on the show we were joined by Chris McQuarrie and we talked through movies that don’t get made anymore, movie genres that don’t get made anymore. And Ryan Smith tweeted at me. He said, “Hey guys, great episode. Loved the discussion. For the ‘sword and sandals’ or Christ figure against Rome features would it be a stretch to say we still make them, but just in the form of Star Wars?”

**Craig:** Sort of. I mean, there’s definitely elements of that in Star Wars, but Star Wars also has elements of pirate movies. Star Wars has elements of war movies. Star Wars has elements of, yeah, I mean it sort of meshes together lots of different things. But no question, I mean, if you watch – let’s go back to the original first Star Wars in 1977, you know, and you have a benign figure sacrificing himself to save others and so on and so forth.

**John:** Yeah, I mean, like a Tatooine and sort of like, you know, that feels like a desert world. It feels very much like that kind of sword and sandals kind of place that he’s in. So movies four and seven kind of feel that way to me. But also we have the pod races in the prequels. And you don’t have those pod races without the chariot races.

**Craig:** That’s right. Exactly. That’s basically Ben-Hur via CGI. And but I think it’s also fair to say that we’re going to see the Christ story in everything. I mean, it’s across all genres. Animated movies are that frequently.

**John:** Now, Craig, you often say that you root for the Empire in these movies. So, do you also root for Rome in the Christ figure against Rome stories?

**Craig:** Well, you know, I mean, Rome is holding things together.

**John:** They are holding things together. They are holding back the chaos.

**Craig:** The question is not how evil is Rome. The question is how evil would the replacement for Rome be. And we kind of know because after the collapse of Rome you have the darkest period in western history. It’s just a brutal ongoing disaster the dark ages. Disease. Superstition. Torture. Murder. Just unpleasantries.

**John:** Yeah. And important knowledge was forgotten. The book I’m going to get to as a recommendation later on, like they figured out how to make concrete and then they forgot. They forgot the recipe for concrete.

**Craig:** Just literally forgot.

**John:** So there were people who were living in structures that they could no longer build, which is just a fascinating thing to think about.

**Craig:** I feel like sometimes that’s where we are now.

**John:** Ah.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** We want to make sure that institutional knowledge is not lost.

**Craig:** Yeah, man.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think the Internet helps, but it doesn’t solve all of the problems.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** That’s why we keep the first 400 episodes of Scriptnotes always available for people to download through the app or to download seasons. We used to sell the USB drives. We want to make sure the institutional knowledge of Scriptnotes continues on.

**Craig:** Of course. And have we sent the USB drives over to the seed bank? I can’t remember if we did that or not?

**John:** So they’re stored in the vault. Unfortunately the vault flooded, but it’s going to work out somehow. Speaking of longevity and things going on a long time.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** So we’re recording this on Friday. So, I.M. Pei, the renowned architect, passed away as we’re recording. And Herman Wouk, The Winds of War. So I.M. Pei was 102. Wouk was 103.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** You know what? It’s sad that talented people have died, but come on, when you live past the century mark that’s awesome.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** I want to live for at least 100 years.

**Craig:** Of course you do. And, oh, well you obviously will live until whenever your parts become obsolete and not replaceable. But I have to say every time someone famous dies now whatever twinge of sadness I have of their passing and the fact that we don’t have them anymore is quickly eclipsed by a larger twinge of sadness that they won’t get to see our current president not be president anymore.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re not going to see that. And I’m so bummed out. I don’t want to die before I see that.

**John:** Yeah. You want to go out at a good place, a good time.

**Craig:** And I don’t mind being political. I don’t care. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Craig doesn’t mind being political? I can’t believe it.

**Craig:** You know what? I’m going to speak my mind. How about that?

**John:** I would say when my dad passed away, this was when I was in college, I was of course sad to lose my father but in the years past that point I would say the thing that kind of makes me saddest when I think back about him is that he didn’t get to see sort of what the Internet became. Because he was involved because he was an engineer at AT&T. So he was involved in the very early stages of what became the Internet. And he would just be blown away by what sort of what it became and what it grew into. And so those are the conversations I miss having with him are mostly about the things that happened, how the world changed, and how excited he would be about the stuff that came.

**Craig:** I just had a vision of you waking up at night and there is the ghost of your father. And he’s looking at your phone, scrolling through the Internet. And then he just turns to you with a shocked, devastated look, and says, “John, it’s all porn.”

**John:** Ha!

**Craig:** It’s all porn.

**John:** Yeah. The Internet is made for that.

**Craig:** Internet is for porn.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s get onto our other topics. So, this past week I had two videos out. I had a video that was put out by the WGA about the Start Button. So it’s a little animated video. Matthew Chilelli did the music for it. Of course, because Matthew Chilelli is a genius.

I also recorded a video with Michele Mulroney where we talked about screenwriter issues. It looks like our audition tape for hosting the KCLM morning news because we’re seated side-by-side. It was my first time using a teleprompter. Teleprompters are fantastic. I love Teleprompters.

Even those two things were not the biggest news of the week, because on Thursday evening it was announced that Verve had signed onto an agreement with the WGA. Verve became the largest agency to sign an agreement with the WGA. So, folks who want to be represented by Verve can be represented by Verve again.

So the WGA in their statement said that, I always go back to what the WGA officially said so I don’t speak out of turn, but in their official statement said, “WGA and Verve representatives first met face-to-face on April 30 and thereafter exchanged counter proposals. The back and forth with Verve was the most substantive negotiation with an agency we’ve had to date.”

And that’s true. From my perspective, the ability to actually talk through specific things was great. And that’s been one of the things I’ve enjoyed most about this part of the process is to really get down to fine details on stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I would put this in the category of not-insignificant. Because Verve is a legitimate agency that represents quite a few writers, what like 300 WGA members? That’s a lot. They are not part of the ATA, so that’s the one thing that I think a lot of people didn’t realize. This wasn’t a case where the WGA had a strategy of splitting off an ATA company and succeeded. But nonetheless–

**John:** Yeah, one small agency which was already an ATA member had split off, but it’s not something you’d heard of.

**Craig:** Yeah. So we’ll put that in the is-insignificant category. So, the other significant victory here is that there is proof of life in that at the very least even on the most entrenched people on both sides of this fight between the Writers Guild and the ATA there is evidence that an agreement is possible. Negotiation is possible. And so that’s promising.

**John:** Yeah. Well let’s talk about what is different between the original code of conduct, so we can put a link into so people can read it, but the basic things that are different from what other folks had signed before is that it’s a mutual agreement. So it’s not just here’s the code, take it or leave it. It’s an agreement that both parties are signing. Both parties have the right to open and renegotiate this agreement. It clarifies that agencies can represent producers who do not employ writers, which was a real question.

It gets around some of the reporting onus by just saying that agencies can copy the WGA on invoices and request for payments. So the WGA sees those records but they don’t have to file a whole separate listing of things. And it changes – it backs off on how often agencies have to list which films they are representing for sales and other stuff. So they don’t have to do it as often. So it backs off on some of their reporting requirements. Those are the big things that the WGA sort of specified or are different in this code of conduct.

**Craig:** Yeah. Now, so good news and bad news, right? So the good news is that the WGA was able to negotiate this with Verve and that, OK, the WGA was clearly willing to meet them halfway on certain things. Bad news is none of those things are the big issues that we have with the ATA. So one of the reasons that Verve was a good candidate for this is that they don’t do packaging. And they don’t have their own production company the way that say William Morris Endeavor does.

**John:** Let’s be clear on one thing. Verve has traditionally done TV packaging. And so even in Verve’s statement they said like this doesn’t mean that we are against TV packaging. And sort of saying like – which I took to mean like if the ultimate agreement that’s reached says that TV packaging is OK we want to be able to go back and do it.

**Craig:** Right. OK, fair enough. It wasn’t a large part of their business.

**John:** It wasn’t a big part of their business.

**Craig:** But that makes total sense. And I think one thing that was really interesting and smart by the WGA for sure, although to give into at the very least, although it was surely something that Verve insisted on, was a most favored nations’ clause.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Essentially if you go make a deal with the ATA that is more favorable than the one you made with us, which is in the eventuality of the deal almost certain, that Verve gets lifted up to that as well. And that’s really important because it provides a relief valve. If that clause isn’t there the problem is then there is nowhere to go for negotiation between the WGA and the ATA. Because what you can’t do is then go and undercut what you just did with Verve. It makes no sense essentially.

**John:** Well, it also gets rid of the first mover problem where you don’t want to be the first person to sign on because you’re worried that people later on are going to get better deals. So you know you’re going to get the best deal ultimately.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So I think that’s an important thing. And that truly was in earlier versions of the code of conduct. So the people who signed that earlier thing, they can take this deal if they prefer this deal.

**Craig:** Great. So that’s great. That’s all good news.

**John:** But let’s talk about what’s not in there. So clearly a decision on what TV packaging looks like, this agreement says you cannot do TV packaging. You can’t collect fees on that. And you cannot be a producer. And so those are two big things that the big four agencies are going to really be focused on.

**Craig:** Correct. I mean, that is – those two things are where the battle lines are drawn. I think both sides can easily make more out of some other issues if they want. But the big ones, as you just said, packaging fees and agency-owned production. So, that still needs to be worked out if it can be worked out. And we are now I believe we have four weeks of this behind us, correct?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** OK. So, you know, let me just say the following. I’ll be brief about it. But I’m disappointed. I’m disappointed in general. Because this is not what I wanted. When I supported this movement from the start and we had Chris Keyser on and I was pretty – I think I was pretty demonstrative as I normally am. I believe that there are real issues that make the way the agencies conduct their packaging fee business and their producing business untenable as they are moving forward. We cannot continue in that way. And I think excellent points have been made why.

I think, frankly, that most of the people in charge of those big four companies agree. I think they are also aware that the way it’s been going cannot continue as is. It has to change. OK. This is what has been so disappointing to me. For four weeks essentially nothing has happened because there has been a breakdown in communication. And I know that both sides essentially are pointing fingers at each other and saying you’re why. But I’m a member of the Writers Guild. I’m not a member of the ATA. So I’m going to talk about the Writers Guild.

I am confused and a bit exasperated by our strategy of not talking to them. I don’t think that talking to somebody is a capitulation, nor do I think it’s a sign of weakness. I don’t know how much more leverage we could possibly have. Because in this situation we have 100% leverage as far as I’m concerned. If we choose to not we don’t have to ever enfranchise them again. With that in mind, a lot of people – way more than 300 – thousands of writers, including myself, would very much like to get back to the relationships that were functioning if not perfectly, fairly well, and in a way that was good enough to say let us improve this and salvage this.

So, what I’m urging is that we figure out how to get back into a room that makes sense. Because the room we were in clearly didn’t make sense. Whether it’s their fault or our fault the problem is all either side heard was offense and hurt and anger. Neither side seemed to understand what the other side was doing. All intentions appear to have either been poorly relayed or poorly heard. So, we need to figure out something.

I don’t mind a situation where best efforts lead to a failure. I am growing angry by the fact that we are not engaging actively in figuring out how to find a way to talk to the other side so that we can try and get something that works for everybody. And we don’t have to take it. That’s the thing. If in our hearts of hearts we’re like, look, this is 100% of what we want and we’re not willing to settle for less than 98% of it, fine. But try. You know, to not be in a room for four weeks because, I don’t know, there’s some theory that we can get 150 or 200 or 4,000% by waiting another four weeks doesn’t make any sense.

And there’s a pressure here and the pressure I will relay is, as always, I will speak on behalf of feature writers. So in our last negotiation – I’m sorry, I’m monologuing but it will be over soon – in our last negotiation I swore to myself, Craig, you’re not going to do this again. You’re not going to just willingly go along with the guild as they put all of the membership at risk and leverage us and our work to get a better deal for one part of the membership, TV writers. You’re not going to do it again because feature writers are the ones that are really getting kicked in the teeth every single day. And they’re the ones who are losing money year by year and they’re the ones whose employment is going down year by year. Ugh. Don’t do it anymore. And yet I fell into the trap and did it again because this entire agency battle, this entire agency battle, hinges on these two major issues and really both of them impact television far more than features. Far more.

So there are a lot of feature writers who once again are being told by their union you’re firing your agent and also maybe – maybe – you can get them back if we can figure out something that’s better for TV writers. And the longer this goes on the more tragic I find that.

So, in short, I remain committed to the goal, which is to improve a system that cannot continue as it used to be, right? So the status quo, what was before, unacceptable. We’re not going back to that, no matter what. But we don’t have to. That’s number one.

Number two, I want us to actually now do the work to get there. Whatever it takes, do the work. If we can’t get there, at least we tried. And then that’s on them. But if we’re holding our breath I just don’t see the point.

Rant over.

**John:** I know. We kept you in a single that whole time. You were in a tight single. You maintained for your whole monologue.

So, obviously I’m on the negotiating committee so I can’t talk about some things and I can’t talk about strategies and tactics and other stuff. I’m a little bit disadvantaged in responding to some of it.

**Craig:** Acknowledged.

**John:** But what I will say is that as a screenwriter I feel that the producing function of all this is a thing that keeps me up at night. And it kept me up at the very start of this all. The idea that five years, 10 years, 20 years down the road if we don’t address this now we’ll be kicking ourselves because that move from being a client to an employee is devastating. We cannot let that happen.

And I hear you when you say that it’s more a factor for TV than for features. I don’t think the distinction between TV and features is especially meaningful five, 10 years, 20 years down the road. I think there will still be two-hour things written, but I think if we don’t address this producing function now we’re going to see these same places producing features or essentially forcing themselves onto things that should be studio features because they can. So those are my big concerns.

**Craig:** I hear you.

**John:** If we don’t address this producing function, you getting the rights to that book you are going to be fighting with an agency to get the rights to that book because they are owning property. And that to me is the thing. And so even stuff that you’re developing now, I do think that if this weren’t addressed you would have to take these folks on as your partners in order to get to any of that stuff. And that just can’t happen.

**Craig:** Well, you’re right that probably in five years or so the distinction will dissipate entirely, but for the next five years there are a lot of people who are trying to earn a living as feature writers who don’t have agents now. One of the things that the Writers Guild has encouraged is for those writers to seek shelter in the arms of managers, all of whom are entitled to ownership and production of their client’s work, and frequently do, and have done for decades.

So, there’s a little bit of an inconsistency there. We already have representation that does that. If we are committed to eliminating the production of client’s material, we shouldn’t be recommending anybody go to a manager, which by the way is something I say all the time. I’m not a big fan of managers for precisely this reason.

I completely agree with you and this production thing has to be figured out. I mean, at the heart of it there’s really only two things I want. I want to know that the more money a writer makes the more money an agent makes. That connection has to be there. It has to be preserved. And the other thing I want to know is that if an agent has any connection to any entity that has a connection to another entity that owns some of that client’s work it has to be some amount that makes it essentially a silent minority partner. We can’t be run by the people that supposedly are working for us to advocate our interests.

But we’re not going to get there this way. And there’s a real danger of not talking. And there’s a real danger to us just saying, OK, it’s a permanent divorce. For one, as a writer, I don’t like the idea that every writer going into a television show is going to be represented by someone at some agency but the director and the non-writing producer and the actors are going to be represented by these massive agencies. We will lose power.

And I’m a pragmatist. I don’t like all this talk of, you know, the agents are mafia. They’re not the mafia. They’re agencies. That’s what they’re doing. They’re agencies. And they became successful because they do what agencies do. I want them to do it for me. I just want them to do it for me in a way that’s fairer. And we can’t get there until we get back in the room. I’m the back in the room guy. That’s my new official name.

**John:** I hear you there. So, we can speculate a bit on what could be coming next. And this is just free speculation. We’re not committing to any of this stuff. Things that could happen in the near period. Some other small agencies could decide to sign that same agreement. It’s really for the same reasons that Verve did is that they’re not involved in those things that are the big issues and so they might decide to sign.

Agents could move around. I don’t think that’s going to happen a ton and Verve seemed to try to downplay that in their thing, saying like they only want to grow organically. So we’ll see if any of that were to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And whether agents would move and take former clients with them. And we could come back to discussions with individual agencies or the bigger group. A couple different ways that could happen. Craig, what do you think is the way that discussions begin again?

**Craig:** Well, in a case like this where the initial method of communication and exchange of proposals was such a crater, I don’t think you would want to just say, “All right, well let’s just do that again.” It didn’t work. So, in my mind the ideal would be for someone at the guild to kind reach out through a neutral third party mediator, and there are some wonderful people out there that serve that function all the time in business disputes, to say let’s just begin by having a small discussion through a mediator about how to have the discussion. Let’s just begin with that and not throw ourselves back into a situation where we’re set up to fail. Let’s figure out how we’re supposed to talk to each other. And begin that way. Just gently get back in and start undoing a lot of the ill effects of the way this has all gone down. I mean, the current situation as far as I’m concerned is bad for writers.

What I want is a better deal than what we used to have with the big agencies. What I currently have is you can’t be at the big agencies. That’s not better for me. It’s not better for any of us. The good outcome is something that makes sense for us there. At least that’s my feeling. I don’t believe that there is a good outcome where no writer is allowed to be at those agencies, because they won’t cease to exist. Oh, far from it. And we will get hurt if we’re not part of that mechanism.

**John:** I’ve had a lot of conversations with writers who are either doing great or not doing great. And the ones who are not doing great seek me out and I have phone calls with them and I talk to them at mixers. And a question I sort of go back to, which is really helpful for me and I think also helpful for them to frame what they’re looking for, is let’s say this gets to some kind of new normal. Describe the new normal you’re looking for. And that has been really helpful for me to understand what folks are really looking for in the outcomes of these things.

A word that I just – I guess it’s because of Avengers, but man, “end game” comes up a lot. Everyone keeps talking about the end game. And I’m like I don’t know what the end game is. I’m not sure how far we are into the second act. So, I can’t talk to you about the end game. I can only talk to you about sort of what is important to you and communicate that through to everybody else.

**Craig:** I’m going out on a limb here that I think a lot of people are wondering about the end game because we were kind of presented a sense of how things could and would go and they haven’t gone that way. And so the next question is, well, OK, whether or not technically they have or haven’t gone that way there was an impression that this going to lead to something positive and I don’t think there are too many people in the membership who thought the day before this all ended that it was going to go on for four weeks without either party even talking to each other really.

So, there’s a question of is this like forever? Is this for a year? No one seems to know and people are growing concerned because what happens is as you approach month two, whatever was in the pipeline that was being worked on is being exhausted out and now people are going to have to deal with something new.

**John:** I hear you. And, again, there’s some stuff I can’t respond to just because–

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Of things. But the idea that no one is talking, I understand why it feels that way. It’s not as accurate as one might think. And so I’ll leave it at that.

**Craig:** At the very least that is encouraging. [laughs] And I hope that that, you know, obviously my hope is that that becomes the order of the day rather than something that we’re also kind of sort of doing. But rather the thing that we are focused on.

**John:** Well it sounds like you want a more concerted effort to–

**Craig:** Talk.

**John:** To talk.

**Craig:** To talk. And just so people know, it’s not like I’m just showing up on here after four weeks and going blah-blah-blah. I have been saying this privately–

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** To David Goodman for the last four weeks. So I’ve definitely been sharing my point of view. I’m not sandbagging anybody.

**John:** That’s part of this process. Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Let’s move onto the next part of the process which is the pitch process.

**Craig:** OK!

**John:** So this is a thing we talked about doing on the show a while back. I had forgotten about it. Then Megana, our producer, reminded me that we have like 30 of these pitches sitting in her inbox.

**Craig:** Oh man.

**John:** And so went through them. So this is kind of analogous to our Three Page Challenge where we invited our listeners to record themselves doing a 90-second pitch. It could be for a series. It could be for a TV show. And they’ll send it in and we would take a listen to them. And so we’re going to listen to five of them today.

Now, Craig, you have experience doing this because you are often a panelist at the pitch panel thing at the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Yes. I have been a judge at the finals of the pitch contest at Austin twice. Both times along with the great Lindsay Doran. It’s a fascinating event. It’s not really what we do.

**John:** It’s not what we do. And so I was thinking about that as I was trying to write my notes for this is that this 90-second thing is not actually a thing that writers do on a daily basis or even ever, kind of. But what I think is interesting about both the Austin version and what we’re going to do today is that it’s like writing a sonnet. It’s forcing you to think about your idea in a very specific form, in a very concentrated form. And the actual skill of doing that is analogous to what it’s like to go into a room and start pitching a project. Even though a pitch in a room is going to be longer, an elevator pitch is going to be shorter probably, it is a thing that is helpful.

And so I think the process of doing this obviously for these five writers but also for people listening, it does make you think about what does this thing I have in my head or this script I’ve written, what does it feel like to a person who is listening and what are the hooks I can use to keep someone’s attention as I’m describing it. So I think that is the valuable part here.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a little bit like debate, like formal debate societies.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** Vis-à-vis professional attorneys or legislators. It’s a strange side thing. It’s not irrelevant. But it’s not spot on. We don’t really walk around doing these things.

**John:** All right. So the best way to do this is to actually listen to the pitch. Each of these pitches is 90 seconds or less. We’re going to start with one from Karen Welsh. It’s called You’re What. Let’s take a listen.

**Karen Welsh:** This is a feature film. A 56-year-old woman, a failure at pretty much everything, discovers to her delight that for the first time in her life she is pregnant, to the dismay of her about to retire professor husband. You’re What is a dramedy aimed at the over-50 crowd. In case you’re wondering, yes, though very rare a woman in her 50s can naturally conceive. When the media get involved the absurdity of a woman that age pregnant is played for laughs, but the problem with having kids late in life? Baggage. A lot is riding on this baby.

Jill wants to give her agent mother the grandchild she’s never had. But Clara, brokenhearted over a family tragedy, and not impressed by Jill’s many failed attempts to compensate refuses to believe that her daughter won’t disappoint her again.

Then there’s Trevor. His two grown kids from his first marriage are back in his life, making demands, while the broadcast of a reality show upends his dignity, his career, and his home.

At the breaking point Trevor blurts out that he never wanted this baby and in fact he never wanted children, period. Jill is determined to be what she’s always wanted to be, a mother. But Trevor is the one with the emotional arc. Only a moment of emotional clarity will lead him to do the right thing. Happy ending? Nope. Bittersweet.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** OK. So when you guys do this at the Austin Film Festival you get to talk to the person and ask them questions. Now, we don’t have Karen here to ask her questions so we can only respond to just what we heard. And my very first impression is that from the title I was thinking this was a comedy and so then when it was pitched as a dramedy I’m like, oh, really? And then when the dramatic moments happened I was less excited about them.

I think the premise of a 56-year-old woman having a baby for the first time and her older mother I think is really fun. I think the stresses of that and as you’re getting closer to retirement suddenly having a kid is interesting. I want to see all of that. But I think I want to see it in a comedy and not as a dramedy. Craig, what was your impression?

**Craig:** Well, you know, when we do these things we actually don’t really have any kind of back and forth with the people. We just sort of give them a bit of feedback that combines our sense of how interesting did we find their pitch in terms of content and also how did their pitching style help or hurt them.

In this case I found Karen’s style to be a little bit like newscasters talk. It was very formal. And sort of bleached out a little bit of what I would consider as normal human passion for the material. You know, sometimes it can sound really rehearsed and really canned in that regard.

Story wise, I don’t know, is a 56-year-old woman getting pregnant massive news? I don’t think so. I just don’t. I mean, it is a rarity. But I’m struggling a little bit with that part of it.

And I guess the other thing I would say is the way that she relayed her story, a lot of her sentences were complicated sentences, meaning there were clauses and additional clauses. Even the very beginning one, “That’s right, pregnant, much to the dismay of her.” You know what I mean? There’s a certain loss of punchiness because of the ornate over-comma style of the sentence structure.

**John:** Yeah. It feels a little written rather than spoken.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And the pitches have to be that really middle ground between the two. I can see the reality show of it. I can see why that is useful for the feature of it. I can see how it’s exposing the problems and things. But I feel like you have to set up that Jill – there’s a reason why she’s an interesting person to be following at 56 doing that. She’s just an ordinary – you know, she was an office manager. That’s not remarkable. But if she was famous for some other reason or had been famous for some other reason, or she was a soap opera actress. There would be some reason why she’s worth this attention and scrutiny.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because the plot of reality television company comes in and upends normal person’s life we’ve seen quite a few times.

**John:** Yeah. It does feel like a feature though rather than a TV series.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** In that a pregnancy is about one change and then a birth. And so that’s what we kind of want to see. Or, if it’s going past the birth it’s not going much past it probably.

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s a built-in ending. Yeah.

**John:** A literal ticking clock.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Do you want to set up the next one?

**Craig:** So our next pitch is from Hayley Grgurich. And it is entitled Uncertain Texas. Let’s take a listen.

**Hayley Grgurich:** Here’s my pitch for a comedic TV series called Uncertain Texas. Rival podcasters arrive in the same tiny East Texas to discover they’re after the same true crime story. The series follows their attempts to out-maneuver each other without much help from the locals who are suspicious of the podcasters’ motives and inclined to keep their hometown business to themselves.

This idea comes from actual people and places I encountered while living in East Texas, along with the popularity of true crime podcasts and two news stories that stuck with me. The first story was about a man who went missing in an 11-person town in the Australian outback. Police suspected foul play almost immediately. And after interviewing the remaining ten residents also suspected everyone in town.

The second story I learned while I was interning at Esquire. Chris Jones, one of the top features writers, went to a small town in Ohio to report a story. After finishing an interview with the key source he said, just as a bit of housekeeping, that he’s appreciate it if the source didn’t share the information they discussed with anyone until after the story came out. The source looked kind of sheepish and told him he already had. It turned out there was a reporter from GQ in town for the same reason. The discovery sent both writers into a neurotic tailspin as they tried to file competing takes from the same motel.

The combination of Texas characters, professional rivalry, and the goofiness of podcasting really delight me and I think Uncertain Texas can also resonate on a deeper level through exploring the conflict between small town culture and big city interference. Thanks for your feedback. I appreciate it.

**Craig:** OK. Well, John, what did you think about Hayley’s pitch for Uncertain Texas?

**John:** I think Hayley set the table really well. She had a good way of describing what the show was kind of going to feel like and what the real life background was behind this kind of stuff. This idea that there were multiple people who would be going after the same story and crossing paths was real. So I like all of that and I liked her sort of quiet delivery of it all. I think that all worked really well.

She didn’t get to any characters or any story or any plot or any things that would sort of tell us what we’re actually going to see on a weekly basis in this series, or an episodic basis on this, which could be fine. I felt like this was honestly the first 90 seconds of a pitch and right after that then you say like, “Now let me tell you about the characters and what would happen next.” But I’m kind of fine with that. Having heard this, I wanted to hear more which I think is a good sign for a pitch like this.

**Craig:** I agree. Right off the bat you kind of want to be friends with Hayley, you know. She just sounds friendly. You can sense emotion coming through. There’s a little moment at the end where you can tell she’s smiling, even though she’s not visible. And it’s a really interesting idea. It’s a great premise, I think. And what I loved about her pitch was that she explained why she wanted to do it.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So instead of kind of hitting me with the good old, “Jim, 25, is a blah-blah-blah.” She just said I’m Hayley, I’m a writer, here’s what turned me on about this whole thing. There were two stories and they made me want to write this. That’s a huge thing. That actually imparts that sort of passion that you’re hoping for so it doesn’t feel so dry. I really liked it. I thought she did a terrific job.

**John:** I think it’s also good that she wove in the fact that she was an intern. Gives a little sense of her history and backstory within the context of what this project was.

You know, this idea reminds me a bit of A Very Fatal Murder which is the really terrific Onion podcast about a fictitious true crime, but in the best ways. And I think it’s the right way to approach the absurdity of a podcasting universe descending on a small town. Everyone is looking for the dirt and sort of how outsiders stir things up. It reminded me a bit of Schitt’s Creek.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which is another great sort of outsiders coming into a place. I think there’s a lot of comedic potential here. So, she definitely – she baited the hook really well.

**Craig:** All right, well, John, do you want to take the next one, our third pitch?

**John:** Our third pitch is by Jake Arkie. It’s called How to Make a Man. Let’s take a listen to Jake’s pitch.

**Jake Arky:** Hi Scriptnotes. My name is Jake Arky. And I’m a writer who has a half-hour family comedy pilot to pitch to you guys. My pilot is called How to Make a Man and it’s for a series about when a Mormon family adopts an Indian child with special needs and the patriarch jumps ship which forces the eldest son to step up to become the man of the house.

This is partially based on a true story of my family growing up in Salt Lake City, Utah. We weren’t Mormon, but we were heavily involved in communities that were. And when we adopted my brother from India he kind of change our lives in many different ways. And I wrote this series kind of as a This is US meets Malcolm in the Middle, so there’s some poignant stuff, there’s some comedy stuff, but it’s really about the relationships within the family, especially between the two brothers. And the idea behind it is that we’re seeing so much right now about toxic masculinity and how men are being raised in certain ways that turn out to be bad. So I thought what about making a show semi-based on my life about how we can actually make better men and raise them better.

So, that’s my pitch for you. Hope you enjoy it. Thank you so much.

**John:** Craig, what was your impression of Jake’s pitch, How to Make a Man?

**Craig:** Well, it was nice. It almost sounded like somebody else had written it and then he was describing it because he’s like, “Yeah, it’s got a little bit of this, it’s got a little bit of that.” There was a certain casualness to it. I think it sort of took off at the end. The advice I would give to Jake is that what’s interesting about his pitch is what he said at the end of the pitch which is why do I want to do this. Because for most of the pitch what I’m hearing is, OK, so it’s just a family and there’s a kid and a kid from India isn’t really a reason to have a show. It’s just a kid.

And so I’m just waiting for why I care about this. And then I get to this end part and I go, oh, OK, that’s a whole different thing. I would argue that if you’re going to tell a story about How to Make a Man then you kind of need to do it from the perspective of the person that’s raising a boy into a man, not a brother. So, there’s issues going on there. But it was – I was engaged and I was listening along. I just I think this pitch would have gone 50% better if he had taken the stuff at the end and put it at the front.

**John:** I had a hard time picturing anything as he was describing it. So, I think about the other pitches and I could see something, I was starting to form characters. And I think part of the challenge is I didn’t have a sense of how old the brother who is being adopted into the family was. It’s a very different story if we’re talking about toddlers or if we’re talking about teenagers. And I didn’t have any sense of the grounding of sort of what kind of story I was looking at. So when he said Malcolm in the Middle I’m like, oh OK, so it’s more that age great. And the patriarch thing threw me off a little bit too because I took that to mean the father but I wasn’t quite sure that’s really what I was supposed to be meaning.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You know, sometimes using too specific of a word or too nebulous a word kind of knocks me out of the story for five seconds and when it’s only 90 seconds long it’s a challenge.

**Craig:** That makes total sense. And you’re absolutely right. I mean, there wasn’t much to sort of imagine there. And there was a lot of ambiguity. It’s a weird thing, Jake, because sometimes when you’re basing things on real life you will elide over details that are absolutely crucial to everybody else but they’re not worth mentioning to you because just you know it. But we don’t, so definitely something to think about.

**John:** I would also say that Jake it’s great that this involves part of your real life story. And so including that in the pitch I think is crucial because otherwise we wouldn’t have a sense of why you are the right person to write this story. And so explaining that in part of any pitch is really important.

**Craig:** Agreed. Well, our next one is from Guy Patton and it’s called Sinnerweb. One word. Sinnerweb. Shall we listen?

**John:** Let’s listen right now.

**Guy Patton:** Hi, I’m Guy Patton and my show is called Sinnerweb, and hour-long supernatural police procedural in the vein of X-Files with the feel of a modern western. Essentially it asks what if a young female Longmire were the Sheriff of Twin Peaks. Much of the uniqueness comes from the setting in rural Pennsylvania Dutch Country among the Amish and Mennonite communities there. And draws on the real life legends in mythology of those worlds, a rich and uniquely American folklore pantheon to explore.

For example, Hexenmeisters, essentially witches and warlocks who practice a folk magic using Hex signs and symbols to encourage good harvest or to curse someone and destroy their lives. These are powerful figures in this culture and exist in various forms to this day.

The title is also the main character, Sinnerweb, the sheriff of the strange town of Cavalry and a train wreck. Obviously if you name your kid Sinner there’s probably some family issues there to explore as well, and we do.

Initially when we meet her she is doing some decidedly un-sheriff like stuff. She’s in a bar, drunk, making out with a stranger in a bathroom. Then her deputy arrives to let her know there’s been a tragedy. A young Mennonite woman is found dead at the scene of a devastating fire yet her body is unburned. The investigation of this event, based on a real life story, provides the plot of our pilot. Thanks so much for listening. And if you like Sinnerweb you can read the pilot on the Black List website.

**Craig:** All right. John, what did you think about Sinnerweb?

**John:** So, Sinnerweb, it is two words. So Sinner Webb is her name. So now I know that. I didn’t know what a Longmire was. And so again I got thrown thinking like what is a Longmire?

**Craig:** What is a Longmire?

**John:** We can Google it now.

**Craig:** Let’s do it.

**John:** Longmire was a TV show. It’s a dedicated, unflappable staff of–

**Craig:** Oh, it’s a western.

**John:** It’s a western.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a western.

**John:** Great. I liked that there was a supernatural quality to this. I liked the idea of a really folklore kind of place. Twin Peaks is a good reference for it, but it feels like it wasn’t specifically Twin Peaks-y. So, I like the visuals that you gave me in terms of an unburned body in a burned building. That’s really cool. So I think all these things are really intriguing.

Honestly, Longmire threw me off a little bit and I had a hard time grabbing some early straws in that, but I was intrigued by where it was going.

**Craig:** Yeah. A little bit of overload in the beginning. So in the beginning it’s Longmire, which I don’t know what that is, and it’s a western, and it’s Twin Peaks, and it’s Amish people. Help me. But really, Guy, the funny thing is all you had to say was, “It’s Twin Peaks but Amish.” It’s Amish Twin Peaks and there’s all these mythologies and things and demons and witches and so on and so forth in a culture that we are very familiar with and yet don’t know at all. And then I get it. And then I’m down.

I personally detest characters with names like Sinner Webb. Because I just feel like they were not born of a woman but rather a laptop. Do you know what I mean?

**John:** I totally know what you mean.

**Craig:** I just don’t buy it. I just don’t buy it. I mean, the one that always killed me – I like the big robot movie. What’s the big robot movie where it fights the–?

**John:** Pacific Rim?

**Craig:** Yeah, Pacific Rim. I like Pacific Rim. But that one character is Stacker Pentecost and I’m just like, no, no, no one’s last name is Pentecost and no one’s first name is Stacker. Or, if they are, they would never be together. It just seems so written, you know what I mean?

**John:** It’s like a hat on a hat. Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a bit of a hat on a hat on a hat. So, I’m like – it’s like a super cool sounding name, Sinner Webb. I don’t buy it. So it kind of like knocked me out a little bit because what I really want is for that person to just be named Carole. I mean, they do this so well on Fargo. By the way, Fargo is how you should be referring to this, I think. Not Twin Peaks. Because Twin Peaks is its own weird freaky thing and it doesn’t sound like you’re doing it. It sounds like you’re doing Fargo but Amish and supernatural stuff.

So, really cool. I would take a little bit of the practiced rehearsed edge off of your thing.

**John:** Yeah. It felt a little salesman-y, like listen and subscribe and give us a ratings on iTunes.

**Craig:** Smash that like button. [laughs] No, but it’s a really cool idea for a show. Don’t name it Sinnerweb and don’t name her Sinner Webb. That’s my god honest opinion.

**John:** All right. Our final one comes from Laura Beck. It’s called Hard Core Vegans. It’s described as a series. Let’s take a listen.

**Laura Beck:** Hard Core Vegans is a 30-minute dark comedy pilot in the vein of Good Girls meets Barry with a little shaggy dog thrown in. What would happen if there were vegan activists who were willing to do literally anything – and I mean anything – to save animals? Hard Core Vegans follows the two founders of San Francisco Vegans Unite. Ally, a granola-munching, Birkenstock-wearing self-righteous mess, and Sam, a fantastically gorgeous and painfully perfect Instagram celebrity vegan. Because of their warring ideologies the two women are always at each other’s throats and one day, after a particularly contentious vegan bake sale, the two women witness a man die and then through a case of mistaken identities are assumed to be the hit people behind the job.

This leads them into an underworld of murder-for-hire where a shadowy character named Rufus gives the women their second job: kill beloved vegan superstar Moby. It turns out Moby isn’t actually vegan and is running a cannibalism ring. I know! Can our heroines kill one of their idols? Will human blood on their hands be OK if it means they can use the money to rescue a bunch of animals? Will they become straight up hit women and murder hella people? That’s Hard Core Vegans.

I’m vegan, and while I’m not a murderer, I swear, I spent quite a bit of time volunteering for animal welfare causes and met some of the most wonderful, funny, passionate people ever who were also a little bat shit crazy.

Ultimately Hard Core Vegans is an extremely dark comedy about what it means to follow your passions and live your dreams. Even if that means you’ve got to get a little dirty. And by dirty I obviously mean murder.

**John:** Craig, talk me through some Hard Core Vegans. What was your first impression?

**Craig:** My first impression was that every single first impression I had was wrong and then I’d have another first impression and then that was wrong. First of all Laura is delightful to listen to and that was a very funny ending. And I happen to know that there – I’m not a vegan – but I read an article once about this crazy schism in the vegan community and it was really vicious. And you think of like vegans as being super positive peaceful people I guess. Nope. They’re just people.

So that part actually was kind of intriguing. I like the sort of satirical aspect to it. Where I just kind of felt myself lifting off the ground in confusion was when Moby suddenly was involved. I just was like I don’t know what this is anymore. But this is one of those pitches where you listen and you go I’m not sure I’m qualified to comment on this. I don’t know what I just heard.

**John:** I think I’m qualified to comment on it. So, like you I kept having new first impressions. Because it’s like, oh, I get what this is. Like, no, it’s not quite what I thought. And it just kept pulling me a little bit away from where I wanted to be. So she starts by Good Girls Revolt, which I don’t know, but Barry, and I can see that. Where it’s like it’s well-intentioned people and it goes into a very dark place. And I love this idea of sort of warring factions of vegans and sort of people with noble intentions who to really dark, dark places. It’s sort of that question of like well what would you do to make the world a better place?

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** How far will you go? That is so intriguing. And I think that is why it is a really good premise for a TV show. And I can see that. The details of sort of how these two women meet and compete and sort of like what their unique lanes are I wasn’t entirely getting. And I didn’t like that they’re mistaken for murder. Like that to me doesn’t feel like – they’re not making an active choice. I want to see these women make a choice that takes them to this place. And that to me is what’s great.

There could be an element of accident, but I think back to 9 to 5 and you look at the murder that seems like it happens in 9 to 5. You are completely on their side and yet they know they’re done something horrible. So, that to me is an opportunity of a way to look at how these women come together to do this thing.

**Craig:** I think that’s really smart. That may have been the thing that ultimately started knocking my dominoes down and I was just so confused was the whole mistaken – mistaken identity, like two people mistaken for hit people, just understand this Laura. That plot point doesn’t just say something about those two characters, it says something about the entire world of your show. And what it says is the world of your show is a bit stupid. Because no one actually confuses a hit person like that, much less two people, much less two vegans. It’s just not a thing.

And then weirdly they are hired to kill a non-vegan who is posing as a vegan. So there’s this weird coincidence that they happen to be confused for killers and also now must kill somebody that’s directly related to the thing that… – You know what I mean? It just starts feeling a bit silly in a bad way. But I’m with you. Like all the things you say you like I like. So I would say Laura you should do what John just said.

**John:** Yeah. I actually like the idea of Moby being a character in this because he’s identified with this kind of movement. I just don’t know that he’s the target for being a hypocrite. I think there’s some interesting way to use him that could be fascinating. If he is the kingpin behind stuff that could be great, too.

I liked him as an element, I just didn’t think killing him was necessarily going to be rewarding for – the best comedic reward for using that element.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m not going to stick around and watch that season. I just kind of don’t care about Moby.

**John:** Craig, what did you think of this whole pitch idea?

**Craig:** I liked it. I mean, it’s definitely a different thing for us and what we’re talking about now is something that we – it’s actually really hard to get to and this was a fun way to do it. How you interact with the world when you’re talking and being a writer in a bar, in an office, on the street, how do you come across and how does your story come across? It turns out actually this matters quite a bit. And so maybe this is the beginning of little kind of training for people about how to just talk about what they’re writing and why.

**John:** I think it’s also a useful way for us to divorce the words on the page in the Three Page Challenge from this general idea. Because when we do the Three Page Challenge it is so focused on what I got out of these three pages and less of like do I think that that’s actually an idea, a premise that is going to be sustainable for a feature or for a series? And we can talk about it kind of on those terms. And also I know Mike, my husband, just tunes out all the Three Page Challenges because he won’t read them. So I think he might actually stick around for these.

**Craig:** He might. I mean, listen, if we can get Mike back we’re onto something.

**John:** We know we hit something. So thank you to everyone who sent in their pitches. I think what we’ve been doing for receiving pitches is you write into ask@johnaugust.com. You attached the recording you’ve made of your pitch.

I think Megana was sampling for a range of storylines and premises and also genres, but also a bit for quality in the sense of like actual recording quality. So just do it in a quiet room. That’s great. But you can use your phone for it. So, send those in and we’ll do it as another feature down the road.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Cool. Craig, this week I sent a little message to you asking about the font you use in Chernobyl. So this is a thing where I’m watching Chernobyl, I’m enjoying it very much, I’m listening to the companion podcast.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** But you have not spoken about the font that is used in Chernobyl and the font is terrific. And so since I actually know the creator of the show I emailed or I messaged you with the most important question about what typeface is being used as the display face in Chernobyl.

**Craig:** So, this was something that Johan Renck and I were very, very, very, very, very, very fussy about. Because for starters we don’t have an opening title sequence. It’s not something that people have remarked upon particularly. We tried. We thought about it. We talked to some incredible people who have designed amazing opening title sequences. We just couldn’t find one that seemed to not disrupt what we were going for which was that kind of verisimilitude. You know, we wanted you to forget that you were watching a television show.

So, with that in mind we said, OK, it’s just going to say Chernobyl. And then we have quite a few place and time fonts as well, or subtitles, that we have to put on there. So the question is what do you show. Here’s we knew we didn’t want to do. That really goofy fake Cyrillic English font thing where, oh look, the R is backwards. No. No. [laughs] Definitely not.

What we wanted to do was impart something that in keeping with the rest of the way we do this show some kind of accuracy to time and place. You know, we can’t show Cyrillic to people. They won’t understand it. But what Johan did was he worked with his brother. And I’m still working on getting all the details for you. But essentially they created a font, as far as I understand. And the font was kind of inspired by Cyrillic fonts. And there’s a number of Cyrillic fonts that came out of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had their own state-run typography department and they did create a number of fonts, including something called – well, it’s referred to as Poor Man’s Futura. There’s a bunch of them. Anyway, the point is rather than font out and dork out, what we went for was that. Essentially an English font that conveyed the truth of what Soviet fonts looked like at the time.

They’ve got weird kerning. Some of the numbers are slightly bizarre for us. And then we messed around with the color a little bit and we fuzzed some of the edges just to make it feel like it was part of 1986. So that is the long and short of – and I suppose we’ll have to come up with a name for it. I mean, I’m going to propose that the name for that font be Renck.

**John:** Oh, Renck would be fantastic. There’s already a typeface called Chernobyl so that would be confusing. What I like about it, Futura is clearly a reference for it. And if you use the What the Font app to look at screenshots of it, which I did, there are faces that are kind of similar to it, but the numbers are really strange and different. You know, it’s a Sancerre face. It has that aspect of weird kerning. You are only using in uppercase which is appropriate because Russian is written in what we would consider uppercase only.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But anyway, it was well done. And I was just – I agree with you that it feels very specific even though it’s not Russian at all. And I think it’s consistent with everyone is speaking English but all the other signage is in Russian. It makes it feel like the right mix.

**Craig:** Great. Well I’m glad it’s working for you. We certainly put a lot of intention on that. I think at times Carolyn Strauss and Jane Featherstone were like are these two font nerds going to ever shut up? Johan far more than I.

**John:** Couldn’t it just be Arial?

**Craig:** Well, Johan definitely took the lead on that one. He gets the credit for this font. And the Renck family, the extended Renck family.

**John:** Nice. It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a book that I finished last week. It is called Blueprint: Evolutionary Designs of a Good Society by Nikolas Christakis. It’s really terrific. I heard him on the Gist podcast and he was halfway through his interview and I was like I’m going to buy that book.

The book talks about how humans evolved both biologically and culturally to have a set of social ideas that are really important for how we can function together as groups and as a society. So ideas like love, altruism, selflessness, learning, collaboration, individual identity. They seem really obvious to us, but very few other species on earth have these qualities, or have all these qualities. And it’s hard to imagine that we could actually do most of what we do as human beings if we didn’t have this sense. For example, if you didn’t think of yourself as an individual and think of each other person as an individual who is consistent in time you couldn’t do most of the things that humans do.

So as important as speech is, as important as our hands are, these are probably qualities that let us do what we’ve been able to do on the earth. So, I thought it was just a terrific book. Highly recommend it. It’s sort of in that same zone as the Jared Diamond books or the Steven Pinker books. I loved it.

**Craig:** Great. That sounds like one for me. I like that sort of thing. I wrote a paper about altruism in college and the notion of – and I’m sure that Mr. Christakis gets into this in this book, but the notion that there is a social or rather a survival advantage to being part of a group.

**John:** Oh absolutely.

**Craig:** And so pro-social behavior is encoded into us, in other words we are to some extent at least for a number of people instinctively pro-social. We want to do things that would help keep the group together and cohesive. But interestingly that occasionally expresses itself in ways that are directly detrimental to the individual person’s survival.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Which to bring it back is sort of when you watched things, when I was reading and doing research about Chernobyl and I would see these people do these things I would just think–

**John:** Oh, that’s episode two. That’s like I’m going to walk into the water.

**Craig:** Pretty much. And you’re seeing the expression of this pro-social behavior. There’s a very famous story about a plane crash in the ‘80s in Washington, DC, and the plane essentially went into the Potomac and it was freezing cold. And a man just jumped like 100 feet into the water or whatever it was to save people. And he didn’t know any of them. And he had no connection to any of them. He just did it. And in that moment you think, yep, there it is. That’s that little gene going do-do-do-do.

**John:** Yeah. So it’s obviously – if that person is your own child there’s a genetic component to that so like that would happen with other species. But it clearly goes beyond. We’re wired and our cultural switches are flipped in a certain way that you will do that stuff. You will help a stranger even though it is no benefit to you.

**Craig:** Exactly right. In fact, this explains things like colony insects, like bees.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Bees will happily sting you and die as a result just to protect the rest of the hive. Well why are bees so hive-oriented and so kind of pro-social? Because the way bee reproduction works they are all highly related to each other, more so than say humans. There’s way more overlap. In other words, if I’m dying to protect you I’m still furthering our genetic code because we’re really closely related. It’s a world of twins.

**John:** You can also think about the organism is really the entire colony. The organism is not the individual bee. And to some degree the organism is this human group. And so you will do whatever it takes to keep this human group alive, which could involve individual self-sacrifice. And so when you see nationalism, bad nationalism, it can be as a result of over-identification with that group and not thinking of yourself as an individual.

**Craig:** Yep. No question. No question. That’s a great point actually and the way it backfires.

Well, I’ll go with something that – we’ll just keep along the idea of pro-social work here. So Chernobyl Children International is a wonderful organization. It is based out of Ireland run by a wonderful woman name Adi Roche. And it is a charity that helps support children and various people that have been affected by the Chernobyl disaster across Belarus and Ukraine and just Eastern Europe in general.

And I was lucky enough and had the honor of speaking at the United Nations. Did you know that, John? I spoke at the United Nations.

**John:** You know what? Someone might have told me. It was you. You told me that you were speaking at the United Nations.

**Craig:** John, I have news for you. I spoke at the United Nations.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** So, anyway, when I was speaking at the United Nations because I spoke at the United Nations I was there with Adi Roche. And she really was the one that put it all together. She is a dynamo. And, of course, as people watch the show they may want to be charitable. I think that her organization is a terrific place to start. HBO and I and Carolyn and Jane all were donors. And so I just wanted to put that out there for people if they were feeling like they wanted to throw a little money towards some people who might be in need, Chernobyl Children International is a terrific organization. Obviously a proper charitable organization. And we’ll link to their website in the show notes.

**John:** Fantastic. And that is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from the fantastic Jonathan Mann.

**Craig:** Is this the one?

**John:** This is the one from last week.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** So enjoy this one everyone. 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 like the ones we like to answer on the show. For short questions though I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin on Twitter. Those are fantastic.

If you would like to send in your 90-second pitch you can also send it to ask@johnaugust.com.

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

Some folks have been doing recaps on Reddit and it’s great. So if you want to read a recap of this episode or the last couple episodes go to Reddit. Go the /screenwriting sub-Reddit and you’ll see them there.

You can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net. Or you can download 50-episode seasons. There is a new season that should be up by the time this one comes out which goes through episode 350-400.

**Craig:** Oh man.

**John:** If you’re going to download that one you might want to check out the Scriptnotes Listener’s Guide because that has recommendations on previous episodes that you should not miss. So that’s at johnaugust.com/guide. And you can of course through the app listen to any episode you want at any time and just go to Scriptnotes.net for instructions about the app.

**Craig:** Spectacular.

**John:** Thank you so much for a new feature. 401 and we’re still innovating.

**Craig:** Unbelievable. Here’s to the next 100 and I’ll see you next week.

**John:** Thanks. Bye.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes LIVE](https://theatre.acehotel.com/events/scriptnotes-live-podcast-taping-benefit-hollywood-heart/) on June 13th at the Ace Hotel with Alec Berg, Rob McElhenney, buy your tickets [here](https://www.axs.com/events/374457/scriptnotes-live-tickets?skin=acehotel)!
* Order your Scriptnotes 400 shirts, sweatshirts, and tanks [(Light)](https://cottonbureau.com/products/scriptnotes-400-light#/1506766/tee-men-standard-tee-heather-white-tri-blend-s) and [(Dark)](https://cottonbureau.com/products/scriptnotes-400-dark#/1506818/tee-men-standard-tee-vintage-black-tri-blend-s)!
* WGA Start Button [Video](https://www.wga.org/contracts/enforcement/start-button)
* John August and Michele Mulroney discussing [Issues Affecting Screenwriters](https://www.wga.org/members/membership-information/agency-agreement/video-updates/agency-campaign-update-issues-affecting-screenwriters)
* [Verve Signs WGA’s Code of Conduct, Citing ‘Meaningful Dialogue’ With Clients](https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/verve-wga-code-of-conduct-sign-1203218082/)
* [WGA-Verve Code of Conduct Agreement](https://www.wga.org/uploadedfiles/members/member_info/agency_agreement/WGA_Verve_Code_of_Conduct_Franchise_Agreement_5-16-19.pdf)
* Pitch Session selections: Karen Welsh *You’re What?!*, Hayley Grgurich *Uncertain Texas*, Jake Arky *How to Make a Man*, Guy Patton *Sinnerweb*, Laura Beck *Hardcore Vegans*
* [Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society](https://amzn.to/2Q7BA7q) by Nikolas Christakis
* Donate to [Chernobyl Children International](https://www.chernobyl-international.com/donate/)
* Watch [Chernobyl on HBO](https://www.hbo.com/chernobyl) and listen to [The Chernobyl Podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-chernobyl-podcast/id1459712981) with Craig and Peter Sagal
* [Find past episodes here](http://scriptnotes.net/), [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* Thank you to everyone who submitted to the pitch session! If you’d like to be considered in the next Pitch Session, submit your entry [here](https://johnaugust.com/pitch).
* [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 Jonathan Mann ([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_401_you_got_verve.mp3).