Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/comedy-geometry).

**Craig Mazin:** Hi this is Craig. Today on this podcast there is one F-bomb that gets dropped, so if you do have some small kids around you in the car or at home just be aware that that’s going to happen at some point. You might want to put the ear muffs on.

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

John August will not be with us today. He is in Japan doing stuff. Later on in this episode we will have a “What is John doing in Japan?” lightning round because I honestly don’t know. But I have some guesses.

I will be your sole podcast host, but not alone as we bring back one of our favorite guests, or at least one of mine. I don’t really know what John thinks about him. But I love him. The writing master of not one but two – count ‘em two – hit comedies on HBO. Mr. Alec Berg. But first, say nothing Alec Berg. Say nothing. There’s some follow up.

We did an episode recently, you know what, go ahead. Say a little something, because you can join in on this part.

**Alec Berg:** Hello. Hello. Can anyone hear me?

**Craig:** You can see why he’s so, so successful. A couple of weeks ago we did a show about money. Money stuff that writers have to deal with. And got into some nitty gritty things about payroll and corporations. It was a laugh-a-minute, Alec. We have a follow up from Anonymous who writes the following.

“I work for an entertainment payroll company.” You know this is going to be good, right? You’re already excited?

**Alec:** My interest is piqued.

**Craig:** “So I finally have a correction for Craig. Loan out corporations generally can’t collect unemployment.” All right, so I had this whole thing. All right, so you get paid, you work at Starbucks, you get a paid a wage. And they take out unemployment insurance. It’s UI. It’s on your paystub. And then when you lose your job, if you should, then you can file for unemployment and you start to collect that money back. That’s how that works.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I believed that when we pay ourselves from our corporation that a corporation does the same thing on our behalf. And then we could reclaim that money back if we stopped working.

**Alec:** And?

**Craig:** This guy basically says, “Shut up, idiot.” I’m not going to read his whole–

**Alec:** That’s a terse summary.

**Craig:** The whole email is much, much nicer than what I just said. But basically what he said is dumb-dumb you’re working for your “company” and you’re still working for them. You don’t stop working for them because they’re paying you a regular salary. So therefore it’s not really happening – you would have to basically fold your company for that to work that way.

He’s right. I’m wrong. Thank you, Anonymous.

We also have another question, Jeff from Seattle following up on the money topic. “I enjoyed the discussion in Episode 342.” That’s how many–

**Alec:** What?

**Craig:** I know. I know. Oh, I should say this is Episode 344. John usually handles that sort of thing. “I enjoyed the discussion in Episode 342 where you touched on the business side of screenwriting including agents, managers, lawyers, corporations, federal taxes, state taxes, etc. At the end of the day, how much is left? Let’s say you sell a screenplay for $100,000 or $1 million. After everyone is paid how much is left? Can you walk us through the math?”

Alec, do you want to take a shot at that? Let’s say you’ve been paid $1 million.

**Alec:** Yeah, I think the last time I did the math my take-home is about $0.47 on the dollar.

**Craig:** That’s not bad actually.

**Alec:** Well, I don’t pay taxes to the government. They’re not listening to this though, right?

**Craig:** You know who is? This guy from the payroll service. Anonymous is certainly going to report you. So you get paid $1 million. Let’s take off $100 for your agent. If you have a manager, I think a lot of writers do.

**Alec:** I do not. I have a lawyer. That’s 5%.

**Craig:** That’s 5%. And I’m going to presume that there is a manager in the mix because I think you and I are actually weirdly the exceptions now. So, we’re going to take off $250,000 of your million right there. Now you’re down to $750,000. And of that $750,000, what we’re saying is between taxes, maybe half of it goes away?

**Alec:** Pretty close.

**Craig:** Pretty close. At that point what you’re talking about is $375,000. $0.37 on the dollar.

**Alec:** Well, but that’s the manager. That’s the difference.

**Craig:** That’s the difference. Exactly. So, I think Jeff from Seattle what you’re looking at is somewhere between let’s call it $0.35 to $0.50 on the dollar, which is a bit sobering. And it’s particularly sobering – and this is a point we’ve made on behalf of the WGA to the companies – when you do sell your screenplay for $100,000, because now you’re talking about $37,000 for the year maybe.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Your big dream of being a huge, wealthy Hollywood screenwriter has suddenly been a bit impinged.

**Alec:** And that’s if you work as a solo act. And I spent the vast majority of my career working with sometimes one and sometimes two other partners. So I was taking home $0.47 on one-third of a check.

**Craig:** Right. You were taking home $0.47 on a one-third dollar.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So my first job, I had a writing partner, and I think we got paid $110,000. That was our deal. So I got $55,000, which meant really at the end of the day $20-something thousand dollars.

**Alec:** $27,000. Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, which was less than I was making at my other job. So, it’s a bit sobering, Jeff. And it kind of works out where to make – well, I guess to have a comfortable living as a screenwriter you need to do more than one thing a year. You need to sell more than one thing a year or you need to get the amount that you get paid up quite a bit.

Anyone who is out there thinking that this is a big lottery, well I guess it kind of is a lottery in that you’re probably not going to win. Well, and this has been Scriptnotes Podcast. OK.

**Alec:** The shortest and least satisfying Scriptnotes Podcast of all time.

**Craig:** Stop doing this job.

Today’s featured guest is the mighty Alec Berg. In his past collaborations with aforementioned partners, Dave Mandel and Jeff Schaffer, Alec wrote for and then ran Seinfeld. Lame. And he also wrote for and then ran Curb Your Enthusiasm. Not at all funny. And also wrote movies such Euro Trip and Bruno and the Dictator. Well, now this joke is getting a little awkward, isn’t it? I’m not going to continue the rub.

**Alec:** It’s no less true.

**Craig:** But lately, lately, he has been most prominent as the showrunner and head writer along with Mike Judge of Silicon Valley on HBO. And now as of literally this week or this past weekend–

**Alec:** Yep.

**Craig:** A new show, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say a new hit show that he is running with Bill Hader. Barry. So, yet another hit from the ha-ha money machine known as Alec whatever-your-middle-name-is Berg. Alec, welcome back to the show.

**Alec:** Well thank you. It’s lovely to be here. And by here I mean my home where we are right now.

**Craig:** It’s kind of weird right? Like you have to feed me. You have to give me a green room. You have to take care of me.

**Alec:** It’s lovely for you to be here.

**Craig:** I think it’s fantastic. So, let’s talk about Barry. I know that you’ve been doing a lot of this – this is what happens when you have a show come out. You have to do a lot of this chitchat.

**Alec:** It will be remarkable how bad I am at it still, having done–

**Craig:** It already is quite remarkable. I think everybody at home has noted that. Well, here’s what I want to know. You have a new creative partner in Bill Hader. How exactly is it that you came to find another creative partner and give birth to another project and then actually make it and produce it and I think probably direct a little bit of it?

**Alec:** Yeah. I directed the last two episodes.

**Craig:** You did all of that while you were running another television show. How did that happen?

**Alec:** Mistakes were made. Poor decisions were made.

**Craig:** Run it down for us.

**Alec:** I mean, the only way that I could really do it is when we do Silicon Valley and now Barry we don’t do that many episodes. You know, when you do a network show it’s 22 or 24 episodes a year. Silicon Valley’s order has always been 10. Well, not always. The first season we did eight. And actually this season we did eight. Part of the reason we’re doing eight is because of the load that Barry put on me that doing 10 was just—

**Craig:** Too much.

**Alec:** Too much. So we did eight Barrys this year and eight Silicon Valleys.

**Craig:** But even then the comparison isn’t quite perfect because you’re talking about 16 episodes of television, but you are serving so much more of a role on those 16 than you would say when you were doing Seinfeld. You had, you know, I would imagine a whole lot more writers.

**Alec:** Well, no, we have a staff on Silicon Valley and we have a staff on Barry.

**Craig:** So you are kind of lazy in a sense?

**Alec:** Yeah, no, I smiled and waved at them.

**Craig:** Why are you complaining? I’m not quite sure then.

**Alec:** Because I complain. That’s what I do.

**Craig:** Oh, OK.

**Alec:** No, it was – both had to be on the same lot because I was going back and forth. And so they were both on the Sony lot and I bought a bike. And I would go – we were writing both shows at the same time, so from 8am to like 1 or 2 I would work on one show.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Alec:** And then I would get on my bike or eat my lunch while I walked from one office to the other. And then I would work at the other office from 1 or 2 until 9 or 10 at night.

**Craig:** Was it just the bike ride and the lunch walk that gave you the opportunity to essentially reset your brain?

**Alec:** Yeah, I mean, oddly doing two different shows, they’re slightly different muscles and the tones are slightly different. So, it’s not – like if I had been doing double the work on one of those shows in a weird way it would have been more arduous than doing the same amount of work but splitting it between two shows, if that makes sense.

**Craig:** It does. But you still – the two shows have more of tonal overlap than for instance I’m able to say, “OK, I’m going to work on this, like Chernobyl, so there’s episodes about period piece/historical drama and then in the evening I’m spending a week on someone’s comedy and so it’s just two totally” – this is not totally different. Did you ever kind of have these moments where Barry popped up in your mind in a Silicon Valley episode?

**Alec:** There were definitely moments where — it was mostly like, “Wait, have we done that? We had a line about this. Wait, was that this show or the other show?”

**Craig:** Oh god.

**Alec:** It’s mostly like back catalog stuff where it’s just like wait a minute, did we already do something like this? Or was that the other thing?

**Craig:** Did you have two writing staffs that were sort of each jealous of your time or–?

**Alec:** You know, I have a running joke with the Silicon Valley cast that they’re wishing me success, but not that much success on Barry. I got a lovely call the other day from Zach Woods, you know, who said like, “Look, as much as I want to hate Barry, I watched it and I enjoyed it.”

**Craig:** I think that’s actually nice. I would be a little more concerned if they were like, “Go Barry! Take up all of your time.”

**Alec:** Yeah, you know, “If you don’t want to come back that’s fine.”

**Craig:** “Geez, we hear the folks at Barry could really use you.”

**Alec:** “Maybe you should do one show. Not this one.”

**Craig:** Right. Yeah. “If you’re here for us, that’s—“

**Alec:** But I also, you know, I have really good partners on both shows. You know, Bill Hader is an immensely capable and creatively prolific guy. And Mike Judge is not a slouch. So, if it were just me on both, sure, that would be trouble.

**Craig:** It would be trouble.

**Alec:** But I have a lot of – and I have a good writing staff on each show. And, you know, Silicon Valley has been on for five years so everybody knows what’s going on. And the production people are great and the crew is great.

**Craig:** So it works?

**Alec:** Yeah. So, you know.

**Craig:** No complaints.

**Alec:** What do I have to complain about?

**Craig:** Well, quite a bit.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I want to talk a little bit about your work ethic because we are sort of joking about what do you have to complain about, but I really do believe that most people, including professional writers who even have a lot of experience, I think most people would have crumbled under the burden that you carried. You have an ability to carry a tremendous burden. And this is a bit of a philosophical question that I think will be applicable to everybody listening, not just people that have two shows on HBO, because obviously there are many people like that. There’s you…

**Alec:** Um…

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Alec:** There’s me. Yeah.

**Craig:** All right. So this has general application for all of the writers listening. There’s a balance that has to happen in your mind between work ethic and then kind of a just a need for rest to be creative. And I’m just kind of curious how you negotiate the difference in your mind between a work ethic, proper work ethic, versus a desire to please or fulfill what you have been told to do. And on the flip side how do you negotiate in your mind whether or not it is that you need a recharge and a rest for your own creativity or you’re just being a bit lazy that day. Can you even parse those out?

**Alec:** Yeah, you know what I’ve gotten much better at is there are days where it’s like, “OK, I have to write this episode or these six scenes.” And I sit down to start writing and immediately I just know my brain is not there. And it’s not going to happen. And what I will end up doing is spending four hours sitting at a computer farting around and not getting anything done. And at the end of four hours I will have nothing to show for it except that I spent four hours that I could have spent resting or thinking about something else.

So, that’s one sort of thing that I’ve gotten much better at is forgiving myself those moments where it’s like “It’s not happening right now. You know, for the next few hours my brain is garbage and I need to just listen to that and take a step away.” That said, you know, that is a luxury to be able to do that because there are a lot of times where it’s, like, I don’t have that time. Like it’s like whether my brain is there or not I need to be productive.

**Craig:** I actually think those are very dangerous times because what I have found when I don’t have it, my brain isn’t there, and I need a rest, I need a break, and then someone says, “Uh, yeah, too bad. You can’t have one.” The dangerous thing is then I say, “OK,” and I do it.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And the lesson you learn from that is you can actually override temporarily at least. It’s like riding your car, you’re on fumes, or you’re riding on a donut, not a real tire. It’ll work for a while. But then it’s not a rest that’s coming, it’s just a collapse.

**Alec:** Yeah. I’ve gotten very close. Season two of Silicon Valley, Mike Judge and I directed all 10 episodes the two of us. So, he did five and I did five. And the combination of doing all of the writing and directing half of them, or supervising the writing and directing, that’s the closest I’ve come to – there were a couple of days where like I was walking to my car and I got so dizzy. I literally had to sit down. And I started laughing because it was just absurd. I was just like I’m honestly about to collapse.

**Craig:** This is the thing I don’t think people quite get. Mostly because their experience of writing is either the experience of watching a finished product, which has been designed to appear effortless. Massive amounts of work have gone into making it look like it took no work at all.

**Alec:** Ideally.

**Craig:** Ideally, correct.

**Alec:** If it works right, it seems like it–

**Craig:** It just squirted out of the sky like this.

**Alec:** It just emerged out of whole cloth.

**Craig:** Or if they’re writing something, they’re writing it on their own terms, in their time, in their own way, without any budgetary issues, meetings, actors calling and grousing, not that you’ve ever had to deal with anything like that.

**Alec:** No. Never.

**Craig:** The remarkable quantity of work at times is overwhelming.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I wonder sometimes how many people we’ve actually lost that would have done really, really good work if not for the fact that this business runs in a crucible-like fashion.

**Alec:** Yeah. And that’s kind of the complaint that most of the people who do what I do for a living that I talk to are like, “God, I wish there was a way to do it that was financially viable where you could just do it at three-quarters of that pace.

**Craig:** Exactly. Even looking at the shooting day. I mean, the hours that go on here. Interestingly, I was talking with – you know, we’re about to start shooting and so we’ve been having–

**Alec:** Congratulations on that, by the way.

**Craig:** Well, thank you very much. And we’ve been having a lot of sort of production-y meetings, organizational meetings now because we’re getting so close. And this is where they do – there are fascinating differences between the European model, because this is an entirely European production, and the US model. And one of them, at one point we were talking about a little bit of a scheduling issue. And, well, we can’t put that on this day because we have this on this day. So we’ve got a problem. And I and the director, we both said, “Well, maybe we just go long that day.” And they said, “Oh, no, no, we don’t do that.”

They don’t do it.

**Alec:** Really?

**Craig:** They don’t do it.

**Alec:** Wow.

**Craig:** It’s a 12-hour day and then you go home.

**Alec:** Huh.

**Craig:** And in the United States, I mean, yes, I’m sure there are occasionally bits of overtime, but it’s never planned that way.

**Alec:** No, but as much as you would like it to be a complicated and like, “Oh, we don’t do that,” it just becomes about money, right?

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** It’s just like, no, whatever you can end up doing – and this is why I think crews get abused, right?

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**Alec:** Because it’s just, “Oh, we need to do it and it’s money, so we’ll work a 19-hour day. And we’ll just pay them more.”

**Craig:** That’s right. And that’s the danger.

**Alec:** And knowing that you can do that I think leads to a lot of abuse where it’s like just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

**Craig:** Precisely. And we have an epidemic in the United States of fatigue on sets. I don’t really know how anybody is doing any good work at that point anyway. It’s a bit tragic. So I’ve been sort of fascinated by that aspect, but I do think that there is a certain element of self-care that we ignore as writers because we’re actually not hauling cable, you know, or setting up flags, or driving a truck. We’re just sitting, right? Seems like–

**Alec:** Yeah, how hard could that be?

**Craig:** Turns out pretty f-ing hard.

**Alec:** Yeah. But the flip side of it I guess, and this is where I keep getting deeper into more and more work is like on the one hand, yeah, it’s hard, but on the other hand it’s like, you know, if people want to hire me I still do struggle a little bit with that thing of like but there’s an opportunity here and this could be good. And I want to work with that person. And I don’t want this to go away. You know, and as we all know nobody ever calls you in this business and says like, “OK, you’re done.”

**Craig:** Ever.

**Alec:** Like there’s no pink slips. You’re the last person to know that your career is over.

**Craig:** Yeah. When we go away we go away the way squirrels go away. Where do they go to die?

**Alec:** No idea.

**Craig:** Small pile leaves. Nestle under there. And you’re gone.

**Alec:** Where did that squirrel go with my career?

**Craig:** That’s basically right. One day you wake up and it’s all gone.

**Alec:** A squirrel has buried your career under an oak tree.

**Craig:** Well, that dilemma of when to say no versus a fear of not saying yes, that is a topic for another day, but it’s a good one we should do.

**Alec:** But it’s also – it sounds like such a whiney high class problem to have. “Oh no, I have too much work.”

**Craig:** Yes and no. Because the truth is it’s actually a huge problem I think when you’re starting out. Because when you’re starting out you’re desperate to do work, right? You’re desperate to start your career, to make money. And someone is going to come to you and say, “Do this absolute career-killing pile of crap.”

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you at that point have a choice to make. Actually more likely that is where you’re going to have the hardest of those choices I would imagine at the very beginning.

**Alec:** Yeah. But that also you’re factoring the quality of the offer. Right? I’m talking about just like at a certain point it’s just like you can do what you want to do, right?

**Craig:** Yes.

**Alec:** I find myself fortunately through an enormous series of good breaks to be in a position where–

**Craig:** Oh, is that what it was? Good breaks?

**Alec:** I’ve stood next to a lot of very talented people. But, you know, luckily enough I’m at a point where the issue I have is like, “OK, well what do you want to do?” Look at Barry. That really was, the whole thing was Bill and I sat down and it’s like, oh, “We’re fans of each other and we want to do something together. What do we want to do?”

**Craig:** And it just happened.

**Alec:** And it’s not because I’m in a contract year. And it’s not because I’m a corporate shill. I will tell you HBO is the best in the business, as you know. You’re working with them as well.

**Craig:** I am. They have been wonderful to me.

**Alec:** I’ve had nothing but great interactions with them and they genuinely believe in the quality of the product and they trust you and they leave you alone.

**Craig:** It’s actually quite – like I don’t quite believe it.

**Alec:** No. No, I find myself wondering what the hell is wrong with them. When are they going to wise up?

**Craig:** This is obviously a trap.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, well. That’s what working for the Weinsteins did to me. I’m now like, it doesn’t matter who I meet. I’m just like, “Where and when does the knife go in?”

**Alec:** Yeah. It’s obviously behind me somewhere.

**Craig:** Well speaking of knives going in, and this is where – John likes to do things like that, these segues.

**Alec:** Oh.

**Craig:** And I make fun of him.

**Alec:** Speaking of ham-fisted segues.

**Craig:** Segue Man. Knives going in. So, I want to talk a little bit about what your experience is now as somebody who is writing not one but two shows that are widely seen that are actually huge – they’re occupying spaces in pop culture. Barry is already doing it. I see it happening. And then there’s that interesting other side of that sword. When you occupy a space in pop culture suddenly people have quite a bit to say to you. You went through some storm clouds over Silicon Valley and gender representation.

**Alec:** Sure.

**Craig:** And then there was the departure of TJ Miller which was fascinating to watch from the outside.

**Alec:** Oh was it?

**Craig:** Probably not so much fun from the inside. [laughs] Just like your show, incredibly enjoyable for me and costing nothing. And for you–

**Alec:** Yeah. It’s lovely to parachute in and watch for half an hour, isn’t it?

**Craig:** For you you’re fainting and laughing. How have you come to deal with all of that? Do you have any advice, strategies, or thoughts on how we as writers should be dealing with pop culture as we occupy it and it starts to occupy us?

**Alec:** I just think you have to – all of that commentary – Bill Hader is friends with the writer George Saunders. And Bill was saying that he talked to George Saunders about critiques and reviews. And George Saunders said something I thought was really interesting which is the vast majority of all criticism is really about the person writing it, not about you or what your thing is.

You know, so I think you just have to take that all with a grain of salt. And it’s like if somebody is angry about something that’s going on on something you’re writing it has as much to do with what they’re going through in their life as it does what you’ve rendered.

**Craig:** I think that there’s truth to that.

**Alec:** And you just have to take that all with a grain of salt. And you just have to believe in what you’re doing, and also every once and a while somebody has something interesting to say and you go, “Oh, that’s actually an interesting point. I hadn’t thought about that.” But this idea of trying to write your way out of criticism is – it’s folly. Like if you don’t believe in it.

**Craig:** What about this other thing that is less I guess criticism and more of a kind of wave of feedback. Twitter in particular has a way of – well, it’s like the wave in a stadium. 12 people can start it.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But within 10 minutes you have 50,000 people moving in unison, explaining to you that you’re terrible. Right?

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So it’s like a wave of awfulness. And I don’t think you’ve experienced that.

**Alec:** But that’s fundamentally different than my everyday life, so.

**Craig:** Right. That’s sort of what it’s like when you wake up.

**Alec:** Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I guess I’m used to writing that way.

**Craig:** Well, I also think that – I suspect that, given the way those things work, I believe that no matter what you do, if you were caught tomorrow cutting puppies up with scissors it would obviously be a big news story and people would be very angry at you. Twitter would just be up in arms with scissor emojis and puppies and how could you and you’re the worst person in the world.

And I do believe on that day if you got on a plane and went to Fiji and just waited two weeks when you got back no one would be talking about it anymore because something else would have happened.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think about two weeks. And then you’re kind of out of the woods on it.

**Alec:** Yeah, I mean, obviously depending on the degree of – I feel like cutting puppies up with scissors may be–

**Craig:** I don’t know. I actually think–

**Alec:** Maybe three weeks? Maybe a month?

**Craig:** The problem is you’d think that. But on Day 13 someone else does something insane. Or people just get bored. They just get bored.

**Alec:** Well, I do think, I mean, that’s the most interesting thing. To me there is this culture now of outrage as a recreational activity, right? Where people are just like, “Oh, what are you going to do for the next hour? You could watch TV or you could just go on the Internet and rage about things. Or I could go outside and shoot some hoops.” You know what I mean? It’s like one thing or another–

**Craig:** It is very satisfying. I understand it in the sense that maybe because I actually am not very good with being part of a group. I’ve never felt comfortable sort of sharing my identity with a group. So I get little snacks, like little tastes of it if I’m online. And everybody is teeing off on, well, let’s just say Ted Cruz just for the funsies of it.

**Alec:** Just for example.

**Craig:** It’s nice to be part of a group all of a sudden. Like, I’m so used to being the one in the corner going, “Wait everyone. Stop. Let’s think about this. You shouldn’t all just necessarily…”

**Alec:** Yeah, sure, it’s fine. But the fundamental problem with that is that as the firehose pans from left to right.

**Craig:** Ah yes.

**Alec:** Slowly. Eventually it pans back to you and you get blasted.

**Craig:** Voila. Yes.

**Alec:** You know what I mean?

**Craig:** Live by the mob, die by the mob. I completely agree with you. I want to ask you one final question, but it’s about what I call the Bergian machine.

**Alec:** Dear god.

**Craig:** Yes, the Bergian machine is a comedy engine by which small decisions in the beginning of a story loom larger and larger as the narrative unfolds and eventually emerge surprisingly in the final motions of a story to either save or completely upend our character. This is the Bergian machine. I have noticed this throughout all of your work, even as tones change and plots change and things change. Maybe it’s at its strongest in Seinfeld. But it is still there in Silicon Valley. And maybe to a lesser extent in Barry, but still there in Barry. I see it.

And it occurs to me that there’s a kind of life philosophy that’s being applied by this a little bit. Because I think funny things are funny for a reason. They reflect our reality. And it’s the idea that the more we try and control the world around us the more likely we are to sow chaos and undo ourselves. And I’m kind of curious like where you kind of instinctively get your hooks into the Bergian machine.

**Alec:** Well, first of all, please stop using that name.

**Craig:** Well, it’s Bergian. And it’s a machine. I’m talking about the Bergian machine now.

**Alec:** I understand. No. You’ve said that already.

**Craig:** So let’s discuss that.

**Alec:** I guess to me it’s just I learned – really I learned to write at Seinfeld. At that was my graduate school of comedy writing. And so much of what I do to this day is, you know, entirely due to what Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld taught me about, you know, that sometimes the satisfying connection between two stories is better than a satisfying beat. You know, if you’re kind of following one thread and it’s like this happens and because of that this happens, and then because of that this happens. But something coming from another story and intersecting one story. The fact that you’re getting this sort of two-for-one where it’s like a beat in two different stories but it’s one beat is sometimes the most satisfying beat of the story. And so – and that I learned entirely from Larry. Where the stories intersect. And when you’re outlining stuff and it’s like, you know, “Oh, our lead character is dating a guy and another one of our characters is buying a bike from a guy.” And you go, wait a minute, what if that’s the same guy? And now it’s like, oh, not only does the story have an economy and efficiency to it, but now you’ve got two of your main characters that have opinions about each other. And you’re always trying to get characters – you know, it’s all about conflict. So you’re always trying to get characters that have opposite opinions of something. And, oh, she likes this guy, but he hates this guy. So now he wants her to do something about this guy.

You know, and now you’ve got all this energy between your characters.

**Craig:** So, in short, there is nothing fancy about the Bergian machine. It’s actually quite practical.

**Alec:** Honestly, we called it Comedy Geometry. You know this from writing. I feel like there’s two fundamentally different types of writing when you’re outlining. One is inspiration where it’s just we need a great reason for this guy to go from here to there. Or a great way that she learns that her father is this guy. And that’s just sometimes you work for days and you don’t have it. And then you get in the car and as soon as you stop thinking about it you go, “Oh my god, this is it.”

**Craig:** You get it. Right.

**Alec:** Or sometimes you just have a weird thought of like an image in your head of like, oh, this is really funny. I just have this visual image of this thing. And then you go, oh wait, that could be that thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** And that’s the inspiration part of it. But the honest answer is the vast majority of what we do in series TV is the other type of writing and that’s just elbow grease.

**Craig:** It’s math.

**Alec:** And it’s just working it, and working it, and working it. And what about this, what about this, what about this, what about this. And Bill Hader and I sort of liken it to two idiots standing at a piano going, “What about this note?” Ding. Nope. “What about this one?” Ding. No? “What about this one?” No. “Wait, wait, hold on, hit that one again.” Ding. Ding. Wait, that’s it.

**Craig:** Really, see, in a sense, let’s come full circle here, because it really does come back to work ethic in a sense. There is the talent part to me is knowing that when you do hit the right note that it’s the right note. But I think people without talent sometimes land on these things and they don’t know it.

**Alec:** Yeah. And, by the way, I will say that people always say, “Oh, you’ve been doing this for a while. You must have figured out how to do it. You must have a system. Must have gotten easier.” No. It’s not any easier. In fact, it’s harder because, one, I’ve done way more stories.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** Right? So I have 25 years’ worth of stories I’ve done so that when somebody pitches me something and says, “What about this?” I go, oh yeah, season two. When I was at Seinfeld 20 years ago we did this thing with George so we can’t do that.

And the other thing that makes it harder is I wouldn’t say I’ve gotten any better at coming up with good material. But I’m much, much better at telling you whether something is good or not.

**Craig:** Well, that’s really important.

**Alec:** Whereas it used to take me, you know, whatever. I’d have to come up with five ideas before I’m like, oh, that’s a great one. Now it’s like it’s 50 or 60.

**Craig:** The experience of watching material go from page to screen is vital for you to start to hone that metric. You can’t – I don’t think until you’ve actually gone through production, a lot of production, you really can’t fine tune your sense of whether something is or is not a good idea. Because you actually haven’t seen all of it yet.

**Alec:** That’s right. And a lot of times people will be very excited about something we’re working on and I’m like, you know what, I’ve died on that hill.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Alec:** I’ve died on that hill twice.

**Craig:** Exactly. I can assure you. And in fact I was you telling another me why I was wrong and that me tried to keep me from the hill.

**Alec:** Yeah. That other me warned me.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** I didn’t listen.

**Craig:** I didn’t listen. And that’s why I only have eight fingers. No, it’s absolutely true. Ted Elliott once said that screenwriting/television writing is one of the few jobs where people can get paid quite a bit to only do half of the job. Because they never get to that second half. And there are people that do – most of the things that they’ve done they’ve been paid for have not been made.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s, well, I think less and less now with the rise of television.

**Alec:** I will say that’s the other thing that I love about TV is that in my years in the movie business the most frustrating thing, as you know, is you write a lot of things and then for whatever reason it’s like movies have this energy about them and they either come together and the wind is blowing in the right direction and for whatever reason they happen. And if they don’t happen in a brief amount of time then they just go into this purgatory. And it’s like, “Oh, well that idea has been kind of sitting around for a while, so–“

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s boring to us. Therefore it’s boring. Right.

**Alec:** Right and they just go away. Whereas TV, the great thing about it is it’s just about making the trains run week in and week out. And the great thing is when you make a deal to do a TV show when you get to a point where it’s on the air it’s like, “Oh, we’re picking you up. You’re making eight of these or 10 of these. And this is when you start shooting. And this is when they air.”

**Craig:** That’s right. It’s fascinating.

**Alec:** As opposed to when you’re pitching a movie where it’s like I have an idea and I want to get it made. This is the opposite. It’s like here’s when we’re putting 30 minutes of something on the air.

**Craig:** Right. Fill it.

**Alec:** Go figure out what the hell that is. But you’re backing into delivery, right? So it’s like–

**Craig:** Well, we do that in movies now, too. Unfortunately there are – some of the bigger movies – the ones that weirdly cost the most money, we are backing into those. It’s terrifying. In part because, well, you get one episode don’t you? I mean, that’s the issue with movies. You get one.

**Alec:** I never got those jobs when I was–

**Craig:** Well–

**Alec:** I don’t know that feeling.

**Craig:** It’s not a good feeling.

**Alec:** But there is something nice. Like it’s part of what I love about doing TV is that, I mean, look, I never thought of myself as an artist. I feel like I’m a craftsman. And there’s art in that, you know, when you make a chair or a table. There’s a tremendous amount of art in there, or there can be. But it also has to serve a function, like a chair has to support the weight of a human sitting on it.

**Craig:** I have to say every time I hear someone, a writer, say I consider myself more of a craftsman than an artist I think to myself that’s a real artist. And every time I hear someone say I’m more of an artist than a craftsman I think, nah, you’re a craftsman. [laughs] It really – like to me there is that aspect of kind of keeping yourself humble and your fingers on the keyboard and doing the work is necessary to actually be the thing that pretentious people pretend to be.

**Alec:** I suppose. I don’t know. I mean, I feel–

**Craig:** There you go again.

**Alec:** I’m hesitant to look inward–

**Craig:** Because you are a genius.

**Alec:** But, look, I make clocks. And sometimes you go “Oh my god this gear fits perfectly in that gear. That’s awesome.” And sometimes it’s like, “Dammit, I have this gear that’s a really cool shape. But I don’t know where to put it.”

**Craig:** That’s the worst feeling.

**Alec:** But ultimately like if the thing doesn’t keep time, doesn’t matter how much art is in it.

**Craig:** Well, absolutely.

**Alec:** You know, your watch is six minutes fast and it stinks.

**Craig:** But this is what comedy – comedy is a cruel task master because unlike drama comedy has accountability built in. When you say it doesn’t work meaning they’re not laughing at it.

**Alec:** Yeah, although, I will say – and I think Barry is I hope a prime example of that, your mileage may vary once you see it – that area is starting to get grey where it’s like, you know, I feel like – Barry I feel like is neither a drama nor a comedy. Like in the best possible way. And a lot of the reaction we’ve gotten to it, which thrills me, is people go, “What? What is this?” Which is awesome.

**Craig:** Well, it’s been received beautifully and I’ve seen quite a few of the episodes. I’m ahead of people just because I know you and it’s great. It’s fantastic. And I think actually the tone of Barry is – well, it’s the kind of tone where you are aware in a great way what the arrangement is between yourself and the show. The show is not saying to you, “Right, huh, yeah, funny?” It’s not doing that.

**Alec:** No.

**Craig:** It will sneak up on you and make you laugh really, really hard when it wants to. And there are a couple of characters that are – you know, they’re there more for laughs than others. Although I always think that those are the ones that are probably going to end up making me cry. But there is that arrangement. And so then really what’s fascinating to me is your understanding of whether or not the clock is working is your understanding of it. You basically are saying this tells time. I know it. Here it is everybody. And you’re not waiting to – like in movies, god, I mean, you have the experience of sitting in the test screening and finding out if you’re funny or not.

**Alec:** Yeah. Yeah. And there’s nothing sweatier than a movie or a TV show that’s like “Is this work?” Do you know what I mean? As opposed to, you know, I mean the comics who always kill are the ones who are like – there’s a confidence, right? I mean, it is just like I’m going to do this.

**Craig:** I don’t care if you–

**Alec:** If you don’t get it–

**Craig:** It’s your problem.

**Alec:** Then fuck you.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**Alec:** And people go, whoa, what’s this guy got? I better figure out what this is as opposed to like somebody, “What about this? Do you like this?”

**Craig:** Precisely. Well, it’s begging. Begging is just–

**Alec:** It’s unseemly.

**Craig:** It’s pathetic. It is unseemly and pathetic. Shall we answer some listener questions?

**Alec:** Oh please.

**Craig:** All right. Emily in Los Angeles writes, “Somebody recently pointed out to me that the American film industry does not make tragedies. Their opinion is based on the theater terms for comedy and tragedy. Tragedy goes from order to chaos, versus comedy which goes from chaos to order. Most movies seem to tie up their stories with a pretty pink bow and don’t explore the cathartic value of tragedy. What are your thoughts and opinions on this idea?”

Alec Berg, Harvard graduate, what are your opinions on this?

**Alec:** Do I get one pass? Because I don’t even understand – my brain hurts. See, this is one of these things where I do feel like this is like cutting open the bird’s throat to see how it sings.

**Craig:** Let’s skip that question. It might not be – do I want to know this?

**Alec:** When I was at Seinfeld we got somebody’s graduate thesis on the storytelling of Seinfeld. And it was like this 100 and something page thing. And we used to joke when people would come in to like pitch ideas we’d be like, “Hold on, let me see here. Go away. Read this. This is really all you need to know.”

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Alec:** “And if you read this and really internalize it.”

**Craig:** But if you had read it, it probably would have ended the show.

**Alec:** Well, no, because it was just utter – it was like there are 11 main archetypical stories on Seinfeld. There’s the this story, and the that. And it’s like, what? No there aren’t.

**Craig:** I think Emily’s question is – there’s an interesting thing about American – I’ve been having this question a lot with Johan Renck, our Swedish director, on Chernobyl. Every now and then he’ll say, “You know, this one thing here, it’s a little American.” And I’ll say, “You mean successful?” [laughs]

**Alec:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And we go back and forth about this all the time. I’m like, “I know, this moment here where we’re given information we need to understand what comes next rather than two old men mumbling over a piece of pickled herring? Yes, this is an American” – but you know what, a lot of times when he says it I’m like, “Oh you know, that is a little American.” I’m starting to understand what it means.

**Alec:** That’s so funny. A friend of mine was making a movie years ago and he had a French cinematographer. And they did a couple of takes of something and the producer came over and said, “Hey, the studio is just going to want to make sure that we get one take where you cover this line a different way or something.” And he was like, “I don’t really like that.” And the producer is like, “Look, just do one more take. Just cover us.” And so he turns to his DP and he goes, “All right, we’re going to do one more take.” And the guy goes, “You are going to do that?” And he goes, “Yeah, they want us.” And he goes, “You are going to listen to that?”

And he goes, “Yeah, I just think we have to. I think it will be easier.” And the cinematographer just says, “This just became a job.”

**Craig:** Oh wow. That’s rather Francais.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “This just became a job.” Well, there is a balance between these things.

**Alec:** What was it before? You’re still getting paid the same. It was a job.

**Craig:** There is – everyone has different thresholds for their integrity.

**Alec:** By the way, I don’t know if you’ve ever worked on the John Ford stage at Fox.

**Craig:** Nope.

**Alec:** But if you’ve ever done a sound mix there, it’s where we did the sound mix for Euro Trip. There is a plaque on the wall of the John Ford sound mixing stage that has one of the quotes that makes me the happiest that I’ve ever seen in show business which is this long thing about, you know, I tried to do good work, I tried to be as artistic as I could and be true to stuff, but at the end of all my days I knew this: it was just a job.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Alec:** And it’s this thing where you’re there at four in the morning, tearing your hair out, trying to get this thing right. And then you pass by this plaque every time you go to the bathroom and you read it and you go, “Oh yeah, what?” Like ultimately this is not – we’re just trying to get this as good as we can.

**Craig:** It’s a job. It’s actually a great place to put it, too. When you’re in the sound mix it really is a job. Well, Emily, we didn’t really answer your question, but we gave it our best shot. Christina has sent in an audio question, so here it is.

**Christina:** I just wrote my first screenplay and I set out to write a comedy. I just read the first draft and realized that I started to write a thriller or a suspense movie. I think it’s really hard to do both of these things well, and I would like to hear your thoughts on how I should make the decision of whether I should just focus on making it a comedy or focus on making it a suspense movie.

**Alec:** I think the question is backwards. Like that implies that you’re trying to force it to be one thing or another thing and you’re pushing it in a direction. The analogy I always use is it’s like pushing a rope. You have to pull a rope. And a rope won’t go a certain direction.

And with Barry, Bill and I didn’t say we’re going to make a thing that’s exactly this. We just went “What’s interesting?”

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** And we started working on it. And it’s like, “Oh, it feels more like it should go this way.”

**Craig:** Followed your instincts.

**Alec:** Or it feels more like it should go this way. And ultimately we just felt like as long as what we were doing was interesting and true and was an observation of real human behavior it just was whatever it wanted to be. And, you know, it sounds very pretentious, but I always feel like you have to listen to the material. And it’s like if it starts to want to be one thing and not another thing–

**Craig:** Yeah. Let it be that.

**Alec:** Like, you know, when I was doing Curb, people would come in sometimes – actors would come in – and they’re “improving” a scene, but they clearly had a joke that they wanted to get to.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Alec:** And so in the middle of a scene it’s like, “Larry, do you ever go bowling?” And you just go, “What? Why are you – oh, because you have a joke about bowling you want to get to?” And it’s like this is not organic at all. It just felt like as soon as that happened you just go, no, no, don’t do that. That just doesn’t feel real.

**Craig:** I’m sorry, you’re fired. Yeah.

**Alec:** And let’s not do your joke.

**Craig:** So, I guess what we’re saying, and I completely agree with you. Christina, if you set out to write a comedy but you wrote a suspense movie instead–

**Alec:** Does it work?

**Craig:** You wrote a suspense movie. That’s the thing you wanted to do. I think you should focus probably on the one that you ended up writing. One movie by the way to look at, Christina, if you have not yet seen it is The Last of Sheila. Have you ever seen that one?

**Alec:** I have not.

**Craig:** Last of Sheila. Fascinating movie. 1970s. Murder mystery with some comedy overtones in it. Sort of like a modern whodunit, or a modern Agatha Christie for the ‘70s. Written by Tony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim.

**Alec:** What?

**Craig:** They wrote the screenplay. It’s really good. It’s a really good movie. Last of Sheila.

**Alec:** Wow. I never heard of this.

**Craig:** Yeah, Last of Sheila. Ted Griffin, the great Ted Griffin, he of all ‘70s movies, turned me onto that one.

Let’s do one more here. We’ve got Mike from Boston. Yo, Mike. He writes, “I’m currently working on some half-hour comedy pilots to send around to potential managers. My question is should these pilots feature explicit act breaks where I label act one and end act one and so on. Does it depend partly on the style of show? Neither of the pilots is very networky in the vein of say multicam sitcom, but at the same time I don’t think they’d only work as a streaming show. Does this apply even if the pilots are meant to be writing samples rather than actual pitches?”

Where do you fall on this whole act one da-da-da?

**Alec:** I think if it’s meant to be networky where you’re putting commercials into those breaks then you can write act breaks. If it helps you to organize your thoughts, I think you can think in terms of act breaks. I always did that when I was writing features. But even then you’d get into a discussion about like, “Well, I think the first act ends here.” And somebody else would go, “No, I think the first act ends here.” And it’s like it’s all subjective. And if it works it works.

I will say personally I haven’t written or thought about an act break in 20 years. That’s not how I write.

**Craig:** I mean, after Seinfeld you were kind of out of commercial interrupted television, right?

**Alec:** Yeah. Curb there were no, I mean, it was just – and it was interesting with Curb where we’d get to this point, and it was the same point on the board every time. And we almost joked that you could take a Sharpie and draw a red line on the board right where you get to it where it’s like that’s the barrier that you always have to jump over and we always get stuck right there.

**Craig:** Because that’s where the commercial would go?

**Alec:** Well, it’s because that’s where you’re turning for home, and if you hadn’t set up the stories correctly and if all the stories had sort of played their last beats at the same time, it’s kind of what I was talking about about connections. Like what you need right here is this story is kind of logically done and this story is logically done. What you need is some other story to come in and knock the pins over. So you go, oh my god, now we have to pick them all up again. But we never thought in terms of act breaks.

I think if it helps you to organize, but I don’t – you know, personally I don’t think any single camera show that isn’t for network, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an act break in any of those.

**Craig:** Well then, you know, it sounds like what we’re hearing, Mike, is it’s up to you. It’s totally up to you, buddy. Should we do one more? Should we do one more question?

**Alec:** Sure.

**Craig:** Oh, this is kind of a good psychological question for a tortured Swede like yourself. Christina from Malibu writes, “How can I tell if I’ve just been replaying this movie, a period biopic, in my head for too long and it all seems familiar, or if everything I’ve written is a horrible cliché?”

So this is sort of like the internal version of the studio saying, “Yeah, you know, it’s been sitting around here for a while therefore we’re bored of it, therefore it’s no good.” Or maybe it’s boring and no good. What do you do?

**Alec:** I think the answer a lot of times is you’ve got to show it to somebody.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Alec:** Like I always felt like – even somebody who has no idea what they’re reading. Like sometimes people who have no “expertise” are the best audience because they can just go, “I don’t know how to read these things, but yeah, that’s just like that thing I saw in this.”

**Craig:** Right. Or it feels very cliché or it feels like I’ve seen all this before.

**Alec:** Yeah, that’s like that thing from this movie, or that’s like that thing. And you go, oh yeah, that is kind of familiar.

**Craig:** Well, I guess in that sense if you’re showing it to people with, I guess with that honestly in mind, that maybe you think it’s cliché that if they say, “Oh, this is cliché,” you won’t fall apart or lash out.

I always worry about people showing things to other people simply to hear applause. That’s a real syndrome. But it sounds like Christina would be the kind of person with a good work ethic.

**Alec:** Sure. Based on what?

**Craig:** We’ve known her for quite some time.

**Alec:** Oh, is that right?

**Craig:** She’s from Malibu.

**Alec:** Ah.

**Craig:** We know that much.

**Alec:** Oh that’s Christina. Oh, sure.

**Craig:** I said Christina. Did you not hear?

**Alec:** No, I guess I didn’t.

**Craig:** Anyway, Christina is pretty great. So, hopefully, Christina, that helps you. I agree with Alec completely. Show it to somebody and get somebody else’s perspective on it because a lot of times it is impossible to tell from your end.

A little bit of a lightning round here before we get to our finish. What is John doing in Japan? What is John August doing in Japan? Thoughts? Go.

**Alec:** You’re asking me?

**Craig:** That’s right. I have no idea what he’s doing. What do you – knowing him as you do – what do you think he’s doing?

**Alec:** I think he’s enjoying some sort of fish-based food substance.

**Craig:** Like a paste?

**Alec:** Perhaps with some noodles of some sort?

**Craig:** A substrate? A slurry?

**Alec:** Yeah. Maybe an Udon.

**Craig:** Oh, OK, an Udon. He went there for an Udon?

**Alec:** Yeah. Well, the Udon.

**Craig:** The Udon. I think he’s possibly getting some sort of parts upgrade.

**Alec:** Could be. Could be. And those parts generally are made in Japan?

**Craig:** I think they’re made in China but installed in Japan by one of their–

**Alec:** Oh, OK, like iPhones.

**Craig:** Precisely. A Xybotsu.

**Alec:** Sure. Either that or he’s inspecting a nuclear facility.

**Craig:** OK.

**Alec:** Just to make sure things are–

**Craig:** He’s impervious to radiation obviously. That’s the point. He can go in.

**Alec:** Yes, that’s correct.

**Craig:** Where humans could not.

**Alec:** No, I mean, even a helicopter would be irradiated immediately and crash into the sea.

**Craig:** Correct. But he can wander in and then wander back out. Just to report.

I think of the three scenarios we just mentioned that one does sound like the most likely. So we’re going to go with John is in Japan–

**Alec:** Inspecting a defective nuclear facility.

**Craig:** What else could it be?

**Alec:** Seems like the most likely.

**Craig:** Of course. So we like to end with One Cool Thing where you just literally toss out One Cool Thing. Do you have anything?

**Alec:** I do. And we just discovered it when we were starting this podcast. You tried to log onto my wifi.

**Craig:** Oh yes! That’s right.

**Alec:** And my phone buzzed and I went what is that? And it said, “Share your wifi password with Craig Mazin?”

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** And I clicked yes and you didn’t even have to type the password on your computer.

**Craig:** Freaking magic.

**Alec:** That’s the coolest thing ever.

**Craig:** So I didn’t even know that–

**Alec:** I didn’t know I had it.

**Craig:** No, neither did I. When did this happen?

**Alec:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Oh, you know who would know? John.

**Alec:** Yes. Well, when he emerges from that defective nuclear facility.

**Craig:** From that glow pile?

**Alec:** Yeah. And his parts aren’t too irradiated to function.

**Craig:** Slowly decaying uranium, then he emerges. He’ll be able to come back–

**Alec:** Maybe he’ll be stronger and smarter.

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know how that’s possible. Well, stronger. I could see him getting stronger.

**Alec:** He’ll recharge.

**Craig:** Smarter, no.

**Alec:** He’ll internalize all of that radiation and emerge stronger and slightly taller.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right.

**Alec:** And even more articulate.

**Craig:** Like the Borg? You know the Borg? They assimilate. He’s going to assimilate this new–

**Alec:** Do I know the Borg? I’m Swedish. I know the Borg.

**Craig:** Of course, “Do I know the Borg?” Do I know the Borg?

**Alec:** Hey, I freaking invented the Borg?

**Craig:** It’s like if the Borg had gone through the universe and finally assimilated one Jew and that was all it took. “No, they’re all Gilbert Gottfried.”

All right, my One Cool Thing, I think I’m going to go with The Last of Shelia. I don’t know, maybe I’ve given that before as a One Cool Thing. But The Last of Sheila is a fantastic movie. It’s funny. It is tense. It’s scary. It’s got a great ending. Stephen Sondheim. Stephen Sondheim decided one day, “You know what, I’m going to write a movie.” And then he wrote a great movie. And then he’s like, “Nah, I’m done with that.”

**Alec:** “Too easy.”

**Craig:** “So easy.” You were talking earlier about laziness and it reminded me of one of the great, great, great stories of all time which occurred when you and I, along with our families, were on vacation together in the Bahamas. I would like you to tell this story.

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

**Craig:** We’ll finish off with this amazing story.

**Alec:** We were at the lovely Atlantis which one of us enjoyed more than the other one.

**Craig:** I’m the one that hated it. And just to preface, we had been kind of talking a lot when we were there about how many New Yorkers were there. I’m from New York. So, I naturally want to defend New Yorkers, but there were a lot of New Yorkers there. It was oppressive.

**Alec:** By the way, the next time I stopped into the Atlantis for a day I literally saw Joe Girardi walking around at Atlantis. I’m like the King of New York is here.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. Alec and I were at a bar and just talking in Atlantis and a fist fight broke out. It was just a New Yorky fist fight.

**Alec:** It’s like, oh, oh, those guys are going to go.

**Craig:** That’s right. And it reminded me of going to a Yankee game in 1979 and two people just suddenly beating the crap out of each other in the stands. So it was a very New Yorky place.

**Alec:** Super New Yorky. So, there’s a giant outdoor fish tank full of sharks. And this woman covered in – she’s outside in the sun. It’s 90 degrees. And she must be wearing 40 pounds of gold. These giant clip-on earrings and massive gold–

**Craig:** From New York would you say?

**Alec:** Yeah. So she walks by and she looks at this shark pond and she turns to her husband and her two kids and she just says, “What do they do all day? Just swim around? Lazy.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**Alec:** And I think we said that phrase 50 times.

**Craig:** It’s so great.

**Alec:** And it was one of those things where as soon as I heard it I just went, “Oh my god, I have to find somebody and tell them this.”

**Craig:** This is why we came here. Because this – I’ve gone through this in my mind so many times. And I just love the implications, the layers of implications. These sharks should be starting businesses.

**Alec:** Yeah. What are they doing?

**Craig:** They should be studying.

**Alec:** It’s such a waste. Why aren’t any of them in medical school?

**Craig:** This is what she said, “What do they do all day?” The only thing they do all day. Lazy. That’s what they do.

**Alec:** She was so judgmental about sharks.

**Craig:** About sharks literally doing the thing sharks were designed to do.

**Alec:** And I can only imagine how much she must have ridden her own children to do more with their lives. If a shark isn’t living up to its potential.

**Craig:** That’s all it does is the only thing they have ever done. They’re no good. And neither are you.

**Alec:** Lazy.

**Craig:** Wherever she is, madam we love you.

**Alec:** Thank you. That was a gem.

**Craig:** All right. Well, Alec, that was a fantastic show. This show, Scriptnotes, is produced by Megan McDonnell. And it is edited by the great Matthew Chilelli. Oh yeah. Our outro this week is by Rajesh Naroth.

If you have an outro you can send us a link at ask@johnaugust.com. That is also a place where you can send longer questions. For shorter questions, on Twitter I am @clmazin. John is @johnaugust. And Alec Berg is–

**Alec:** @realalecberg.

**Craig:** @realalecberg.

We are also on Facebook, which I am no longer on because apparently it’s a Russian platform for stealing our lives. You can search for Scriptnotes Podcast – are you still on Facebook?

**Alec:** No, I deleted it.

**Craig:** Yeah, deleted. Oh, felt so good. However, Scriptnotes is still there. You can search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts under Scriptnotes. Just search for, get it, Scriptnotes. And while you’re there leave us a comment because John August loves comments.

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. You can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net.

Alec Berg, thank you so much for being a guest.

**Alec:** My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

**Craig:** You’re amazing. Folks at home, next week our wonderful John August shall return. Thank you for listening.

Links:

* Thanks for joining us, [Alec Berg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alec_Berg)! Check out his [credits](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0073688/).
* [Barry](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b09aJdWqVp4) is now on [HBO](https://www.hbo.com/barry?pid=googleadwords_int&c=Google|Search|MKL|IQ_ID_105710467-VQ16-c&camp=Google|Search|MKL|IQ_ID_105710467-VQ16-c)!
* [Silicon Valley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(TV_series)) is in its [5th season](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7pYslGR6GU) on [HBO](https://www.hbo.com/silicon-valley?pid=googleadwords_int&c=Google|Search|MKL|IQ_ID_-VQ16-c&camp=Google|Search|MKL|IQ_ID_-VQ16-c).
* [Sharing your wifi password](https://ios.gadgethacks.com/how-to/instantly-share-wi-fi-passwords-from-your-iphone-other-ios-11-devices-nearby-0177972/)
* [The Last of Sheila](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_of_Sheila) by Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim, directed by Herbert Ross. Here’s the [trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPLgmD_RTLU).
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [Alec Berg](https://twitter.com/realalecberg) on Twitter
* [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)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([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_344.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/the-one-with-the-indie-producer).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig is off in Europe working on Chernobyl. Luckily we have a guest who is more than his equal. Keith Calder is an indie film producer with credits ranging from You’re Next, to Blair Watch, to Charlie Kaufman’s animated Anomalisa. His new film, Blindspotting, debuted at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival where it was purchased by Lionsgate. It comes out this summer. Keith Calder, welcome to the show.

**Keith Calder:** Thank you for having me.

**John:** So when Craig is gone I love to have a guest on who knows about things that Craig and I don’t know about. And I really don’t know very much about indie film. So, I have worked at the Sundance Labs helping out projects that are going into production. I had a movie that came out at Sundance, The Nines, but that was 10 years ago. And I feel like indie film changes a lot year-by-year. So, I’d love to talk about sort of the state of indie film right now. And a lot of our listeners are people who are trying to put together movies, and I want to know what that’s like. So, I think you might be the person to help us out.

**Keith:** I can try. [laughs]

**John:** What do you actually do as an independent film producer? What is your day-to-day life in trying to put together movies?

**Keith:** You know, it’s interesting, because it’s a question that gets asked a lot is “What does a producer do?” I get asked it even on the sets where I’m doing my job and people still don’t know what it is. And I think it’s a hard question to really even define. The more – I think I used to have a bunch of glib answers and a lot of kind of easy quick responses. And the more I’ve done it the more I realize how useless most of those are. So, I’ll try to give a more complete answer.

The simplest is I think you sort of have to separate the concept of the credit of the producer from the job of the producer. The credit of the producer could go to really almost anyone. It could go to someone who was friends with the writer. It could go to someone who knew that an actor might have been looking for a certain piece of material. It could go to someone who just has some money that they want to put into a movie. Or it could go to someone who is doing the more full set of jobs that is a producer.

Or it could go to someone who is actively trying to sabotage your movie. They just end up with a credit anyway.

**John:** Let’s go through the range of those possibilities. And first of all we’ll talk about what kind of producer are you mostly? Are you a producer who is on set every day getting the shots, making sure that the movie happens? Are you the person who finds financing? What is your role in the movies I have described?

**Keith:** I think traditionally I’m a – first of all, I would say I work with a producing partner who is my wife, Jess, and we’ve worked together on almost all the movies we’ve made. So to a certain degree when I’m answering, what I’m really answering is how we as a unit work. But I would say that predominately we’re a beginning to ending producer. We’re there from often concept through to marketing campaign. And that means being in the room for casting sessions. It means being there, deciding who the director is. It means being on set with usually one of us at the monitor all the time and the other one, if not at the monitor then kind of preparing for the challenges of what’s coming up later in the day or the week or the rest of the shoot.

What I would say is that as I’ve grown as a producer I’ve come to realize that that’s not necessarily always the right answer. Like I think that a lot more of what I do now is I do what the job requires. And I think on some films it means you have to be there for everything. And some films you actually shouldn’t be there for everything. There’s other people that can make those decisions and be there. And that your job is choosing when to actually step in and when not to step in.

**John:** Absolutely. So on projects where you are the producer from beginning to end, so this is a thing where you have found either the filmmaker or you found the script and here is a nascent idea for a movie and you’re the person who gets it to the next step. Talk about what that part of the process is like. Because so often what Craig and I are talking about – so in the background you’re going to hear my dog whining. This is Lambert, my dog, who is the best dog. But he’s very excited to have a guest in the office. So if you hear some whining in the background that’s Lambert.

**Keith:** It was very kind of you to excuse my horrible whining sounds that I make by blaming them on your dog.

**John:** Exactly. Always blame the dog for the farting noises and everything else.

Usually when Craig and I are talking about putting a movie together we’re talking about there’s a pitch and you’re going in, you’re pitching to a producer, then you’re pitching to a studio. And there’s a whole sense of “this is how movies get made.” But it’s a very different process that you’re describing. Most of the movies that you’ve made, what is the process of – is it a filmmaker first? Is it a script first? What is the thing that got that project to come together?

**Keith:** I think it’s different with every project. I think I’ve come to realize that each film takes its own path. I will say that for me and for Jess a lot of the things that we’ve made started with us identifying talent that we wanted to work with. And then building a film from there. So in the case of our most recent film, Blindspotting, it is one way the most typical version of how we would make a film, and in other ways completely atypical.

About 10 years ago Jess and I decided we wanted to make a movie based on the world of spoken word poetry. And so we started watching a lot of Def Poetry Jam and watching a lot of poets on YouTube, and finding whatever we could. And we found this young poet, Rafael Casal, who is based up in the Bay who had appeared on Def Poetry Jam a couple times. Jess reached out to him I think via YouTube and just said, “Hey, have you ever thought of making a movie? We feel like you could write a movie or star in a movie.”

We flew up there, met with him, and he’s like, “Well, I love movies but I don’t know anything about it whatsoever.” We then spent really nine years working with him and then meeting his friend, Daveed Diggs, and developing a film from scratch that they wrote, starred in, and produced with us. But it was really from us identifying a type of movie that we wanted to do. And then finding the right collaborators, and then building it from the ground up from there.

I mean, I say building, really they did most of the building. They were writing the script. But we were sort of helping them figure that out the whole time.

**John:** Great. So you identified an area. There’s a movie to be made in this world.

**Keith:** Yeah.

**John:** Who might be the person to make that movie? And then you sort of nurtured them along the way.

**Keith:** Exactly. So that’s a good case there. And then I think with You’re Next was a movie where we had produced a few horror movies, and it was a genre that we liked working in. But we found it really hard finding projects, like films that were horror movies but also had an interesting voice or something to say. Or something that separated them from the rest of low budget horror.

And we had a film doing the festival circuit the same time that Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett had A Horrible Way to Die. And a few friends said, oh, you guys should really meet because I think you’d work well together. We finally grabbed dinner and started talking about movies. And the four of us all really hit it off.

And Simon mentioned that they were working on a home invasion movie, and we kind of spent the rest of the dinner talking about a lot of what we all considered the problems with that genre and kind of how those problems could be opportunities if you approached it the right way. And I think within two months Simon had a script that he sent us that we liked and we immediately signed on to produce it and put it together. And we were shooting it in the spring. And that was the first of three movies we’ve made with Adam and Simon. And I think that, yeah, it was about the person first for us, and then the idea, the sort of what the movie could be. And then just a lot of conversations about how you go from idea to execution.

**John:** Absolutely. So in the case of You’re Next, which I thought was terrific, and it was a very smart exploration of the home invasion genre and sort of what that’s like. Basically really question the motivations of why these characters are doing what they’re doing. You have a script now. So you have a filmmaker you like. You’ve seen the thing that he’s made before. You have a script you like. What is the next step in figuring out where we shoot this thing, how we do this thing? And while you’re figuring out how you’re making it are you also planning how it gets released? What the venues are for it getting out there in the world?

**Keith:** Yeah, I mean, You’re Next is an interesting case study for this, because we knew we wanted to do it. Simon and Adam were coming off of making a movie for I think about $100,000 and they wanted a step up in budget. We had had some experience in making movies in that sort of $500,000 to $1 million range, which is in a way a really huge range, but also a very small range. So it was kind of figuring out where in that range the movie made sense to do it.

Adam and Simon had worked on A Horrible Way to Die in Missouri, and so they were really excited about the idea of going back to Missouri to make You’re Next. So the location was kind of figured out in a grand sense from that. Like we knew we wanted to go to Missouri to shoot this movie.

The actual location of the house was something we found literally a week before we started production. It’s not like we had a specific place where it was going to happen. In terms of building it, we had the script. We started casting. We brought on a foreign sales company, Hanway, which is the company we had a relationship with from prior movies. Hanway started selling the film off the script, and I think before we started production we decided we just wanted to try to sell one major international territory. And then kind of take risk for the rest of the equity on the film. And so we sold the UK I think for about half the budget, which is really unheard of. And once we did that we were like, “Oh OK, we’re fine, we’ll just go make the movie. Keep the rest of the world as upside and know we’ve kind of covered half the cost out of the UK.”

And our goal was very much to shoot the movie in the spring. To have it ready to bring to Toronto to premiere at the Midnight Madness section of the Toronto International Film Festival, which I view as one of the top places to launch a low budget horror movie. And luckily for us Toronto saw the movie, and liked it, and accepted it. And so it was definitely a case of we had a plan for each step and it all went according to plan. But to a certain degree those plans are ludicrous. Like it’s nonsense to assume you’re going to sell half your budget from one territory. It’s nonsense to assume that your film is going to get into the exact festival and the exact thing you want. And then it’s going to sell to the one distributor that you think is probably the best distributor for it.

And I think it’s easy to look at the success stories and say, “Oh, that’s the path.” It’s only the path because it was successful. If we hadn’t taken that path, we would have had to find some other way to have the movie find success.

**John:** Absolutely. So I want to go back and define some terms, just because people may not know some of the things that you’re talking about. So when you say equity, so basically this is money that you had found. That you had/you found. Basically it’s money that you could write a check for or have somebody to write a check for for making the movie. So, in a small budget, in this case it was half of that. But other times you might write the whole thing and sell stuff later on. There’s many ways of finding the money to make the movie the first time.

**Keith:** Yeah. I would say the thing that makes it hard for people to learn too many lessons from our path is that we have financing. So we can put our own money into films at this point. So a lot of the more traditional independent film producers and model are about finding other people to put money into the film. For us it’s much more about feeling comfortable with where we’re putting our equity in. And if we’re making bigger movies it’s finding other partners or finding ways to justify it.

You know, the truth is with independent film even if you do have financing it’s a hard business to stay in business in because the nature of it is that most films don’t succeed. And if you’re a studio, most films not succeeding means that you recoup half the budget. In independent film, the film not succeeding means no one ever buys it. It never gets seen by anyone. And you recoup nothing. So it’s a high risk/low reward business, so kind of the worst of them all.

**John:** Yeah. Good choice of career here for you.

**Keith:** Yeah.

**John:** Just to define other terms. So you talk about foreign sales, or foreign presales, or foreign sales. And so classically most indie movies back 10 years ago when I was doing The Nines, either you would – based on the script, the director, and the cast you would go to international markets and say like, “OK, I have this movie that stars these actors, it’s this budget, it’s this thing. Here is a mock poster for it. Will you give us a certain amount of money for France, a certain amount of money for the UK?” And hopefully you get some people bidding against each other. You raise enough money from those people essentially saying “We promise to buy your movie when it’s done” that you’re able to then go back and get financing in order to do it.

So, essentially you have a commitment that they’re going to buy it when the movie is completed and then you go and get a bank loan essentially, a special kind of bank loan, to make the movie. Is that still the common model? Because I feel like in the last 10 years with the rise of streaming, with the rise of other sort of distribution platforms that may not be as crucial. And also some budgets, just because of technology and other things, some budgets have come down a lot lower. So, what are the models right now for making a movie?

**Keith:** I mean, it’s definitely the Wild West now. I think that what you described was the dominant model for, I’d say, pretty much from maybe the late ‘80s through to maybe six or seven years ago. And I think it still exists. There’s still a lot of independent films that get financed off of the foreign presales model where you use that to kind of fill in the gaps. And you put it together that way. I think more and more it’s a hard model to make work, because a lot of foreign distributors are struggling in their own territories to kind of make their businesses work. They aren’t being as aggressive on pre-buying most movies. The sort of star value system is in a different place than it was in the past. Like I think there’s a view that a lot of stars that used to be bankable just on their own now are maybe bankable with other stars, or bankable within certain types of intellectual property. Or bankable within certain genres. Or bankable if you are also spending $20 million on P&A. So it’s less of a given that you can kind of raise money off of a package.

The other side of it is that the market for films now a lot of time are driven by worldwide buyers and the foreign sales model can really hurt the chances of a film when you do that. So Netflix for example is a big buyer of movies now. They’re not super excited about buying a film that already has a lot of foreign territory sold off in advance, because they want the entire world. Same is true for Amazon. Same is true for even some of the traditional distributors like a Fox Searchlight. They kind of want to have the world when they’re buying a movie.

There’s definitely a weird chicken or the egg problem there because you sometimes need to try to sell those rights to finance the movie, but then you also are expected to retain those rights to sell the movie later.

**John:** The situation I find even sort of more frustrating and dispiriting is when you see a movie that’s gotten made that’s not perfect but there’s something promising there, and they clearly have not thought about distribution at all. And so I’ve gone into 20 screenings where I see this film and it’s like “This film is good and it’s interesting and it’s promising, but there’s a very good chance that no one will ever see this film because it will never get released in a meaningful way.” And that’s the real heartbreak is that when people come to me saying like, “Oh, I was thinking maybe I’ll just raise some money and do this myself.” I want to be encouraging because you want them to be that sort of one thing that breaks out that gets that big attention, but it might not be that thing that breaks out. And they could have spent all of their life savings trying to make this movie that no one will ever see. So, figuring out like what the overall plan or strategy is for distribution feels so crucial at an early stage.

Not only what is this thing that you’re trying to make but how will people see this thing you’re trying to make.

**Keith:** I completely agree. It’s interesting because I think a lot of people, when they’re approaching independent film, are looking at the movies that exist in the marketplace, meaning like things you can just watch on TV or in theaters or on Netflix, and their assumption is, “Well, if I make a movie that’s better than the worst of those then that means I will get to be released in those same ways.”

**John:** The plus one fallacy.

**Keith:** Yeah. And it’s the same thing that happens with people writing spec screenplays. They look at the movies onscreen and they say, “Well, if I write a script that’s better than the worst of them then that means that I will be able to succeed.” And it’s just not the way that the world works. And I think that one of the key things to realize is that most of the movies that you see in the world are movies made by companies that already own their own distribution system. And the nature of that is that they will always rather release the worst movie they’ve made than the best movie you’ve made. It’s just fundamentally the nature of their business is that they need to try to return money on their bad movies over making you money on your good movies.

I would agree with you. I would be very cautious to advise anyone to go out and try to make an independent film. I think it’s a tricky business, and it’s a tricky creative path to take. That said, sometimes it’s the only way you can make a movie and sometimes for certain types of movies it’s the only way they would ever be made. And I think that the models that we kind of touched on a little bit, but the other models for making independent films these days are really relying on soft money, which is when I say soft money that usually means tax incentives. In Europe or Australia or certain other parts of the world they have heavy arts funding bodies where you can kind of get big chunks of your budget that way. And independent film financiers that are looking for different returns than just financial returns. Like there are definitely people that are putting money into movies because they want to support the arts, or because they want to – for the more callous reasons is that they want to hang out with famous people and things like that.

I’m not saying that I wouldn’t advise that. That’s what people do. But sometimes that is the source of money you need to get your movie made.

**John:** So let’s talk about a hypothetical filmmaker who has a script that’s in a genre that they know the genre, it’s a pretty good script. It feels like a movie that should be made independently. It’s fairly low budget. It’s the next Adam and Simon.

So, if Adam and Simon were to come up today, what would your recommendation be for their next steps? Should they shoot a short that’s a proof of concept? What would be the way to get their movie made, whether it’s You’re Next or their movie before that? What would you recommend that they do?

**Keith:** I think the key advice I would give anyone is when you’re starting out make things as cheaply as possible. I just think that there is a path for just making things so cheaply that the minimal value that most independent films get can still help you recoup your budget. And I think that that’s a path that I think the Duplass brothers took really well and I think it will always be a path. There’s always going to be an appetite for movies of a certain sort. And if you can achieve quality with very low budget I think you can find a path within independent film.

I think a lot of it is about deciding where you want your career to be and what type of filmmaker, either as a writer or as a director, or any aspect of filmmaking. You want your path to be. I think that if you’re looking at what you hope to do and it’s Marvel movies or Bond movies or just movies that require a lot of money to go do, I’m not convinced that the independent film path is the best path there right now. Even though a lot of the studios have been hiring independent filmmakers, it’s a lottery ticket path rather than like actually doing things that show you can do the work to get there.

**John:** So your hunch for going down the Marvel path or the James Bond path would be through screenwriting, though visual effects, like how would you recommend that person get to the big prize of making those things?

**Keith:** My advice is always that your path to success is to do the things that you’re the best at. And I think a lot of time the things that you’re the best at are the things that you have the most passion for. And I think those are the two areas I would always recommend people focus on. I think that it’s more likely that a fantastic amazing stunt coordinator is going to get hired to direct a big movie than someone who has made another big movie really badly. Like I just don’t think that – it’s an industry where you get over-rewarded for things that you do really well. And I think that those are the things that you need to focus on.

I think it was Guillermo del Toro said that all of the things that are flaws about you when you start doing well just become your voice. And when you’re not doing well they’re all the things people point out as problems.

**John:** Yes.

**Keith:** And I think if you focus on all the things that you do great, then all the things you don’t do great you either figure out how to get around or you they just become part of your voice.

**John:** That’s great. So, let’s talk about, when I was doing The Nines, a big push at that point was that you had to – you really wanted a deal that guaranteed theatrical release. And if you didn’t get your hand stamped in theaters that was a real mark against you both for the value down the road in home video, but just as a filmmaker you wanted to have that theatrical release. Do you still see that as being such a crucial thing for a movie that’s coming out of a festival right now? Like Blindspotting is going to have a theatrical release, but if Netflix had come to you and said we’re going to buy it for more money and we’re going to promote it a certain way, would that matter to you?

**Keith:** To me, yeah, it probably would still matter to me, if I’m being honest. I mean, part of that is that I’m what I view from a sort of in-between generation of people that kind of grew up with Netflix as their primary form of entertainment and people who grew up with theatrical film experience. If Netflix were offering a lot more money and that meant that our financing was recouped and that it had a higher profile in the world then yeah, for sure, I would go that path.

But I do think you have to kind of compare these things realistically. So I think that a lot of the time people will overvalue the theatrical release because they’re imagining that the film will break out in some massive way. And the truth is that very rarely happens. So I do think that you have to be fiscally responsible. Like you shouldn’t go with the theatrical distributor that is paying you nothing over a non-traditional or what is it, I guess, online release or something like that where you are actually able to recoup your investment and get your film out there and seen by a lot of people.

**John:** Yeah. The question of like “seen by a lot of people” is such a weird thing with streaming because obviously anybody who looks at Netflix, you scroll through and you see like what are all these movies. What are all these things? Who could watch all these things? But living in Los Angeles you actually drive by billboards for all of these different limited series and movies and I’m halfway convinced that some of them don’t actually exist. That like if somebody actually looks for them, then they’ll go off and make them, but they’re just trial balloons for things because it’s a giant expensive billboard for something like I don’t know what that is. I’ve never heard of this thing. And yet somehow you made this thing. We’re in a very strange time.

I feel like all the extra money being thrown into that system is leading to some really weird choices. And obviously people are – you know, it’s production that’s happening, which is great. But if I were that person with that billboard I would be excited but I would also really be wondering is anyone actually going to see this thing that I’ve spent years of my life making.

**Keith:** I’m always curious about those billboards in LA. But I feel like part of it is just about these streaming platforms proving to the rest of the industry that they’re legitimate and big and promoting their movies. And I think it’s so much of the billboard – the billboard game in LA seems to be about advertising within the film industry rather than advertising to consumers. It’s an odd sort of ego game more than anything else.

**John:** Yeah.

**Keith:** You can also see that – I know that studios will buy billboards near the actors in their movies so they feel like they’re spending money on the movie. And I think the same thing happens where Netflix are buying billboards based on reminding certain production companies that “Hey you should come sell your thing to Netflix” and things like that.

**John:** That’s very true. We got a question in from a listener and I thought – I already emailed it back because I actually know the person, but I thought I’d read it and get your take on it because this is sort of your wheelhouse. And it’s about a decision of life kind of moment.

So he writes, “After working for a reality TV company for over two years I was just laid off. With a downturn in show production came downsizing, and it turns out I was more expandable than I thought. Stressful, but I’m realizing that I have basically unlimited possibilities in deciding what’s next for me. I’m unmarried, no financial dependents except for a low maintenance dog. I’m not tied to any geographical location or job. And the world is essentially my oyster.

“If anything, I see this as an opportunity to take steps towards big picture career goals: writing and directing features or writing and producing television is the real goal here. In the moments of calm self-reflection that I’ve been able to find between bouts of panic, two distinct potential next moves have clarified for me.

Option one: I focus all my energy on making a feature film directorial debut. I drive Uber, work part-time, sell myself to extras casting to make ends meet while giving myself the flexibility and time to develop, write, and put together an achievable indie feature film. It’s hella ambitious, but I still have a lot of connections in my non-LA places to crew something like that up for a non-union low budget feature within the next year or three.

“Option two: I still work on my own projects in my spare time but stay working in the industry. Jump to the bottom of a more useful ladder, such as a PA or assistant in the lands of scripted television or features and then work my way up.”

Keith Calder, so these are two very different paths and they’re sort of what you were describing. That sense of like do you go off and make the independent film or do you try to work a more normal path and inch your way up? What would you want to talk to David about?

**Keith:** I think that my main advice for David, not knowing anything beyond his scenario from what he’s kind of outlined here, is that I don’t think you should view these paths as mutually exclusive. I think that writing is something that as long as you have time within your day you can set aside a large enough portion that you can focus on it. You can do really no matter what else you’re doing, especially when you don’t have kids and you don’t have other draws on your free time. So I think that if he wants to write I think that’s something he can do while he’s still supporting himself financially with an income of some sort.

I also think that when you’re trying to make a film, especially a micro-budget independent film, you need to have resources other than money. And those resources are a crew base that are from people that you know or that you have worked with or that you have mutual fondness of film together. And I think that you build that by working within film or working on other people’s films or doing things like that. I think that there’s a danger to think of this as, “Oh, my path to making movies is to silo myself.” And I actually think for most people your path to making movies is to surround yourself by other people that are making movies.

So, I would advise that, if he wants to take the path of writing and potentially directing and making an independent feature, I think that it’s something that while he’s writing it he can be building a crew base by going out there and PA-ing and working on other people’s independent films or on short films or whatever it is. And I think you build the team that you then use to go make your micro-budget film.

**John:** I think that’s the right advice. When I was writing back to him I said, I first off asked does he have that project that he’s passionate about. Whether it’s written or not written, you have to have that thing like you’re going to wake up every morning saying like “Hell or high water I’m going to make this thing.” And figuring out what that is is a crucial first step.

And so to put everything else aside, to write this thing which you don’t know what it is yet, feels like a mistake. But I really agree with you. You have to find who your group is. Who your core people is you can collaborate. Because so much of making a movie is essentially entrepreneurial. You’re basically figuring out how to do all that stuff. And if you’re figuring out how to make a movie and how to sell a movie and how to cast a movie and how to do all of these things for the very first time, you’re not going to be great at all of those things. So you need to witness the process through other people. And so you’ll learn about how to physically shoot something by physically shooting some things. That means crewing on some other people’s films. Not just little student university shorts, but some bigger things. Seeing the ups and the downs. And then make your own stuff and sort of work your way up through.

On any crew you’re going to be able to pick three or four people who are like, “Oh, they’re great. They really know what they’re doing.” Help them out and get them to help you out and sort of rise up together. Because you see even the people who have gone through to do the bigger studio features, people who have done Star Wars, they tend to still bring along some of their indie film people because those are the people who are really smart that they trust, but who also have a vision who can do a thing that other folks can’t. So, I’m urging David to spend these next couple of years finding those people and finding that place rather than try to do the lottery ticket where I’m going to write the one thing that’s going to breakout and everything is going to change.

There’s a thing, you know, a term called “silent evidence” where we only see the successes and we sort of miss all the things that fail. And I feel like it would be helpful for people to go to a second or third tier film festival and see all the movies and then follow up on like what actually happened to those movies. And some of them you’re going to love and some of them you’re not going to love, but most of those movies are not going to find a home anywhere. And yet each of those filmmakers had spent years of their life trying to make that thing. And so recognize what a gamble you’re making by sort of putting everything into just one thing.

**Keith:** And to think about those second tier, like those mid-level tier film festival, are still rejecting other movies that don’t even get into that festival. So, yeah, it’s absolutely true. I think independent film and film and entertainment in general is dominated by success. And I think that that success is all that’s visible. And it’s easy to get caught up in the idea that the lower tier of the things that are successful is the lower tier of everything. And it’s just not true. You’re just seeing the top 1% of what’s being made. And you’re looking at the bottom of that top 1%.

**John:** Yeah. It’s crazy.

Starting to talk about film festivals, how important are film festivals for an indie film that’s coming out right now? Theoretically you would have finished – like a movie like Blindspotting – you would have finished it. You would know what it was like. Why go to Sundance to debut it rather than just like you know who the distributors are. You could’ve just had a screening and invited them to come. What’s the decision process there?

**Keith:** You know, it’s interesting. I think there’s a few key festivals that are really, really important to trying to sell an independent film. There are festivals that are wonderful for exposing audiences to independent cinema and for building great relationships and things like that, but I do think there’s a few that are really markets for selling finished films in a way that still provides a lot of value. And I think Sundance is near the top of that list. And there’s a huge variety of reasons. Things that you can read about and I’ve thought about a lot over the years.

I think the key ones are just the decision makers are actually all watching your movie at the same time. And are aware that they probably have to make a decision quickly. I think those two things lead to being able to sell an independent film and create not necessarily a bidding situation but the idea that there’s an understanding that this film will probably get distribution within the festival or shortly after the festival if it’s a commercial movie that people recognize that side of it.

I think other festivals it’s really hard to do that just because honestly the distributors don’t go. So you can go to an even just slightly tier below Sundance and have an amazing screening, and it doesn’t have that same benefit because the decision makers aren’t in the room. Maybe the junior people below them are and they can kind of say, “Oh, it was good, you should watch it at some point.” It just doesn’t have the same environment that I think Sundance and Cannes and Toronto and a few of these other film festivals will have.

So I would always – if you have an independent film that doesn’t have distribution, I think it’s always worth targeting the biggest film festivals that you can. You can do your research and see which films have launched out of which film festivals and sort of start to get a path saying that, “OK, my film is like these types of films that did really well at this festival. That’s probably a good festival to premiere at.”

**John:** So, when we were doing The Nines one of the crucial things we had to have was a PR/marketing company who would plan the festival basically with us. Basically so we could go in with a message and this is how we are going to communicate. These are all the different media venues we’re going to talk to. Is that still a thing? Is that still a crucial aspect of this early part of the process?

**Keith:** If we have a film that’s premiering at Sundance or Toronto, which are really the two main festivals we’ve had films at as premieres, the two things that I would make sure that we have are a festival publicist that is just handling all of the PR requirements for that festival. And a sales agent, whether that’s a foreign sales agent or domestic sales agent.

I think that if you’re trying to sell a film at a festival, especially at a major festival, those are two very important elements. The sales agent especially if you’re making your first movie. You don’t know how to, A, manage the sort of market process of getting distributors to show up to the screening. But certainly you don’t know how to manage the process of handling proposals and how to counter the proposals and when and when to have filmmaker meetings and when not to have filmmaker meetings. And there’s a whole rigmarole to selling a movie at a festival that you just won’t know how it works on your first movie or probably your second movie either.

And then with the publicist, there’s a lot of things that you can do as a savvy producer to help promote your movie, but the publicist will have a better sense of how to target it towards critics. Which critics to get into which screenings. A lot of times they’ll be helpful thinking about sales strategy. But they’ll also give you good advice on what not to do. So there’s simple things that I would advise filmmakers not to do when premiering a film at a large festival. And a lot of those things go against what the festival is encouraging you to do. So I think that you don’t want to release a ton of still images. I think you usually would want to release one, maybe two, and I don’t think you should be putting up your own trailer and your own promo. I don’t think you should be releasing clips for the movie.

And really all the things that on the surface seem like really logical things to promote your movie I would advise against.

**John:** Why?

**Keith:** I think that if you have a movie that has anticipation, where either it seems like it’s a commercially-minded movie or it seems like it’s the launch of a really interesting filmmaker or interesting acting talent and you have a good screening slot in the festival, I think you have to have confidence in your movie and confidence in the festival that you’re in that people will want to come see it. And I think that the more materials you release the more you’re potentially seeming desperate, which I think doesn’t help the market around your movie. And I think the more that you are putting out into the world things that your eventual distributor will regret that you’ve put out into the world.

Almost every time I’ve worked with a really great distributor it’s something they’ve brought up is that they’re really thankful that we didn’t have some trailer that we cut in-house and put out there because as – I mean, as I think everyone knows now, once something is online it’s just forever. And so suddenly anytime anyone wants to see what’s going on with that movie they’re opening the trailer that you did your best intentions to do a good job cutting a trailer for, but it’s just not what a studio would use to sell your movie.

**John:** You’re going to show up with some sort of one sheet, some sort of art work that can represent it on a board but it won’t be the final artwork.

**Keith:** If that. If that.

**John:** So you wouldn’t even do that?

**Keith:** We do do that, but we only do it if we’re doing it properly. So, I mean, we’ll use poster vendors and we’ll go through the process and get a lot of comps and kind of really make sure that either it’s a really strong poster or something that could not be considered anything other than a teaser image. I think that your strongest step forward at a festival is purely non-traditional marketing, or very teaser-based marketing that don’t reveal much about your movie.

I think that the more you reveal about your movie before it plays at the festival, the more that you’re either elevating anticipation to the point that you’re setting expectations differently from what you want them to be, or that you’re giving distributors a reason to pass on your movie. I think that a trailer that doesn’t fit how they would sell a movie or a poster that doesn’t fit how they would sell a movie is a strike in their heads against your movie.

**John:** All right. So all this advice that you’re giving are things that a first time writer-director is not going to know going into this. So it feels like that writer-director wants to have someone like you, an experienced producer who has done this kind of thing before. How would you recommend that writer-director find the producer who might be the right person to do this movie, or to do all these parts of the job, but especially this part of the job which is so different?

**Keith:** I think that if you’re making a low-budget independent film, especially if like your friend David, like if he’s making a movie that’s really a micro-budget movie where it’s a group of friends coming together to make a movie, I don’t think you need to have a producer like me where I have a bunch of experience at festivals and things like that. But I do think that’s where you want to have a good sales agent and you want to have a good publicist.

I think that you can find someone like me to give advice. I mean, every year at Sundance there are filmmakers that I know or friends of friends or things like that that will reach out for advice on what to do at the festival and I’m happy to give it. But I’m not a big – I’m not a big proponent of filmmakers making a movie and then seeking a producer to put on it to help them with the sales process. I think that the kinds of producers you would convince to do that are not the kinds of producers you actually want to be in business with, generally.

There are people who exist in that space doing – giving the advice that you’re looking for. And really those are sales agents and festival publicists.

**John:** So, the flip side of that question, so let’s say that you are a person who loves movies and loves independent film, but you are not a writer-director yourself. How does one become a person who is making films? Is it what you’re describing where you find a filmmaker you like at a festival and you say like, “Hey, I want to sort of help you make your next thing?” Like what is the process of–?

**Keith:** Of becoming a producer?

**John:** Of becoming a producer. Of becoming sort of like what you’re doing.

**Keith:** You know what? I actually do think that if you live really anywhere in the world and you want to be a producer, I do think that your best step forward is to go to your local film festivals. Wherever you live there’s probably one within driving distance. And see what the local talent base is like and see if you can build a local filmmaking community of some sort and make movies that way. I don’t think that that is necessarily a path to financial success and kind of success within the larger industry, but it is a path to working within the arts and making movies in the same way that I think if you want to do theatre you can go be in your local theatre production. You shouldn’t have an expectation that that’s going to lead to you starring in a play on Broadway.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with making regional cinema. I think that’s actually a great way for people to spend their time. And I think you can do really cool work that can expand way beyond that. But I do think that the arts has a tendency to look at the absolute most success and then say, “Well how do I get to that?” And there’s very rarely a real path to that other than doing what you can do as well as you can.

**John:** Yeah. I think your metaphor for like theatre is appropriate because most people are not making a fortune in theater, especially not smaller theater. You do it because you love to do it. And so there aren’t people who are making a fortune off of independent film. There was sort of that heyday in the rise of Miramax where it felt like, “Oh, that’s where all the excitement and all the money is.” Fox Searchlight does really great, but that’s not what most indie film is really like. It’s making enough money to make that movie successful and be able to make the next movie. It’s not giant mansions.

**Keith:** I think it’s also tricky with independent film is that a lot of movies get sold as independent film. Like it’s viewed in the world as being independent film, but they’re truly studio movies. And I think that a lot of the most successful movies you would consider independent — that the general people would consider independent films — are essentially studio movies that were just made for a low budget that they were able to convince everyone to work for cheaper by pretending it was an independent film.

**John:** That’s true. So how do you like to define independent film right now? Because we’re talking Fox Searchlight or we’re talking A24, they’re making the movies that are kind of like that but they are really their own studios. They’re getting approvals – it’s not like they’re buying that movie off the festival usually. So what is independent film to you?

**Keith:** I would still consider, I mean, this is a definition that everyone has differently. For me, I’m pretty strict in the sense that I think that if the source of financing of the film was not a major distributor, then it’s independent film. And that can include really very large movies as well as small movies. Like I would include a movie like Looper as an independent film because it was put together, the model we talked about earlier, where they were doing foreign presales and they were piecing it together that way. But it’s a big budget movie with movie stars and everything in it.

Arrival I think is a similar thing. That’s an independent film because it was made independently. And then a studio really wanted to buy it and they bought it. I wouldn’t consider a lot of Fox Searchlight movies for example as independent films because they were really just low budget movies made by a division of a studio that makes low budget movies.

**John:** Yeah. “Specialty” might be the better term for it.

**Keith:** Yeah. They can still be an art house movie. Like it’s released in art house theaters, but that doesn’t mean it’s – to me it wouldn’t be an independent film. That’s kind of my criteria.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Keith:** So I would still consider an A24 movie an independent film because I think that they are an independent company. That they also release their own movies doesn’t mean that they’re not independent of the larger major studio system.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Keith:** To me, the sort of ground where I’m not sure is you could make a case that Lionsgate’s movies are independent films. I mean, it’s an independent studio, but it’s also a majorly traded public company at this point with a large valuation. I guess mini-major is kind of what you call it now.

**John:** But to be clear, you’re trying to distinguish between independent film represents a business model whereas specialty or art house represents a style or a placement of a kind of movie, regardless of the genre.

**Keith:** Yeah.

**John:** So you can have big budget sci-fi indie movies and you can have studio-made art house films and that’s fine. But not to try to conflate the two things together.

**Keith:** Yeah. I mean, for me, to a certain degree, I’m not sure what – if a studio is financing a movie I’m not sure what it is independent of. I think independent should be defined by it being independent of studio financing. I think that is what independent should mean.

Yeah, I think it’s more helpful to describe films by how they are originated rather than how they end up being seen.

**John:** Absolutely. Sometimes it’s also the sources of financing are a bunch of things cobbled together. So Participant felt like that kind of thing, where Participant was a company with a specific sort of agenda in terms of progressive ideas. And so they would funnel money into a bunch of things. And so a lot of those movies feel either they truly were independents or they were kind of studio movies where Participant was participating in them.

Go was originally a totally independent movie and so we had foreign financing. We had a list of – we had to get a white male star, 45 years or older, to be in it. And we just couldn’t put all the pieces together. And at the very last minute Columbia came in and took over. And that – it was a combination of things. And still it happened, it’s called a negative pickup, where essentially the studio has already agreed to buy it and basically they’re the bank that’s paying for everything. But we were still able to work like an indie film, where we didn’t have quite the oversight that a studio would have.

That’s another way of thinking about it is that I talk to sometimes Sundance filmmakers who are – they have a certain plan. They’re going to do it in a very classic way and then a studio comes in and the studio just becomes the bank that takes over the making of things. So you don’t know what it’s like. I think sometimes being flexible about sort of how you’re actually going to do it is the key. You have a vision for what the movie is going to be. Who paid for it and how it is coming out in the world is sometimes less important.

**Keith:** Well, yeah. I wouldn’t put a value judgment on whether something is independent or studio. Like I think that there are movies where you maintain more autonomy and creative ability within a studio than you do independently. Yeah. I think there’s so many emotional things tied to the idea of something being independent or studio that I think in every given case is not the reality.

**John:** Yeah. What are some movies that you’ve seen lately at festivals that you want to make sure that we are aware of that we look for that are coming out in the next year?

**Keith:** I’ll be honest. Like, at Sundance, I was at Sundance. We had our movie there. I saw one other movie. It’s just when you have a movie premiering at a festival that you’re selling and doing all the marketing PR around you don’t – I find I don’t have time to watch anything.

The film that I saw recently that it’s not helpful because it’s not out in the US. There’s a movie called Down Under that’s an Australian independent film that’s fantastic. And it was so good that I immediately reached out to that writer-director about doing his next movie which we luckily were able to do. But it’s a comedy about a real race riot in Australia. And it has tinges of Get Out and that type of where it’s a commercially-minded movie that deals with very real issues in the world. And I’d say Down Under is an incredible movie. And if you are in a country where it has been released, I highly recommend checking it out.

**John:** Talk to me about how you reached out to him. Did you reach out through Twitter? Did you reach out through official representatives and channels? How did you get to him?

**Keith:** So, I’ll tell you. The short version is that it premiered at Fantastic Fest, which I wasn’t at, but I have had films at before and I kind of know people there. And a friend of mine who lives in Austin was at Fantastic Fest and he said, “Oh, you have to see Down Under. It’s the best movie at the festival.”

I then went on Studio System and looked up the director. And I saw that coincidentally he had just been signed by the same agent who represents Adam Wingard who is a director I’ve worked with a bunch. So I reached out to the agent and said, “I hear this movie is great. Is there any way I can see it?” And he got me a screener. I watched the movie with Jess and we both loved it. And I said, “Can I talk to the director?” And the agent set up a Skype and we Skyped.

**John:** Great.

**Keith:** And then the next time he was in LA we got dinner together with him and with his producing partner.

**John:** Great. So that’s the situation of this wasn’t anything he did to get to you. He made something good, put it out in the world, and people came to him because it was good.

**Keith:** Exactly. And I will say that that’s often what the path is. I think that there’s a tendency to feel like the proactive thing an aspiring writer-director should be doing is reaching out to people with query letters or emails or things like that. And I actually think the proactive thing you should be doing is making things. And then showing them to as many people as you can show them to and hope that that goes somewhere.

**John:** I’ve had a series of assistants who have gone on to become great writers and busy employed writers. And they always ask me, “How will I know that it’s happening? How do I know that it’s all going to happen?” And to me it’s always when I hear that their scripts got passed around to people who they didn’t hand them to. And basically when someone read something that was good enough that it just got passed around. And that’s almost always kind of the case where it’s the work itself. And so it’s doing really good work, putting it out there in a way that people can discover it, because it’s not going to do any good on your shelf. And then it just kind of happens. It’s what happened for me and it sounds like it’s what happened for this filmmaker.

**Keith:** Yeah. I think so much of what launches careers is word of mouth about your work and word of mouth about you as a person. Those are the two things. And I think that in the case of with Adam and Simon it was the word of mouth that you would all work really well together, which I heard from four or five different people. With the case of Abe who did Down Under it was, “Hey, you have to see this movie. You’ll love this movie.”

**John:** Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a book called Liar Town: The First Four Years 2013-2017 by Sean Tejaratchi. I’m going to mispronounce his name. But Liar Town is a great site on the Internet. You should go type, I think liartown.com. And you will see that there are absurd images and memes that this guy has created with ridiculously good Photoshop skills. They’re always found things, as if he found this book that existed on a shelf, but of course he made it up. The book version of this sort of takes all the stuff that he’s done on his site and prints it in a terrific form.

If you buy this book you should not leave it out where children can see it or your parents can see it because there’s lots of dirty images. But it’s one of the most hilarious things I’ve seen to the point where like, if I read it at night, I hurt from it – stomach and chest hurt from laughing so much. So I’d recommend Liar Town: The First Four Years.

Do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Keith:** I do. I thought about this a lot, because I’m an avid listener to the podcast, so I’ve heard many cool things at this point. Mine is the Eco-Cha Tea Club which is a – there’s a lot of these online things where you sort of pay a subscription fee and they send you different things each month. This is an oolong tea club based in Taiwan. These guys that go out and find small farms that have small stock oolong tea leaves and they send you a bag of tea leaves every month. And it’s different ones every month and they are all delicious and incredible and I’ve now become a big supporter of Eco-Cha Tea Club. And I’ve been a member for a few years and I’m never let down by the tea they send me.

**John:** That’s fantastic. That is one of the most esoteric One Cool Things. Well done, Keith Calder. That’s a very good job.

I have a tiny bit of WGA business here at the very end. So the WGA will have just sent out a screenwriter survey to all of the screenwriters in the WGA about what they’re experiencing in their daily life. It takes about 10 minutes. I think it’s a well-designed survey. We went through so many iterations of it. So if you are a screenwriter in the WGA West you will get an email with a link. Please click that link. It takes 10 minutes to fill it out. It will really help us figure out what you’re facing out there in the world.

And that’s our show this week. Our show is produced, as always, by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Luke Davis. 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 David’s question.

We’re on Facebook, maybe. I don’t know if we should still be on Facebook. Facebook seems like it’s a sinking ship. But you can look for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can look for us on Apple Podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there you can leave us a comment.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. And the transcripts which go up in about a week.

I am on Twitter @johnaugust. Keith, you are on Twitter as well.

**Keith:** I am Twitter @keithcalder.

**John:** Yes. You often answer questions about film and stuff and you’re a great person to follow. I’ve followed you for many, many years.

**Keith:** I sometimes answer questions about film. Mostly it’s nonsense.

**John:** Nonsense is what Twitter is for.

You can find all the back episodes of Scriptnotes at Scriptnotes.net or you can buy a USB drive with the first 300 episodes at store.johnaugust.com.

Keith Calder, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was so good to be able to talk to you about film stuff that I just don’t even know about.

**Keith:** Thank you so much for having me on. I hope that I gave useful answers.

**John:** Great. Thanks Keith.

Links:

* Thanks for joining us, [Keith Calder](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2096462/)! You can check out his [website](http://keithcalder.com/) and [wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Calder).
* [Blindspotting](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt7242142/) comes out this summer. [Here](http://variety.com/2018/film/reviews/blindspotting-review-daveed-diggs-rafael-casal-1202667959/) is Variety’s review.
* [You’re Next](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27re_Next) and its [IMDb page](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1853739/). You can watch it on [Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Youre-Next-Sharni-Vinson/dp/B00GNL127K/ref=sr_1_1_pfch?s=instant-video&ie=UTF8&qid=1522106656&sr=1-1&keywords=you%27re+next) now.
* [Down Under](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_Under_(2016_film)) [trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Whn4q8HuC8g) and [IMDb page](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4463120/).
* [LiarTown: The First Four Years 2013-2017](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1627310541/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Sean Tejaratchi.
* [Eco-Cha Tea Club](http://teaclub.eco-cha.com/)
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Keith Calder](https://twitter.com/keithcalder) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Luke Davis ([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_343.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/getting-paid-for-it).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 342 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

We’ve had a bunch of craft episodes back to back, so today I thought we’d take a look at the business side of things. We’re going to talk about getting paid, getting credit, and getting rid of a bad manager.

**Craig:** Yes! Oh my god, that’s like the trifecta of stuff that makes me pleased.

**John:** Very good. We’ve done almost no preparation for this episode, so it’s going to be making up answers as we go, which is sometimes the best thing.

**Craig:** You know, John, welcome to my world buddy. This is every episode for me.

**John:** We have some follow up though. Chaz from Disney wrote in to say, “On the last episode of Scriptnotes, Craig and John pitched a ‘standing offer’ to come and discuss the notes process with any studio that was interested in having such a discourse. I ran the idea past our president, Sean, and we agreed. As two gentlemen that we hold in very high regard, we’d like to take them up on that offer.”

So, that’s one studio down.

**Craig:** It’s not just one studio. It’s actually five studios. So, if I could have picked one studio to do this, it would have been Disney, not because they’re particularly good or bad at giving notes. It’s more that they cover so much. They now own Fox, in terms of movies, and Disney, and Disney Animation, and Pixar, and Marvel, and Lucas Film. That’s a lot of notes going out the door. And Sean Bailey, who is the head of Walt Disney Pictures, so that’s their live action film arm from Disney, is fantastic. We both know him and have worked with him and for him.

And I’m not surprised that he’s the guy who said yes to this, by the way. It’s very Sean-like to want –- he’s a good scientist in this regard. You know, he’s very rational and he loves the idea of kind of hearing another point of view on this.

So, I want to say to – so first of all, we’re doing it, for sure.

**John:** Yeah. We need to figure out when we’re doing it. Sometime post-Chernobyl or sometime.

**Craig:** It will be post-Chernobyl. I mean, we are all living in a post-Chernobyl era, but probably as we get into the summer. But I would also like to point out to any of you listening at Sony or Universal or Warner Bros., Disney is doing it.

**John:** It’ll be nice.

All right, so the question is what exactly are we going to say because it’s very easy to point out like bad things about notes, but even since we got this email in I started asking other writer friends about what are examples of good notes –- what is a helpful way to sort of give notes?

So, if you are a writer who has gotten good notes from a studio, or have received notes that were actually helpful or presented in a way that was helpful. It could be the means of getting the notes, or the structure of the notes, or who was giving the notes, let us know about that because we’d like to talk about best practices and not just complain about things that are terrible.

**Craig:** Completely. And, in fact, I don’t think it’s particularly useful to run down a list of here’s the dumbest note I ever got. That’s not what this is about. For me, this is entirely about process and philosophy. And very specifically what is going on in our brains, in an emotional sense, and in a productive sense. What is happening inside of our heads when we’re doing this? And what are the general philosophies that work best?

The whole point of this is entirely to get better work made. So better work out of us. Better work for them. And some of it is a little counterintuitive. There are things that I think have just become encrusted in the notes process that need to be looked at freshly and then dismissed. They are no longer useful. They’re not the right way to do it.

**John:** Yeah. They are barnacles on the system that need to be shaken free.

**Craig:** Hells yeah.

**John:** Hells yeah. Next up, Jen writes, “In Episode 340 both John and Craig use the term ‘central casting’ to describe a character. Can you describe what you mean by this?”

**Craig:** This is an old Hollywood term that’s kicked around forever and then has made its way into general lingo out there. Central casting refers to the most stereotypical example of how you would fill a role. So, if you say, OK, well this character of the prison guard is straight out of central casting, well who would you imagine is the most stereotypical prison guard? This big beefy guy with a buzz cut and kind of tough looking.

I mean, whatever it is that you imagine. It’s just the most stereotypical version of that person.

**John:** Yeah. So central casting, there was a casting department at a lot of studios. I think there still is a casting department at most studios. I know like networks will have the casting department. But it doesn’t sort of work that same way now. When we talk about central casting, we’re describing the look of the person. So it’s both the actor and how that character is made up. And so that’s the, again, the incredible stereotype of what that’s supposed to be like.

So it’s the nurse with horn-rimmed glasses. There is a very set idea of what that thing is like. So, you can say central casting in your script if you’re trying to sort of push against it or that it’s an example of why you want to be the biggest stereotype possible. But it’s not generally helpful. And so usually, if hear the term central casting, it is pejorative in that it is not well thought through.

**Craig:** Yeah. Inside of our business it’s pejorative. So you’ll say, OK, well you’ve written this butler character to be straight out of central casting. He’s a ramrod posture British man at the age of 60 who says, “Very good sir.” That’s central casting. It’s cliché. We don’t like it so much.

In the outside world, behind Hollywood, a lot of times they use it as a compliment like, well, we had to hire ourselves a new head CEO and we found this person and they were straight out of central casting, meaning they’re just the ideal person for that gig. So, two different meanings, but inside Hollywood not so great. Outside, generally pretty good.

**John:** I’m not sure. I think it’s changing outside of the world, too. Like your example of a CEO out of central casting, it does feel a little unimaginative. Like you’re worried that that person does not have a vision.

**Craig:** I think in the business world that’s considered a plus.

**John:** Although I would say, you know, the central casting version of the Silicon Valley entrepreneur, like that I totally get. You still see that out there.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** Yep. With the hoodie.

**Craig:** With the hoodie.

**John:** Kevin writes, “I’m listening to you guys argue about Sarah Paradise’s three pages as I type. I’ve been a stuntman in LA since 1999. Craig, you’re right.”

**Craig:** Oh, let’s just stop the podcast here. We’re done. Wrap it up. We had a great run. Folks–

**John:** 342 episodes.

**Craig:** At that’s our episode. Scriptnotes is produced by–

**John:** Now fill out your forms. Make sure you return all your uniforms. Erase all those little notes in the margins because we’re done.

**Craig:** We’re done.

**John:** Craig has finally been proven right.

**Craig:** Finally.

**John:** There’s a little bit more to the email, so we’ll get through it.

**Craig:** Ah, OK.

**John:** “Stunt people don’t punch each other in the face, especially stunt people who happen to be attractive women. If we are accidentally hit during a fight on a show or a movie we pretend it didn’t happen, then whisper to the person who did it to say you clipped me on that one. Then they apologize profusely. This is because how we look is a large part of how we get employed. Hell, we don’t even get haircuts for fear of losing work because an actor has to be doubled with long hair.

“Side note: I’ve been writing for about 17 years. I’ve been listening to current episodes as they come out, but I’m also on Episode 80 on the back catalog. The back episodes are fresh and informative because I’m a different writer now than I was a few years ago. I recommend that every listener go back through the old episodes again. It’s not like watching reruns. It’s more like watching Fight Club for the second time.”

**Craig:** Wow. That’s a hell of a compliment.

**John:** That really is.

**Craig:** Thank you, Kevin. I mean, by the way, also just a brilliant analogy, because I remember the first time I watched Fight Club and I was like what is this garbage? Then I got to the end. And then I watched it again and I was like, oh, this is my new favorite movie of all time. And I’ve seen it a billion times since.

Yeah, by the way, Kevin, first of all thank you. You sound like a very responsible stunt actor, stunt performer, so thank you for also doing that job. We need you. And also I’m a different writer then I was back then, too. I think everybody is changing constantly. This podcast as it goes on is an interesting kind of archeological record of me and of John and of all of us. So, thanks. Really nice comment.

**John:** It is a nice comment. I would say that making Launch, the other podcast I did for Arlo Finch, even as I was making it I realized like, oh, this will actually be a great little time capsule of who I was and where I was at that time, because it’s really like what the experience was like of making that book. And I’m looking forward to being able to go back 10 years, 20 years from now and listening to that again.

I don’t know that I’ll go back to listen to the old Scriptnotes, but I’m sure if I did go back and listen to some, there’d be advice I gave or things I talked about which I have a different opinion on now just because things have progressed and changed. The industry has changed and I have changed a bit as a writer.

**Craig:** I mean, and the world around us. Everything. Everything. If we were the same, what would be the point anyway? Right? I mean, things keep changing. Even though I’m joking about how exciting it is to hear that I’m right, the truth is as writers we spend most of our day being wrong. That’s part of the process. And that’s how good things will eventually come. You recognize that you’re in motion all the time. So, we’re like little butterflies that flit around, then we land on an opinion. We can stay there for a little bit, and then we’ve got to flit away and find something better. So, all good. Thank you for that Kevin.

And I have a little bit of follow up myself. Because I talked about being wrong. OK, so I had my one brief moment of being right there. Yay. Now let’s get back to me being wrong again.

My One Cool Thing last week was Alto’s Odyssey, a game I was really enjoying and still am. But I had one complaint and that was that when I downloaded it for my iPad it did not show up on my iPhone. In fact, the iPhone was saying, hey, you got to give us more money now. And I thought, oh, they’ve made this app where you have to pay for it twice for some reason because it’s on an iPad versus an iPhone.

No, no. It’s just that I had stupidly disabled my automatic iCloud app download function thingy. So, when I flipped that back on suddenly Alto’s Odyssey was available for download for no money, because I had already paid for it. I apologize Alto’s Odyssey people. My mistake. Sorry.

**John:** Yeah. It was user error.

**Craig:** It was totally user error. And you know what? I’ll tell you, it’s not like anyone told me. The Alto’s Odyssey people didn’t call up. If they heard about it, they probably just shook their heads and said, “Idiot.” But they let it go.

**John:** Yeah. Because you were that one person. I mean, there might be like 10 or 12 people in the world who are using this app and you are one of them. And I’m sure they were saddened that one of their 12 players wasn’t getting the best experience out of it.

**Craig:** Well, first of all, they spend their days listening to us. And specifically me. I’m pretty sure what they do is they just listen to my side of it. And, you know, they hang on every word. I get it. And I’m sorry. What do you want from me? I apologize.

**John:** All right, let’s get to some questions and all of these questions are from our listeners and they’ve written in about things that relate to the business of screenwriting. So, I thought we’d dig into those. They’re almost all feature questions, but I think there’s going to be some relevant things here for people writing for TV, both scripted TV and variety talk shows.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So we’ll start with Anonymous in LA. Writes, “I’m a young screenwriter who recently quit my well-paying salary job to pursue screenwriting full-time.”

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**John:** “I can hear Craig saying oh boy as I type this.”

**Craig:** Oh, interesting.

**John:** “Last year I wrote a script that earned a substantial amount of attention. And placed near the top of the Black List. It got me an agent and several dozen meetings with studios and production companies. Because I was taking mini meetings each week and could no longer fulfill the duties of my job, I decided to quit about three months ago. While I do not regret this decision, I have never been without steady work. And this new situation is quite frankly terrifying. I find myself in a constant state of anxiety and depression surrounding my unemployment. I am working towards securing work by pitching open assignments, but so far I have landed nothing.

“My question is, how do you deal with the anxiety and depression that comes from the instability of this profession?”

**Craig:** Well, we have talked about this quite a bit. So, first of all, Anonymous, you’re going to want to listen to Episode 99, that’s a big one I think that we talk about a lot. That’s where we had psychotherapist Dennis Palumbo, and also former screenwriter, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, Dennis Palumbo onto talk a little bit about the psychological challenges that we face as screenwriters. It is very, very hard to do what you’re doing. I feel anxiety and depression and terror surrounding potential unemployment and so when you are actually unemployed I can only imagine it is even more crushing. And I can also imagine it becomes extremely hard to be creative and inspired. My guess is the adrenaline is really good for volume, that is you will write because you’re terrified, but the quality of it is going to start to become warped by your perception of what they want and what they will give you money for.

Suddenly the money becomes really, really, really important. It’s not to say that when you start out you shouldn’t be taking jobs for the money. It’s not a bad idea. You have to pay bills. And all experience is good experience. But I am concerned about your situation because you did quit and you are scared. And you have not been paid yet. And so I think it’s fair to say that you should try and find something that brings in some money. Maybe there’s some freelance work you can do. Maybe your agent, for instance, can hook you up with somebody that needs some copywriting done. Little things. Anything. Just to get a little bit of money in so you’re not in just a total freefall about money going out and nothing coming in. That is terrifying. And more than anything it’s not so much about your bank account, it’s about your head space and feeling like when you sit down to write you’re not doing it with a gun in your mouth.

**John:** Yep. I will say Anonymous I think you made the right choice. And I don’t know anything about your situation beyond what you described, but in your situation that is when you just decide, OK, I’m going to have to pursue this fulltime because otherwise I can’t take these meetings. I can’t make this all happen.

So, you got to pull the ripcord at some point and you probably pulled the ripcord at the right moment. But it is scary. And I was exactly where you were at where I left my last job and I had not sold anything, but I had an agent and I had some traction. I was taking meetings. It looked like something could happen. But there were about four months there, five months there where there was just nothing and I was just falling. And one of those slow motion falls where you’re sort of swimming through the air. So I definitely remember what that felt like.

I think Craig’s suggestion of trying to find some way to get some income is good. And freelance copywriting could be something. Uber or Lyft could be something. Something so there’s a little bit of money coming in would be great.

Minimizing your expenses would be great, because if you’re a person who came from a salary job you’re used to like, oh OK, I can make this all work because I know how much money I have coming in. When you don’t know how much money you have coming in that all changes. And you’ve got to be realistic about how your life is going to change. Because even when you hopefully do get a job or sell something, that will be a chunk of money and that chunk of money will disappear.

So what I did in Anonymous’ situation was I had a little spreadsheet and I had my monthly expenses. I knew how much it cost for me to live each month with rent, with utilities, with food. I minimized those as much as I could, but I could see like this is how much money I have. This is how I can live for six months on the money I have. And you’ll get through it.

So I think you’ve done the right thing but I think you’re also right to be thinking about “How do I prepare for this thing that could go on a little bit longer than I’d hoped.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I think she or he has done the right thing, too. I definitely think so. I mean, based on what you’re saying, placed near the top of the Black List. You have an agent. You’ve had meetings and attention. All that says, yes, you did the right thing.

And I will tell you that the worst part of your fear, I think, at least for me, is the fear of the fear itself -– that it will never go away. That this is your life now. That you now live in a terrible freefall as John described. And it’s not going to get better. Or, if you do get a job it’s only a brief respite and then you’re right back in the fear pit again. So all I can tell you, Anonymous, is no.

Here’s the situation: you will either succeed in a reasonable way so as to make yourself a life and a career as a screenwriter. Or you won’t, and then you will go back to doing what your well-paying salary job was. The good news is you’re young so it’s OK to be afraid but don’t think this is forever. The feeling that you’re having now is not forever.

**John:** Yeah. It will morph into a different kind of forever feeling.

**Craig:** Which is also exquisitely horrible. But wait until you’re in your 40s and then you’ll know about that one.

**John:** Yes. So what I would say is different about my advice for Anonymous than for some other writers is that Anonymous is in a situation where –- we’ll say she –- she placed well on the Black List, she has an agent, she’s going out for these meetings. It’s not just an idle dream that she has of being a screenwriter. Like she’s a screenwriter, it’s just a question of getting paid to be a screenwriter and whether that will happen. I think it probably will happen. As we’ve always said, any person starting in the feature business right now has to also be looking at television, so hopefully your agents are sending you out on great television meetings as well.

But I think something will probably happen because you seem to be a good writer who is asking smart questions.

**Craig:** Yeah. One last bit of advice for you, and then we’ll move on from Anonymous, it’s good that you’re going out for the open assignments. Open assignments are lotteries really. Because what happens with open assignments is they are casting a pretty wide net. You’re going up against a lot of people who are exactly like you. And at any given moment either one of them will get the job, or someone like John will bump into the executive one day, they’ll have a chitchat over a drink. That executive will say, “Oh, we’re working on this thing.” And then John will say, “Oh my god, based on that book? I loved that book as a kid.” “Really? Would you want to read?” “Yeah, I’ll read that. You know what? I can do that.” And then it’s over. There is no more open writing assignment.

So, point being, don’t let those things –- and this is the hardest part because you have to prepare. It’s like you’re writing a movie a week preparing to pitch on these things. But don’t let that distract you from what got you in this position in the first place which was your voice and writing your work. That is the one thing that John can’t do, nor can anyone else. No one else can write your script. So, keep that going. That is going to keep you fresh and in people’s eyes.

They are so much more interested in writers that are sending them things than writers who are coming in with their hand out saying give me something.

**John:** Yeah. The third possibility in those open writing assignments is that the job just completely goes away because they decide like, oh, maybe there isn’t a movie to be made about this. And I would say in more than half the cases they hire nobody for those jobs. And so that is the other frustration. But what you’re describing, that process of going out for an open writing assignment, or a quasi-open writing assignment, like they’re not even sure they’re going to really be making this movie, is it’s like an actor going out on auditions. And auditioning is a crucial skill for actors and pitching on these things is a crucial skill for writers.

I’d hoped to have her on the show at some point and maybe we’ll still have her on the show, but Jenna Fischer has a really good book on being an actor and sort of an actor’s life. And she talks a lot about that audition process and how crucial it is in terms of finding your own voice going through that audition process. So I’m going to recommend that to you to read through as well, because actors and writers have a lot in common in this area.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Cool. Theo writes in with four questions. So we’ll take each question one at a time. His first question is, “How many scripts did you write before making your first sale?” Craig Mazin?

**Craig:** One.

**John:** So you wrote one script. What was that script?

**Craig:** It was a script that I wrote with my then writing partner called The Stunt Family.

**John:** Oh yeah, we’ve talked about The Stunt Family.

**Craig:** It was not good. But it was funny. It was just not good. It was very dated, very early ‘90s sort of Simpsons-y kind of live action thing. A very broad comedy about a legendary family of stunt people. Very silly. Sort of like a Chris Farley kind of thing.

**John:** Did they hit each other in the face?

**Craig:** Oh my god, like that was constant.

**John:** Because according to our follow up, they shouldn’t hit each other in the face.

**Craig:** Well, that’s the thing. Because this movie was so ridiculous and over the – I mean, they lived on the studio lot. Their house was part of the studio tour, so every day a tram would go through and an “earthquake” would rip their house apart. It was very, very broad.

**John:** I wrote three scripts before I had anything sold or I got paid to write. So, Here and Now, which was a romantic tragedy set in Boulder, Colorado, my home town. Devil’s Canyon, which is a cross between Unforgiven and Aliens I want to say. And X which was the short film version of Go, so it was just the first third of Go. So those are the scripts I’d written before that.

My first sale was actually an assignment. I was hired to write the adaptation of How to Eat Fried Worms. Was your first sale a sale, Craig?

**Craig:** Yes. Well, it was a pitch.

**John:** It was Rocket Man?

**Craig:** It was Rocket Man. That’s exactly what it was. When we pitched it the title that we had was Space Cadet, which we eventually were not allowed to use because Lucas Film apparently was squatting on Space Cadet, which I’m still waiting for the Lucas Film Space Cadet. It’s been about 22 years.

**John:** Any day now.

**Craig:** Any day. They’re on it.

**John:** Theo’s next question is, “How many scripts have you written that have not been made?” For me the answer is at least 11. I was counting through in the folder. It’s probably more than that, but at least 11.

**Craig:** Now, does that include things like, OK, where I came in and I was rewriting something and then eventually that project just never happened?

**John:** Yeah, so I’m not counting those. I actually have printed original full scripts I wrote that were not based on a previous script.

**Craig:** Oh, I see. Geez, maybe like three. Not that many. Because most of the time I was either rewriting something that somebody else had started or it was an adaptation of something that kind of had been sputtered along. Or it was kind of like a sequel. There was a lot of that.

**John:** Theo’s next question, “How many scripts have you written that have never been optioned or sold?”

**Craig:** I’ve never optioned anything.

**John:** I’ve never optioned anything either. The only thing I ever sold was Go.

**Craig:** I’ve never sold a screenplay.

**John:** Well except for Rocket Man.

**Craig:** That was a pitch.

**John:** Oh, it was a pitch. The pitch. That’s right. A pitch.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve actually never sold literary material like that. I’ve either been commissioned to do it, or I have sold a pitch.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve sold some original pitches, but I’ve never sold a spec script, except for Go.

**Craig:** Except for Go, yeah.

**John:** “And what was the story behind your first sale? How much did you sell it for?” Well, my only sale was Go. I think it was about $75,000, sort of all in. So it was purchasing the script and the rewrite on it. That was for a little tiny company called Banner. We ended up selling the project to Sony right before we started shooting. But it was really done as an indie film.

So, that was fine money for what that was. So they said in that deal that I’d be a co-producer on the film and I’d be involved in the whole process and they were true to their word. So, it was a very good deal for me to have taken.

**Craig:** Yeah, so my first sale was the pitch for Space Cadet/Rocket Man. It was to Disney. It was 1995, I think, is when it happened. Roughly I believe we got something like $110,000, which then we had to split, of course, and then we had to pay our manager, and our agent, and our lawyer. So, it dwindled pretty quickly. And that was also when we learned how long it would take the contract to actually be finished therefore how long it would take us to actually get our money. So, for one day we felt like billionaires, even though we understood $100,000 was not a billion dollars. About eight months later I was like, “Can I please have my $15,000?” Because that’s all I’m getting out of this really. After taxes.

But, yeah, at the time it seemed pretty awesome.

**John:** Yeah. So I will say the first thing I actually got paid for, sort of two things I got paid for. I wrote the novelization of Natural Born Killers and that was the money that I was living off of for those six months before I actually got paid for other things. The money I got for How to Eat Fried Worms was WGA scale. So the minimum they could legally pay me. It was about $35,000 I want to say. But then I ended up doing multiple drafts on it, so over time I got more money than that.

But that’s why we have to have scale. If we did not have the WGA enforcing minimums, there’s no way I could have been a professional screenwriter.

**Craig:** No. No way anybody could be. I mean, that’s the whole point.

**John:** Well, some really rich people could be.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, but what a weird way to spend your life as a really rich person, just idly writing screenplays that make other people massive amounts of money but not you.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** Hmm. Do you want to take James’s question?

**Craig:** I do. James says, “I recently found myself owing $1,500 to the tax man. And it started me thinking about the business side of being a screenwriter. Do you treat your screenwriting as a business? By that I mean registering as an LLC, a limited liability company, or other entity? And what sort of expenses could you claim as a writer? Especially when you have no guaranteed income if you’re working on a spec script.”

John, all good nuts and bolts questions. What do you say?

**John:** So, yes, I do treat it as a business. And most screenwriters do treat it as a business once they start getting paid. So for our international listeners I think we should explain a little bit about companies in the US and how it all works. An LLC, I think it’s called a limited corporation in the UK, every country has some ability to have a corporation where instead of paying you as an individual they pay a company. And that company then employs you to do the work.

So, for screenwriters it is either through S-Corp or a C-Corp rather than an LLC. I am a C-Corp. Most screenwriters I know are S-Corps. There are subtle differences about how they can work, what deductions they can take. Both are fine. I’m a California corporation. You can incorporate in another state if that is more helpful to you.

But, yes, at a certain point you’re getting paid enough money that it makes sense to be a corporation rather than an individual person. So like for Go, my first sale, that was purchased from me. And so those checks go to John August. They don’t go to my corporation. So it’s always weird because I get separate residual statements for those things. And everything else goes to the corporation.

I will also say I do also have an LLC. So like this podcast and my software business, those are all run through the LLC rather than the C-Corp. It has to do with like a C-Corp really can’t have inventory and stuff like that. Whereas we have t-shirts and USB drives and stuff like that. And for accounting purposes it was really important that that be through a different branch. And that’s all through the LLC.

**Craig:** That’s how you’re laundering money and keeping it away from me. I know what’s going on. Continue.

**John:** That’s true. Craig, are you a C-Corp or an S-Corp?

**Craig:** I’m an S-Corp. I do not know the difference, but it’s just what they told me to be. I, like you, am incorporated in California. You have two numbers when you’re a corporation in the United States. You have a federal ID number which begins with the number 95 and then you have your state corporate number. And the reason is you’re paying taxes to both federal and state.

It would be awesome if you could incorporate in any state. And, in fact, you kind of can. If you’re a large corporation you often incorporate in Delaware because they have incredibly, well, just loving, lovey laws for corporations. They end up paying far, far less in taxes and all the rest.

However, when it comes to what we do it’s essentially impossible to incorporate anywhere other than the place where you are actually doing the bulk of your business. Believe me, I wish that I could do the bulk of my business across the state line in Nevada, and then I wouldn’t have to pay any state tax at all, although then I would just be a bad person. But pretty much every screenwriter is incorporated either as a C or an S in California. Like you, John, my residual checks for Rocket Man come to me and maybe Senseless, not that there’s that much coming in for that one, but regardless everything after that comes in through the corporate thing.

And, James, you’re right. You can claim all sorts of expenses as a writer. Easy ones off the top: every dollar you pay to your agent. Every dollar you pay to your lawyer. Every dollar you pay to your manager. That is a fair deduction. Also, the dues you pay to the Writers Guild. A fair deduction. Then if you have an office or office rent. You can even get away with a home office, although it’s a little bit of a red flag for the IRS. Computer equipment. Paper. Toner. Your cellphone.

Now, here’s the thing. One of the reasons that they tell us to incorporate is because it allows us to deduct a lot of these things without running into this whole alternative minimum tax business. I don’t really understand it. I’ll just be frank about it. All I can tell you is everyone is told to do it. It can’t be wrong. It just can’t be. So that’s kind of how it works.

**John:** Absolutely. The other thing I would say is helpful about a corporation is as a WGA writer you have a WGA pension. It’s lovely that we have a pension, but there’s a limit to how much you can sock away in that pension because it’s a union plan. You can establish your own pension and put money in for your pension for your corporation and that is a helpful thing as well.

So, for long term planning that is a reason why you would be doing that.

**Craig:** That’s my first level like every year the first level investment is the retirement plans and so forth that we’ve set up through the corporation. Because that is the best investment you can make because they don’t take tax off of it until you finally withdraw it later on in life.

**John:** Yeah. It’s been interesting. I’ve had some assistants, like Stuart Friedel, who were with the company long enough that they actually vested in the pension plan, which was kind of great. So it’s funny that Stuart has a pension through my corporation.

**Craig:** It’s going to be paying out for a long time because Stuart just seems like the kind of guy that’s going to make it to 148.

**John:** Oh, easily. Stuart Friedel will never die. He’ll find a way out. Like death will show up for him, and Stuart will negotiate a much better deal.

**Craig:** Forever Friedel.

**John:** Anonymous writes, “I was recently having lunch with an actor friend. The actor told me that all actors freely claim unemployment when they are not working. Up to $300 or $400 a week. I Googled it and SAG even has instructions on how to do this. The idea is that actors are only working while they are on set basically. All other times they are ‘looking for work’ and therefore eligible for unemployment. Does the same apply to writers in the WGA?”

**Craig:** I believe so. The issue has to do a little bit with this whole loan out company situation, but basically then your loan out company, meaning your corporation, as they pay you they’re paying the unemployment money. So the idea is when you work your employer has to send a bunch of money to the state on your behalf out of each paycheck that they’re responsible for, which is unemployment insurance. And then when you are out of work you apply to receive that unemployment back.

So, yeah, I’ve actually never done it.

**John:** So, Craig, I don’t think he was talking about the writers who have their own corporations. But what you’re saying is just fascinating, because I don’t know any writers with their own corporations who have done that. I think of that as sort of the writers who are still trying to get up to the point where they will have incorporated.

**Craig:** I mean, I think it would work either way. Now, when you are paid as a corporation what happens is a bunch of money comes into the corporation and then the corporation gives you a salary. This is part of how the corporation is viewed as legitimate by tax entities. So out of those paychecks there is some unemployment. But, yes, generally speaking if you have a corporation, money is coming through, this is not a problem for you anyway. But, yeah, I mean, look, it’s your money. Somebody once explained it to me, because I think a lot of people think, “Oh, he applied for unemployment, it’s like, oh, he went on welfare. He’s on the dole.”

No. It’s your money. It’s money that your employer had to send into the state on your behalf specifically for this situation. So, while I’ve never done it, I don’t see why you shouldn’t. It’s not a question of applying to writers in the WGA. It’s a question of applying just to citizens who work in the United States.

**John:** Yeah. So I know that production office staff will also do this where production office people will be working incredibly long hours on shows and then when that show wraps they will take some time off and get their unemployment for a while. They’ll do what they need to do in order to be “looking for work,” but that is sort of a planned part of how it all works.

I don’t know where the ethical lines are on claiming unemployment, but I will say that it is a not uncommon practice. And if it allows a class of people who are writers and actors and production people to exist between jobs, I get it.

**Craig:** Yep. For sure. That’s what it’s there for.

**John:** All right, Jay, in Los Angeles writes, “I sold a screenplay two years ago to a major studio. The script went into production this past September.”

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** So, “The script went into production this past September. I found about this through a friend working on the film.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** “I also found out the writer-director attached to the film reworked the script, turning it into a sequel to a mildly successful comedy, all still using the title of my script to the film. The film is scheduled to come out in theaters in October of this year. No one has contacted me in regards to the film. I see write-ups on the film, but my name is not attached. I’ve looked up information on the film, but I have yet to see my name attached to it anywhere. All of the credits are listed on IMDb, except for the writer, which is odd. It’s as if they’re purposely not posting the writer’s name.

“My greatest fear is that the writer-director will take full credit for the film and I will be left out in the cold without a credit even. Even though I sold the original script. I also found out that a production company, not connected to the studio, financed the film. The studio I sold the script to will only be distributing the film.

“In short, studio buys my script. Separate production company offers to finance it through their company. It is then reworked to become a sequel. The production company shoots the film. The studio will distribute the film. I’m not a member of the Writers Guild, so what the F do I do?”

Craig?

**Craig:** Well, all this comes down to one single question. You are not a member of the Writers Guild, and yet you have sold a screenplay to a major studio. The major studio, by definition therefore, is a signatory to the Writers Guild. All major studios are signatory to the Writers Guild. Which means it had to have been a Writers Guild deal. If it is a Writers Guild deal, that is to say your contract is covered under the terms of the MBA, well first of all if it’s a screenplay and you sold it you should have become a member of the Writers Guild. But putting that aside, if it’s covered under the Writers Guild Minimum Basic Agreement then you don’t have to worry because the credits are going to be determined by the Writers Guild.

Now, you have to be on top of this because – well, actually you don’t. You don’t have to be on top of it because the writer-director has written on it and therefore there’s going to be an automatic arbitration. And you are guaranteed minimum Story by credit if it’s an original screenplay. And you may very well earn yourself Screenplay credit as well, depending on what the actual shooting script ended up looking like.

If you somehow didn’t sell it to a signatory, I would be confused how that happened considering that you said you sold it to a major studio, then in this case your script is viewed as source material. It is not covered by the Writers Guild. The studio, I believe, will be obliged to say based on a screenplay by Jay in Los Angeles. You will not get residuals for it. They don’t have to invite you to the premiere. There’s no guarantees of anything. That’s it. That’s what you get. Which is all the more reason why no one should sell screenplays to anyone if it’s not under the Writers Guild Minimum Basic Agreement.

**John:** Very true. So, Jay is not his real name. I emailed him when I saw this question this morning to try to get more details. Clearly some things have been changed in this email because I can’t Google to find out what this is. So don’t go Googling sequels in October because I think he’s changed some dates deliberately to obscure what’s happening here.

But I emailed him to ask what it actually was so Craig and I could figure out a little bit more closely like what might actually be happening here. I’m a little concerned that it could be a situation like The Disaster Artist. And we haven’t gotten into that because we just don’t know all the details yet, but essentially the lawsuit that was filed in The Disaster Artist was a very different kind of suit than we’ve seen in other things where like, “Oh, I sold my script” because clearly this person was writing a script for the actor and director of the film, but then other writers ended up writing a completely different script. And it became really unclear where this person’s script fell in the chain of title, or if there was a chain of title. It was a mess.

I’m worried that Jay’s situation may be a mess for some things we just don’t know about. So, that it wasn’t really a major, or sometimes – I remember back when I worked with Miramax, Miramax would have a whole separate arm that would buy non-WGA stuff. And that it could be some sort of weird arm’s length thing that they’re doing when they bought this thing. Or they bought it basically just for the title.

So, I’m a little concerned that there’s something going on here that we don’t know.

What I will say to Jay is don’t just sit on your hands and say like, “Oh I hope this all works out OK.” If you sold this thing, then you have an agent, a manager, a lawyer. You have somebody who represented you. Call them right now and ask. And then figure out who you sold it to and call them and ask what’s going on with this. Because just delaying and delaying, all you’re going to do is increase your anxiety. And you’re not going to make it worse for yourself by asking.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Ask now. Figure out what’s going on. Because it sounds like a situation where there should be a WGA credit arbitration. But if there’s not going to be one, you need to know that now.

**Craig:** Best advice.

**John:** Cool. Do you want to take Peter’s question?

**Craig:** Yeah. We’ve got Peter writing in. He says, “My wife was a full-time writer on a network late night show and now she has a successful full-time show of her own on a major podcast network. Two shows a week. But it is not a WGA show, which leads to my question do you have any suggestions on how to keep our health benefits through the WGA?”

All right, John, so she is doing a podcast. It’s not WGA. What does she do? What do they do?

**John:** Well, I don’t know of any WGA podcasts, but there probably should be and probably will be in the future because I think podcasts are occupying a space that feels a lot like what television has been in the past. What those deals are going to look like, I don’t know. But I think that’s a thing that will be coming at some point.

But at some point will not get you WGA insurance right now. So, if I were in your situation, Peter, I would encourage you to encourage your wife to find some WGA employment, writing on something that is covered by the WGA contract so she will earn WGA money that will pay for the health plan. Because WGA health insurance is fantastic and keeping it is a very good idea. So, if she can find some writing for some other late night show, for some other WGA-covered program, I think it’s probably worth it for her to be doing that because as busy as she probably is doing her own podcast, you know, keeping that WGA coverage is really a good idea.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s nothing that is going to happen now in terms of this podcasting, even if down the line the WGA starts making deals for podcasts, it’s quite likely that the initial deals won’t involve health. I mean, the contributions from the employers to healthcare are the single largest expense that they incur as a result of their deal with the WGA, I think even more than residuals. I could be wrong about that, but it’s a lot.

And so all I can say Peter is if she’s loving this job and loving what she’s doing, maybe whatever you’re doing on your side can get you guys some health insurance because it’s not going to happen through the WGA this way. And there’s really no suggestion of how to keep it. The only way you keep WGA health insurance is by qualifying by hitting the income minimum each year. And if you don’t, then you get a little bit of time with COBRA as an extension. And if you’ve over-earned in prior years you have the point system, so you can use those points to kind of extend it a little bit. But after that, no.

So, check with the plan. Maybe you have some points where you can extend it a little bit. But that’s about it.

**John:** Yeah. This is the brief political rant I’ll have here. The idea that we have to be freaking out about her health insurance and Peter’s health insurance at this moment is maddening to me because it stifles innovation and it stifles this person who has gone off and does something else that’s great because she has to be worried about keeping her health plan. So she may need to go write on a crappy home improvement show just so she can keep her health insurance. And that’s just ridiculous.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a whole – you know, that’s a good side podcast, too. Maybe we can solve one of the great intractable problems of American politics. But it does seem like things are happening in a weird way. It was the strange response to Obamacare in our country, followed by the strange response to the threat of taking away Obamacare. We are an irrational people.

**John:** Deeply, deeply.

**Craig:** But things are happening that are different than I have noticed before. And I think the trend is toward universal coverage. That’s the way it feels to me. But it’s a long road ahead.

**John:** Yeah. Everyone outside of the US is saying–

**Craig:** Like what?

**John:** What do you mean? How do you live with this?

**Craig:** Duh.

**John:** Not well.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, yeah. Gina writes, “I optioned a script with a manager about nine months ago, and since then I’m not happy with the manager.” OK, Gina, you’re in my wheelhouse now. “And plan on cancelling our contract when it is up in a couple of months. My question is the script I optioned while with him is in the late stages of development and it’s really picking up steam towards financing. After I leave my current manager, is he still a part of the option? That is to say, does he get his 10% and the money going through him before it gets to me? Am I stuck with him forever on this deal? Or, am I able to dump him and get a new manager by sweetening the pot with a late developed screenplay on the table. After the current screenplay option ends I could sign a new one with the new manager, right?”

John, I like the way Gina thinks. Let me just put out there, I like the way her gears are turning. I like the way she thinks a lot.

**John:** Yeah. Getting rid of bad, unhelpful people is a goal we encourage. So, your situation depends on whatever this contract was you signed with him. There’s probably things beyond that, but this contract will be the thing that determines ultimately I think whether he stays attached to this project or not.

I don’t know what your contract look likes. Manager contracts can look very different. My hunch is you will not be able to shake him completely from this thing because it started underneath his little mantle. But that should not deter you from getting a better person on your team, because waiting it out for the clock to run out is not going to help you.

**Craig:** Yep. OK, so a couple of things, Gina. First of all, take a good careful look at that contract and discuss it with your lawyer. Most of us don’t sign contracts with representation. When they ask you to sign a contract it in general is a red flag. And what I would say to any manager or agent is if you need me to guarantee to you that I’m not going to leave for a while, that does not speak well of you. You should have the confidence to know that I’m going to stay because you’re doing your job well.

That aside, in these contracts very typically there will be an escape clause that says something like “You are bound to be the client for a two-year period, however this contract can be nullified if employment does not occur within any consecutive 90-day period,” let’s say. So you have to take a careful look at that and see if perhaps you can escape based on that clause alone. Because options are not employment. And, in fact, you’re saying, “Well, it’s in the late stages of development,” but have you been employed?

Right, so anyway, take a look at that. Second thing: after you leave your current manager, is he still part of the option – does he get his 10%? OK, so here’s the deal. Managers are not agents. Agents are attached to deals permanently. Agents are also bound by the Talent Agency Act. Managers aren’t. That gives them certain upsides, but also certain downsides. The way it has been explained to me by an attorney, and this was proven in my case through jurisprudence, managers are what they call on the wheel/off the wheel. They are not being paid for a deal. They are being paid for their ongoing services to you on a day-to-day basis. Meaning the day they stop working for you as a manager is the day you stop paying them.

So, there are a lot of ways to handle this. There are also things that you can – look, it depends on how unhappy you are with this manager. If you’re really unhappy, well talk to your lawyer and take a careful look and see if he’s violated the Talent Agency Act by attempting to procure you employment. And if you have proof of that that’s one phone call to the Labor Bureau in California and suddenly you have quite a bit of leverage there.

This is why I’m not generally a fan of the way a lot of these managers operate. You have more leverage I think than you realize. Definitely talk to your lawyer.

**John:** Great. I’ll go back to the first sentence here: I optioned a script with a manager about nine months ago. I don’t quite know what that means. And so I don’t know whether that manager signed on as a producer or kind of what happened there. I’d look at sort of what the actual agreement was there between you and this person who is a manager, but sometimes managers are also producers. If it’s a producer situation, whatever the deal is there is going to show up in that contract.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know what? There is an ambiguity there because the way I read it was that she optioned a script and the manager was along with her when they optioned it to a studio. But you’re right. It could be that he optioned the script, or she optioned the script, and then they’re acting as a producer. This is why I don’t like managers.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** It’s also why we don’t want agents to be doing managerial jobs, which they increasingly are doing.

**Craig:** God no.

**John:** God no.

**Craig:** Let’s hear from Mark.

**John:** Mark says, “I recently completed my first historical feature script and I’m currently looking for my next topic to tackle in the genre. However, I recently found out the historical figure I wanted to write about already has a major spec script sold about him with A-list actors attached to boot. I brushed it off and pivoted to a new historical event that was less famous, only to find out that this subject is also in development with A-list talent attached. Granted, one of the scripts has been in ‘production hell’ for over a decade. And the other is a fairly different take on my subject compared to what I had in mind.

“So should I just continue writing on these topics and hope that preexisting projects stay in production purgatory? And/or bank on my take on the subject matter being different enough? Or should I move on to a seemingly original topic to tackle?”

Craig, what should Mark do, our historical fiction writer?

**Craig:** Mark should stand still while I approach him and slap him. Slap! What do the five fingers say to Mark? Slap.

Mark, listen to me. Listen carefully. Everybody that anyone has ever heard of has a script about them in development somehow somewhere. Everybody. There are 12 different Winston Churchills on screens at any given moment on any given day all across the world. 10. 12. 15. Possibly 20 Churchills. It never ends. OK?

You will – listen to me, Mark – you will not care about that stuff. You will write your script. Either your script will or will not get made, but if it is beautiful and it is wonderful it is going to do wonders for you. The fact that one of the scripts you’re worried about has been kicking around for over a decade, well what else do you need to know? And the other one is a different take on this. You’re being way too concerned and scared and timid. My guess is that the historical figure you wanted to write about was a pretty brave person. Perhaps take some inspiration from them. And get back in there and do what you want to do. Write what you want to write. That will be the best script you are capable of writing.

**John:** Yep. I’d also say to Mark that it seems like your deal is that you love historical fiction about events and people of the past. If that’s your lane, stay in that lane. Do that thing and write really good scripts in there. And it’s helpful I think at the beginning to be a little bit stereotyped because then they know to go to you with that thing. So, don’t worry about it. Write the best script you can and then write the next best script you can.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** Cool. It is time for our One Cool Things. Craig? Oh, I know your One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Well, I’ve been obsessed with this now for weeks. I think it went viral basically. There is an old advert, as they say in the UK, put out by the British Pork Counsel, Concern, you know, like these industry organizations that promote a particular meat or drink.

**John:** Milk does a body good.

**Craig:** There you go. Exactly. Pork, it’s what’s for dinner. Or Beef, sorry, Beef, it’s what’s for dinner. That was a–

**John:** Pork is the other white meat.

**Craig:** Pork was the other white meat. That was the American version. Well, in England back in the ‘80s there was an ad for British pork and I think the slogan was, “It’s got the lot,” meaning it’s got everything. But what is fascinating about this ad is that it is – it features a family. There is a man and his wife, and they’ve got friends and perhaps their children, all sitting around a table having lunch on Sunday. And they are serving roast pork.

And the man delivers all of the dialogue. No one else is allowed to talk. And it is the creepiest thing I think I’ve ever seen. What he’s saying is creepy. The way he says it is creepy. The way he says it is creepy. The way he looks at the camera, at you at home, implies that this is not really about pork at all. That he’s a killer. And that this may be – he may have killed Nana. This might not be pork. And he’s threatening you is really what he’s doing. It’s threatening. You feel unsafe watching it. It is astonishing that it was ever approved, written or approved, and put on the air in the first place.

Well, we have it for you to watch. I don’t know what to say. Just enjoy the subtle insanity of this British pork ad.

**John:** Yeah. So I have it paused here on my screen. And I had not really noticed, because I have only seen it on my phone, so now I get to see it on a bigger screen. It’s so fascinating, like the table they’re sitting at is incredibly tiny.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Tiny in a way that doesn’t seem that it could possibly be real. And it’s also a great thing to look at because you might have a question like what are eye lines. What is that term? Eye lines are not what this ad should teach you. Because he’s looking in really strange places. And when people look up at him, they’re not looking all the way in the wrong direction. It’s not like crossing the line problem. But they’re not looking at him. And it feels like a character choice, like I don’t want to look directly at him because he scares me.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** When the wife looks up at him in his general direction, and she quickly looks down, it’s just so fascinating. And it’s such a great example of how even if you took out his oddly menacing tone, you would know there is something deeply wrong in this family.

**Craig:** No, there’s something really – and I’ve been trying to figure out what’s going on. All right, eye line wise, so what’s happening is he’s standing over this pork. And he’s apparently going to slice it up and hand it out, but everybody already has their food completely. So I don’t know what he’s doing standing over this pork anyway.

But the next time we see him, the way he’s standing is such that when they go in close it appears that he’s sitting. His posture is odd. So then people are looking up at him, but it appears that he’s sitting, so the eye lines are bizarre. And what he’s saying – what he starts is, “My wife, she’s got what it takes.” She’s got what it takes. Which is the weirdest. Like what do you mean she has what it takes? This is about sex? What is this about? My wife has what it takes?

And then he starts talking about pork, which is a total non-sequitur. And he starts talking about how they have plenty. You know, he’s got plenty. They’ve got plenty. We’ve all got plenty. And when he says, “We’ve all got plenty,” it’s like he’s saying “Don’t you dare tell me that we don’t have enough meat in this house. Screw you, man.“

And then he returns once again to his, “My wife.” And it goes to her. And she looks so terrified, and is so clearly not allowed to speak. It is awesome. It’s awesome. I’ve watched it 100 times.

**John:** Yeah. So I think some of the backstory on this is this from 1984 apparently. These are times of trouble. This is like an economic downtown. This is not the peak of success. And so to have pork for Sunday dinner was considered not necessarily extravagant, but like the sense of like we’ve got plenty is like “I’m able to provide for my family.”

**Craig:** Right. I get that.

**John:** So you as the homemaker should be cooking a Sunday ham to prove that I am a successful breadwinner.

**Craig:** Yeah. It definitely is Thatcher-era, what do they call it, austerity. And he’s saying essentially, yes, that we won’t be hungry today. But he’s doing it in such a way that you think if I don’t get pork, a steady of supply of pork, to feed these people – who by the way are dressed in suits for some reason. If I don’t get this pork, I’m coming for you. I’ll cut your throat. You’ll be my pork. He’s terrifying.

**John:** Yeah. And the fact that he’s addressing camera directly. I mean, it’s a little unclear whether his eye line is supposed to be down the lens to us, or that he’s talking to somebody else. But no one else seems to be hearing him.

And it is a strange thing in commercials where the actors will sometimes address camera directly, even though there’s other people around them. But this doesn’t work.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s like an Uncanny Valley situation here.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s so weird.

**John:** It’s not quite to us. It’s not quite to them.

**Craig:** And it’s so quiet in the room. And you just hear the clinking of – you understand that what happened is he said, “I’m going to talk to my imaginary friends about this pork. You’re all going to sit and eat it. You’re not going to say a damn word. None of you. Not one word. Do you understand?”

And they’re all like, mm-hmm. “And when I point at you, you smile.” OK daddy. Please. “Good.”

It’s so great. What’s your One Cool Thing, John?

**John:** My One Cool Thing is the pilot for Champions on NBC. So Champions is a new show, a half-hour comedy, written by Charlie Grandy and Mindy Kaling. This pilot is directed by Michael Spiller. What I really admired about it is how it makes me remember how much information you have to pack into a pilot.

And so with the pilot episode like every time you’re going to a new set you have to establish that set. You have to establish who those people are in this set. You have to actually do the jokes, and be funny, and move the character things along, move the plot along. And pilots are just this weird beast. And I thought it was just a really great example of form of this really strange weird beast we do.

It made me think back to the first episode of 30 Rock where you have to set up Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy who is taking over as the new boss. And what their whole dynamic is going to be. And their sets. And sort of what the show is trying to do. Yet it’s all for the first time. And so this was just a very good recent example, I thought, of how a pilot does all these things and sets all these wheels in motion.

And it’s so breakneck speed because there’s just so much to cram in. But just remarkably well done. Like you can actually still feel all the jokes in there. You can feel it all working. So, I just – I’ve never written a half-hour. I don’t think I ever could do it. But it was just an impressive version of like what a half-hour pilot can do.

And I wonder if I would be able to read it on the page and really see what was going to need to happen in front of the lens to make that all work. So, the writing was great, but I thought it was also really nicely directed.

**Craig:** Well this is why the writer of the pilot and the director of the pilot are handsomely compensated for the run of a show, because they really do set so many things in motion in that first. In a network pilot, you’re talking 23 minutes effectively?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s an astonishingly restrictive writing form and therefore it requires enormous craft. And, again, I will just say all awards should be given to comedies. All of them. Even best drama should be given to comedy as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** Absolutely true. So check that out. I have a link to the little trailer in YouTube, but you can also check out the full episodes on iTunes or probably NBC.com.

Cool. That’s our show for this week. As always, our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions or follow up like the things we answered today.

For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. We’re on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. Leave us a review. We love those reviews.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts. We still get those up about a week after the episode. And you can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net or on the USB drive which you can find at store.johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** Hmm.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** We’ve got plenty.

**Craig:** We’ve all got plenty. Plenty to go around.

**John:** Have a good week.

**Craig:** Take it easy, John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Alto’s Odyssey](http://www.altosodyssey.com/)
* An ambiguously threatening advertisement for [British pork](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0wDjWOnHcY) from 1984
* [Champions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsobbyIvPn8) on [NBC](https://www.nbc.com/champions?nbc=1), created by Charlie Grandy and Mindy Kaling, directed by Michael Spiller
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [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)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([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_342.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/knowing-vs-discovering).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 341 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we will try to answer the question how much do you need to know before you start writing. We’ll also discuss when to take a note and when to stand your ground.

**Craig:** Ooh, I like that one.

**John:** Stand your ground! But first we have some follow up. In our recent How Would This Be a Movie segment we looked at a Bloomberg story about debt collectors. And listener Joe wrote in who said, “The writer of the article, Zeke, is a buddy of mine from back in high school in Boston. He’s very excited that Hollywood people are talking about his story. And here’s the devastating news: Zeke Faux is actually pronounced Zeke Fox. I know. I’m sorry.”

**Craig:** Uh, it’s not. You mean, I think what listener Joe means is that Zeke Faux is actually mispronounced as Zeke Fox. I mean, that’s Faux. It’s F-A-U-X. It’s a word.

**John:** It is a word. It’s a French word. But he pronounces it Fox.

**Craig:** That’s fine. I mean, he can pronounce it Fox.

**John:** Like Guy Fawkes Day sort of pronounces it.

**Craig:** Right. But what he should do is go with Faux.

**John:** Yeah. So I sympathize with Zeke because I had an unpronounceable last name, which I ended up changing. But we pronounced my last name Misey, everyone else in the world pronounced it Mease, because that’s sort of how it looks. It should have been pronounced My-za in German. There was no winning. So Zeke has chosen his cool looking name, but he’s going to pronounce it Fox. I get it.

**Craig:** Yeah, listen, it’s cool. Whatever – I mean, it’s his name. But I’m just saying if you’re trying to be a super hero or villain, Zeke Faux is just cool.

**John:** It’s a cool name.

**Craig:** You know who loves that name?

**John:** Who loves that name?

**Craig:** Cool Craig.

**John:** Ah, Cool Craig. Oh, welcome back Cool Craig. Cool Craig, like are you a cousin of that other guy who doesn’t show up anymore?

**Craig:** Oh no, he shows up man.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Yeah. Cool Craig is actually a very close cousin of Whole Foods Craig. Whole Foods Craig cares more about you.

**John:** That’s good. I think the thing about Sexy Craig is there’s nothing wrong with Sexy Craig as long has everyone consents to Sexy Craig’s appearance in the podcast. And sometimes I don’t consent to it.

**Craig:** Sexy Craig weirdly is just learning about consent. Sexy Craig – he’s into it. Believe me, he gets that the world has changed and probably isn’t as hospitable to guys like Sexy Craig as it used to be. But, no, he’s learning about it. He’s into it. But he’s evolving.

**John:** That’s good. It’s crucial that this fictitious persona evolve along with all of the characters out there. So many characters in stories that I love are really problematic looked at through a modern lens. And that’s just a thing we have to accept.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly.

**John:** Do you want to take the next one about MoviePass?

**Craig:** I do. I do. Here we go. So, Brian in Winchester, Virginia writes, “An interesting situation arose this weekend with Red Sparrow.” That’s the Jennifer Lawrence film that’s out right now. “The regular 2D screenings of the film were not available on the MoviePass app. Each listing was grayed out just as the premium screenings of other films are, even in theaters that accept MoviePass. The scuttlebutt is that the distributor wouldn’t sponsor or pay for MoviePass to promote the film. Users have been getting direct emails to see certain films with their subscription. So MoviePass flexed their might and leveraged its users by preventing us from seeing the film on the opening night/weekend, likely impacting the box office.

“I’ve enjoyed MoviePass. I see more films and save money, but we are getting direct promotional emails to see certain films. It seems like a very slippery slope to use us subscribers as leverage against distributors. Both are options that could drive the value of the program down.”

Well, John, oh boy, here we go.

**John:** Yeah. This does seem like a slippery slope. And not even a slope. A thing just happened. The classic scheme of this would be you’d have a person who comes in and says like, “You know, it’s a really nice movie you’ve got here. It would be a shame if anything happened to it.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** This doesn’t feel great. Now, we’ll zoom back out and say like there are people who influence the outcomes of opening weekends and movies all the time. And there’s always the sort of quid pro quo where you’re doing publicity with people and stuff like this, but this feels like a very kind of direct transactional thing. And they’re coming to us and saying like, “Hey, would you like us to promote your movie?” And if you say no then they will sort of unpromote your movie. And that doesn’t feel good.

**Craig:** Yeah, you can now see what they’re doing. Right? The classic Internet truism is “If you are not paying for the product you are the product.” And in this case it appears that the subscriber base for MoviePass is the product. So MoviePass very cannily is monetizing this by advertising movies to their base and, yes, it appears that if you – it may not even be as much as, “OK, well if you don’t advertise with us then we’re not going to let our people see your movies.” It may also just be these people are advertising with us and they’re in direct competition with you. So part of our deal with them is we’re sending our hordes to them. This is sort of the Groupon model of things.

If they push this a little too hard and a little too quickly, which I think they are, I could definitely see a situation where studios – and this is where they have to be careful about not running afoul of antitrust – but I could see them all just going, “This service is not in our long term best interests. Let’s stop advertising with it.”

**John:** Yeah. No, it’s a really interesting situation. Now, I didn’t do any research on this, but I know in the past there have been controversies over things like radio stations that will have their annual holiday Christmas concerts. And there’s that sense of like if you are a band who is asked to play that and you don’t play that, you will not get radio play on that station. They’ll cease to promote you.

That is a form of a distributor coming in and saying to the artist if you do not basically pay us by your free performance we will not support you. That kind of thing happens in Hollywood all the time where if you don’t do Entertainment Tonight they’re not going to talk about your movie. There’s always that kind of situation. This just feels much more obvious of an impasse between these two powerful parties.

**Craig:** And I think also that if MoviePass pursues this method, at some point their patrons will become frustrated. I mean, I don’t think it was in the user agreement – I mean, it is, of course – but it wasn’t certainly out front that you would get to see all of the movies you could see in a month, except for the ones that they don’t want you to see because it’s not good for the MoviePass company. That’s not attractive.

**John:** I agree. I agree. So Netflix in its heyday when it was still sending out DVDs, there were limitations. They wouldn’t always have every movie available. There was sort of some built-in shortages there, but this was an artificial scarcity that they were just creating here and that is the thing that is going to make people less happy than they would otherwise be.

**Craig:** You know, a movie like Red Sparrow, I mean, come on. This movie – these are the movies we need to be helping. And I haven’t seen Red Sparrow. I don’t even know what Red Sparrow is about. All I know is that Red Sparrow is not a $100 million or $500 million budgeted massive brightly colored explosion festival. And therefore it would be nice – and it stars a movie star. And it’s not a little tiny, tiny like little indie-indie movie.

Right? It’s the sort of movie that Hollywood used to make a lot of. They’re frightened to death of making them. And now MoviePass is going to choke the life out of it. I mean, that’s just wrong.

**John:** I agree. All right, continuing our follow up. Last week we talked about the plan or lack of a plan in Return of the Jedi. Sian Griffiths wrote in to point out that maybe the worst thing about that opening sequence wasn’t Luke’s plan, but the metal bikini. So I’m going to link to her blog post she did which was a really good analysis of sort of how in that third movie of Star Wars, the initial trilogy, so much of what we had learned to love about Leia kind of becomes undone because the Leia character is suddenly sexualized. A quote from the article is, “The ultimate crime of the metal bikini is that it turned Leia from being a force of personality into merely a body.”

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, I don’t know quite what to think about these things because I’m so easily swayed. I am very much a weathervane on these things, right? So I read something like this and I go, yep, yep, yep. And then I’ll see some other article where women talk about how they thought it was the most body positive thing and they love to cosplay as her in the bikini. And it’s a huge part of their – and I’m like, OK, yep, yep. You know what, I don’t know. I’m defaulting to my hands up. I don’t know.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t know either about Wonder Woman and her outfit versus Captain Marvel who has a non-sexualized outfit. I don’t know. I mean, I want women to be able to own and present their sexuality as a powerful part of their force. But I don’t want them to be limited to it. So, I don’t know what the right answer is.

**Craig:** Women disagree about things the way that men disagree about things, which makes sense because they’re human beings. When women are disagreeing about things that have to do with women, I have learned to shut my mouth. And just listen. You know, I’ll let them hash it out.

**John:** All right. We also had several listeners who wrote in with their own theories about what was possibly happening. We could get into this, but I don’t know that it’s really going to serve anybody to get into the more elaborate theories of why people were doing what they were doing other than to say you can make anything kind of make sense, but what we’re actually seeing on screen right now doesn’t really make a lot of sense if you stop to think about it.

**Craig:** No. I mean, people can torture some sort of bizarre bendy pipe cleaner explanation for this, but in general good storytelling observes Occam’s razor. Even if it’s not an explanation that you could have predicted, it’s a surprise, in the post-analysis of it you should be able to say that’s a very elegant thing that happened there. The more complicated and twisty and bendy it is, the more of a – well, just a screenwriting artifact it is to allow the writer or the filmmakers to achieve moments they wanted to achieve separate and apart from a compelling storyline or character motivation.

**John:** Absolutely. That actually is a perfect segue into our first main topic which is sort of knowing versus discovering. And sort of what you’re describing in terms of tortured logic to get you to a certain place. That can often come about because a writer has a plan for how things are going to fit together and that plan may not be the most natural way of getting about it.

So, this all sprung from a conversation I’m having this week and the people who are inviting me to have this conversation threw out this question, which was how much does a screenwriter need to know before he or she sits down to write a scene, which I thought was a great question and we haven’t really talked about that. We’ve talked about writing a scene, but we haven’t talked about what you really need to know beforehand. And so my first instinct of course was to make a checklist.

So, I’m going to read through this checklist, and then we’re going to throw away the checklist. And I wanted to read through sort of like what might be on that checklist.

So, you might ask, “Well, who is in this scene. What should those characters want? What are they hiding? What is the central conflict? Where does the scene take place? What just happened before this? What’s going to happen next? What’s the first image we see in the scene? What’s the first line? What absolutely has to occur in this scene in order for it to make sense and for it to move the story forward? And, finally, how does this scene change the direction of the story?”

So, these are 10, 11 points that might be on a checklist as you’re sitting down to write a scene. And I made this checklist and quickly realized almost every scene I’ve written I couldn’t answer all these questions and I think that’s good. I think if you did have the answers to all these questions you’d sort of be paralyzed. And I’m curious what your thoughts are on this checklist.

**Craig:** Well, it’s a good list. I think all of these are valid and I would – I guess in maybe a slightly more vague way some of the questions I ask myself are what’s the point of this scene. Why do I want this in the movie? And how will the scene be entertaining? Because I’m constantly terrified by being boring. And so those are two big things that hang over my head.

I actually try – I do try and answer as many of these questions as I can before I start writing the scene. And then I give myself permission, and I don’t even have to do it, it just sort of happens that as I’m writing things begin to occur. So I feel much more comfortable and targeted when I have a plan and I have a lot of answers.

And I think simply because I feel comfortable when I begin to do the writing other stuff starts to happen. But it happens within the context of an understanding about some hard answers. Even if part of the thing that results is a deviation from the plan.

**John:** Yeah. So you and I have never written on classic TV shows where there’s a room and as a room you’re breaking the story. So you’re breaking the big beats and you’re breaking the smaller beats. You’re breaking it down to scenes and often you’re breaking down sort of what happens in the scene. And there’s something wonderful about that because you have the ability to have a bunch of different brains working through something and sometimes you can come up with something really great.

Where I wonder if I would be incredibly frustrated is when I get that big document and then have to write the actual scenes that become the screenplay, or the teleplay, the kind of weird paralysis I’d feel that I was locked into the scene is going to happen the way that we broke it in the room. You’re going to have to follow these beats.

Because I have a very hard time writing a scene if I know exactly what’s going to happen in the scene. Like I have a hard time making that scene feel spontaneous and feel like the characters are making their own choices in the moment versus the scene making the choices. It’s the difference between character-driven versus plot-driven. And we always think about character-driven as like the whole movie is character-driven. The sense that these characters have a big someday wish that they are setting out on a quest to sort of get to that someday wish. They’re facing these challenges. They’re changed by the journey. That’s what movies are.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But I think within the context of a scene that same thing kind of happens where characters come into it with a certain goal, a certain ambition, and by their own actions they’ve changed things. And you want to feel that they are making choices within the moment, line by line, what they’re saying, what they’re doing, how they’re reacting that is causing the effect of the change of the scene.

If I came in with this sort of master plan document for exactly what’s going to happen in the scene and how we’re going to get through the scene, I don’t know if I could do that very well.

**Craig:** I do a master plan. And I have the opposite emotional requirement. I find it hard to write a scene if I don’t know how it begins and how it ends and roughly all these things that are supposed to happen in it. But what I find is that what I really need to know when I’m writing a scene is – it’s a bit like, OK, I’m about to throw some characters into a lake. I need to know why I’m throwing them into the lake. I also need to know that at the end of the scene they’re going to emerge from the lake at this point on the shore for this reason. So, then I feel good. I’m like, great, I know why I’m throwing them in. I know what’s going to happen when they plunge down. I have a general sense of how they’re going to struggle to get back up to the surface. But from that point to the point I know must occur at the end, let’s see. Let’s see how it goes.

**John:** That’s I think what I’m describing. It’s that you just talked about your goals for this scene. Basically you as the writer, the sort of meta like what is the intention of the scene. Why does this scene need to be in the movie? What is the thing that’s going to happen to it? But the characters in that scene, they shouldn’t know where it’s going to go. They shouldn’t know what’s going to happen. And to the degree that we sense that they do know what’s going to happen or where it’s going to go, we’re bored.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** It has lost all of its spark or magic.

Another analogy I’d have for it is sort of like a road trip. And so you can think of a movie as being like a big road trip and you can sort of pick where the destinations are going to be on that road trip. So we’re driving from LA to New York. Are we going to take a straight route there? Are we going to stop in Houston? Are we going to stop in Bozeman, Montana? Is it going to be on a time clock like we’re in a hurry, or is it just whenever we get there that it’s going to be that? That’s the scope of the movie feels that way.

But, an individual scene isn’t like a road trip in that way. It’s more like an errand. Like you’re going out to do something. You have a very specific goal. Like you have to stop at the drug store and pick up this thing.

And within the course of that scene you could just have them go in the drug store, pick up that thing, and pay for it and leave. But you can also do so much more. And if you let the characters, give them some space to breathe and sort of make their own choices you can find a much more interesting way to make that scene work than just the functional version of it. It’s like, OK, well that scene works because they picked up the thing that they needed to pick up. Those tend to be the least interesting versions of those scenes.

**Craig:** I agree. And this is why so much of the fun part of writing for me is the part where I try and see as much as I can in the space of the scene. So, if I have a scene that is designed to serve a plot purpose and also a character purpose, and I know what those are. And then I’m imagining the moment and trying to make it real. And so I have two characters that are in this pharmacy and they have to go pick up medicine, because that’s the errand as you say. I’m literally using an errand to describe the errand. And one of them is eating a Snickers bar. He has bought a Snickers bar and he’s eating it. And his friend is at the counter and she’s waiting for the pills to come out. And they’re having a conversation. And I know that the point of the conversation is they disagree about something. Well, there’s no way in the world that in my master plan I would have said and this guy should be eating a Snickers bar.

That’s just something that I kind of fill in. But now that I know that he’s eating the Snickers bar, at some point I want her to slap it right out of his mouth. Because that’s exciting. And that’ll just happen. There’s no plan for that, right? So you start to like use the stuff in your environment. The only way to surprise people is to surprise yourself. And to have characters surprise each other. Life is surprising, particularly the parts of life that we find fascinating which we’re supposed to be presenting in movies.

So, there is this kind of need to plan so that your scene isn’t this rambling, shaggy dog, pointless mush, which we see a lot of from early writers. These like long runs of rambly dialogue going nowhere because they think that’s what’s real. But, then within your disciplined moment you’re just playing in this very real world. And then if you know, “Well, my purpose here is for him to realize that she is no longer going to take his crap, well now the Snickers bar is the way I’m going to do it.” And I could have never foreseen that.

**John:** Absolutely. So, what you described with sometimes beginning writers, or other writers who they seem to become in love with their characters’ voices, but they don’t actually have them doing anything interesting, is these characters just sort of keep wandering down these blind alleys. That it’s not moving the actual story forward. So, the individual scenes might be really funny, but they don’t add up to anything. Or even within the course of scenes there’s not really a shape to them. They’re sort of just in this moment. And a lot of times you’ll notice this in scripts where you go through a whole sequence and you realize like they basically just have been talking or doing the same thing for like ten pages. Nothing has actually progressed. And if I were to take these ten pages out we’d still be in the same moment.

So, that kind of planning problem can definitely happen. I guess you can’t let this process of discovery just lead you away from where you’re actually trying to get to. And if your whole scene became about the chocolate bar and slapping things, and then became a huge slapping fight inside this, and they got arrested, and they got taken away, well, that probably wasn’t what the scene needed to accomplish.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so it does go back to that initial question of like what absolutely needs to happen in this scene? Because the scene happened, this next scene is possible. Well, what is that next scene in general? Or how is it leading us to the next thing? And I have seen many cases where people get seduced by really interesting things that happen in the moment and they get led astray. And I face that in real life all the time. Like there will be times where a scene will take me in a really interesting way and I will decide like, OK, you know what, I was going to go there, now I’m going to go here. I think I can get myself back over there. Most of the time I can, but sometimes I will have to just chuck a scene that I really do like because it really wasn’t getting me where I wanted to go. It was a really interesting character scene that couldn’t actually contribute to what it needed to contribute to the story at that point.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. Happens all the time. You have fun when you’re writing and sometimes you have fun in a way where you go, “Wonderful.” And sometimes you have fun in a way and go, “Yeah, no, I got to delete all that.”

Anybody that is concerned about efficiency should not be a writer. It is not an efficient process. If it’s efficient you’re doing it wrong, I’m pretty sure.

**John:** I was reading this blogger recently who talked about how every night he makes a plan for the next day and he has his day scheduled out to like ten minute increments. It’s called hyper scheduling. And I could, A, never do that. But I do feel that sometimes aspiring writers are attempting that in their screenplays. And probably because they’re read too many screenwriting books they see like this big macro thing, like this is what structure is, and this is what happens in a scene. Or they read some book that tells them every scene needs to flip from positive to negative, and then negative to positive. And there’s a whole way things have to happen.

And so they get incredibly granular in figuring out like, “OK, what’s going to happen in this scene before I write it.” They keep trying to optimize this unwritten thing.

So I think there’s a real danger to over-knowing. And it’s you sort of preclude new discoveries. You preclude new possibilities because you’re so determined to hit these beats that you’ve already set out for yourself. And sometimes it goes back to even like character backstory. Like a lot of times before writers will start writing a script they’ll do these elaborate bios for their characters about where they come from and how many brothers they have and what their favorite cereal is. And I’ve never found that helpful for me because if I know those details part of me wants to use it in some way which is almost never going to be helpful. And by locking down those details I’ve taken away my ability to be surprised by something that happens in the moment.

Like if I knew that Lucky Charms was his favorite cereal that’s probably not going to help me. But, how you made that decision might preclude some other interesting decision down the road. So people obsess about that stuff which is just kind of so often busy work I find.

**Craig:** Yeah, look, everybody has a certain amount of busy work they do to comfort themselves as they prepare to do this thing that often is miserable to do. I would say this: if you are having success – and creative success is I guess the most important thing there. I mean, the rest of it hopefully is following along. And your method is to backstory the hell out of your characters because that’s how you do sort of your running jump, your running start. That’s your running start. I’m with you. I don’t really find those things to be particularly important. And generally speaking when I get to a moment where I think, oh you know what, it would be good to know what her attitude is about blankety-blank, then I start to go back and fill those little bits of the map in.

But I don’t feel a great need to do any of that stuff myself. And I think that new writers are trying to exert control over a very scary process. Who wouldn’t? I mean, we are trained to exert control over circumstances in order to achieve results. And when you try and control things like screenplays you end up with very dead things. There is a kind of madness that is required along with this remarkable sobriety. You kind of have to have both going on at the same time or you’ll either have this very wooden thing or just a rambly, bizarro mess.

**John:** Yeah. I think there’s essentially a great compromise we tend to make. Because you want your characters to be free to do what they need to do, to explore themselves. And you also need to get them to go to the places where you need them to go. And so I think the bargain we make is that the characters can sort of move however they want to move, but we are the ones who are going to lay down the road for them.

So, they can go anywhere they want, but these are the roads. And so you’re ultimately going to get them to where they need to go, but exactly how quickly they’re going to do that. They still have a feeling of control, even though you are the one behind the scenes who is sort of mastering everything. And I think that speaks to also why when people do these elaborate backstories sometimes they’re describing a character who is still. They’re describing a character who is like in a museum. But the characters we see in stories are in motion. And so if you’re so focused on where the character came from and all these things, it’s like this frozen in time snapshot of who that character is. But in a movie you’re always seeing them in motion. And so be looking for what’s changing. Be looking for what’s challenging them. Try to do the work to figure out what that character is like when they’re moving and talking and curious and frightened, not just who they were when they were ten years old.

**Craig:** Yep. I agree with that. I think that the more you lock yourself in on that stuff the less you are concentrating on how that stuff is no longer who this character is supposed to be. And that’s what your movie is about. It’s about taking somebody from A to B. And so much of what the beginning is is establishing what you believe the audience needs to know. So, there’s the question what do we need to know to begin writing a scene and then there’s this other question which I’m asking all the time, which I suppose informs the first question: what does the audience need to know coming out of this scene?

And too much information is bad. It’s not only boring, but it starts to reduce a sense of wonder and mystery and participation. There’s that notion of active viewing. That you are leaning in because you know you have to pay attention. And it’s interesting and also things will be left out that you’re going to have to fill in for yourself.

So, another question I suppose we could put on our long list is what does the audience need to know before you start writing your scene. Because I think about that all the time.

**John:** Yeah. The weird things about a screenplay versus a book is that as a screenwriter we are sort of the proxy for the audience. We are sitting in the seat watching the story unfold on a big screen in front of us. So when we say we see/we hear, we’re saying that as the audience. Like this is what we’re experiencing. And so we’re always trying to remember what the audience knows, what the audience expects, what the audience is looking for. Because, if we don’t have a sense of what this story looks like from the audience’s point of view, we’ve lost.

**Craig:** 100%.

**John:** All right. Let’s switch point of views to the screenwriter who is taking notes from somebody. Notes from a producer. Notes from a director. Notes from a studio executive. Craig, can you talk us through and answer definitively when should you take the note and when should you stand your ground?

**Craig:** I don’t know! I’ve been struggling with this my whole life. I did a talk about this at one of these creative salons that we had here in Los Angeles a while back. John, I assume you’ve read Le Petit Prince, The Little Prince, of course.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** So, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, wonderful book, but it opens with something that even as a child confused me and concerned me. So in the beginning of the book he says when I was a kid I used to draw. And I drew things – the idea was I drew a snake that had eaten an elephant. And so the snake – the elephant obviously is inside the snake so you can’t see the elephant in the snake – but he’s drawn a snake that has eaten an elephant and the shape when he shows it to adults he says, “Look what I drew.” And they would always say, “Oh, what a nice hat.”

But he knew that in fact it was not a hat. That’s the boring interpretation of it. And that in fact it’s an elephant inside a snake. And now he is a grownup and he’s crash landed in the desert and he meets the Little Prince who is the embodiment of innocence and child-like wonder. And he shows him his picture and the Little Prince says, “Oh, what a nice snake that has eaten an elephant.” And you’re like, ooh, finally, somebody gets it.

And as a kid I remember thinking, “But it looks like a hat?”

**John:** It does look like a hat.

**Craig:** It’s not fair. You’re not being fair. And that in fact that is a reasonable note that it looks like a hat. But I’ve always been a bit envious of people – and you and I, we know all sorts of writers and directors. And there is a certain sub-segment of our community that has absolutely no problem saying “What I’ve done here is an elephant inside a snake and if you don’t see it that’s your problem. I’m not changing it. I’m right. I have this bedrock faith in my instincts.“

When we go through this medium, this collaborative process, we are constantly getting input from people. And sometimes we think they’re right and sometimes we think they’re wrong. But the big question that I have, and I struggle with all the time, and maybe we can help people as they struggle with it is how do I know when I’m right and how do I know when I’m wrong. Because if you go too far one way or the other you end up either as a pushover or as this arrogant person. Or you could be this brave person, or you could be this weak person. And I struggle with it all the time.

How do you deal with it?

**John:** You know, I think a couple strategies I might employ at different times. One is just try to figure out consensus. So, if one person has the note, well, that could just be their opinion. If nine people have the note, then, OK, there’s something about that. There’s something that is hitting a lot of people a certain way and I need to really pay attention.

Another strategy might be to look back at my original intentions. Like what was I trying to do here and would taking this note change my intentions. Would taking this note bring me closer to my intentions? When I’m doing that sort of internal audit, I might also ask why am I reacting this way to that note. Is it because I’m afraid that they’re right, which is sometimes is the case. I might be afraid that they’re right and it’s going to be a lot of work, or I won’t even know how to implement that note. That might be something that I’m struggling with as I’m hearing that note.

But sometimes at the end of this assessment I’ll just decide, you know what, they’re wrong. And then I have to figure out like are they wrong enough that it’s worth sort of planting my foot and saying no I will not/I shall not budge. Or do I need to find a way to change something that addresses their concern without sort of implementing their solution if their solution is bad. I don’t know if any of these things are familiar to you.

**Craig:** No, they all are. And I’ve thought a lot about this. I think that there are certainly these moments where we get input and we have an emotional response. And that muddies the waters. And I’m almost saying let’s take that out of the equation. Let’s jump ahead. It’s two or three days later. You’ve calmed down. And now you can soberly look at this comment and even now you’re wondering “Am I right or am I wrong that they are right or they are wrong?”

And it’s not just about I’m right/they’re wrong. Sometimes I worry when I’m thinking they’re right and I’m wrong. And I worry about this because when we examine ourselves honestly what we will see is a lot of irrationality and a lot of cognitive errors. We change our minds, for instance, all the time. Sometimes our response to something is colored entirely by the fact that it is our first encounter with that thing.

Then the second or third encounter is a much different experience. So I’m wondering is my problem that I’ve seen it too many times? Is my problem that I just heard this note for the first time? I’m always sort of digging into this to try and figure out if I’m causing harm or not.

And over time I’ve come to the following conclusions, which are not super-duper helpful, but how could they be given the conundrum here. Conclusion number one is that there is no perfect way to do this. I will absolutely make mistakes. There are going to be times where I say no and I should have said yes. And there are going to be times where I say yes and I should have said no.

Conclusion number two: When I am particularly ambiguous or confused about whether or not I should be saying yes or no, that in and of itself is an indication of a problem. And so there’s a problem underneath all of this. Because even if there are times where I feel 100% confident and it turns out later I should not have been, generally speaking in those times my batting average is pretty high. Whether, again, sometimes I feel 100% confident that what somebody has just told me to change is exactly the right thing to do. But that happens because the writing around that spot is generally in the place it should be. And here’s a change that makes sense.

I get wishy-washy when the ground is not as firm under my feet as it should be.

**John:** Absolutely on all three points. And I’ve definitely been in situations where I’ve had the emotional response. I’ve stepped back. I’ve taken a look at it. I can look at it in terms of the work, the words on the page, the plan for making a movie. Obviously the screenplays we’re writing, especially if we’re not going into production quite yet, is just a plan for something that has not been built yet. And so sometimes we have difference of opinions on like well what should we build. And so it’s not a question of like is this the right way to do this thing. It’s like “Is this even the kind of thing we want to build?” And so those difference of opinions, like you have to sort of wrestle through those all the time.

Where it gets harder, and honestly I’ll say that half the notes I face tend to be in the second category, where I feel like the note is not actually about the work. The note is about something else. The note is about that other movie that opened last weekend. That note is about some other sort of defensive posture that this producer, this studio executive, this director is taking that has actually nothing to do with the work in front of them.

Those are sometimes the most frustrating notes because I have to then ask myself is it worth trying to implement this note if I will not ruin things because this is apparently something they feel they need to address in order for this project to move forward.

Sometimes you do those notes and sometimes you don’t do those notes. And I’ve been burned both ways where I’ve stomped my food and said, no, I’m absolutely not doing that. This is a ridiculous note. This is not helpful. And sometimes I’ve even said, “I can see why you’re saying that, but this is not the right thing. This is not the movie I signed on to write.” And I’ve left the project.

There have been other times where I’ve stayed on the project, and I’ve written those notes and it didn’t matter anyway. Because they were going to go in a different direction down the road. And so we’ve both been through situations where you’ve killed yourself for six months to sort of fine tune this thing and that line of dialogue on page 32 which you went back and forth over for three weeks and there was all this discussion. That scene is not in the movie anymore and they’ve completely changed how that whole thing works.

That’s the frustration, and the decisions that we have to go through, whether we’re taking a note or not taking a note. Because there’s a cost. There’s a cost to taking that note in terms of your time, in terms of your sort of pride in the work. You want to be the person who gets hired by that producer, by that studio again, because you are collaborative, but you also don’t want to just be a typist. Because that gets to be the real frustration.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think you’ve hit on something really interesting here. Because most of the time when I’m feeling ambiguous and wishy-washy and doing my whole Hamlet routine it’s because someone has given me a note that they believe in. And anytime someone gives me a note that they believe in I have a natural instinct to give it credence or at least give it a fair shake.

But there is this other thing that happens. And I know that we have some executives and producers that listen to us and if you are an assistant and you’re looking ahead, you’re on that track to be a producer or an executive listen well. Listen carefully to what I’m about to tell you.

You know how one of the most common notes that you guys give us is, “Um, this writing here didn’t feel quite organic.” So, in Hollywood people use the word organic to basically mean natural, elegant, realistic, flowing, it doesn’t bump you is another term they’ll use. In other words, it seems nice and smooth and connected and integrated. It doesn’t feel artificial or inorganic. Well, there are inorganic, artificial, synthetic notes. And we know it when we’re getting them every single time. You guys think we don’t. You guys think that we can’t tell the difference between notes that you believe in because they have to do with this true creative feeling you have. And notes you’re giving us because of synthetic stuff. Like we want to hit a certain audience, an older audience, a younger audience, a whiter audience, a blacker audience. We are concerned about how this will play in China. We don’t know if we can get this on the schedule unless the budget is this. There is an actor that wants to do this movie here, and if we give them this one then they’ll do this one. There’s a million of those things.

And when you guys give us notes in order to help you achieve something inorganic – the marketing department thinks that blah, blah, blah. We know it every time. And it would be great if you would just say, “Here’s something that we are trying to accomplish that is separate and apart from just pure creativity.” Just be honest about it and own it. We’re not dumb. We’re not children. If you say, “Listen, we have a problem. We need to keep this budget under blank, which means we have to shoot it over here. And right now we’re concerned that we’re not going to be able to do it that way. So, we have suggestions that will help us get there. And you may not like them, but at least you’ll know why we’re giving them to you. We’re certainly not giving them to you because we think they’re brilliant creative ideas.”

It would go over so much better with us. And we would feel so less, I think, agitated. And then you see we would have I think much more mental capacity to handle the actual creative notes that are honest and organic.

So, to sum, if you are a producer or an executive or an assistant who wants to be a producer or an executive, be aware that we know when you are giving us synthetic notes. Give us synthetic notes and acknowledge they’re synthetic notes. It will really help all of us.

**John:** I really agree. And I can envision the document sort of being broken into two parts. Like these are the notes that are actually about the script itself and moments in the story that we feel could be better. Opportunities that we think aren’t being paid off. Moments where we are were genuinely confused. Great. Love all of that.

A second part of the note saying like these are things that we need to talk about because we don’t have this in the budget, because this is too similar to this other movie that we’re concerned about. That there’s some other extraneous forces that we need to be looking at here. Great. I get that, too.

Rarely do I see that in notes. And so instead when I get notes, when I get like official printed notes, is a paragraph that says, “We’re so excited. This has so much great possibility. It’s going to be an exciting movie, unlike anything we’ve ever seen. That said, here are our notes.” And then they go on for like seven pages. And they’ll be broken into little sub-heads about things. And they can be better written or worse written, but invariably there’s going to be contradictions. And sometimes the contradictions are called out. They hang a lantern on it like, “We’ll we said we want to see more of this character, we’re concerned that it not distract from the hero.” Basically they’re asking for – I want to see the hat and the elephant in the snake simultaneously.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** They’re asking for impossible things.

**Craig:** It’s what Lindsay Doran calls “a close-up with feet.”

**John:** Absolutely. That’s the best term for it. And those are maddening. So sometimes you’ll get to go in and you’ll sit down with the executive or with the producer and you’ll talk through them. And you can describe honestly like this is what I get, this is what I don’t get. Is there a plan for going ahead?

Another thing I will say that early on as I started out as a writer I loved the notes, because they’re notes. People have read my script. I will do whatever you tell me to do because I want to – not only do I want to please the teacher, I’m terrified I don’t really know what I’m doing so therefore I will just do your notes because you’ve made movies before. And I’ve not made movies. And that’s not a great scenario either.

**Craig:** No. No it’s not.

**John:** Again, you always have to be able to think about notes in terms of the context of like what the ultimate product is going to be. And that ultimate product is going to be both a movie you’re seeing on the screen, but also a movie that gets made. And so sometimes you’re balancing what this movie could be in this perfect form on the screen versus this movie actually existing. And it’s a delicate thing and you don’t quite know which side to push on.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wish that I could teach a class at every studio on how to effectively give notes to screenwriters. Not because I’m trying to help screenwriters, but because I’m trying to help them. I mean, their goal is to influence the work. The way that they do it, generally speaking, it’s not very – there’s a low batting average as far as I’m concerned. First of all the document, the notes document, is generally something I think we can all dismiss. Because I think even internally they’re dismissing it. Part of the reason why is that document is the result of some kind of political brokering process. There are multiple parties at a studio that are at multiple hierarchy levels. And they are all sort of throwing their opinions in. So you can have a situation where one person just keeps harping on something and everyone is like, “Well, none of us agree but that person is slightly above us. Let’s give them that one.”

**John:** Yeah. Let’s put it in the document even though it doesn’t match any of the other notes in the document.

**Craig:** Correct. Well, we don’t know that. And, furthermore, you won’t tell us that, understandably. Right? So, that document starts to get silly. Also, that document often gets really granular because just like I think rookie screenwriters try and exert too much control over the process. That’s what I think a lot of newer producers and executives do. They’re trying to control this thing that ultimately cannot by being really granular. Like when you get into these page notes it’s laughable. Page notes literally ignore how movies are made. But there I think is a process that’s incredibly useful, that I find incredibly useful, and that’s the one where we get rid of all the formalities, and I and the producers and the executives just have essentially a therapy session for the screenplay.

We just talk.

And we just listen.

And we see where it is that we really are caring. And we don’t worry so much about trying to treat this thing like it’s a broken radio that just needs a few extra diodes and maybe a piece of wire here. It’s this living, breathing thing. It’s a story about human beings. So let’s just have a therapy session about it. And more often than not, just like in real therapy, the stuff that people were saying is what they wanted isn’t really what they wanted. And then you get to the meat of it. And then you can actually make things better.

**John:** Yeah, you could. Craig that was probably a very dangerous thing for you to wish because you say you wish we could just like go and teach a class to all the studios about how to give notes. That feels like a thing we could actually do.

**Craig:** Oh, OK, I’ll do it. I mean, if they are willing to actually sit there and listen to me. Because I actually like good notes, I just want to tell them how to do it better so that they don’t end up with either frustrated, angry, miserable, demotivated, or confused writers.

**John:** That’s totally a doable thing. Don’t you think? It’s totally a doable thing.

**Craig:** Well, you know, it’s really up to them, isn’t it?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Standing offer, folks.

**John:** All right. Let’s wrap this up and go to our new segment which we call–

**Craig:** John’s WGA Corner.

**John:** So today in the Corner, if you are a WGA member you got an email from the WGA that’s talking about the AMBA. You probably never heard of this term before. I hadn’t. But it’s essentially the Agency Minimum Basic Agreement. It is an agreement between the WGA and all of the agencies. And there’s discussion about what the future of that agreement should be. And there are some meetings coming up. So you should go to one of these meetings because it’s actually really important.

So the two that are coming up in the future are March 14 at 7pm at the Sheraton Universal and then Tuesday March 20, 7pm, at the Beverly Hilton. So in the email you go there’s information about how you RSVP for these meetings. But it’s really good if you go. I’m going to be at the one that’s on Saturday, so it will have already passed by the time this episode comes out. But it’s really good. And there’s good information about what’s happening and what the decisions are ahead.

**Craig:** It’s the new hotness in the Guild. So the old hotness was getting grouchy with the studios. The new hotness is getting grouchy with the agencies. So let’s see where this all goes.

You know, I remain, John, as you know endlessly skeptical of these things, but you know the last negotiations with the companies I thought really shook out some great things. Wouldn’t have done it necessarily the way it was done, but I can’t argue with the results. And so I guess I’m kind of hoping for the same thing here. I’m not sure if I kind of get how this going. But then again me getting how something is going isn’t necessarily the criterion which matters. How about that?

**John:** Indeed. So if you are in the Craig Mazin camp and are not quite sure what to think of it, these meetings are a good place to start. So, we’ll be telling you more then. If you don’t get to one of these meetings, the only thing I would tell you is that most writers who are represented by agencies have never signed agency papers. Have you ever signed papers for any of your agents?

**Craig:** Never.

**John:** Never. Like 1% of WGA members sign papers with their agencies. If your agency is suddenly like this week or next week says, “Hey, we need you to sign a contract with the agency,” don’t do that. That’s probably not a great idea.

And also I’d be curious if they are asking you to do that. So just email me at ask@johnaugust.com to let me know that, because I’m curious whether that’s going to start happening. Because we could envision a scenario in which a lot of agencies try to make their clients sign longer term agreements with agencies, which would be very unusual.

**Craig:** It would be. And my guess is that the larger agencies really aren’t going to go through the pain and weird awkwardness of asking their big money earners to sign these contracts because it looks weak. And if your client doesn’t want to be there, they’re leaving. It’s just not worth it. It’s not good for you. The worst possible thing in the world for an agency like CAA or UTA or WME would be to have a high profile client that hates them, doesn’t want to be there, and the agency won’t let them go. I mean, that’s just – that would be a nightmare.

**John:** Yeah. That would not be good. But other writers might not be in the situation where they can so easily feel like they can leave and so if this does happen, if you get this email or call from your agent, I’m just curious about that. So, just drop me a note at ask@johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** I feel like the managers may have people signing things.

**John:** I think it’s more common with managers.

**Craig:** I’m not a big manager fan as you know.

**John:** Yeah. At some point we will have the manager conversation. Most of these writers who I’ve met at these screenwriter meetings have managers.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** And it’s incredible common.

**Craig:** I hate it.

**John:** And most of them if you ask them why they have a manager they say it’s so their agent will work harder for them.

**Craig:** The whole – it’s just – oh man. It’s sort of like, what’s the best way I could think of this? Like if there’s a limited supply of positions. Every single artist requires an agent. So that’s one-to-one. I mean, it’s not really one-to-one because an agent, you have lots and lots. But for every writer, they can only have one agent. They can’t employ two agents or three agents, right? So this business just invented a new term. Here, now you can have two agents, because we just name this one a manager.

Well, why don’t we just have a third one now called a talent coordinator? And that will be your third agent. So I have an agent, a manager, and a talent coordinator. What else can we get in there? I mean, you obviously have a lawyer who does a very specific job. And maybe there’s a fourth thing that we can do so that more and more people can take our money.

**John:** That would be good. I will say that as I’ve been talking to different screenwriters at lunches and various things, people tend to like their entertainment attorneys who take a 5% commission or charge an hourly fee, and who are – I don’t know. They’re just responsible folks. And at some point I just want to give our entertainment attorneys a big hug because they’ve worked very hard for both me and for you.

**Craig:** Oh, listen, that’s the biggest scam of all. Is that you’ve got agents taking 10%. You’ve got managers taking 10%. Plus managers producing and getting backend fees. The lawyers are doing almost everything. The lawyers aren’t just writing up these long form contracts. They’re also negotiating the terms.

You know, typically the agent is really saying, “OK, this person wants to talk to you about doing this job. Great. Let’s talk about what the big number is that you’ll get paid. Great. Lawyer, literally do everything else.” Everything. That means it’s the big number, and how the bonuses break out, and blah, blah, and the options and the so-and-sos. The lawyers do so much more and they get half. And believe me, they know. They know they’re getting screwed. But, you know, they’re still doing pretty well.

**John:** But they’re not getting that big backend money.

**Craig:** No. Well, in that sense they’re like screenwriters.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Screenwriters just traditionally in features they’re like you guys don’t get first dollar gross, but dopey director Jim who has done four mediocre films, but he’s a director, he can get that. Why? Why? It makes no sense.

**John:** Agreed. Yeah. The only thing that makes sense are One Cool Things. Talk us through your One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Segue Man! My One Cool Thing this week is a sequel, John.

**John:** You like the sequels.

**Craig:** I do. I like the sequels. So, there was a game a while ago that I think we probably had on as a One Cool Thing called Alto’s Adventure.

**John:** It’s so good.

**Craig:** Yeah, great little free runner for iOS and probably for that other platform that neither of us care about. And you play a guy skiing down a mountain, or a girl. Actually, you’ve got a guy, a girl, and then a big guy and a big – no, it was actually just one girl. She was the one I liked the most. I liked playing her the most because she had the tightest spin. I like a nice spinning.

So, anyway, love that game. Played it to death. Well, they have a sequel out called Alto’s Odyssey. And instead of you being in the snow, now you’re in a desert. And you’re sandboarding. So it’s a very different environment. But I thought like, OK, you know, so you changed snow to sand, and the graphics are a little updated. Cool, but what else?

They’ve come up with so many other things in this that are so much fun that build beautifully on the platform that was there. Just really very clever. And it’s such a fine line between not enough and too much. And they got it just right I thought. So, the only thing that bothers me is I downloaded it on my iPad. And then I went to my phone because I’ve got it like OK if you do it here it shows up there. And on my phone it wasn’t there.

And they’re going to charge me again. So there are those certain apps where they charge you separately. Because the iPad version I guess is slightly different than the iPhone version.

**John:** Yeah, sorry.

**Craig:** Is that a thing?

**John:** It’s a thing, yeah. So you can have combined bundles where it’s one bundle that can install on either iOS device, but they also have separate iPad versus iPhone versions. It’s the developer’s choice.

**Craig:** Yeah I don’t like that so much. So that was annoying to me. But, you know, listen, I can pay the $4, or the $5. It’s $5, I think. So, anyway, fun game. Alto’s Odyssey. Check it out.

**John:** And I did play through the most recent Room, per your recommendation, and it really was terrific. And so no spoilers, it’s basically all inside a creepy Victorian dollhouse and it was delightful.

**Craig:** It was delightful. I don’t know I would say, I mean delightful, the ending is disturbing.

**John:** Yeah, but they’re all disturbing endings.

**Craig:** I know. I love it. I’m so sad that it’s going to be another like two years. John, where is Elder Scrolls 6? What’s going on?

**John:** I don’t know what’s going on.

**Craig:** Do you realize Skyrim came out in 2011?

**John:** Yeah, so last year in France I started playing the up-res version of it, and it’s still just a terrific game. Like the same basic mechanics. It was still just great. But, yeah, I think they’re ready for a new one.

**Craig:** Yeah, like come on. Come on!

**John:** My One Cool Thing is simply a song and a video. It is by a band called Superorganism. The song is called “Everybody Wants to Be Famous.” It’s just good. Someone recommended it on Twitter. I listened to it. I’m like, you know what, that’s a really good song. I liked it. And it reminded me a little bit of Rachel Bloom’s version of the Scriptnotes theme where she sings When I Will Be Famous. And this is a whole song that is basically that same vibe.

So, we’re going to play this as our outro this week. So that is the music you hear underneath me as I’m speaking.

Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** If you have an outro or a question for us, you can write in to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place to send me notice that your agent has started asking you to sign a contract, because I’ll be curious if that happens.

We’re on Facebook. You can search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us at Apple Podcasts. Just look for Scriptnotes. While you’re there you can leave us a review. People leave lovely reviews, so thank you for that.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts, going back all the way to Episode One.

You can hear all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. It’s $2 a month for all those back episodes. Or we have some of the USB drives that have the first 300 episodes. Those are for sale at store.johnaugust.com.

Craig, on Twitter, is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. And have a really good week.

**Craig:** You too, John. See you soon.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* Siân Griffiths’ blog post, [The only Girl in the Known Universe](https://changesevenmag.com/2016/07/06/the-only-girl-in-the-known-universe-by-sian-griffiths/amp/) about Princess Leia
* The Little Prince’s [elephant inside a snake](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/78/d1/1b/78d11b4d7c439f7fc2d61ecdc5912448.jpg), not a hat.
* [Alto’s Odyssey](http://www.altosodyssey.com/)
* [Everybody Wants to Be Famous](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJQYRzAoErc) by Superorganism
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [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)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Superorganism ([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_341.mp3).