Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/call-me-by-your-name).

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

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** My name is Aline Brosh McKenna.

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

A couple of years ago we sat down with the writer and director of Frozen, Jennifer Lee, because you and I were genuinely obsessed with that movie. And luckily this year we are obsessed with a new movie.

**Aline:** Obsessed!

**John:** It is called Call Me by Your Name.

**Aline:** It’s not at all like Frozen. Or is it?

**John:** In some ways maybe it is. Like who is the Hans of this? Who is the Anna? And who is the Elsa?

**Aline:** Yeah, well there’s no bad guys in this movie. It’s one of the things I love about it.

**John:** Yeah, it’s very good. So, is obsessed fair to characterize us? Because I’ve seen the movie, I’ve read the book, I’ve answered questions in forums about like what I think certain things mean, or–

**Aline:** I’ve seen it twice. I’ve read the book. I’ve listened to the audio book. And I read the screenplay. Did you read the screenplay?

**John:** I didn’t read the screenplay?

**Aline:** The screenplay is wonderful.

**John:** So we’re going to talk about all that stuff and we have with us Peter Spears who is a producer on Call Me by Your Name. Peter Spears, welcome to the program.

**Peter Spears:** Thank you. Glad to be here.

**John:** Peter Spears, I’ve known you for 20 plus years.

**Peter:** I love that it’s my name, my whole name together. Peter Spears.

**John:** Yeah. I’m John August. That’s Aline Brosh McKenna.

**Peter:** And Cher.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Peter, I’ve known you for a super long time and I didn’t know you were making this movie until Sundance, I think, that it came out that you had made this movie. I was immediately so excited for you and for this movie because it seems fantastic. What is the backstory of how you first came upon this project?

**Peter:** Well, about ten years ago, the book came out in 2007 and I had read an advanced copy of it. I forget how I got that copy. Somebody thought I would like it. And did indeed – sort of was blown away by the book and so much of it spoke sort of specifically to me and having been, you know, about that age at that time and being Jewish and gay and all of that was – and a Europhile and just all those sorts of things.

Another producer on this project, Howard Rosenman, had also read it and Howard and I went out to the book agent and threw our hat in the ring to want to make the movie.

**Aline:** Were a lot of people vying for it?

**Peter:** Well, yeah, as I said that, too, it’s like I threw our hat in the ring and there weren’t a lot of other hats, truth be told. There was one other hat and it’s an interesting part of the story and I’ll tell you about that. They were already sort of down the road talking with someone else about it. But I think most people didn’t think this was a movie. You know, they loved the book and almost immediately when the book came out it was heralded as sort of an important work of gay literature and compared with Thomas Mann and–

**John:** And Maurice.

**Peter:** And Maurice. And…oh, I’m spacing on…A Boy’s Life, Edmund White, I think. And several other people. So that was great. But also from the New York Times Book Review and lots of other reviews, the book also seemed to almost immediately resonate with audiences beyond just a gay audience.

So, we were ultimately successful in prevailing to get the rights for that.

**John:** I’m going to stop you there. So, let’s go back to you read an early copy. Were you reading a manuscript? Were you reading a galley?

**Peter:** No, I think it was one of those kind of half-published but sort of not really a full on book version. So it wasn’t that.

**Aline:** Galley.

**Peter:** It was a galley I guess. But then – or advanced reader copy?

**Aline:** But it was bound. I know what it looks like.

**John:** So you read this book and you say well this is fantastic. At what point did you make the decision like, OK, I’m going to try to pursue the rights on this book?

**Peter:** Just like immediately. Like immediately. I never had – you knew me for many years as an actor and then I was a writer and had also directed both a short and an independent feature. So, and in those capacities you do produce a bit. But I never sort of said “I’m going to produce a movie and see this from start to finish and do this.” And I just knew that I was going to want to do this.

**Aline:** Now let me ask you. If I had stopped you and Howard right when you got the rights to the book and said what’s the movie you imagine – so this is ten years ago. Who were you picturing being in it or starring in it? What was your comp? What did you point to people to say, “Yes, it’s a very internal book,” because it’s almost like an extended monologue in a way?

**Peter:** Well, you know, I think truth be told we almost immediately knew that the movie was going to probably be in the tradition of a Merchant Ivory film, of something like that. I mean–

**Aline:** But it’s not period. So that’s interesting.

**John:** But it is period.

**Aline:** I mean, it is period. But it’s not–

**Peter:** It’s the 1980s.

**Aline:** But it’s not corsets.

**Peter:** Right. That’s true. But I think we’ve come to understand that when you say something is like a Merchant Ivory-style piece, there’s an idea that it’s a beautiful adaptation of a book that has the best of production values and actors and writing. And in the case of Merchant Ivory movies, they always seem to deal with a sort of sexuality, but a buttoned up sexuality. You know, a Henry Jamesian sort of way. Maurice, less so. And, in fact, I don’t know if you’ve seen Maurice recently, but it’s kind of remarkably–

**John:** It’s really sexy.

**Peter:** Sexy and current in ways. I kind of remembered it more as being more – a little stuffy. And it’s not at all, which is interesting because I believe Jim Ivory had a much bigger hand in that script, in that screenplay, as opposed to Ruth who did a lot more of the other screenplays that he worked on.

So, with that in mind, almost immediately reached out to Jim Ivory who lives near me in Upstate, New York. And we had gotten to know, became friendly with, Ismail had already passed away. And Jim had already read the book and loved the book.

And so we had gone to Jim and asked if he would come on board as an executive producer, lend his name, and that sort of hallmark to the project as we started to put the pieces together.

**Aline:** And at this point he was a very young man of 70, correct?

**Peter:** Yes. Well, truth, right, I think this next month he turns 90.

**Aline:** Oh, so he was 80?

**Peter:** He was 80, yeah. And loved the book.

**John:** Let’s back up here for a sec. So you’ve read the book. Howard Rosenman has also read the book and loved it. And so you say let’s team up, let’s go in and try to get the rights to this book?

**Peter:** Yes. And he had known the book agent for a while. As younger people they had kind of come of age during that time. So, we then went back to her, Lynn Nesbit is the book agent, André’s book agent. And had that conversation with her and prevailed ultimately by putting together how we might make the movie and what we might do.

**John:** So, this how you might make the movie, is this a written thing you’re sending in? Are you getting on the phone with André?

**Peter:** There was a conversation with André, but mostly it was through the agent. And I think just a – the other person who they were in conversation with who was just someone that I think would have certainly, probably, who knows, make a great movie or whatever, but it’s like you give your resume or something. It’s the idea of how we were pitching. How we wanted to make the movie and what we wanted to do ultimately prevailed.

**Aline:** Were you saying we’re going to take it to this studio, or this actor? Like what was in your mind the first step once you had the rights?

**Peter:** Yeah, I don’t think, you know, I mean, at the time back then there were other actors who sort of came to mind. There was a different, you know, we had an idea of a person who we’d already spoken with who, again, I don’t need to talk about whatever, but there was a – in the pitch of that there was the name of a screenwriter who was attached at the time. That screenwriter ultimately got another job after we got the rights and wasn’t able to continue with the project. But we then went out to – and by that point we then had the rights. But we had the rights in a stepped way where you have option periods. So we had however many options that we could pick up. And then when you were done with your options you needed to go back to them and sort of show if you wanted to extend it what have you done. Do we like the energy of what we’ve been doing?

And then there was finally at a certain amount of time there was a moment where you’re now out of options and you have to literally buy the book rights forever, or are you going to just let it go. And so the problem for our project was that it was a movie that certainly had to come together in the development process, so we had a writer-director who we went to and said, “Would you come on board and do this?”

The interesting part of this story is that that writer-director had unbeknownst to us been one of the people who had also originally been looking to do that. So the symbiosis of like, “Oh my gosh, this makes such good sense.” So we hadn’t known that at the time that had been who the other person was.

So we tried to make the movie that way. And that writer-director–

**John:** How many years ago was that?

**Peter:** So that would be for the first several years. So, if we’ve been doing this for ten years that was the first few years. And wrote a beautiful version of the script. And, you know, as the vagaries of this happened we were able to – we just ultimately didn’t prevail in trying to get all the pieces together, the Rubik’s Cube of how you do this movie. You know, a talent had to be attached to get a certain amount of money. But we went on location scouting to Italy, knew what our budget was.

But the problem also was that we could only make the movie one time a year. You could only make it in the summer in Italy. So we had for many a time we had the pieces together in sort of this Jenga tower, but then you pull one of the pieces out because an actor all of the sudden says, “Hey, I got a bigger paying job. I have to go do this or whatever.” And with most movies you can push and say, “OK, well we’ll do it in the fall, we’ll do it in the winter.” But our whole house of cards collapsed.

**Aline:** And did you have that – because when you’re involved with indie movies there’s this strange thing that happens where it’s like the foreign sales people say, “If you have this actor you’ll get this exact dollar amount, but if you have this actor you get this exact dollar amount.”

**Peter:** It’s crazy the math.

**Aline:** And you’re like it’s not based on any real thing. It’s based on some numbers and calculus—

**Peter:** It’s something, an algorithm they’ve got of some sort.

**Aline:** It changes – it’s so changeable.

**Peter:** Daily.

**Aline:** It changes daily. What people don’t quite understand is you think the studio system is star-driven, the independent film business is star-driven.

**Peter:** Completely.

**Aline:** It’s just different stars. And so you end up sort of contorting yourself in strange ways because you’re like I guess this 42-year-old guy can play a 17-year-old. We’ll just do a little tweak to the rewrite. And it’s really hard to stick to your guns when they’re saying, “This person will get you an extra million dollars,” or whatever it is, to say, “No, it needs to be made this certain way with this right person.” It’s harder than people think.

**Peter:** Well, it’s that. So you have the math of the actors involved. And then you have the financiers themselves who are saying things like, “Yes, it’s a beautiful script, but the stakes don’t seem to be high enough. Could the stakes be higher?” This classic sort of like 101 script development from a book, but you know – and of course our answer was the stakes are the stakes of the heart. I don’t know how much higher they could be. And they’re like, “Well, but could there be more jeopardy? Or could the mother be more evil? Can we make the mother more evil? There don’t seem to be any obstacles really for them.” And so we’re sort of like well that’s kind of the point.

So, we just then had to come to the difficult decision often when that money might have been there that maybe these aren’t the right people to go forward.

**Aline:** Got it. So you had a certain script for a while, and then when did you switch to Jim’s script?

**Peter:** So, a few years in, about three years of trying to put that version together, we were unsuccessful and needed to make a change of some sort because we had sort of explored all the options that we could, and that’s a heartbreaking moment to have to sort of change directions and have that difficult conversation with your collaborator who is also a good friend and besides just being a professional relationship. But very graciously and was given the blessing to say understood and do what you need to do.

So, about that point – there were a couple other directors that we spoke with and were kind of quasi attached for a little while and for different periods who both went on to go do bigger studio films. So by that point then, five years ago or so, we then said to – had the idea that Jim Ivory and Luca together might come together to kind of co-direct.

**Aline:** Jim had the maturity. Was now 85. So he’d grown up a bit.

**Peter:** Yes, exactly. And so said – thought wouldn’t that be interesting. Certainly Luca being a student of so many different important directors whose work inform so many wonderful auteurs, you know, was a student of his and knew him somewhat socially. But the idea was then that Jim and Luca together would do this, sort of a co-directing paradigm if you will.

And Jim was game for that and thought that sounded interesting and great. But Jim said, “You know, if I’m going to do that I really need to work from my own script.” And so Jim sat down then and began to write longhand a version of the script. And Luca would travel to New York and Jim would travel to Italy. And they would collaborate and work in that way that like how – you know, they both what they envision for the script and what they wanted for a movie.

That came together and was done and finished in somewhat short order. And then we began the process of trying to put that movie together now and going out to new financiers and new talent. And about that time we met Timothy and–

**Aline:** Can we just back up a second? So, Luca said that he was producing it for a while. He wasn’t going to direct it.

**Peter:** That’s right.

**Aline:** And the thing that really touched me was he said, “I wanted to do it,” it turned out at some point that he needed to be the director to get it made. And he said “I wanted to do this for Peter and Howard.”

**Peter:** Oh, that’s sweet.

**Aline:** And I thought that was very sweet.

**Peter:** Yes. Well he had come onboard. We had known Luca socially through his relationship with my husband Brian Swardstrom who is Tilda Swinton’s agent, besides also Timothy’s agent. So we knew Luca. And Luca was interested in – had read the book in its Italian translation. Loved the book. So very early on we had gone to Luca because he has a production company in Italy and said would you come onboard. Would you help us figure out how you make this movie in Italy?

So he came onboard really at first as an adviser, then executive producer, and then was really a producer with us almost – even from those early recces, location scoutings we did in Italy, you know, it was with Luca and through Luca’s company that we did all of that. So, Luca was one of the early parts of this in the DNA of this as well, which is interesting then how – you know, so I think there’s a lot of organic-ness to that.

**John:** So I think you’re referring to there’s an episode of The Business where Luca talks through the whole backstory on sort of how he came onboard and sort of the ageism that kicks in with people being nervous about James Ivory.

**Peter:** Well, that’s right. Exactly. So at this moment, at this juncture, after we have this sort of new version of the script and trying to put this together, it’s the difficulty of going back to financiers and people like that and stuff who just didn’t quite – I don’t know if it’s like when directors are brothers or family members or something, co-directors are, people understand it better. But we couldn’t get traction in that way that we had hoped we would from people to make that version of the movie. And so at the same time we – Luca had also been – A Bigger Splash had opened and was done now, or whatever. So kind of concurrently with that, at the same time people were saying, well, we like the project, we don’t know about this co-directing thing, whatever. We would make the movie though if Luca was directing this movie.

Then we had, again, the conversation with Jim and to explain where we were with this. And Jim, got his blessing to say go and make the movie and do that. So that we did, and then timing wise Luca’s schedule also opened in a way that he could do this. And I think, if I’m not mistaken, he was going to do Suspiria first, and then potentially this one, but then Suspiria had to push for reasons unknown to me or unremembered. And he then was able – had this window to do this.

**Aline:** And who stepped up with the money?

**Peter:** So we ended up finding the money through very interesting, kind of with the help from a global world effort. Memento, Emilie Georges’ company out of France, and that became then a European coproduction between Italy and France, which allowed us to access a lot of soft monies in Europe and she famously works with – who is the Iranian director, the Persian director who is A Separation and – and she works with a lot of auteur directors where she’s very auteur-driven. And that’s really kind of the theme of her company and her involvement with the movie. So she wanted to be involved with Luca.

**John:** Was the French money at all behind the extra French that got put into the movie? I mean, the French doesn’t exist in the book, and there’s a lot of French in the movie. Is that related?

**Peter:** It is related. It is related in ways that we, as part of that coproduction deal, the French – we had French crew members. We had French casting. And Timmy is actually part French. And also just – which worked so well for us because it helped, even though in the book it’s just an Italian-American, the fact that like Timmy had grown up with this idea of a bicultural identity, and going in and out of languages and everything so easily.

**Aline:** So when did the French come into the script?

**Peter:** That time that Memento came onboard, I think we just – yes. I mean, there wasn’t much more other than just they’re going to speak French in some places, but there wasn’t like a French storyline or anything like that that happens. It’s just a fact that he is now instead of being an Italian-American family, they’re a French-Italian-American family, which is very organic to–

**John:** Yeah. It fits really well with the rest of the movie.

**Aline:** It’s hard to imagine it without it now.

**Peter:** Yes. Exactly. And I love the way they kind of go in and out – you know, in German, too, these languages, and stuff like that. So they came onboard as well as RT Features from Brazil. And they’ve been involved in a lot of great movies as well. And so these were really producing partners. Financiers and producing partners who were interested – there just weren’t those sorts of – we didn’t get these notes from them. This is the movie they wanted to make. This is the story they wanted to tell. And with Luca at the helm, this is the film they wanted to help be a part of.

And when you get those right partners ultimately after years of struggling with trying to put the round peg in square holes and all the different ways, and you feel so tempted to make those Faustian deals, it just all of a sudden – it just came together.

**John:** Also, my guess is that with Luca at the helm they could see, even as talent was being assembled, they knew he could get a cast. They knew he could pull in actors of a certain caliber and size. They could envision the movie they were going to get out of him in a way they couldn’t otherwise.

**Peter:** Yes. That is absolutely true. Especially right on the heels of A Bigger Splash, which had been to such acclaim, and had been a little bit of time since I Am Love, but certainly the memory of I Am Love for the whole film community was so intense. They were able to connect dots in ways that had been difficult before. And especially with a movie that was not readily understandable, even if the book was beloved, so many people still thought I don’t know that I understand how this is a movie. It’s so interior. There’s so much narration. How do we get out of that?

And, in fact, in a draft of the film we still kept always wondering and tinkering with the idea like does there need to be narration.

**Aline:** Voiceover.

**Peter:** Should there be voiceover? It’s so often, I know there’s so many schools of thought about narration and whether it’s good or not, and certainly like when it’s good it’s great like in movies like Notes on a Scandal or something. And I’m sure on this podcast you guys must talk about narration a lot and all that stuff. But I think for Luca ultimately there was the ability in post if you needed to. See what you needed and do it. But once the film was all cut, you know, and Luca very strongly, he just wanted it to be – narration made somehow the story wasn’t in the present and he wanted the immediacy of feeling like it was happening right then.

And then he always had this sense that the music would be a sort of narration. And, in fact, when he reaches out to Sufjan Stevens to contribute, A, can we use Futile Devices which was his introduction to Sufjan’s music, and would you write a new song for us. And Sufjan had never wanted to be a part of movies and had been asked many times to be in movies. And Luca and he chatted about the script and the book and Sufjan read all that and Sufjan then said, “Yes, I’ll write you a song.” And in fact sent two songs and both ended up being used.

So, I think once that music was laid in and was there, it acts as a sort of narration. It is a sort of–

**Aline:** Well I’m curious. This is my main kind of craft question about it. I feel a first-personness in the movie. I feel a first person in the movie that’s different from the first person of the book.

**John:** I agree.

**Aline:** And the book is this very sexually outspoken, frank kid whose desires are palpable to him from pretty much the first second. And so you’re with him in kind of a different way. And I feel like with the movie he’s a lot more opaque, right? You’re not inside his mind in exactly the same way, because he doesn’t have a confidante. He doesn’t have—

**Peter:** Right, he’s not writing in a journal every day.

**Aline:** But I felt a very strong other first person experience, even though it was different from the book if that makes sense. I felt a very palpable sense that someone had lived these experiences and so that was what drove me to read the book because the movie felt so first person and then when you read the book there is another strong sense of first person, but they’re slightly different kids in a way. And I’m curious where is that located? Is it partly in the specificity of the movie or in Timothy’s performance? And then that’s also why I read the screenplay. And obviously the kid in the movie is more like the kid in the screenplay. But even in the screenplay there’s a little bit more of a sense of the character from the book.

They’re all a little bit different in a way.

**Peter:** Right. Well, I think you have to factor in the variable of the artist responsible at each of those moments. You know, in the book it’s just André. And in so many ways, if you know André there’s lots of, you know, so much of André is Elio. So much of André is Oliver. So much of André is the father. But it’s always going – it’s just André.

And so – and I guess what we bring to it ourselves as the reader, right? That’s the other part of that equation. But then when we see the movie now you’ve got the mercurial sort of alchemy of what the actor and director bring to it. You know, for a moment, just like we met Timothy about four years ago, almost immediately about the time that Luca and Jim started working together, and knew immediately – we met no one else. Like that was it. It was him. He’d really done not much of anything. But he was so Elio. You know, my husband had met him – he represents Damien Lewis and he went to visit Homeland on the set where Timmy was working. And he called me from the set and said, “I think I met Elio today.”

So, he’s going to bring that to the equation. And then combined with his director, with what Luca. And the two of them working in tandem just created this movie Elio which is like – you know, you just couldn’t – so you see the screenplay, so you get the idea of the screenplay and what’s there in the screenplay, and you still don’t see it yet until all of a sudden you’re seeing the movie and now you’ve got the movie Elio. And that’s sort of the amazingness of, well, you guys know, of the collaborative nature of moviemaking of just how much more is going to be created by the right combination of the artists coming together I think.

**John:** We always talk about externalizing internal things. So we’ve talked about adaptations a lot and Aline and both have written a lot of adaptations. And in a book characters can do anything. You can get inside a character’s head. In looking back to Call Me by Your Name, in the book we are in Elio’s point of view, but it’s an older Elio. So he’s thinking back to this time. He’s thinking back to what it was like to be in this sort of fever dream where he was in lust with this guy but wasn’t sure whether to approach him or not to approach him. And he was sort of like hanging in this beautiful agony.

And that works so well in the book because we’re sort of used to books being told in the past. And it sounds like Luca wanted the story to only exist in the present. So this was not a nostalgic look back to an earlier time. This is what it was like to be really in that moment and for him not to know what was going to happen next.

**Aline:** But I don’t want to skip over Jim in between the book and Luca because when I read that screenplay that is a master storyteller who understands concision. And when you read the book there’s like I don’t know how you resist the little girl. That is catnip for 99% of writers because she’s such a convenient device for the sadness, the longing, the sick little girl. She’s just dangling out there to be used. And I thought that that adaptation is – that screenplay is one of the masterpieces of going into the overstuffed closet that all books are, no matter how slender they are.

**Peter:** Editing. Editing. Editing.

**Aline:** You know, there’s that whole section, the dinner in Rome. It’s a huge section of the book. Because the movie is a pas de deux, right, the movie is the two of them really. And I think if you had included all of those other perspectives you would have lost–

**John:** Completely.

**Aline:** That specialness of these two individuals. And it would have gotten diluted.

**Peter:** Well keep in mind the script is written not just by a screenwriter, which is not to minimize–

**Aline:** In conversation with Luca.

**Peter:** But my point being, even that screenwriter is a director. So, you know, and a world renowned famous director. So they know already – they’re already thinking. Obviously in conversation together–

**Aline:** He’s ten steps ahead. And that’s why if anybody – is the screenplay available online somewhere?

**Peter:** I think it is to the WGA.

**Aline:** Can you please post it?

**John:** It’s not as available as it should be. So after this we’re going to try to get it.

**Aline:** Please. Because it’s only about 88 pages or something like that. And it is exactly – I think it’s such a great, great screenplay for aspiring screenwriters to read because it is a document for production. It is a movie in a screenplay format. It is not riddled with “look at my writing, look at this moment.”

**Peter:** No. It’s a blueprint of how are we going to put this movie together. And it is taking everything that the master James Ivory has learned in 80+ years. And knowing at the time he was writing, thinking he would also be directing and ultimately editing and stuff. So he already, like you said is ten steps ahead or whatever. In conversation with this other amazing director who is sort of famous for all the sorts of – the visceralness of life’s experience, you know. So the attention to the tiniest moments of things.

**Aline:** I mean, everyone needs to stop and go watch Luca’s movies, because they’re – I mean, they’re beyond exquisite. They’re just exquisite.

**John:** Let’s talk about some of the things that got left out, but also some things that are in the movie that are not part of the book which surprised me as well. So, Aline just referred to there is a sick girl who lives next door who is going to die—

**Peter:** In the book.

**Aline:** Vimini.

**John:** Oliver befriends her and that becomes a recurring thing. It’s not a huge part of it, but it sort of rhymes throughout the rest of the book. And it pays off at the end. Gone from the movie. Does not exist in the movie at all. There’s also an author who has a book who comes to this little small town to visit and then later on we meet up with him in Rome.

So in the movie version of the story the two guys go to another Italian town.

**Peter:** Bergamo.

**John:** Bergamo. And they do some hiking and stuff like that. In the book version they go to Rome. And they go to this big book party and it’s a huge chunk of the last third of the book is this book party and it’s all about Elio having a vision for sort of what his life is going to be and sort of the excitement of cosmopolitan. And it’s fantastic. It would not have worked in the movie at all because suddenly this other character who you don’t really care about becomes an important third part. There’s all these new women involved.

**Aline:** It loses the intimacy.

**Peter:** So, I can speak specifically to – obviously we changed the location of the movie from the book is to Northern Italy. So going into Rome became–

**Aline:** Not an option.

**Peter:** Not an option. And also just a production nightmare for as little a movie we were making. So they’re going to Bergamo. But that scene with that guy talking around that table is something a book does really well. But it is so not cinematic. It just isn’t to have this character arrive at this point and to take up that much time or whatever. And though – and you’re absolutely right in saying well what is indicative in the book is that experience of how much they love each other and how deep their feelings are for each other.

So, Luca decides well what is a way visually I can show that. So Luca’s idea was, it’s referenced earlier in the movie, oh that spring that they’re in, the source of which is up in the mountains up there. So he’s like I want to take you to the source of that spring and show you this water fall, this massive waterfall.

**Aline:** But now you’re in a brilliant metaphor ultimately.

**Peter:** And now this waterfall, when they stop and look, this is the depth of my feeling for you. This is how much I feel for you. So that’s just visual. That’s visual storytelling versus–

**Aline:** But you know, so few people would have been like, well, Millie Robert Brown, or what’s her name, Millie Bobby Brown is going to play the little girl. Can she do an Italian accent? And Anthony Hopkins will play the author. And there would just be such a tendency to stuff it.

**Peter:** I just also think the little girl who is sick and dying again adds this level of – you know, he didn’t want to tell that story. I mean, I think the idea is to remove those sorts of moments. You know, someone just interestingly told me they had seen it a second time and how much – as much as they loved it the first time they really loved it even more the second time, because the first time they felt this sort of sense of – almost of dread or suspense in their stomach the whole time. Just waiting for when is this bad thing going to happen that we’re sort of used to in these sorts of queer romances.

And so he has the bloody nose moment, or the bruise moment, or when they’re dancing in public. And they were – and those moments don’t come. It doesn’t happen. So, I think, too, the sense that like there’s the little girl who is sick and dying or something, too, I think there was just like let’s just be for once in a romance between these two characters.

**Aline:** I have two questions based on that. One is, and I’ve been dying to ask somebody this, and I think I know the answer, but when the dad is saying I had things like that–

**John:** Does mom know?

**Aline:** Well, does mom know I kind of get?

**John:** I want to ask you about–

**Aline:** Does mom know. I felt like he’s saying she may not know the specifics, but she kind of does know. And then later in the movie it’s clear that she does. And also, anyway, my point being is dad’s saying “I almost was with men,” or “I almost had a great love and I didn’t have the nerve to go for it.” Or is it either, or is it both, or is it up to the viewer? What’s he saying?

**Peter:** Well, it’s always up to the viewer, right? So that’s the answer to that. I can only tell you what I think and then we can debate it here.

**Aline:** Yeah. Tell me what you think.

**Peter:** And I just had this conversation with David Ansen a few days ago about this very thing. And he enlightened me in a way that having seen it now as many times as I’ve seen it, and read it a billion times, and everything, he had a new take on it which might be what you’re thinking, I’m sensing John.

So I think he’s saying, to me I think he’s saying “I almost had specifically the kind of relationship you almost had. I didn’t do it.” And I don’t think it’s like, it doesn’t become an indictment of his marriage or his wife.

**Aline:** Meaning with a man. Meaning with an older man. Or just a man.

**Peter:** With a man. Yeah. And so I think that, yes—

**Aline:** I think the book thinks that. The book kind of says that. That it was a man.

**Peter:** Right. So I think the idea is that yes, but some people say well does that mean his marriage is a sham or whatever. It’s like, no, I think there’s much more of a fluidity to sexuality to use a term that’s used a lot.

David Ansen went on to ask did I think that the end of that scene was that comment about, “Does mom know?” meaning does mom know about me Elio is asking, when in fact David felt it meant Elio is asking does mom know about you. And so he’s saying, “No, I don’t think so.” And in all the years it never occurred to me that that might also be what’s happening.

**John:** That was exactly my question for you. So, there’s the question does mom know. And in the book it’s really clear that Elio is asking about himself. In the movie it makes more sense for the question to be about the dad. I want to talk about the mom.

**Peter:** We see so much more of the mom.

**John:** We see so much more of the mom. She’s so much more of a character. Also the girlfriend is a much better character, a bigger character.

**Peter:** Yeah. André is so happy about the way the movie depicts women in a more fleshed out way and finds them more sort of present. And so, yes, Amira who plays the mother, I mean, it’s a really unheralded–

**Aline:** Yeah. OK. So let’s finish talking about this part. Because I almost thought in a way because he’s a professor, he’s talking about these sculptures and they’re sort of like this Hellenistic thing happening, I kind of felt like he was saying I almost had a relationship like the Greek ideal of men who – there’s something about the classical sculpture of it in a way that he was talking about this sort of like elevated connection that you can have with someone who is in some fundamental way the same as you.

**Peter:** Yeah.

**Aline:** And I think that’s what’s really very much in the book which is they’re the same person. There’s this intimacy and sameness that you can get from a same sex relationship that is different and he’s saying it’s almost like that platonic ideal of that–

**Peter:** Well, which is where we get the title of the book from. It’s such a sameness that like Call Me by Your Name—

**Aline:** Right. They’re fusing.

**Peter:** They’re fusing. Right.

**Aline:** But I read it, as a straight girl I read it as a love so wonderful, you had something great and I could have had that I didn’t. I think the fact that you can also read it the other way—

**Peter:** I think it’s super important though, you’re absolutely right, but I think it’s super important to know that in no way is the father saying that what he has with his wife is less than. I think it’s also. I think it’s great. I think their relationship is amazing. I think the mother probably – frankly, the mother when you look at the David Ansen/John August way of looking at it, like that comment does mom know and he says, “I don’t know.” I think the answer to that is he’s probably just like – they’ve just talked about it a lot. It’s a lot that they’ve talked about and in lots of ways I think he’s giving both of them a bit of a break to not sort of say mom knows all this too and you’ve got to process all that know. I think that the answer probably is – I mean, especially the way Amira plays it. The mother knows it. The mother gets it. She’s been married to this guy. She knows the life that they have.

**Aline:** And she says why don’t they go on vacation together.

**John:** Yes.

**Peter:** I mean, yes, some people thought like well she has no idea the extent to what they might be doing on vacation, but maybe she does.

**Aline:** And that brings me to the other question. Something that I just want to talk about because I think it’s so important. So, I was talking to some people about it, some younger people who felt that the movie contains a certain amount of privilege. And I thought they meant because they’re rich people, and they’re fabulous, and they’re whatever. But what they were talking about was the fact that this child happens to have accepting parents and gee isn’t that a fantasy that in 1983 you would have these parents that are so accepting.

And I have to say it makes my blood boil that, you know, he’s not rich. He doesn’t have these parents because he’s rich or because he’s privileged, but because he’s lucky. And the fact that if you depict any sort “minority community” that they have to suffer and that there has to be a price enacted. And the boldness from a narrative standpoint of this movie is that no one opposes them but themselves. And that is, to me, the political act of that movie is to say our love stories matter because of what they say about my relationship with another person and not because I have to confront these obstacles that you are requiring me to have because I speak to this group. And I feel like it’s very unfair to expect movies like this to always have the tragedy and the obstacles and people dying and being ripped apart and evil parents.

And John and I have talked about this before. I want those fairy tales for people who live other kinds of lives. And I don’t think the movie plays it for fantasy. He just has kind parents. Some gay people have kind parents, and it’s not because they’re rich. They could be poor. He just has an understanding set of parents. And I feel like there is an arrogance in saying that that community needs to have these kind of clichéd obstacles in front of it.

**Peter:** Right. Well, it’s all we’ve had. I mean, it’s the only kind of movies that have broken through really. You know, I mean, Brokeback Mountain. Even Moonlight to some degree, right?

**John:** Philadelphia.

**Peter:** Philadelphia. These are the movies. And this is what we were schooled.

**Aline:** And they’re wonderful. And that’s great.

**Peter:** And they’re wonderful. So how lovely now maybe to be at this new threshold where this story can also be told. And this year, golly, this year was sort of a golden year for “queer cinema,” but like there was lots of great movies from Beats per Minute and God’s Own Country. And so like one movie now doesn’t have to carry this load of everything.

**Aline:** But please don’t tell people what stories they are allowed to tell.

**Peter:** Well, yes. We all must tell – there’s room for us all to tell our stories. And we all should tell our stories. And the truth of the matter is, getting back to the book, and getting back to André and stuff like that, like people may think this is a fantasy or whatever, but like I said from the very beginning, these characters are drawn in many ways from a real life experience. André writes a lot about his father. And in his newest book his father is very present in the new book also. And as well as in his nonfiction writing. You know, he famously wrote a book Out of Egypt about being Jewish refugees expelled from Alexandria, Egypt when he was a young man.

And so you get a sense the more you know André and the more you read his work and whatever, these people aren’t completely borne out of thin air. I think he had parents that were very much like this. And I think he is a parent who is very much like this.

So, it’s not completely fiction.

**John:** We talked about sort of platonic ideal and the degree to which the movie is looking at this idea of two people can be sort of the same thing, that actually sort of gets back to the issue of there’s no villain in the story. It’s actually kind of a classic protagonist/antagonist thing. Elio changes because Oliver shows up. And Oliver changes because Elio is there. And sort of going back and forth on this dance.

And I can imagine during the whole development process and trying to set stuff up people kept looking for the villain, the one who would come in. Because we’re so used to that antagonist being the bad guy. And when I first started watching the movie I was surprised at what a jerk Oliver was, because I had a really hard time understanding what his motivations were.

**Peter:** And you hadn’t read the book yet?

**John:** I hadn’t read the book yet. And then as the movie goes along it reveals itself. You see like, oh, I can understand why he’s being the jerk he’s being. It’s a self-protection mechanism that’s there. Defense things. And I was about to understand Elio’s point of view, because we’re sort of grounded with him pretty much the whole thing. Are there any scenes in which Elio is not part of the scene? I think it’s almost entirely his POV.

**Aline:** Well, there’s the scene where the mom comes in and looks at the ravioli and she talks to Mafalda.

**Peter:** And he’s gone upstairs with a peach.

**Aline:** It’s not a lot.

**John:** So basically we’re almost locked on POV for him. So he’s classically our protagonist. But you really do see him change over the course of it. And even without a voiceover you can see the internal machinations happening.

**Aline:** But there isn’t zero, right, because Oliver is like let’s stop now before we do something that we’re ashamed of. They’re not in a fantasy land, and especially in the book. I mean, they’re not in a fantasy land where it’s like—

**Peter:** No, he’s careful when he wants to kiss. He says if I could kiss you I would when they’re in the alleyway of the street and stuff.

**Aline:** So that was another thing I want to ask you, because another thing that people have said to me about the movie is like, “Well, he’s 17. Can he really consent? He’s so young.” He does look very young. It’s not like you went the other – you didn’t cast an Elio who looked older and an Oliver who looked younger. He very much looks 17 and Armie very much looks older than him.

When that comes up, what I would say is one of the reasons I love this movie is that there are so few movies about how horny you are when you’re a teenager. I can’t stand how chaste teen movies are. I mean, he’s so sexually and romantically obsessed, but there’s no time in your life when you take crazy risks because you’re so horny. And I find that movies about teen sexually are so unrealistically like people are just kissing and – you know, you’ve done crazy things in library parking lots because you – and so I love that about it.

But there are definitely people who are saying he’s awfully young. The guy is older. Especially in the climate that we’re in. How have you–?

**Peter:** I mean, I think the movie is the answer to that. I think Anthony Lane said it best in his review of the book which was just like how wonderful in this challenging time we are to see a movie that celebrates the joy of consensual love. And the whole movie is about – I mean, there’s 17,000 moments where each person is checking in with the other person to make sure they’re OK and fine. And the parents are consenting. I mean, literally all this conversation we’re having about everything else is important, important, important conversation to be having, but also good to remember the joy of our love and some fun in something like that.

**Aline:** There is a moment in the book that I was surprised by where he – the first time after they sleep together he’s very ashamed and almost repulsed by him.

**Peter:** Well that happens in the movie, too. When he gets up at the thing and he gets up–

**Aline:** It’s a little light. It’s light. It’s a little bit less—

**Peter:** Yeah, but he says are we just not going to talk about this anymore. They go out in the thing and he’s like are we going to do this thing now where this is awkward. He’s like, “No, no, I’m fine, I’m fine.” But, yes, there’s the thing in the book is the ghost of the grandfather sitting in the room and sort of watching this moment and everything. So, yes, I think there’s a little more shame, internalized shame in the book that Elio might struggle with than you find in the movie.

**Aline:** But to me it was like when you’re a teenager and you first start to express yourself that way, you know, the animalness of it is weird. It doesn’t matter what kind of sex you’re having. It’s like, “Oh my god, I took my clothes off and I did these things. How am I capable of that?” I don’t think it was necessarily – I didn’t take it in the book as necessarily related to the gayness of it.

**Peter:** Yeah, I think everyone talks obviously about the peach scene and it’s sort of famous or whatever you know now. And it was anyway in the book, too. And you’ve probably all heard Luca talk about, you know, making sure it actually worked. And Timmy did as well. And that is even possible. And everyone is excited. It’s probably happening all over the world right now that everybody is like, “Hey, that actually does work.”

**Aline:** Peaches are being – are not giving their consent.

**Peter:** Right. Exactly. So, I think for me and even sort of more, every time I see the movie, a scene that sort of rings even more sensual and remarkable in that “Oh my gosh the things – like you said, the things we have done in our lives,” is the scene where he has the swimsuit over his head. And it’s just–

**John:** It’s so potentially embarrassing, yet in the staging and in the performance it feels completely authentic.

**Aline:** Yeah, but we’re animals. When you’re sexually obsessed with someone—

**John:** So you’re cringing for him, and yet you totally understand his–

**Aline:** You’re going to smell their—

**Peter:** The essence of them, right?

**Aline:** It’s so relatable.

**Peter:** And you don’t even realize you’re doing it and all of a sudden the noise startles you of somebody coming in. And you’re like, oh my god, how did that moment just happen. And then it just kind of keeps progressing.

**Aline:** Well, I wanted to say the thing that I found so moving and that locked me into the movie in the beginning is how challenging it is that – so my best friend growing up was a gay man. And I remember how hard it was a teenager to just try and figure out if a boy liked me. And do you like me at all? Are you thinking about this with me at all? How challenging it is.

But to have the overlay of that be not just like do you like me, but like are you open to this. That’s the thing that I found so moving was that there’s just a further step you have to decode, which is like not just “Are you interested in me, but is—“

**Peter:** So, look, I absolutely agree with you. I think I love that the movie has been embraced and I love the universality of the fact that people are realizing love is love. And first love is this sort of thing that we all share. And that’s been fantastic. But I am also very proud of the fact of the specificity of the queer love aspect of this. And I do believe that this is in lots of ways a love letter to and for my/our brothers and sisters for whom the closet stole – for the magic of first love and the beauty of first love.

Because we did not – because it’s all those things you said. And we did not have this. And we’ll never have it. And we’ve had – I mean, we’ve had our own firsts. We’ve fallen in love for the first time, but it wasn’t like the way it seems to be for the rest of the world.

**Aline:** Yes. And my friend who I grew up with, that’s what he was robbed – he was robbed of that. And the fact that it took place in ’83 when he and I were that age, it was such a moving idea of what he could have had that was taken away from him. And the fact that they’re able to say I am like you in so many important ways, in the ways that you do when you’re falling in love that first way. Look at all the ways in which we are similar. And you find that first profound connection to someone. It’s so amazing to have that out there.

**Peter:** And so many straight people have come to me and said, “I’m progressive. My politics are right and everything. I did – I still did not understand that the way my gay friends’ relationship, and love, and connection and first love was was the exact same as mine. I believed in their rights. I believed in the fact that everyone is equal and everyone should have the same rights, but I still thought it was other. And I can see now that – this movie showed me that it’s not other. I got it in a way I just never understood it before.”

**Aline:** Yeah. And to me it’s not only – I feel like I’d already gotten that, but the movingness of how much courage it takes to say to someone, “Are we the same,” you know, “Is this the kind of love that you also want?” It takes so much courage when you’re a kid to do that. And that’s what I think is so moving about their connection with each other makes them brave enough to go past these things. And it just takes a lot of courage to love somebody and to say the things they want to say. And the fact that it took place in an era where so many people didn’t get to have that experience to me made it extra moving.

**Peter:** Yeah. And you know what’s on the horizon, too. I mean, you know what’s about to come. And a friend of mine, Ira Sachs, a filmmaker, said, “I just kept thinking through the whole movie that, oh my god, these guys have no idea what’s about to come.” Meaning obviously the AIDS epidemic and stuff like that.

So, you know, that there’s just a lot – the deck is really stacked against them in so many ways. And for this one idyllic Greek – the Greek idea of ideal moment, they experience this thing. That when you read the book you realize will haunt them, be a part of them for the rest of their lives. Even despite the paths of both, you know, because in the book we might say the end of the book jumps forward many years.

**Aline:** Yes. Several, several times.

**Peter:** Several times. And their paths cross again a few times. And you see how this summer informed for both of them many more years of their life going forward and stuff. So, and again, that’s what a book can do so well as well.

**John:** So let’s wrap this up by time traveling back ten years to you’ve just read this book and you have this like well I’m going to get the rights to this book. I’m going to make this into a movie. The movie you had in your head at that point, in what ways does it resemble the movie you have and in what ways is it different? Did you think you were probably stopping at the place where the movie stopped? What was the shape of that movie and how does it resemble this movie, or how is it different?

**Peter:** Well, the movie is much more cinematic, much more visual than I thought. All I had was the book then and I’m not a director of the caliber of Luca and Jim, people who would have known that a book is a book but a movie is something very different. So I think it was much more literary, the idea in my head.

But also because I had made a promise to André that in giving us the rights to the book that he’d be proud of that. And I felt that responsibility. And the responsibility to people who already loved – I mean, so many more people love it now. And for the first time it just was on the New York Times Bestseller List, the paperback version. André’s first time ever, even though the book has been out for ten years.

So, you know, but there still was a sense that people loved the book. And so I had this sort of pressure to kind of deliver that. But in my mind I thought maybe the way you delivered it was by being so very true to the book and be much more literary in that way. So the fact that it isn’t ultimately, that it found its own right way and its own path in a way, but also that André loves and that people love and people still feel is of spirit of the book, but in its own way as its own thing.

You know, David Ansen was just also saying, he’s like, “Gosh, so often, always almost it just feels like adaptations are less than and not something more than.”

**Aline:** Right. But I think that question, what that points to is like a great producer doesn’t need to know sort of what visually it’s going to look like, or what every exact moment is. What a great producer is is the loamy soil and the support for a filmmaker to put their vision, to grow their vision in. And I think that a lot of producers are anxious or insecure and they want to – they have opinions about things which they don’t need to.

You had the spirit of the story and what was important about the story. And you fought to protect that. And in the end of the day that’s really what matters. Not you picking the DP. You know, it’s this understanding this is what matters in this book and this is what I will fight to the death to change, and if it’s not Rome it’s another small city. And if they’re speaking French, that’s OK.

It’s understanding what are the OK things to change and what are the things that are stalwart, “No, mom is not going to be a villain. No, dad is not going to” – you know, those are never going to change.

**John:** Those are the essential DNA of the story.

**Aline:** That’s what a good producer does.

**Peter:** Well, thank you for saying that. I think that that’s probably very right. I think, you know, you look at a movie like Dunkirk which is great and wonderful but a very different kind of movie and I can only imagine what those producers had to deal with with that. And the director in making a movie like that. But, you know, by comparison Call Me by Your Name is like, you know, it can be just as difficult to make a little soufflé. And to balance all that and to do all that. And to also get out of the way of the chef who is doing that.

And I think since the time the book came out, almost there’s been something blessed about the spirit of the book, of the story, of Elio and Oliver’s connection. And everybody who read the book, who read the script, who came to the movie from around the world. Like our producers were a global team of people and our DP was Thai and the actors from all these countries. All came because they were moved by the story. And everyone really brought their best and then some to the collaborative nature of making this movie.

**John:** Great. Peter Spears, congratulations on Call Me by Your Name. Thank you very much for coming in and talking to us about it and answering our questions.

**Peter:** Thanks guys. This was super fun. I’ll make another movie so I can come back and talk to you guys.

**Aline:** Oh, I’m thrilled. I’m thrilled.

**John:** Awesome. Thanks.

**Aline:** That’s a good reason.

**John:** Hey, this is John. So, last week we had a preview for Launch, my new series about making a book. As you’re listening to this, Episode 3 should be out. In it we talk about the edit process, the cover, the audiobook. If you’re a grammar nerd or a font nerd you’ll especially enjoy this one.

So, next week my book Arlo Finch comes out, which is crazy. It’s available anywhere books are sold in North America. So if you’d like to check it out, if you’d like to buy it, that would be awesome.

If you’d like to meet me, I will be out on tour as well. You can find out where I’ll be by going to johnaugust.com/arlofinch. I’ll have special guests in a lot of cities. It should be really fun. I look forward to seeing you.

This show, Scriptnotes, is produced by Megan McDonnell and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Hunter Christensen. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place to send questions like the ones we answer on the show, or questions about Launch, or the book. There will be a special episode of Launch where we’ll just do Q&A. So, send in those questions.

If you want to reach us on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. Aline is @alinebmckenna. And Peter Spears is @pjspears.

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

And you can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net or the first 300 episodes on the Scriptnotes USB drive at johnaugust.com/store. Thanks.

Links:

* Thanks to [Peter Spears](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0817379/) for joining us!
* Read the Call Me by Your Name [script](http://sonyclassics.com/awards-information/screenplays/callmebyyourname_screenplay-20171206.pdf), watch the [movie](http://sonyclassics.com/callmebyyourname/) and read the [book](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1250169445/?tag=johnaugustcom-20).
* Subscribe to Launch at [http://wondery.fm/launch](http://wondery.fm/launch) or wherever you listen to podcasts.
* You can preorder Arlo Finch in the Valley of Fire and read an excerpt [here](http://read.macmillan.com/mcpg/arlo-finch/). Also, John’s book tour dates are [available](http://johnaugust.com/arlo-finch), if you want to say hi!
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
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* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [Aline Brosh McKenna](https://twitter.com/alinebmckenna) on Twitter
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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/introducing-launch).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 335 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, it’s a whole other podcast. Yeah, I have spent the last two years recording interviews for a brand new series that begins today. So we’ll have an excerpt from that. Excerpt? I don’t know. It’s kind of a trailer, but it’s like a featurette. Craig, what is a featurette? Do they still exist?

**Craig:** I don’t know. I’ve never known what a featurette is. Most of the time when they add the suffix “ette” to something I’m confused. Other than cigarette, I know what that is. And moist towelette. Other than that I get very confused. Even novellas confuse me. When does it stop being a novel and become a novella? I don’t know.

**John:** That’s a question I could answer on my podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah, you could. But my question for you is I’m not fired or anything right?

**John:** Oh my god, no.

**Craig:** Our show is still a show, right?

**John:** Yes. This is a bonus. This is an extra thing I’m doing.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Why don’t I tell you what it’s about? It’s a show called launch. It follows the process of making a book, from idea, to writing it, to selling it, to printing it, to seeing it in stores. So the series is only six episodes long, the first two of which drop today. So, this is the first chance to sort of get into it.

You listened to I guess the full first episode?

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s right. And that’s why I was a little concerned, because I listened to the whole thing and I thought this sounds like a – you know, I don’t listen to podcasts. We’ve established this.

**John:** No. It was a big ask for me to have you listen to this.

**Craig:** Correct. So right off the bat I felt quite Christ-like in this. But, you know, I have heard like clips of podcasts before, you know? And I did listen to the Slow Burn podcast. That was like a whole big new thing for me.

And so when I listened to the first episode of Launch, it struck me that it sounded a lot like a podcast. Whereas our show, I don’t think we sound like a podcast. I think we just do our show. We just talk. But that show sounded like a podcast and it was even sort of meta. I mean, when people listen to it they’ll realize that you’re aware that it sounds like podcast. But I thought, wow, what a crazy way for you to tell me that you were firing me off of our own show.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** If you just stopped doing our show and just started doing that.

**John:** So, Craig, Scriptnotes is a gabfest style show, where it’s two people chatting. And so it’s done almost in real time. So, Launch is the other kind of podcast, or one of the other kinds of podcasts. It’s much more like a Startup or a Planet Money in that there’s a bunch of clips and there’s narration and I have to be able to put sentences together in a meaningful way. It’s all written. I’ve done so much writing for this show that it’s been crazy but good to do.

And we go through multiple drafts, and so we do table reads. It’s really different. Aline Brosh McKenna of Scriptnotes fame, she helped us out a lot. She listened to an early cut and gave me some really good feedback. So I went back and rerecorded some stuff just based on her notes.

**Craig:** Well, it did remind me of a little bit of Karina’s show, too, because it is written and it is crafted, but it was funny because I know you so well and I know your podcast voice so well and I’m fascinated – because I have a feeling like a lot of people that listen to this show are going to listen to it not necessarily because they’re Scriptnotes people, because they are interested in the writing of books and novels, which is what this is so much about. But I think probably you’ll have some decent crossover. And I’m fascinated to hear what they think about the other you. It’s like this other you. It’s really interesting. It’s more professional. [laughs]

**John:** Well, it’s more professional, but it’s also a whole different kind of podcast in that like there’s ad reads, there’s sponsors, there’s all that kind of stuff. There’s act breaks. So I have to sell stuff on the show as well. And that was exciting to do. But there’s also just other sort of infrastructure.

So, people will recognize some familiar names. So, Megan McDonnell, who is the Scriptnotes producer, she’s also one of the producers on this. But there’s also four other producers on the show.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** There’s a mixer. Matthew Chilelli did some original music for us, which was awesome. So, Matthew is great.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** So you’ll recognize some of those things, but it’s also just really different. It’s a much bigger circus to make this kind of show and I’ve learned a ton.

**Craig:** Wow. Great.

**John:** So the clip we’re going to have today is from Episode One. This is the episode in which I sort of have the first idea for doing this book and sort of how it all begins. It goes up through the part where I get an agent. This is me talking about how to get an agent, which is just really weird. I had to go out and get myself an agent. So it’s that whole part of the process.

Episode Two, which is also out today, is selling the book and then the writing, getting into the edit, and really the shadow of Harry Potter, which is so odd to be writing a kid’s book because Harry Potter looms over everything. So, Episode Two gets into that.

**Craig:** Well, I really enjoyed Episode One. And I enjoyed it so much that I actually will listen to Episode Two. Now, mostly – just slow your roll for a second – because mostly what I’m hoping for are a couple more moments like the kinds I got in Episode One where evidence of your let’s just say organic origin story emerge. Because as you know, most of you was obviously built/assembled in a room at the Foxconn Plant in Guangzhou.

But your mother appears in this and your brother appears. I didn’t even know you had a brother.

**John:** I have a brother. It’s sort of retcon that John has a brother now. But, yes, my brother appears into it.

**Craig:** It’s a retcon. You retconned a brother.

**John:** In later episodes my daughter is in it, my husband is in it. Like everyone–

**Craig:** Well, I know them. But like your brother shows up and the crazy thing is – so first of all I’m listening to your mom and I’m like, yeah, but I guess if I had to imagine what John August’s mom would sound like that’s pretty much right on. And then your brother came on and I’m like who is this guy? This doesn’t sound like John at all. You guys couldn’t sound more different. It was fascinating.

**John:** Yeah. So it has been really interesting to sort of go and do the introspection that is so part and parcel for this kind of show, because it’s really about the questions and decisions along the way of trying to make this book.

The first episode is very sort of let’s get inside John’s head and sort of how I got lost in the woods. And there’s some stuff there that’s a little more personal than I would ever get on our normal show. But down the road it’s also just a chance to sort of break out of the normal bubble of just two people talking. So, Episode Three I get to sit down with the cover artist. I talk to the guy who is doing the audio book for Arlo Finch, which is so cool. He’s awesome.

I get into some fights and some squabbles. We get into some grammar battles. And then in Episode Four I go to the printing plant in Virginia to actually see the book being printed. And that was so amazing. That was my chocolate factory moment where I got to see how it all is actually done. And that is one of the top ten experiences of my life was getting to see the book being printed and how that all works.

**Craig:** That’s so cool. I am a personal fan, bordering on obsessive fan, of any – I guess what do they call them, the how was it made series.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And they have millions of these that you can just watch for free on YouTube through the magic of copyright infringement, but regardless like probably every other day I’ll go how do they make staples. How do they make pills? Pills are one of my favorites. Like how do they make pills? Oh my god, it’s fascinating.

Anyway, any time I watch those or somebody talks about doing something like you’re doing, which is to go to this massive center where books are made, physically, in my mind I always hear that [hums]. And when we were kids there would be a little soundtrack and some sort of wah-wah pedal playing as the pages got churned out of the big conveyor belt. I have a rich inner life, John, is what I’m saying. Rich.

**John:** Well, at least there’s a musical accompaniment to your life.

**Craig:** Oh, for sure.

**John:** Which is crucial. Absolutely.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** The how things are made video that I loved so much recently was how rubber bands are made, which is a surprisingly mechanical manual process. Like you’d think like, oh, it’s just a machine that makes rubber bands. It’s not at all. There’s literally a guy who is taking like this rubber tube out of this vat and sliding it onto this sort of big tube and it goes through this vulcanizing process. And it’s just really surprisingly manual. And you’d think like, “It’s a rubber band. How can that be a manual process?”

**Craig:** I know. Some of it is so bizarre. Some of it is really, really bizarre. But it is all oddly beautiful. I assume you took some video, right?

**John:** So, I was limited in sort of how many photos and videos I could take because there’s trade secrets. This is the biggest publishing plant in the world. And so it was very cool for me to get to go inside and I got to take pictures of my book, like when my book was on a line, but I couldn’t take any pictures involving people, or process beyond a certain point.

But, I could interview everybody. And so everyone was so cool. One of my favorite moments you’ll hear in Episode Four is I’m with the guy who is literally printing the book. So, there’s three stages to book printing. There’s the printing the signatures, which are the 16-page little segments. There’s making the case. And then there’s putting the book into the case.

But this is a guy who is responsible for printing the signatures. And he was awesome. And I interview him and I say like, hey, so you must really love books. He’s like, “No, I hate them. I can’t go into a bookstore. I hate the smell.” And it’s like talking to a grip about movies. It’s like – they’re completely involved in the process of making this thing, but not always the end result.

**Craig:** Right. Like for instance I’m sure the same thing could be said about someone who say every week does a podcast and then does not want to listen to podcasts ever.

**John:** Indeed. You are basically that lineman who is looking at the signatures as they come off.

**Craig:** I have always been that lineman.

**John:** Oh, nice. So, what’s also weird about this podcast is the first four episodes come out before the book comes out. Basically Episode Four drops the day the book comes out. And the last two episodes, we’re not quite sure what they’re going to be. So, it will be following me on the road. It will be sort of seeing what happens.

And so while I’m out on the road you can come see me on tour. Again, johnaugust.com/arlofinch has all my dates. But we’ll be some live shows that are kind of half Scriptnotes/kind of half Launch shows. I’ll be talking to Grant Faulkner who is one of our favorite guests recently this past year and some other cool people in other cool cities about books, and writing, and stuff in general.

So that will be part of it. I know there will also be a Q&A episode, so if after listening to this or future episodes you have questions about Launch or the book, or all that process, just send them into the usual place, ask@johnaugust.com, and there will be a special Q&A episode somewhere down the road.

**Craig:** That sounds great. And I guess part of the deal of this, well, let me just back up for a second. The fact that it’s only six episodes makes me happy, right? Because you know me, I like to know that things end. I can’t just listen to a podcast forever the way that people listen to this one, which is insane. So, I mean, I really, truly don’t know why anyone does it.

So, I love that it ends, but what I find fascinating about the promise of this is that you say in this first episode, as people will hear, that part of the show is what’s going to actually happen with the book in terms of success. Is it going to be a big hit? Is it going to be a flop? What’s going to happen? You don’t know. So I guess that the idea here is that between Episode Four and Episode Five the book happens. And then you kind of say here’s the result, which is either way kind of weirdly – I feel like you win, because you’re going to get a great episode out of it.

**John:** Absolutely. So either I’ll have a successful book, or I’ll have a flop of a book, and interesting things to talk about on a podcast. In a weird way making this podcast for the last two years has given me an excuse for asking all the questions I wanted to ask. And it would be too weird for me to ask if I wasn’t asking them for a podcast. So, I talked to a lot of writers about success, but also about failure and about what was great and what was bad. And I interjected myself into parts of the process where an author wouldn’t usually be there, but I could ask because I’m doing a podcast. It’s not for me, it’s for the listeners of the world.

**Craig:** Exactly. But I think it’s really – there’s a wonderful sense of introspection about Episode One and a fascinating meta look at the whole thing. The whole way you approached it I thought was really smart and I’m fascinated to see what happens. I mean, of course I root for the book’s success, but I don’t want it to be too successful, because then at some point you’re going to be like, “I’m sorry dude, but me and Amy Tan, we’re hanging later. It’s going to be me and the Tanster.”

**John:** Yeah. There’s no Joy Luck Craig.

**Craig:** Nah. There’s no Joy Luck Craig. And what am I going to do? Like if Chernobyl is a big hit–?

**John:** Oh my god. Well, you have plans to dump me immediately, right? You and Brian Koppelman are going to skate off?

**Craig:** Well, first of all, never in a million years. No, and I will tell him that to his face. Never. In a million years. I love Brian, but never in a million years. No, I think I would just end up with some guy who works in the physics department at USC, which is cool for me, but no one is going to listen to it.

**John:** Well, here’s the thing though, Craig, you would have no idea if anybody was listening or if your podcast was even available. So you might just weekly show up and have a conversation with somebody thinking that it’s a podcast, but really it’s just you and the physicist talking about stuff which wouldn’t be so bad.

**Craig:** I feel like you just told me that that’s what’s been happening with Scriptnotes. [laughs]

**John:** This whole time.

**Craig:** Oh. My. God. You’re right.

**John:** So, if you as a listener would like to help me out, there’s two things you could do that would really be amazing. First is to subscribe to the show, Launch, because that drops today. And when people subscribe on the day it drops that actually helps a lot in terms of the ecosystem, the Apple of everything. So, you can find it just anywhere you get podcasts. It’s Launch. Or there’s a URL you can follow which is wondery.fm/launch.

Second thing, because this is a brand new podcast there are no ratings, there are no reviews. So if you’re there and you’d like to leave us a review, a rating, those things are awesome and they are very genuinely helpful, especially for a brand new show. Or tweet about it or Facebook about it. Or if you have a friend who you think might enjoy it, tell them, or just take their phone and subscribe on their phone to the show because why not. That’s what friends are for is to subscribe people to podcasts that they didn’t necessarily choose themselves.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, honestly people should do it even if only to pay you back a little for the good service that you have done all these years. I mean, granted, you also take an enormous amount of money from them that I don’t see.

**John:** Yes, in the form of t-shirts and USB drives.

**Craig:** That’s right. And USB drives. Exactly. And whatever other merchandise you sell that you don’t tell me about. I get it. But, yeah, listen, we have never asked for anything. That’s the god’s honest truth. And most of the time we don’t have to because you and I make our careers largely writing popular entertainment that is marketed and sold by multibillion international conglomerates, so we really don’t need – it would be grotesque I think for us to ask for assistance in those circumstances. But this is different. This is your book. I feel like any new author with any new book is an underdog. And by the way, I’ll be coming at people for Chernobyl also because that isn’t a mass entertainment sort of thing. It’s going to need some love. So people should, I think, I’m saying to people – you wouldn’t – but I’m saying you guys should do it to help John out at the very least.

Plus, also, it’s a good podcast. I got to say.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** I mean, and I know podcasts. I listen to literally ones of them.

**John:** [laughs] All right. So, let’s take a listen to the first episode of Launch.

*LAUNCH FEATURETTE:*

**John:** Hi. My name is John August.

If you Google me, you’ll see I’m mostly a screenwriter. I wrote Big Fish and bunch of other movies.

Two years ago, I started writing a novel. It was something I’d never done before, and knew almost nothing about.

At the same time, I began recording interviews with authors and agents and publishers and everybody remotely connected to the book I was writing. I didn’t know exactly what I’d do with all these interviews, but I had questions, and I figured I might as well get the answers on tape.

Now, my book is coming out.

Two weeks from today, you’ll be able to buy it in stores.

This podcast is about how that book got there. How I wrote it, how I sold it, and how publishing works— not just as a business, but literally how books are printed and shipped. We’ll be talking about success and failure, school librarians, book tours, typefaces, and how the shadow of Harry Potter looms over everything.

As I’m recording this, I know how it all begins, but I don’t know how it ends. Will my book get good reviews? Will it sell? Did I make the right choices along the way?

You’ll find out when I do.

From Wondery, this is Launch, a podcast about making new things.

I’ve never made this kind of podcast — the kind with audio clips and music and ads.

For the last six years, I’ve hosted a weekly podcast about screenwriting called Scriptnotes.

One of the recurring bits is that my co-host Craig *hates* podcasts.

**Craig:** As you know, I listen to exactly zero podcasts. Even this one.

**John:** Me? I *love* podcasts. All kinds. I currently subscribe to 65 of them.

One of my favorites of the last few years is called StartUp. You’ve probably heard it. It tells the story of Alex Blumberg as he struggles to establish a new company. Week by week, you can hear it grow, and change.

The basic format is that Alex talks directly to you and tells you what’s going on. Sort of like I’m doing now.

When you go back and listen to it a second time, you realize there’s also some sophisticated techniques he’s using. For example:

**David Kramer:** This will be probably the biggest and most long term of all your projects.

**John:** That’s my agent, David Kramer.

**David Kramer:** So, you just have to make that decision for yourself of how you see the next several years of your life.

**John:** See that? I’m Foreshadowing that there’s a big choice I’m going to have to make. A life-changing decision. And I’m going to have to make it by the end of the episode.

One of my other favorite shows is called Planet Money. They did a series called the Story of a T-shirt, where they tracked the process of making a t-shirt from growing cotton to delivery. I love stuff like that. Process.

So let’s go back to the beginning of this whole adventure. Let’s see how it all started.

*ominous drone*

**John:** If you listen to a bunch of podcasts, you start to notice some tropes.

Like whenever you hear this kind of drone, you know something bad is about to happen. Especially if there’s an out-of-tune music box playing.

*add music box*

**John:** And then the narrator says something like:

On June 19th, 1977, a young boy went missing in the mountains of Colorado.

His family was camping in the Roosevelt National Forest along the Middle Saint Vrain Creek. It was hot that afternoon. Still, average lows for June dipped into the 30s. A boy in shorts and a t-shirt was at risk for hypothermia, particularly if he got wet.

The more immediate concern was bears. Black bears were frequently sighted in the area, attracted by an easy meal from the campground trash containers.

Bears are foragers; they rarely attack adults. But a six-year-old boy alone in the woods might not fair as well.

The boy’s father — Hank — and his eleven-year-old son — Bill — went searching for the boy.

The mother — Nancy — and her mother — Helen — stayed back at the campsite. They yelled the boy’s name until their voices went hoarse.

This is the story of what happened to that boy in the woods.

*music out*

**John:** I should explain here: That six-year-old boy is me. I didn’t get killed or abducted. It’s not that kind of podcast, remember?

This story about getting lost in the woods is actually really important for understanding why I decided to write this book. It pretty much explains why I am the way I am.

Here’s how my mom remembers that day.

**Nancy Meise:** We were up in Camp Dick, which is a forest service campground. We’d gone up probably on a Friday night. We had had lunch, and your grandmother and I were sitting chatting and you and your dad, and your brother Bill, had, were going to go exploring around, so you left.

Pretty soon, you know pretty soon, I can’t tell you exactly how long it was, but here come your dad and your brother, but no you. And I said, “Where’s John?” And John wasn’t there. I probably got a little bit teary eyed, like, “Where’s my kid?”

**John:** Here’s my brother Bill:

**Bill Meise:** Mom started calling for you. And Mom was kinda freakin’ out, like “John John, where are you?”

**Nancy Meise:** So finally, your dad and Bill decided they would go back out and look. And it seemed like it took forever. I was a smoker back then. I’m sure I lit a cigarette, you know, and probably smoked it down to the nub.

**Bill Meise:** You know, she was scared. She didn’t know where you were. You know, it’s the forest, you know. You know, you don’t know what kind of animals might be out there.

**John:** To my family, this is the tale of How John Got Lost in the Woods.

But the truth is, I wasn’t really lost.

This is what happened:

See, I’d found this trail, and I was curious where it went. So I followed it. There was a little creek, and I made my way across on the rocks.

I wasn’t actually that far away.

**John on tape:** I also remember hearing you and not going back. Does that sound like me?

**Nancy Meise:** YES. (laughs) If truth be told, yes. I mean, because if you were busily involved in something, mom could wait.

**John:** I could hear their voices calling for me..

But there was another voice — this inner voice — that was louder. More insistent. It was urging me to keep going a little farther. To see what was around the next bend. So I kept walking.

That’s when it happened.

I can’t tell you what it was, exactly. The air felt sparkly. The trees were vibrating.

I had this feeling of awe, like I’d wandered into some ancient mystical site. I was six years old, and everything felt electric.

I don’t know how long I stayed there, or why I left. But eventually, I turned around and walked back.

**Nancy Meise:** And here you come. Back. And you know, then I really cried. Because I was just so glad to see you.

**John:** Something happened that day in the woods. I don’t know what it was, but I have the echo of a memory. This sense of wonder.

I’ve been chasing it all my life.

Maybe you feel it too — that notion that there’s something hidden just out of sight. Just around the bend.

All I know is, I see a trail and I want to take it. I’m still that boy in the woods.

Let’s fast forward 38 years.

[*storm sounds*]

**John:** This is when I first spot the trail that leads me to write this book.

It’s October 30th, 2015. I’m in a hotel room in Austin, Texas.

It’s 9:57 a.m. and a massive storm is raging outside. I press my phone against the window to take a video, because it feels like a movie. Winds are howling. Lightning fills the sky. On a nearby building I can see this American flag. It’s whipping so fast I think it might tear off.

It’s been like this for days. The airport is shut down because the traffic control tower is flooded.

I mention the storm because it explains why I didn’t leave the room much that weekend. If the weather had been better, I would have explored the city, or had beers with friends.

Everything would be different.

I wouldn’t be telling you this story.

*skype calling*

I’m in Austin for the film festival, but there’s one work phone call I need to make.

**Kenneth Oppel:** Hello?

**John on tape:** Hey, Kenneth. It’s John August.

**John:** His name is Kenneth Oppel. He’s a novelist. He’s written this book called The Nest. It’s about a boy who discovers that magical insects are planning to steal his baby brother.

Some producers sent it to me because they think it might be a movie. That’s most of what I do as a screenwriter, by the way. I adapt books into movies.

**John on tape:** First off, is it okay if I record this?

**Kenneth Oppel:** Yeah, yeah. Fine.

**John on tape:** When I first read your book, it seemed really creepy for what I had originally been pitched as a kid’s book. I guess I was confused about what were the rules of a book that is designed to be read by young readers. Do you get that question a lot?

**Kenneth Oppel:** All the time. I mean, I just came back from a week book tour in Italy, and talked to a lot of adult audiences, who had very profound ethical and philosophical questions about the book and responded to it in ways that I was glad to hear about, because there’s a lot of subtext to the book.

Sometimes I was asked, “Is it too scary for kids?” To my way of thinking, I think kids read stories in an altogether different way than adults do. Kids are used to a diet, from their very earliest stories, of peril and death and monsters. From Grimm all the way to Beatrix Potter, even. There’s some bunnies get eaten and skinned and put in pies. People get locked in dungeons and towers. So I think kids accept this sort of landscape as much more normal, and it’s often the parents, with much more life experience, who read these stories and are actually horrified.

**John:** I think he’s right. Think back to the books we read as kids. So many of them are really dark. Hansel and Gretl? We all remember the end — the kids pushing the witch into the oven — but it starts with a father abandoning his children in the woods.

That’s like Stephen King dark.

**John on tape:** What do you say when people ask what genre of books you write, who the audience is for most of your books?

**Kenneth Oppel:** Well, in the current publishing market, middle grade is usually defined as a book for roughly nine to 12 year olds. I constantly resist these definitions. I like writing books that I thought had a, you know, you could read them if you’re a good reader at eight, or you could read them if you’re 14. So I never really thought so much in terms of the middle grade, like what is that? I just wanted to write a good story.

**John:** This was the first time I’d heard of “middle grade.” You’re going to hear that term a lot. It doesn’t mean junior high; it’s younger than that.

**Kenneth Oppel:** To me, the middle grade is [00:09:00] sort of the golden age of reading, as a child. You never love a book as much as the books you loved when you were that age, sort of eight to 12. It’s sort of that sweet spot for kids. A lot of kids, after 12, they’re sort of dropping away.

That’s why I love that age group. It’s still such a great time of life, it’s still so full of curiosity and wonder and potential. It’s not cynical yet. The possibilities are still huge.

**John:** In most middle grade titles, the hero is roughly the same age as the reader. Think Harry Potter, or Percy Jackson. The reader can easily imagine being in the hero’s shoes.

**Kenneth Oppel:**There’s lots of famous adult books with child protagonists, but for me, the difference between an adult book and a middle grade book, even if they had a child protagonist, is that there’s no gloss, there’s no editorializing, there’s no retrospective commentary on what that kid is doing. With a middle grade book, it’s all present-tense.

This kid is having this incredibly intense and stressful experience he’s really not equipped to have. Then he finds all this inner strength, and becomes a warrior and defeats this monster, really on his own.

**John:** There’s sort of a template for middle grade fiction. You start with an ordinary kid. But then he discovers something extraordinary — that the world is different than he assumed. He goes on a journey, and the journey changes him.

Basically, a kid goes into the woods. Something happens. And he’s changed by it.

Kenneth and I talk for about forty-five minutes. I don’t tell him, but by the end of the conversation, I have a new plan.

*END LAUNCH FEATURETTE*

**John:** And that is the teaser or featurette or whatever we’re calling this little excerpt from the first episode. If you would like to hear the rest of the first episode, and the second episode, they are available right now. So just Launch. Just check out wherever you get your podcasts. Look for Launch. It’s the little yellow logo. It’s me. And just subscribe. That would be really, really great and helpful. I hope you enjoy it.

**Craig:** I think they’re going to enjoy it. Can I sneak ahead? Can you just give me all of them to listen to?

**John:** I would love to give you all six episodes. There are exactly two episodes that are ready right now. Literally the paint is barely dry as we were putting these out. But I can give you a sneak preview of Episode Three, which is a Google Doc on my screen right now that I need to finish writing tonight because we start recording it tomorrow.

**Craig:** You know what? Hold off. Hold off. But I’m going to subscribe for sure so that you have – and I’m not going to give you a rating because I think people would be like, “Oh, look, Craig Mazin likes John August’s podcast. It’s just not going to hold a lot of water.”

**John:** Yeah. You can give me stars, but without giving me like the named review. That’s fine, too.

**Craig:** It’s going to be weird if there’s only one thing there and it’s like two stars. Two stars is the worst stars, by the way. Two stars is the worst. One star you’re like, OK, whoever left the one star is a crank. Two stars has been thought about. [laughs] If you get two, that’s the worse. Yeah, so no, you get five. Is it five? Is that the maximum you can give?

**John:** Five is the most stars you can give.

**Craig:** Well, that’s what you deserve.

**John:** Thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** I’m going to give you five.

**John:** All right. Some scheduling notes. Craig is headed off to Lithuania I think is your next stop.

**Craig:** It’s going to be Lithuania, London, Lithuania, London. Yes. That’s what it’s going to be. Back and forth.

**John:** I will be headed off on the Arlo Finch book tour, so again if you want to see me just go to johnaugust.com/arlofinch and you will see where I am if I’m coming to a city near you.

But we have a bunch of stuff that’s already recorded and it’s really good, so I don’t want to spoil it for you, but we’ve got some good stuff coming to you, and then we’ll be back live before you know it.

So, Craig, thank you for listening to it. It actually does mean a lot, because I know you don’t like to listen to podcasts, so thank you for listening to this one.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think maybe I actually do like listening to podcasts. Now I’m starting to get a little concerned because I’ve only listened to two. Well, no, three. I’ve listened to three. I’ve listened to Karina’s, and I like it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’ve listened to Slow Burn. I like it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I’ve listened to yours and I like it.

**John:** Oh damn, what if you’re a podcast person?

**Craig:** Yeah, but you know then I’ve listened to Koppelman’s and I don’t love it.

**John:** Oh, come on.

**Craig:** I know. I’m just kidding. I just like doing it because it’s so much fun.

**John:** Because you know it annoys him.

**Craig:** Because it makes him crazy.

**John:** So, guys, thank you all very, very much. Our producer is Megan McDonnell. She’s awesome. She also did Launch. Matthew Chilelli edited this episode. And rather than outro I will just leave you with a plea to please subscribe. Subscribe to Launch and pass it along to your friends if you dig it. Thanks.

Links:

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The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 334 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Our last few episodes have been about craft, but today we’re going to be talking about the profession of screenwriting, specifically what if it goes away and there are no more screenwriters.

Craig: Yay.

John: We’ll look at worst case scenarios and put odds on them happening. We’ll also answer listener questions about optioning books and working with actors.

Craig: Hmm, great. This is a good topic. I always like contemplating my own doom.

John: I find it very therapeutic and really kind of calming to think about the worst things because then everything else seems OK.

Craig: Yeah. Yeah. We just float. We all float down here.

John: Let’s do some follow up first. Luisa in Cliffside, New Jersey, but she was originally from Rio, Brazil, writes, “I really enjoyed your talk about suspense but I wanted to ask a question. Usually when I’m teaching or thinking about my own writing I think of suspense in terms of curiosity about something that will happen in the future. But when it’s curiosity about a past event that’s unclear or unknown, I consider it a mystery. So, a whodunit for example would cause a mystery. The expectation of discovering who did it might be suspenseful, but the whodunit itself, that would be a mystery.”

Craig: Well, Luisa, I think you’re correct. I don’t detect a question in there.

John: I guess that’s true.

Craig: But as a statement–

John: As an observation.

Craig: Yeah, as an observation you’re right on. I mean, it’s hard for anything in the past to be suspenseful because it’s happened. When you’re at a sporting event and you’re waiting to see how the last minute goes and who is going to win, that’s suspenseful.

John: Yeah.

Craig: If you’re watching television and the game has already happened, it’s probably a little less suspenseful.

John: Yeah. I’ll go back to the French. So, suspendre, it’s hanging above you. It’s literally hanging above. That’s what the word means. But if it’s already on the floor, then you can ask why did it fall on the floor. That is the mystery.

Craig: Yep. Agreed.

John: Do you want to take Aldo’s question?

Craig: I do. Aldo, “In Episode 324 during your How Would This Be a Movie segment you have a discussion centered in a NBC News Video about female firefighters from the California Department of Corrections. Craig states…”

This better be my actual words.

John: Check the transcripts.

Craig: “’I believe that by the time this episode airs this will have already been optioned to be developed into a movie.’ Can you please elaborate a bit about optioning? I guess if a writer would like to develop a screenplay based on the NBC News Video, using that as the source material, then the writer would option the story from NBC News or Matt Toder, the video producer for NBC News. But if a writer would like to develop a screenplay about female firefighters from the California Department of Corrections, is there really anything to be optioned?”

John, what do you think?

John: This is a fair question. So, let’s say you watch that video and say like, “Yes, yes, this is what I want to do,” and there is unique stuff about the women who are interviewed in this video, sort of how it’s all set up, that I feel like this is the piece of material that I want to option, you would then go to see who controls the rights to it. It could be NBC News. It could be Matt Toder if it was done as a freelance kind of thing and he retained some rights. But you would go and you would investigate to see who has the rights to this in order to exploit it in a different medium.

But, your instinct is correct. If you just want to make a movie about inmate female firefighters, you could just do your own research and do it by yourself without purchasing any underlying rights.

The reason why some producers might go and get that video, even if they didn’t need it, is it sort of puts a flag in that saying like I’m making this thing. Clear away from other people trying to make inmate female firefighter movies because I own the rights to this thing.

Craig: Yeah. Keep in mind, Aldo, that public facts are not ownable, so when people report on things that becomes part of the public record. Anything that any of the women said in that news story is public record. And you can use it. The fact that they are firefighters and that they’re in prison. Literally any information that this news report puts out on the air now belongs to the world.

However, in a case like this, if you wanted to be specific about it, let’s say you want to write a movie about the female firefighters but you actually also really want to use two of the actual women featured in that news story, I would actually argue you don’t want to go to NBC News because they don’t own anything that you don’t already have in a sense. Because they’ve put it out there in the world. It’s news.

What you want to do is get the life rights of those two women. Because the beauty of life rights is it gives you access to all of the information about their lives, all of the stories that aren’t in that news report, and that would be pretty useful I would think if you wanted to make a movie about those specific women.

John: I agree. An example of the kind of thing that would happen is like last month I was approached with the rights to this radio story. So it was a segment of a popular radio show and producers had optioned the rights to this episode. And it seems weird to option the rights to this episode, but when I listened to it it’s like, OK, I get why they’re trying to do that because it was a very unique story and how they were telling the story was really informing how you would do the movie version of it.

So, even though the reporting on people who existed in the real world and all the reporting I guess could be considered public record, it’s out there in the world, the way it was put together would be key to how you would do this as a movie, which is why they had gotten the rights to that story.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, there’s certain narrative things that do hold copyright. So, facts, available. Narrative structure, copyrightable. I mean, to an extent. To an extent.

John: But, you know, classically like Rolling Stone articles always used to get optioned to be made into movies. And sometimes they were made into movies. So like, Perfect, the aerobics movie, that was a Rolling Stone article I believe.

Craig: That’s right. Well, you know, one of the things about those articles is – for instance, Rolling Stone articles, and you’ll see this too with Vanity Fair articles, long form articles actually contain an enormous amount of research, quotes, many stories. So when you option that article it’s almost like you’re sweeping up a whole bunch of let’s call them sub-life rights. You know have the rights to all of the life that has been reported inside of it.

John: Yeah. And that can be very, very useful. Even if you’re going to fictionalize those characters or do other stuff, you are controlling a big block of stuff that could be useful material for your movie. And I will go back to the point that a lot of times producers are doing it just so they can try to claim an area of the world and say like, “No, no, I’m making this movie so everyone else back away.”

Craig: Yeah. That’s right.

John: All right, let’s get to our feature topic which was thought up about ten minutes ago, but I think it could be an interesting discussion. So, as we talk about people who are aspiring to be screenwriters or our lives as screenwriters, we talk about sort of my running for the WGA, we have a vested interest in the profession of screenwriting. It’s been very good to me and to Craig. I want to think about what if it all went away. And sort of what are the scenarios in which it could all go away.

This comes kind of from a business exercise which I did with my own company here making software where you pretend that like let’s say two years from now this project we’re working on or this whole company goes out of business, like basically it fails. If it were to fail, what are the things that would have happened that brought us to failure? And by thinking through those scenarios that brought you to failure, you might think about what things you should be doing now to make changes that won’t lead you there.

Craig: That’s smart.

John: So, let’s think about that in terms of screenwriting. If screenwriting is not a viable job, a professional job, five years, ten years, 20 years from now, what will have changed?

Craig: OK. All right. Well, I have some thoughts on that.

John: All right. And I guess we should think of some parameters first, because it’s very broad what I’m saying. I don’t know if we want to limit it to US screenwriting. I don’t know if we want to limit it to screenwriting that is able to pay you as a full-time job, so that your only job is to be a professional screenwriter. Are we talking about screenwriting only for big screens as we currently think about them? I don’t know that we need to nail these down, but as we talk through these scenarios we might want to actually discuss what kind of parameters we’re putting on them.

Craig: Well, what if we say we’re talking about screenwriting as we know it dying. So that means a general accepted range of income and a certain kind of method of employment. And it all goes away and is replaced by something else.

John: Yes. So, I mean, the biggest scenarios are scenarios in which the world is vastly changed because of something catastrophic. So the meteor hits us, there’s a zombie outbreak, there’s no film industry because making movies is such a low priority on the hierarchy of needs of things to do. So, you know, if it’s Walking Dead, you’re probably not making movies. Even Michael Bay is not making a movie during Walking Dead times.

Craig: Yeah, I’m pretty sure that at that point everyone can take a break and put their spec away, because, yeah, they have to run.

John: Yeah, I guess so. Even like LA people in coffee shops right now, they’re just not going to finish. They’re going to get stuck like last week’s guy who was at the end of the first act and really having a hard time getting to the second act. He’s going to be stuck there for a long time.

Craig: Feel like actually a lot of writers would be thrilled to see the meteor streaking towards us, just “OK, either I’m a working writer and I had a deadline and now it’s not a problem,” or “I’m an aspiring writer and I’m really tired of banging my head against the wall and I have to write yet another spec. Oh, thank god, here comes the meteor.”

John: You know, I will say in my own professional life there have been times where a movie has fallen apart and I’ve just been hooray. I’m just like so glad to be liberated from the process. Yes, you want to see movies get made, but also sometimes they’re just horrible and you’re just like, wow, to be done with it is great.

Craig: Oh. Yeah. For sure. You know that whole psychological thing of people being, what is it, fear of failure leads to fear of success and that’s for a good reason. Actually doing something and making a movie is just nothing but enormous risk. Emotional risk and personal risk. And it can all go wrong. And, man, think about how much easier it is to say I wrote a brilliant screenplay and Hollywood just couldn’t get it together. And so it’s just one of those screenplays that will never see the light of day, but it’s just one of those that people talk about.

So you’re forever a genius. You are a genius stuck in amber like a little bug. But once that movie is made, yeah, OK genius, here we go. [laughs]

John: When I see writers who are fixated on like the one project that never got made, or they’re still trying to get that one thing to have happen, I think they are kind of stuck in that loop where this is the thing, or I would have been a successful writer if it hadn’t been for this one producer screwing me over. They can happily sort of get trapped in those things. And I think sometimes they welcome the meteor because it provides a convenient excuse for why things never worked their way.

Craig: No question. You know, and I get it. I get it. It’s a really, really hard thing to do and sometimes we just need that little bit of dignity, because we feel ashamed if we quit. And so we’re looking for that dignity. And, yes, there are times, by the way, when this business is terribly unfair to people. We’ve been reading about a lot of them lately. And a wrong is done. A true wrong. Like people say I was screwed over and pushed out of the business. This does happen. We know that.

Now, no one is ever permanently pushed out of anything. You can fight your way back in one presumes. But it’s hard. And it’s harder than it needs to be. It’s unfair. It’s unjust. And I think in certain circumstances people, they get exhausted and they don’t want to and, all right, well, you know–

John: That’s OK, too.

Craig: Yeah, it is.

John: So, I think there’s a second scenario which is not a nuclear strike, or a meteor, or a plague, but like an economic collapse. And so I guess we should talk about like how big of an economic collapse would have to happen before the film industry goes under.

If you think back, granted the film industry was in its infancy during the Great Depression, but there were still movies. And even in those darkest times we were still able to make films. Craig, what’s your thought about how bad would finances have to be before we stopped making films?

Craig: Um, very bad. And kind of hard to imagine, because people’s desires for content seems inversely related to their general happiness. When things are bad, that’s the brilliance of the entertainment business. They seek entertainment and diversion more, and more, and more. And regardless of our complaints about the cable bill, or the Netflix subscription cost, or going to the movie theater, it’s still a fairly efficient and economical way for a family to entertain itself. And it is essentially what our culture is.

You know, particularly American culture is a culture of televised and filmed entertainment.

John: Yeah. So I guess I would wonder whether people would be willing to sort of substitute cheaper forms of entertainment, like television, like the stuff they can get for free, and like going out to the movies, even at a lower price point, because in an economic collapse I would assume that some prices would collapse down again, but you know, I do wonder at what point it gets so bad that people don’t go out to the movies.

Again, I get back to like going out to the movies is one of the cheapest sort of social activities we still have left in America. So, some version of that I got to feel is going to stick around.

Craig: I agree. There seems to be something in humans. They want to congregate. And even in desperate economic times they want to congregate together. And, yeah, in a total flat-out depression, movie ticket prices would go down and popcorn prices would go down. Of course. Everything adjusts.

Certainly I hope it doesn’t happen. And there’s no question that it would impact the movie business, but I don’t think it would destroy movies or television because we kind of have evidence that it doesn’t.

John: Yep. We do. All right, so let’s imagine that there are still movies, but maybe we’re not writing them. So let’s think about who is writing these movies. Obviously an easy choice would be writers who just not living in the US. We want to make our parameters for like you and me are no longer screenwriters. And the North Americans writing movies are no longer writing these.

You know, there’s people around the world who are writers and who are writing movies. Do they farm out? Do they ship those jobs overseas, Craig?

Craig: No. No more than they currently do. I mean, the truth is that any movie studio, any television entity can hire any writer they want anywhere in the world. They are free to do so. And they currently choose to generally speaking hire Americans and Brits.

John: Now, it’s worth noting that people in other countries, they have writers guilds, but they’re not the same as our Writers Guild. You will know better than me sort of what the requirements are on a US WGA signatory when they hire an international writer. Do they have to obey any of the same Writers Guild minimums/contractual things?

Craig: If they are employing that writer here. So, it actually is a question of geography. If they hire a French writer, but they bring the French writer here to the United States to be on set working and writing, then they have to be covered by a WGA agreement. But if they hire a French writer to write something in France, no. Not only do they not have to have them be WGA, I don’t think they can. I don’t think they’re allowed to be. I think that our contract only covers US employees because of federal labor law and all the rest of it.

So, it’s sort of defined by where you are, where you’re doing the job.

Similarly, if you go overseas and write and movie in France, you may not be employed by a WGA signatory because you’re writing it physically there. Obviously if you start a project here, and then you go over there, it’s covered. Once you start it, it’s covered. But, you know, I think that the – and I remember when we went on strike there was like rumors that studios were going to put writers on planes, stick them in hotels in London, and have them start writing movies, which didn’t happen. But I don’t think that globalization is necessarily the thing that’s going to undo us.

John: It’s true that China will become a bigger film market, an even bigger film market in the years ahead. And so I don’t know whether we’ve reached the tipping point where their box office is bigger than our box office. Right now, the movies that are made in China for China are not traveling to the US and to Europe the same way they are traveling throughout China and maybe Asia. But, some of those movies are going to break out. So there are going to be some movies that are entirely made in China, with Chinese money, with Chinese screenwriters that will become incredibly successful.

I don’t know that that’s going to replace our work in any meaningful way soon.

Craig: No. I don’t think so. China has become a large film producer. Yes, you’re right, most of the movies that they make locally are for China the way that most movies that India makes are for India. But, China has had some notable successes. I mean, you look at guys like Stephen Chow with Kung-Fu Hustle, and Ang Lee coming up with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. There are examples where these movies crossover and become global phenomena.

John: So, let me propose a new scenario. There are still movies, there are still things being shown on a big screen, yet the way they are shot – they’re essentially animation. So, animation takes over. What we used to think of as live action becomes predominantly animated. So essentially we see movies but they’re all basically Pixar movies and they’re photorealistic Pixar movies. That is work that is written but is not written by our kind of writers. I mean, they are in many cases – most cases animation writers are not covered by the same kinds of contracts.

Craig, is that a scenario you can imagine where there is a fight over what kinds of movies are coming on screen and whether those have to be written by us under our live action contracts or that they are really essentially animated films?

Craig: Yeah. That fight is coming no matter what. Now, I don’t think that we will ever be in a situation where moves are exclusively made in that manner because at some point we need new human beings to become fascinated with. Even if we leave the age of the movie star behind, we want to find people that get us excited again. Movies are endlessly renewing in this way.

If we switched over today to an all photorealistic/CGI model, well, I hope you like Tom Hanks because that’s all you’re getting from now until the end of time, right? So we need new. That said, yes, there are absolutely going to be situations where animation essentially has become akin to a totally controllable live action.

When that happens there’s going to be a fight. And the fight will have one of two outcomes I think. Either the WGA will somehow manage to establish that it actually has jurisdiction over photorealistic animation, which is an interesting argument and it’s possible. The other possibility is that the animation guild says, “No, it turns out that we do.” At which point if there’s a lot of that kind of work then suddenly you have a whole lot of WGA screenwriters becoming members of the animation guild. And at that point they become voting members of the animation guild and then you have a big fight on your hands.

It will get messy. If the companies are smart when they get to that crossroads, they will avoid a senseless battle. But they might also see an opportunity to crush us.

John: Yeah. It will be interesting to see what happens. I think we should explain that right now most of the photorealistic movies that you’ve seen have been written under a WGA contract. And some of that is just because of the filmmakers involved. Like Justin Marks’ Jungle Book. That was a WGA movie. It had a live action character in it. It had like a real human in it, which I think is part of the reason why it’s very safe to define, but I believe that the Lion King movie which is being done photorealistic is also a WGA movie.

I don’t know that to be true. But, we’re not the only union with a dog in this fight. There are actors who are doing these movies, at least right now, whose performance is being captured. And so those actors are working under a SAG contract.

Craig: Right.

John: And we are working under a WGA contract. The cameras are different. The filming mechanism is different. But it’s still very much like making a live action movie in that part of it.

Craig: Yeah. And I think that this is an area where all three guilds, the DGA, SAG, AFTRA, and the Writers Guild will join together. What choice do we have? We have to join together, when that comes, and say this is ours. We own this.

And, you know, I’m not going to say it’s going to be easy, but I don’t think that that form of filmmaking will ever completely replace standard filmmaking.

John: Standard filmmaking is comparatively really cheap. And so if you want to make a movie like Lady Bird, which is fantastic, you’re going to probably use real actors there. You don’t get a huge benefit out of using animation to do that.

Craig: No. It’s painstakingly slow. Just having someone blink takes either a blink or days.

John: Yes. So, last sort of big scenario I want to lay out there is what if screenplays are still written to some degree but they are not written by human beings? That some AI algorithm is generating screenplays and whether that is exactly what’s being filmed, or created through a computer process, or those scripts are being written and handed off to someone to polish and make them sound better. That a lot of the writing of screenplays gets handed off to AI.

So, I have a blog post that I still have not really ever published about it. I think you read an early version of it. I do wonder at what point AI will replace screenwriters. And so let’s chat about that.

Craig: Well, I don’t think it ever will. Again, for the same reason that even as we recycle a million things over and over with our, whatever they say, seven fundamental narratives, that we crave certain kinds of new. And we crave a certain kind of surprise and shock that is specifically crafted for surprise and shock. And I think that AI – I’m just guessing here – will never get better than mediocre. Mediocre would be amazing, by the way. I mean, the fact that a computer could be a mediocre writer would be kind of amazing.

I think that I could definitely see a future where AI or a couple of AIs are in a writer’s room. I could see them offering suggestions for storylines that might surprise you because they’re odd and they’re AI and they can do it really quickly. I can also see a situation where people would be like, “All right, we have to solve this problem. We need them to be here, but they’re over here, so we need to solve that logic problem. Hey, you know, Jim-bot, any ideas?” Well, and then, you know, by scanning through a billion possibilities Jim-bot offers you three or four and you’re like, “Oh, one of those is pretty good, but let’s now humanize it.” I could see that. Yeah.

John: I could see that as well. I think I am a little bit more, I don’t know if it’s optimistic or pessimistic, that AI algorithms and other sort of developments will be able to through iteration and just technologies we don’t really fully understand yet, sort of the black boxes that are able to do these amazing things, is going to come up with some things that are really fascinating. And so there will be some work that is created by an AI. It will be a movie that will come out and then right as it is coming out, or right after it premieres at Sundance it will be revealed like, “Oh, actually a computer wrote this.” And that will be part of the story behind it. And that will be an interesting tipping point the degree to which AI-assisted or AI-influenced movies are a thing that is existing in our world and displaces some of us fleshy writers doing our jobs.

I think the other stronger possibility is that these AIs will create something that is just wholly new. That isn’t like what you or I would do, but is fascinating because it’s just so different.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And I think that is actually a bigger danger in a way to the future of screenwriting and the future of movies is they’ll come up with something that is just really incredible, that is immersive and just mind-blowing so that you don’t want to go to the movies because what you can experience is so much cooler than movies that why would you go to the movies.

Craig: It’s possible. I also think that if AI comes up with something really cool like that, people will immediately be trying to make money off of it by doing their own versions of it. I also wonder sometimes, just as a purely theoretical question, if it’s impossible ultimately for humans to create a true human mimicking AI because we don’t have access to our own brains. We only have access to the function of our brains, if that makes sense.

John: Yes.

Craig: So there is always that weird separation between what we teach it to do and what’s actually working to create the experience of our consciousness and all the rest of it. So I wonder if there’s just a fly in the ointment there that can never be overcome and that’s the thing that keeps AI from becoming us. It’s like asking a microscope to look at itself. It just doesn’t work.

We’ll see. Either way – listen – either way, you and I die.

John: Yes. One of the guarantees here. Well, actually I’m not going to take that as a guarantee. I think if I were ten years, maybe 20 years younger there’s a stronger possibility that I would not die. That essentially who I consider to be myself might continue on in some virtual form. I’m not so optimistic that’s going to happen in my lifetime, but for daughter, I think there’s a good chance that a lot of who she is would not die when her body dies.

Craig: [sighs] Whoa.

John: Whoa. How are you feeling about that, Craig? Would you – given the choice, would you want your consciousness to live on after your body has ceased to function?

Craig: No question. I have a lot of puzzling to do.

John: Yeah. There’s so many crossword puzzles. And honestly with better hardware you could just do more, you could do more at once. It would be amazing.

Craig: Fun. Yeah. It’s just fun.

John: So, last scenario I want to raise is, you know, in some ways one of the most realistic of the scenarios, but I’m curious what you think about it, the WGA ceases to exist for some reason and we can talk about some of the reasons why. It could be this animation sort of surpasses us. Some sort of huge change in how labor law works in the US.

Craig: Collusion with Russia? Something like that.

John: Yes. Just basically the nature that the WGA is a monopoly that is negotiating with oligopolies. And basically oligopolies become so powerful that the WGA monopoly is no longer enough to sort of stop it. What does screenwriting look like if the WGA goes away?

Craig: Terrible. One thing we can count on with our friends at the companies is a certain inescapable short-sidedness, like greedy children let loose in a candy store. They will gorge themselves until they puke and they will do the same with writing. If they can, they will exploit writers and content creators to the extent that nobody wants to do it anymore. They will. It’s just inevitable.

When you look at – I think this is all business in general. When it is unrestrained you get these busts and booms. It’s that cycle. They can’t help it. So, from a long-term point of view you’d say we have to treat these people well or else they’ll leave and not be here and then we’ll be out of product. And that’s true. But right now I personally can get a promotion if I deliver product at half the price. And so it begins.

John: It’s the creative version of the tragedy of the commons, where it benefits each individual person to be greedy and not think about the future, but by not thinking about the future they create this problem.

Craig: It’s also true for us. As writers, we’re humans. If you remove our commons, right, which is the sort of enforced commons of our union, and you just send us out into the workplace where there’s 20 jobs this year for four million people, it’s a race to the bottom. It’s just a very, very fast race to the bottom. And people will screw each other over to get whatever work they can just thinking, “Well look, I understand this is going to damage my profession and it’s going to make it harder for other people, including me, to get a decent living, but right now I need to pay my rent, so yes, I’ll work for minimum wage.” Well, there you go. It’s over.

John: Yesterday I heard a term I had never heard before, then it was described to me and I was horrified. Have you heard the term “virtual roundtable?”

Craig: God no.

John: So, the writer was describing it to me. And basically they said like, “We’re going to put together a virtual roundtable on this project.” What it means is you’re not going to be physically in the same room with the other writers. Basically we’re sending out the script to a bunch of writers and we’re asking each of them to do a punch-up on it. And then we’ll sort of assemble what people did. Which is troubling on some levels, but the amount of money they were paying for that virtual roundtable for basically a free comedy polish on the whole thing was like about $2,000.

Craig: That is not acceptable for our contract. That is a violation of the MBA. And I hope that you referred this to our legal department. It is a violation.

John: It is a giant violation. And by making up that term and sort of combining it with a thing which is a real thing, which is a roundtable, it makes it seem like it’s legit, but it’s not legit.

Craig: I have already made an argument, as you probably are aware, to our general counsel at the Writers Guild that the way studios currently do non-virtual roundtables but actual in person roundtables is a violation of the MBA and that we have all been systematically underpaid for those for like decades. And now they’re figuring out a way to make it even worse.

John: Yeah. So it’s on the agenda, Craig. You will hear more about this in the months ahead. I can’t tell you to relax. It’s not possible for Craig to relax. But know that that is a thing that will be – it’s on that agenda.

Craig: I mean, my god.

John: My god. Let’s go back through our worst case scenarios and try to apply a percentage to each of them. So let’s go back to a world ending or sort of civilization destroying instant that makes it so we’re no longer screenwriters.

Craig: Well, a couple years ago I would have said 0.001%, but now I’m going to put it at 2%. [laughs]

John: Yeah, I’m between 2% and 5% of some sort of giant catastrophe. An economic collapse that makes it impossible to make movies?

Craig: That makes it impossible to make movies? I mean, we’re due for a nice, big sock in the jaw, but I would say that’s pretty low. I’m going to go with 5%.

John: Yeah. I’m going to go even a little bit lower because I feel like the economic collapse would have to be so massive.

Craig: You’re right.

John: I think a plague is more likely than the kind of economic collapse that stops all movies.

Craig: I think you’re right. I’ll knock that down to a percent. A point.

John: Movies are written, but they’re written by international screenwriters?

Craig: No. Zero percent.

John: I’m going to give it still more like the 5%. I think there might be some way in which that happens. AI writes our movies?

Craig: 1%. Very low. Very low numbers.

John: That’s low. I would say that AI takes a certain chunk out of the screenwriter’s life, or basically the number of screenwriters becomes lessened because of it.

Craig: OK, well that’s different. Then I would go up to – and of course, what’s our timeframe for that?

John: Let’s say in 20 years.

Craig: Oh, 20 years? Yeah, 1%.

John: Something else replaces movies. Basically we stop making movies because something else is cooler.

Craig: Question mark percent. I mean, because I don’t know what – that could be anything really.

John: Yeah. I’m basically describing magic.

Craig: Right.

John: The WGA falls apart. The WGA ceases to exist?

Craig: Sadly, that is one of the more likely scenarios. It is not a likely scenario, but I would put that at 4%.

John: I think that’s about right. In 20 years, I think I would be nervous that it would happen. I might even go a little bit higher because I can imagine if organized labor really goes under just even greater attack, I could see that falling apart.

Craig: Yep.

John: All these percentages are still pretty low. I think if you’re an aspiring writer listening to this podcast, we’re not telling you to give up. I think you should still try to do it.

Craig: Yeah. Generally speaking, your problem isn’t any of the things we’ve said. Your problem is the fact that there are fewer of these jobs than there are in the NFL.

John: Indeed. A person with a problem is Dean in Sydney, Australia.

Craig: Segue Man.

John: He sent in his question as an audio clip, so let’s take a listen.

Dean: My question is actors. Do you ever find that actors come up to you and go, “Hey, so what’s that about? Help me out with that.” If so, awesome. If not, why not? And how do you approach actors as a writer?

John: So, Craig, how do you approach an actor as a writer? And I take it, yes, actors do sometimes come up. Sometimes you have things you would like to say to an actor. What is the dance there?

Craig: Well, in television it’s no dance, right? So, you’re running your show, you’re in charge, you sit and you talk to the actors all the time. And that’s fine. You know, you want to respect a certain relationship between the director and the actor so that while they are actually shooting there is a – we’ll call it a simplification of voices. Because acting is hard enough. When you have two different people telling you two different things on top of each other, it can be confusing. Actors are trained to respond to one person giving them a point of view about their performance.

And, you know, then at times there may be a pause and a discussion and that’s different.

Now, in features, it should work the way I just said it works in television. It doesn’t. In part because directors have created a – I would just argue an artificial culture of dominance over performance and talking to actors.

There are times when I think the actors are desperate to talk to the writers, and vice versa, but there is this strange religious thing that you’re not allowed to, and it’s offensive, and the director will lose their minds, and ban you from the set because how dare you. Which really speaks to how remarkably insecure some directors are. Again, there is a great reason to filter all immediate input about a performance through the director to keep things clear and understandable for actors. But aside from the performance, when we’re talking about in between days and we’re talking about before shooting and rehearsals and all that, the writer wrote it. It makes sense for the writer and the actor to have a discussion about what it means.

But in features, directors feel this need to be the sole god of interpretation, which is why I think a lot of movies are just stinky.

John: Yeah. I agree with you that it should be different in features than it is. I think you have to be mindful of just the way it is and find the best ways to influence the process.

So, this last year as we were doing Big Fish in London, we started rehearsals and one of the things that was the best part of the process for me is we pulled the actors aside in little small rooms and I sit with me, and the actors, and the director, and we’d read through the scenes and we’d talk about them and then we’d read through them again. And that was really my chance to influence what they were doing. Because it was in front of the director, but it was really about the text. And we could really focus on what the intentions were, what some of the options and choices were. We could really look at that. And after that process, if actors came back with a question we could refer back to that previous meeting where we all sat down and it was clear that these are the cool things we can all talk about and it was good.

Then when we’re actually in the room rehearsing, if I had something I needed to change about an actor’s performance, I would go through the director so it was clear that like this is something I want to see, but I’m not trying to do his job, and I’m not trying to insert myself.

Occasionally on movies I’ve had that same experience. On Go, we would sit in little small rooms and just talk through stuff and figure out how we were doing things. And on that movie I ended up becoming incredibly involved in sort of performance because Doug is literally holding the camera on his shoulder and so we’d shoot something and if I needed to change something, or if I saw something happening in front of the camera, I would have to tell Doug who was standing there right with the actors with the camera on his shoulder. So I would tell Doug and Doug would say, “Oh yeah, yeah, what he said.” And then we’d keep going.

That’s ideal and it’s really rare. Most cases when I see something and I need to give a note, it’s this weird dance of suggesting to the director and then hoping that he or she passes that note along to the actor.

Craig: Exactly. And, you know, I’ve spent a lot of time on sets and by and large I’ve had great relationships with directors. And that’s how I do it. I’m there at the monitor and I choose my points. There’s a certain talent to it, Dean, and, well, wrong word. It’s not a talent. There is a craft to it that you can learn. So, you learn, and here, I’ll make it easy for everybody listening. You can skip a lot of mistakes just like this.

The first take or two, let the director just direct. Eight times out of ten the thing that you see, they see too. When you’re directing an actor you are building a performance a lot of the time. So, you get something and then you have a bunch of things in your head. OK, I need that to go faster. They’re saying this word wrong. They don’t understand what that line means. And I need a pause here and here. And then I need them to look and respond without saying a word. That’s a lot.

You cannot tell – some actors you actually tell all that too and they’re like machines. Most you can’t. Most you’re going to go, “Great, awesome. Let’s do it again. Let’s just go a little faster. We’re feeling it. We’re getting into it, right.”

The director has the plan. A lot of times writers who are new to sets sit there and go, “Oh, no, no that’s not all right. That was terrible.” And it was. But calm down. Because “that was terrible” is not great direction. So give the director a chance. Then, when you notice that the director seems to have locked in on a thing and you are still concerned about something, it’s OK at that point to kind of saddle up and go, “Here’s one thing to think about. What if…or do you think that…?” And they’ll go, “Oh, OK.”

Now, sometimes they’ll say, “No, no, no.” Sometimes they’ll be annoyed that you’re talking to them. Sometimes they’ll be, “Oh yeah, good idea.” You never know what you’re going to get. Directing is hard. And then one thing I’ve learned over time is to not take the director’s mood particularly personally. Because they have to swallow all of their misery, anger, frustration, and impatience so as to not show it to the actors. Because actors will presume it’s about them and then it’s messing up their performance.

So everybody else gets the worst of them. Right? And that’s, you know, and I get that. But you figure out a way to kind of deal with them, just as they’re figuring out a way to deal with the actors. And now everyone is taking care of themselves, but you’ve given the director a chance. And then you should be OK. Especially, by the way, if your comments are actually helpful.

You make four or five annoying, stupid suggestions in a row, no one is going to listen to you.

John: Absolutely. Acting is hard. Directing is hard. And you as the writer have this ideal performance in your head, because you wrote the scene. So you saw it a certain way in your head and a lot of the process as you’re watching it is like, OK, this is different than what I saw, but does this accomplish the same things? If it doesn’t, then yes, you speak up. And you speak up after they’ve had a little chance to get into it.

If you do notice that words are being messed up or a thing I sometimes notice is they’ve changed the tense on a verb and I know that it’s not going to cut right with the other thing. They’ve locked into a bad pattern. This is your chance to talk to the script supervisor. So the scripty is there to remind actors what the actual lines are and to sort of get them back on track with that. And she can be your incredible ally in getting the words that should actually be there there.

Again, don’t mess with it if it’s just slightly different words and doesn’t really matter. But if it does matter, or if it’s really changing the meaning, or changing an important plot point, yes, you need to step up there.

I remember on my first movie, on Go, there was a point where I went off to the restrooms, but I still on my comm text — on my headphones. And I heard the scene being performed. And I realized like, oh shit, they’ve changed the tenses here. When they try to turn it around to shoot the other side of that it is not going to match at all. So I scrambled back in there and got them to take one more take with the actual right proper verbs there, because otherwise I just knew we were going to be in the editing room and we were going to be cutting around this thing that they shouldn’t have had to cut around.

Craig: Yeah. Or looping in a line, which nobody ever wants to do. I mean, we have – this is why directors frustrate me. They make it hard for us to do our job on the set. And they should make it easy for us to do our job. I understand their fear and concern about writers essentially wrestling away everyone’s job and the difficult task of making something to hold it to some imaginary movie in their heads. But most of us are smart enough to know that’s not really what we do. And just let us help because we’re actually very good at understanding how our scripts work.

John: All right. Do you want to take Matthew’s question?

Craig: Sure. We’ve got Matthew here. He says, “I’m an author of four novels, first with Doubleday, and now Macmillan, and I have a couple more on the way in 2018. All four of my published works are currently optioned for film by a variety of entities – production companies, producers, and a writer. My first novel has been optioned at least four times by four different entities, but to date nothing has happened. Scripts have been written. Well-known actors and directors have been attached at various times. I get paid a small but not insignificant amount of money every one to two years as the options are renewed or expired and then get picked up by someone else. But I’m wondering: will this ever happen? Can you give me some insight from your side of the table? How often does an optioned novel end up on the big screen? Why is this process so fraught and uncertain?”

That’s a great question, Matthew.

“My agent says to just keep writing my books, which I have. And actually written a couple screenplays now for my film agent. But I’ve gotten to the point that I just tell my friends I’ve stopped thinking about the possibility of a movie a long time ago.”

Oh, that’s a tale of woe, John. What do you think?

John: It’s not really a tale of woe. It’s a tale of reality. And I think Matthew has hit on it. Most books that get optioned don’t get made into movies. Most scripts that get written don’t get made into movies. And when I see authors being so excited about the film rights sold, or it’s going to be a movie, I’m happy for them, but I also want to pull them aside and let them know that like if it gets made into a movie, that’s winning the lottery. That so rarely happens.

Because I’m usually the person who gets sent these kinds of books. And I’ll read the book and say like, “Yes, this is a great book. I just don’t see this actually happening as a movie in our environment.” And I’ll be honest with the producers about that.

But other times, like Big Fish, it happens. And so you just don’t know. And you have so little control over it, Matthew. That’s the remarkable thing. As the author you control everything. And every word and every comma. Movies seem like they’re made by magic. Like other people just go off and run and 200 people are off making your movie. Except most times they don’t get made. They get optioned, they pay someone to write a script. That script sits on a shelf and it doesn’t happen.

Craig: Yeah I actually think you’ve come up with the best possible method here, Matthew, which is to stop thinking about the possibility of a movie, because this is our world, too. I mean, we’re the ones who get hired to write these things. And I understand from a logical point of view you say, listen, you’ve paid me money to adapt this into a movie. Adapt it into a movie! Why would you pay me money to not adapt it into a movie?

Well, there is an appetite for material. And that appetite is greatest when the costs are the lowest. And then it narrows as the potential costs become higher. So, the option amount, there’s a low barrier of entry there. That’s a dollar and a dream. It’s a lottery ticket, right?

OK, I’m not suggesting that you optioned your books for a dollar, of course, but I’m saying – let’s say you’ve optioned your book for $500,000. Well, for a studio it’s actually not that much. So now the sky is the limit. Let’s see who we can get with this great book. Let’s see if we can get the big star, the big director, the big writer. And then, you know, maybe you do get one of those things. And then you start to try.

And you get a script. And you get a director. And you get a producer. But at some point when you’re really close, someone is going to come up with a budget. Well, now the decision is not $500,000, or a million or two for a writer. The decision is $50 million, $80 million. Really it’s more like $150 million because of marketing and all the rest. This is the problem. And so you should stop thinking about it. You should take the money, spend that money, save that money, do with it what you will. Don’t think about it. This is the proverbial watched pot. Turn away and it will either boil or not.

John: The other thing you have to keep in mind is that even if the movie gets made, that may not be a good thing. In the process of doing Arlo Finch, I got to talk to a lot of authors whose books were optioned and in some cases were made. And it wasn’t always a great experience. In some cases the movies were really bad. And so it’s a frustrating experience as an author to have made something that you truly love but there’s another version out there that you don’t love. And that is a strange thing that can happen to you as well.

So, I don’t have any advice for Matthew other than to I guess be happy that in the movies not getting made at least not a bad version is out there of something that he worked on. It would be so incredibly dispiriting to see these characters you love and this world you’ve built made into something that does not resemble at all your hopes and your ambitions. That’s not good for anybody.

Craig: Yeah. Yeah. Always look on the bright side there, Matthew.

John: All right. Last question is Scott from Scotland.

Craig: Oh, of course.

John: Of course. He asks, “Is it OK to use Twitter and so on as part of a plot? Or are there circumstances where it’s necessary to create a fictional brand that mimics an actual existing site?”

Craig: Well, like always, Scott, it depends on what you’re doing. You can certainly mention Twitter casually and a character can say I tweeted about it, and I saw it on Twitter, and so forth. If you want to show a screen with Twitter on it, you’re going to have to deal with Twitter. Because now you’re using their design and their logo and their technology as part of your movie. By and large what happens in production is either the platform is so essential to the concept of the movie that the studio makes a deal and works it out so that they can actually use that. Or they come up with their own fake version of it.

John: The fake version is always terrible. I hate the fake version.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And I will say that I used to work in clearance at Universal so when you saw things that were trademarks on screen, I was the person who had to call and get the legal clearance to show that thing on screen. I had to get the clearances for Reality Bites a zillion years ago.

A lot of places now I think are just saying kind of screw it. It’s the real world. We’re not going to worry so much about clearing all that stuff. I don’t know what has informed them that they feel like that’s a choice they can make. But I like that they make it. Movies don’t feel real to me. I’m aware that I’m watching a movie when I see a fake version of Twitter or Facebook or anything else in there.

I understand why it still happens, but it always annoys me when I see it.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, there are ways to create things that are close enough that you don’t even notice that they’re not the real thing. You know, you want to show a Facebook page. You can design a page that looks a whole lot like Facebook, but it’s slightly different, and just don’t show the top of it where the logo would be. Now it looks like Facebook and everybody gets it. So, there are all sorts of cheap knockoff things like that.

By and large though, it’s a risky thing to write a movie like that. I mean, you can say, “Look, we’re writing a script. It’s called Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.” Well, you’re going to need White Castle. [laughs] You’re going to need them to play ball. There is now way around it, right? Otherwise it’s going to be Harold and Kumar Go to Burger Prince, and that’s not going to be any good.

But, Scott from Scotland, good news, it doesn’t really matter right now. I’m guessing that you are just trying to get some attention and some love for the work you’re doing, so write the movie you want to write. You’re free here. You are unfettered. John and I have to deal with this crap all day long. You don’t. So, why? Why burden yourself with it? Just presume that if somebody falls in love with this script, they will let you know how to work around it. And if truly the whole thing is like, oh my god, if only we could do this but we can’t, well, they’ll have other work for you. That’s just the way it goes.

John: So this is all a matter of public record. You can Google this. But I originally set up the rights to RJ Palacio’s book Wonder. And I loved her book and as we were pitching at places and describing it, one of the things which was always in the back of my mind is, “Wow, when I actually get around to adapting this we’re going to have to talk about some of the things that are in the book and are fine in the book but are going to be real challenges when we put them on screen, such as Star Wars.” Chewbacca is in it. There’s a lot of Star Wars throughout the whole thing.

Craig: Right.

John: There’s Minecraft in it. They perform scenes from the play Our Town. There was just a lot of stuff in there that like, man, that is going to be a complicated clearance situation and we should be thinking about alts.

I did not end up writing that movie for other reasons. But I finally saw the movie and they cleared all of it. They used Star Wars. They used Our Town. There’s specific music things that are in there that I would have thought would have been challenging to clear, but they did it because they felt it was important enough to make it be in the movie. I have no idea what the deals were behind that, but they were able to make it happen.

Craig: Then you also have things like the – there’s a song You’re Making Things Up Again, Arnold in Book of Mormon. And in that you’ll see he’s referencing Yoda, Darth Vader, characters from Lord of the Rings. And they just do generic versions of it. So it’s sort of Yoda, but it’s not Yoda. And this way they don’t have to pay anybody. But we all get it. We all get the joke, you know.

John: And because they’re living in a world of parody and sort of heightened things it’s much easier for that to play there.

Craig: Correct.

John: But like fake Chewbacca for Wonder would have been really, really weird.

Craig: That would have not – fake Chewbacca in general, it’s like who can even tell it’s Chewbacca at that point?

John: I know. Then it’s just a rug.

Craig: It’s just a rug. It’s a bear.

John: It’s a bear with a haircut.

Craig: Yeah. Bear with a haircut.

John: All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is the USS Callister episode of Black Mirror from the new season of Black Mirror. It’s written by Charlie Brooker and William Bridges. I thought it was terrific. And I think Black Mirror is a great series anyway, but what I really liked about this episode and why I think it’s so useful for writers to take a look at it is it does very interesting things with our assumptions about who is the protagonist and who is the villain. You know, characters who you think like, oh, is that a love interest or a principal character? There are characters quite early on that you’re like that’s going to be the bad guy of this one-hour of entertainment, and you are surprised by sort of how stuff plays out.

So, I just thought it was a really terrific episode, but also a really great exercise in understanding audience’s expectations, manipulating them, and also sort of trusting that they’ll go with you. And that you can have characters do some really surprising things if you’ve set the groundwork of your world really well.

Craig: Yeah. That’s the – I think that’s part of the freedom of the format of television. There’s an understanding like you can pause, you can get up, you can walk around, you can come back. So we’ve all lowered the stakes of “Oh my god this must be awesome every second and I must be comfortable every second.” Movies are more and more designed to have like, you know the way like big potato chip companies obsess over mouth feel and stuff like that.

Movies are not designed to just like, ah, no objections ever. Television kind of doesn’t care if you’re there or not, which I love.

John: Which can be great. Gone Girl is another example of a movie that is so confidently made that they’re able to do things about the hero/villain relationship that is surprising and different. So, I always want to sort of single out and celebrate the ones that take those big swings and connect.

Craig: I hear that. Hear that, yo.

All right, so my One Cool Thing this week is a human being by the name of Megan Ganz. She is writer who worked on Community, Modern Family, It’s Always Sunny, Last Man on Earth. That’s a whole lot of funny in one resume.

But why she is my One Cool Thing this week is because she spoke out publicly about a difficult time she had working on Community with Dan Harmon, the creator/showrunner of that show. And essentially implied that he had created a sexually hostile environment. That she had experienced harassment by him and it was very upsetting and difficult for her.

And what ensued interestingly enough was this very long, very heartfelt apology from Dan Harmon. But that’s I think where a lot of people stop. I think people go, wow, Dan Harmon, good job for apologizing.

But, you know, my whole thing is a good apology just gets you back to zero. Right? I mean, you’ve gone negative by doing a bad thing. The perfect apology, the best apology ever possible just gets you back to zero. Apologies in and of themselves are not good works.

But here is what is a good work. Megan Ganz, after listening to his apology, forgave him. And I thought that was just remarkable. You know, he did a bad thing. He did a series of bad things. And in fact by her talking about it, I also learned more about how pernicious this kind of thing is. Because we tend to think of it as the simplest example. Someone grabs your butt. They grab a boob. They say a weird thing to you. They show you their whatever. And it’s, blech. But actually there’s this other kind of just relentless, creepy kind of thing that’s like a slow drip. And it turns sour. And it crosses the line into professional stuff. And you become mistreated and you doubt yourself. And the whole thing is just – it was fascinating to hear how it all went down and it was very upsetting. And all the more reason that I thought her forgiveness of him, which she earned, and she made a decision about, was impressive. And I think forgiving somebody on your own terms is a sign of character.

Doesn’t mean that you have to every time. But I was really impressed. I thought that she handled herself bravely to start with and bravely to finish with. And so I want to concentrate on her and say well done Megan Ganz. You have led by example. I think you’re great.

John: Yeah. I’ve followed Megan on Twitter for a long time. I don’t think I’ve ever met her in real life. And I didn’t know any of this backstory. But knowing this backstory makes me appreciate her very, very funny tweets in a whole new light. So, I agree with you. I think we need to commend what she was able to do here.

Craig: Yeah. Really, really very uplifting. It moved me. It really did.

John: Great. Our show is produced by our own Megan, Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Andrew Roninson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send questions like the ones we answered today.

On Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

You can find us on Facebook or Apple Podcasts or pretty much anywhere you type the word Scriptnotes you’ll find some version of us there. Wherever you find us, leave us a review. Leave us a comment. It helps other people find us.

You can find all of the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net. It’s $2 a month. We also have USB drives where you can get the first 300 episodes. In both places you’ll find all of the bonus episodes as well where we do extra things that were never in the main feed.

You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcript. It goes up within the week usually of an episode coming out.

Craig, thank you for a fun episode.

Craig: Thank you, John.

John: I hope we didn’t destroy screenwriting in talking about it.

Craig: Oh, that would be kind of cool.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Sort of like opening the Schrödinger’s cat box. Oh, you killed it.

John: I killed it.

Craig: I knew you would.

Links:

• Wonder, adapted from RJ Palacio’s book, references many brands. So does “Making Things Up Again” from The Book of Mormon.
• The USS Callister episode of Black Mirror written by Charlie Brooker & William Bridges
• Megan Ganz
• The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!
• The USB drives!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Find past episodes
• Outro by Andy Roninson (send us yours!)

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/the-end-of-the-beginning).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 333 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re going to be taking a listener question about getting through the first act to look at the bigger issues of how we get our scripts on the right track to begin with. Then we’ll be looking at the role of writing and writers in creating VR, AR, and other immersive experiences.

Craig, you are in Seattle. How is that as an immersive experience?

**Craig:** Seattle is a great city. I really like it up here. It is verdant, as we like to say. It’s got that kind of – well, I’d guess you’d say a big city vibe but little city kind of vibe at the same time. It reminds me a little bit in that way of Boston or San Francisco. You kind of have the best of both worlds. Super educated. Very progressive town. Honestly, it just feels like a lot of LA to me, except colder, wetter. The time is the same. You know, you don’t have the time change problem.

So, it’s nice. We’re up here just for a few days. My son is taking a look at some potential colleges and things like that. And, you know, just chilling.

**John:** Cool. We are trying to figure out a date for us to come up to see Seattle and talk to screenwriters up there. Maybe this summer? It’s all really depending on really kind of Craig, because Craig’s schedule is crazy, because he’s making a giant TV show for HBO.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But we’d love to come up there. So if we have dates, we will share them as soon as we know.

**Craig:** As soon as we know.

**John:** Last week you were absolutely correct. You diagnosed me over the air with a sinus infection. That is in fact correct.

**Craig:** Nailed it.

**John:** I’m on my heavy antibiotics. I feel much better. I don’t really sound better, but people will suffer through my nasally voice for one more week hopefully and then I’ll be better.

**Craig:** And what did they lob at you?

**John:** It is not a Z-Pack because it had been going on long enough that they put me on a different antibiotic. I also have some Mucinex, I have two different kinds of Mucinex to take.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** My saline nasal spray. I have other stuff for kind of emergencies. But I really do feel quite a bit better. I was able to fly yesterday without my ears exploding, so I was very happy with the progress so far.

**Craig:** It’s amazing how quickly the antibiotics will turn around an infection like that. And let’s just all pray that we don’t ultimately succumb to bacteria that don’t care about our antibiotics. It’s a real thing. Because, you know, the problem with sinus infections, there are very few blood vessels running through there, so you have to actually bomb your system with a pretty sizable amount of antibiotics just to reach those little nooks and crannies up there. It’s atrocious.

And, also, the clearest evidence we have, I believe, that there is no intelligent design of human beings, the sinuses are absurd. They’re so dumb.

**John:** Yeah. Hopefully they’ll be restored to full functionality soon enough and we’ll be good. My question is would our voices be the same? Our voices would not be the same without our sinuses. So we have to credit some of our wonderful resonant human voices to the bizarre structure of our sinuses.

**Craig:** I don’t know. I guess a little bit. But, I mean, you’ve got a big hole that runs from your nose down to the back of your throat. That’s why we can breathe through our nose. But the sinuses that are in our cheeks and our foreheads, I don’t know if they’re doing that much for resonance. But, yeah, I’ll give you this. Maybe we wouldn’t have – maybe we wouldn’t have Barbra without the sinuses.

**John:** Yep. All right, let’s do some follow-up. Man, this is going back so, so far. Why don’t you try Richard’s question here.

**Craig:** OK. This is from Richard. “I’m writing as a long-time listener with an update to a question I asked all the way back in Episode 3. That’s right, not a typo, Episode 3 from 2011. How simple life seemed back then, right?” An aside, yes. Right. It did.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It did. Oh, 2011, how we miss you. Richard goes on, “Back then I asked as a prospective parent what it’s like raising a child while trying to break in as a screenwriter. You both gave some great perspective about how it’s tough but doable. Well, I wanted to let you know that last year, 2017, I was admitted into the WGA having written two freelance episodes of TV, but better yet my daughter turned five.” Awesome.

“Somehow, through perseverance, discipline, luck, moxie, and a very, very patient wife I was able to become a writer and a parent in these past six years. I’m now preparing to go out for staffing season this year and transition to a fulltime TV writer. I find you both inspirations as writers and people. Your podcast has given me an education and a sense of hope.”

Holy cajole, thank you, Richard.

**John:** That’s very nice. What a lovely way to start 2018 with a follow-up from six years ago. So, congratulations on being a parent. Congratulations on being a paid writer, a working writer who is now a member of the WGA.

Some clarification for people who don’t know, freelance episodes of TV series are – a lot of US TV shows are written by staff. And so the staff is assembled and they put together the whole season of television. There are also freelance episodes. And there are requirements that change and it’s all complicated, but some episodes of network TV shows are intended to be farmed out to somebody who is not a member of the staff, or for other reasons they’ll bring on an outside person to write an episode of a TV series. That sounds like what happened to Richard and that’s fantastic for Richard.

So something else he wrote attracted the attention of the showrunner, or other decision maker there, and said like, “You know what, let’s give that guy a script.” And Richard apparently did well enough to do it twice last season and now he is a paid writer writing under a WGA contract, which is fantastic.

**Craig:** That is. It used to be, I think, a lot of these freelance jobs existed. As I recall friends telling me, they sort of disappeared, but not completely. And so it’s good to see that Richard got that. And really cool to see that, Richard, our podcast is older than your child. I like that.

**John:** Yeah. It’s nice to see.

**Craig:** You know, your kid will always be younger than our show. Thanks for listening for all this time and we’re glad we have helped.

John, we’ve got some more follow-up from Laurie.

**John:** Laurie from Episode 331 writes, “Why are you so adamantly against work-for-hire? Are you saying that non-WGA screenwriters should turn down paid ghostwriting gigs? If the price is right, and the client insists on such terms, that is the alternative is no work and no money, what’s the downside for the writer?”

Craig, what is the downside?

**Craig:** Well, I don’t think, Laurie, that we’re adamantly against work-for-hire in the essence of it, because John and I both work in that capacity all day long, work-for-hire for studios.

What we’re concerned about, and yes, we are saying non-WGA screenwriters should turn down paid ghostwriting gigs. What we’re concerned about and what the downside is is not the downside for you individually in the moment, although there is one, but rather the collective downside for all of us. Because you’re essentially pushing down the nature of the work around us. Anytime somebody shows up and works for less than minimum wage, for instance, they are harming all minimum wage workers. I think we can all agree on that.

Well, in our business of professional television and movie writing, we have minimum wages. We also have some other protections that are minimum protections like our credit protections. When other people show up and work for less and under conditions where they don’t get credit, or paid properly for their work, or residuals, they essentially put pressure on the rest of the world. Not only do they make their lives worse in that moment, but they make other people’s lives worse.

Yes, in that moment you will get paid as opposed to not being paid, possibly, although I would argue you could take a stand. But what are you essentially doing is mortgaging your future to make a little bit of money right now. And you’re also harming everybody else’s.

So, the downside is not so much for the writer. The downside is for writers. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch, Laurie, to say that writers who are hired with money to write things should be able to write, if they so choose, under their own name. They should receive credit for the work they do and they should be compensated fairly. To me, that is not being adamantly against something, it is being reasonably for something.

**John:** Absolutely. So work-for-hire is common across all industries. So it’s not just writers, there’s artists, there’s other folks who work-for-hire. And we are really working-for-hire when studios employ us to work on screenplays. But they’re hiring us under very specific circumstances and conditions because of the union that we have. And if you talk to people in other industries, or writers who are doing the kinds of things that aren’t covered by the WGA contract, they would love to have some of the protections and some of the guarantees that we have. And so I don’t want to dismiss the possibility that there are writers who are working on movie stuff that is not covered and for other reasons maybe can’t be covered because of the weird esoteric conditions, but the aspiration should be to get that work covered and get that work paid fairly and those writers treated fairly. Do screenwriting on feature projects or television projects that could be covered under a contract because you are not just hurting yourself, you’re hurting everybody else who could be doing that work.

**Craig:** Hallelujah.

**John:** All right. Let’s move on to our marquee topic of the day. This is a question that came in from Dr. Cakey, and he sent audio, so we’re going to listen to Dr. Cakey’s question.

**Craig:** All right.

**Dr. Cakey:** To give some context for my unfortunately long question, I write almost constantly, either actually writing pages or more in the notes phase. But despite that, I almost always fizzle out very early on to the point that I finish less than one, even the messiest rough draft, per year. If you have a magical solution to that, I’m certainly open. But otherwise I think a place, or the place that stymies me, the place where I lose my way is what’s in the three-act structure term’s the second half of the first act. That is the incident has incited, the ball has been kicked, but its flight hasn’t yet stabilized.

The transitional period between what the story is going to be about, you know, crystallizing, and the protagonist actually doing that story. The period between Luke Skywalker seeing Leia’s message and him in the Millennium Falcon shooting TIE Fighters, and getting between those two points.

Because this is a period in the story rather than a point in it, I feel like that’s why it’s difficult to talk about, or why I haven’t seen people talking about it. And it’s also why it’s something I can’t find when I outline. So if you have advice about this space between inciting the story and beginning it, I’d appreciate it.

**John:** So an interesting topic and one we’ve never specifically dug into in these first 332 episodes. So, let’s talk a little bit about what we mean by the first act, because anyone who has picked up a book on screenwriting has probably heard the descriptions of what a first act, a second act, and a third act is. But just so we’re all talking about the same things. First act is the beginning of your movie. It’s usually the first quarter to a third of your movie. You’re meeting the characters. You’re setting up the world. You’re setting up the situation.

In the very classic sort of screenwriting book, the end of the first act is this big pivotal turn where everything is different. It’s the Dorothy, we’re not in Kansas anymore. Then you go into the second act which is sort of your biggest act. It can sort of be twice the size of your first and your third acts. That’s where the meat of your story is happening. The end of your second act is the moment of final crisis, the big worst-of-the-worst kind of twist. And then you get to your third act and the movie wraps itself up.

So, what he is describing, Dr. Cakey, is that moment after you’ve sort of first set things up, that inciting incident has happened, the fuse has been kind of lit, but before the character has really fully undertaken this journey. And that seems to be where he’s struggling.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, I tend to think about these things entirely in terms of character. And in terms of the psychology of the character. Because you and I, when we’re doing this, we are in full control. The character isn’t. The character is as close to a real person as we can fashion. But we, as the writers, well we’re in perfect control. So everything we’re doing is intentional.

When I think about the character in the beginning of the story, this is a person who has achieved some ability to survive in the world a certain way. And then you, the writer, have upended things. People call this the inciting incident, and so on and so forth. And that’s, I think, what Dr. Cakey – which I really want to believe is his real name and that he’s a real doctor – Dr. Cakey is describing as the first half of the first act, right.

So, here’s the person. He’s living his life, she’s living her life, and then boom, a thing happens. Everything is rattled up. So, then he knows, Dr. Cakey does, that when we are in our second act some journey of a kind, whether it’s metaphoric or literal, is going to be undertaken. But what happens in between the point of the big shakeup and the going on that journey, the crossing of a threshold?

And to me a lot of times what that section is about, Doctor, is a character resisting and a character contemplating and considering, a character planning, trying to get out of, and then making some sort of bargain with the universe or fate. Characters are I think always on page 15 trying to get back to page 1. And between page 15 and whatever you want to call it, page 30, and please don’t hold me to those page numbers. You know how we are about these sort of things. The character is attempting to wriggle around it. They are meeting people and they are learning things that make it harder for them to wriggle around it, but in short they’re bargaining a bit.

I mean, Luke essentially is, I mean, in Star Wars he’s going to go return the droid and then this guy says, “Kid, come with me and fight the,” and he says, “Nah, that’s not for me. I’ve got to wriggle out of it. You know what? Let me just do one more harvest and then maybe.” He’s bargaining.

And then he goes back and he sees that his aunt and uncle have been murdered. There’s nothing more for him now and so our second act begins. But the second part of the first act for a lot of characters, whether it’s an animated character like Shrek, or a person like Luke Skywalker, or even in romantic comedies, you’re talking about–

**John:** So the decision that the Bill Pullman character is just fine. Like, you know, I don’t need to go off on the better one, I can stay with Pullman.

**Craig:** There you go. Exactly. And so really what – I think what I find helpful, because I think it’s real. It’s not like any of these things were written down by a monk in the 1500s and we just have to follow them blindly. These conventions occur because they mimic in some satisfying way what we know to be true. In your life, Dr. Cakey, if a big boulder comes rolling through and changes things, you are not immediately going to leap into a journey or an action. You are going to spend a little bit of time trying to undo what just happened, trying to make sense of what just happened, trying to excuse it, get out of it, return to where you where, and then once that becomes impossible then you start to think, OK, maybe I can do this, or this if I talk to this person and this person. To me, that’s kind of what it’s about.

**John:** So, what you’re describing is very true and very emotionally accurate to what it would be like to be in those circumstances. It’s also a very classic mythic structure, though. You’re talking about the denial of the call to adventure, which is a very classic sort of moment that heroes go on a classic hero’s journey/quest.

They won’t always have the denial. Like sometimes it won’t be a bad situation that’s forced them into that thing. They actually finally are able to voice that thing that they’ve wanted.

So, you’re talking about something outside coming in and disrupting their life. Sometimes it’s the character’s own want that finally gets expressed. Like this is the thing I want more than anything else, but they’re afraid to sort of fully grapple with it. So that’s another moment you’re going to see in these sort of we’ll say 15 pages, but really after you’ve sort of introduced the character, before they’ve really fully taken on their journey.

But as important as it is to understand this from the character’s perspective, you also have to understand it from the audience’s perspective. The first act is really how you’re teaching the audience how to watch you’re movie. And so in that initial set piece, the initial opening, you’re talking about the world, you’re talking about the characters, the tone, the voice. You’re giving them a sense of what’s important and what’s not important. But it’s after that section, it’s this period that we’re talking about, where you’re really kind of describing the path ahead for that character. What the kinds of things the movie will be doing over the next 90 minutes. And so you’re kind of cordoning off the sections that the character won’t go down, that the story won’t go down, so the audience sitting there in the theater watching it has some sense of what they’re in for.

You’re basically laying out the contract with the audience, like if you give me your attention I will make it worth your while. These are the kinds of things you can expect to see happen. And these are the questions I’m going to set up that I promise I will answer for you over the course of this next 90 minutes if you give me your full attention.

When movies don’t work, when TV shows don’t work, it’s often because that contract wasn’t well written, or was broken essentially by the end of the movie.

**Craig:** Well that’s exactly right. You are not only offering the audience a chance to crawl into your little world and thus give them an orientation tour of it, but you are also establishing a connection with them in terms of your responsibility to them. This portion of the movie is where you get to assure the audience that you’re going to be taking care of them by letting them inside your hero’s mind or thought process in some small way.

Even if the character is thrilled by the boulder that has rolled in, I’m going to go out on a limb and say generally speaking she may want to immediately get in the car and go on that exciting road trip because of what just happened on page 15, but A, she’s not going to want to go on that road trip for the right reason. Something is going to ultimately change with her, so I want to know, I want to get in her mind. I want you to show me her mind so I understand that she has something to learn. That she is not a complete character at this point. And then I want her to, I don’t know, say goodbye to some people. I want her to quit her job. I want her to pack, purchase clothing. I want to see a preparation.

Really, this area is to get ready. All of us, we get to get ready.

**John:** You’re assembling the team. You are figuring out what the path is ahead for you.

Going back to Star Wars, you know, it’s crucial that Luke not only deny the call to adventure, but he goes back and the family is dead. So, we call this burning down the house. You’re essentially making it impossible for them to get back to the life they had on page one through circumstances. Ideally, it’s circumstances that the character themselves have done and not some external force, but it also works if it’s an external force.

But something has changed and you basically said of all the stories this character could go on, the story the character is going to go on for this movie, for this two-hours of time is this story. This is the road ahead for this character. And that’s a crucial thing you’re doing in this period at the end of the first act.

**Craig:** Yeah. I actually don’t necessarily mind if a movie burns the house down, or does something like that in order to force a character to do something as long as I have seen that character refuse to do it prior. Because that does set up a certain tension which is to say, oh OK, now you’re doing it but you didn’t want to. You had to. And eventually you’re going to need to want to. You’re going to need to make this right choice when you can go back to a house.

And that’s a good expectation, but this is all stuff that you are setting up in motion here. You know, you think about the first half of your first act, Dr. Cakey, as who is this person and what is their problem. You can look at the second half of the first act as a little bit of an indication of what the ending of the movie is going to be. Because the motions that they’re going through here should be both in denial of that ending, but also in a sense predicting it.

**John:** So let’s talk about if you’re having problems in this period, what are some things to be looking for? I would start with do you really know what your character wants? And when I say wants, I mean both macro level like what is the overall hope, dream, ambition of the character, but what does the character want moment by moment? It goes back to what Craig was saying about trying to find a way to get back to page one. They probably want to retreat to a place of safety. How do you juggle the very immediate wants, the sort of scene by scene wants, with this bigger sort of emotional want?

Can you hear what the character’s song would be if this was a musical, because this is classically the moment where you’ve already had the “welcome to the world” song. This is the “I Want” song. Well, what is that character’s song? And if they could sing it, what would they be singing? Because that would probably tell you where they’re emotionally at as they’re trying to head into the second act.

Second I’d say have you picked a story that’s interesting to you, or just a character or situation that’s interesting to you? Because maybe it’s a fundamental thing about the nature of the story you’ve chosen, because if you’re not actually that intrigued by the journey, by where they start and where they’re going to, but you really love this character, or you really love this world, or this situation, that may be your problem and that may be why you’re struggling to get through this part of the first act and really only finishing a script in a year is you’re trying to force yourself to be interested in something that’s not fundamentally that interesting to you.

**Craig:** I think also, Doc, if I may, sorry, I think I’m coming down with John’s whatever sinus infection, I think you need to take a step back and start watching some movies that you love that you think you know. And watch them specifically for this. Write down everything that happens in every scene until the first act is over, and then think about what connected you to the second part of that, what you call the first act. Think about it. Really think about what grabbed you and what meant something to you and then ask how that might apply, not the details, but the spirit, how that might apply to what you’re doing.

**John:** The thing I want to stress is we’re talking about first act and second act that like it’s a really natural clear distinction between the two.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And a lot of times in the movies that I’ve worked on, I would disagree on sort of where the first act is and where the second act. I think it can be kind of arbitrary and honestly invisible. When a movie is working really well you sort of cross over that boundary and you don’t really notice that you’ve crossed over it.

Like, you might check in with a character later on and realize like, oh yeah, they’re in a very different place than they were 20 pages ago, but it wasn’t right on a certain page break where like, oh, suddenly now the curtain closed and now we’re open to act two. It doesn’t often feel that way. So, looking through some of my movies, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has a very, very obvious act break where we’re outside the factory, then we’re inside the factory. It’s a very different movie and things happen completely differently inside and outside.

But Go really doesn’t have that same kind of break, even though there’s three sections to it they’re all following different stories. Basically each one of those little stories has its three-act structure, its beginning, its middle, and its end.

Big Fish kind of has a first act and a second act, but I would have a hard time pointing at one specific scene that says like, oh, that’s the start of the second act. You know, it’s two characters on two different journeys and you’re following them. And if I’m doing my job correctly, scene by scene, you’re intrigued enough that you’re not really noticing that the landscape underneath your feet has changed.

**Craig:** Sometimes I find myself in a room where a producer and executive are discussing the first act or the second act, and one of them say, “And the first act, you know, I think ends here.” And then the other one will say, “No, I think the first act ends here.” And they’ll start arguing about it. And I will tolerate it, briefly, but eventually I will say you all understand there’s no – the curtain stays open the whole movie. No one cares. Why are we talking about this? Just talk about the movie. Talk about the story.

A proper movie has one act. Beginning, middle, end. That’s it. I don’t get all hung up on this act stuff. I really don’t. And, by the way, I think partly because there are other kinds of entertainment I’ve come to enjoy very much, like say musicals, that are two acts. But, you know, you could also take any two-act musical, ignore the fact that there’s a break in the middle so people can pee basically, and then re-divide that into three if you’d like. Or five. Or seven. You know.

**John:** So both stage musicals and classic broadcast television, they have act breaks because they literally have breaks where they stop the action and go to the next thing. And because they have that mechanical divide, you write them in a very specific way so that you have an intriguing question at the end of an act and then you come into the next act to sort of answer that question.

So, with Big Fish I had to figure out how to both resolve the action and have a big moment, but leave an open question so that the audience has something to talk about over the break and is eager to see that question resolved. In TV, we look at what Aline does with Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, they have to really plan for what those act breaks are. And once you get used to that form of writing for television, with act breaks, it becomes an incredibly useful structuring tool to figure out how you – those become the moments in which you story sort of hangs. You figure out those act breaks first a lot of times and then write to those act breaks. And it’s powerful when you can do it.

When we had our live show and we had Julie Plec talking about the one thing she wishes she could kill, or the lump of coal, it was the six-act structure which is imposed on some broadcast shows now where the acts become so short that like you’re just scrambling to get any meaningful piece of entertainment in between those last commercial breaks.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, in the writing of Chernobyl I’ve never thought about acts, but not even once. Each episode is an episode. That’s what it is. It’s an episode. Inside of the 60 pages I couldn’t even begin to tell you where there’s acts. It’s just not relevant.

**John:** Yeah. And as we were talking about Game of Thrones and sort of the challenges of that first pilot episode and making it work right, they really weren’t act problems that you were describing. It was audience understanding of what characters were going for. It was audience’s understanding of the world and, yes, those are first act issues because you’re trying to establish things, but they’re really the whole piece issues.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. They had problems at the end of the show when people were showing up and I would say, “Well who’s that?” And I watch Game of Thrones religiously. I couldn’t tell you where an act occurs in any given Game of Thrones episode. Nor could I tell you where an act occurs in any given episode of Breaking Bad or any TV – any episodic TV show, like a 60-minute show. There’s no first, second, third to me. It’s really more about just breaks. It’s different.

In movies, there is this sense of dramatic motion, like “And now the second act is over and the third act begins. Well, the third act seems to be starting a little late.” And I always just giggle. I’m like, is the movie the right length? Then let’s just call to five pages earlier the third – who cares? What are you talking about?

If the movie is the right length and it’s paced properly, I don’t know what any of this jargon means. So hopefully we’ve helped Dr. Cakey without over hammering on the orthodoxy of this act stuff.

**John:** Yeah. So I want to try to square this circle here by saying I think it’s fine to talk about acts while acknowledging that they don’t really exist. What’s useful about talking about acts is we recognize that in most feature films with a central protagonist there’s a journey that happens because these stories happen to a character just once. Like there’s a once in a lifetime thing that is happening to this character that you’re going to kind of naturally flow along a certain path. And one of those paths is going to be leaving this comfortable place and going on a journey.

And not necessarily a literal journey, but some sort of change is going to happen to this character. And in that process of change there are turning points. I think it’s fine to talk about all those things without getting too hung up on “It’s this act, it’s that act, we’re on this page, or that page.” And where I feel the danger is is that somebody at some point read a bunch of scripts and watched a bunch of movies and realized like, oh, it’s happening at this page counts and at this minutes. And that must be how movies work. And they mistook the measurement of the thing for the thing itself.

**Craig:** Yeah. People watch movies and then they confuse symptoms for causes. And they will advise people. You see it all the time. “Well, in the middle of your movie this thing must happen.” OK. Why? “Because it does all the time.” Well, yes, but why? “Just do it. All movies have it.” OK. Well how am I supposed to do it if I don’t know why it’s there? And why did all the people who did it before me who didn’t have you telling them to do it, why did they do it?

And so these are the things that interest me. I’m never concerned about the act effect, which is why I actually like this question because he’s really asking why. Why do these things happen? Yeah.

**John:** So, back in Episode 100 someone asked in the audience, basically I have these two ideas, which one should I write. And I said write the one with the best ending because that’s the one you’re going to finish. I think my advice for Dr. Cakey is as you’re auditioning ideas to write, for you specifically I would say write the one that has the most interesting section of what we’re talking about. Pick the one next to write that has a really fascinating change from the normal world into the – we’ll call it second act – into that journey of like where things are going. Write the one that has a really intriguing moment of that character having to decide to go on that journey, because that’s the one that’s going to probably work best in that section. And it may work best overall for what you’re struggling with.

**Craig:** I’m down with that.

**John:** Let’s go to Nicole in Rome. She writes in with an audio question as well.

**Craig:** Let’s listen.

**Nicole:** Hi John. Hi Craig. My name is Nicole Mosely. I’m listening to your podcast from Rome in Italy. And I’m enjoying it very much. Thank you.

I have a question regarding new formats of storytelling that became possible in the last years. I’m talking about virtual reality, 360 film, and augmented reality. I’d like to know what you guys think about it. Is this the future of filmmaking? Or is it just to hype something that is already dead before it hits the mainstream?

And the thing that would interest me even more is how does it affect storytelling? For example, how do you actually get the viewer to look at what is important and convey story and meaning when it’s no longer you, the screenwriter, but actually the viewer who decides what he’s going to look at? What does all of this mean for dramaturgy like the three-act structure? Does it still apply as it does in non-linear movies, or does it work in a completely different way?

And is that still storytelling? Or would it serve for journalism, education, gaming, and other experiences? Also, the moment we talk about full immersion and the viewer being inside the story, what role does he take on? Is he the protagonist? Or is he a fly on the wall?

I know those are so many questions, but I’d really like to know what your take on all of this is. Thank you.

**John:** It was one of those epic questions that sort of keeps on going. But they’re all related and I think they’re all fair questions to ask.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** From my perspective, I don’t think AR/VR/Immersive storytelling/360 movies, I don’t think they’re the future of cinema. I don’t think they’re the future of moviemaking. But I think they are in our future. I think they are important art forms that need to be talked about in their own way and to try to just say that all movies are going to become them I think is really naïve.

I think they have as much to do with video gaming as they do with traditional movies. I think you have to sort of look at what is the best way to tell a story in those new mediums and not necessarily try to apply everything we’ve learned from TV or from film. Just let them be their own thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. Well, first of all, Nicole, these are really, really good questions. And I don’t blame you for being a combination of skeptical and also possibly hopeful. I mean, it’s always exciting when these things come along. And then, of course, scary as well. What is it going to mean for all of us?

I think the first thing to understand, at least from my point of view, is that virtual reality/360 film, and augmented reality is – well, let’s leave augmented reality aside. Let’s just talk about VR/360. That already exists. They’re called videogames. The only difference that we’re seeing now is the delivery method which now straps to your head, so you’ve eliminated the space between yourself and the television. So, visually the experience is different. But storytelling-wise it’s the same. You control your point of view in a 360 up and down way the way you do in say Skyrim.

The storytelling that occurs in that format, well, there’s lots of ways of doing it. One way is the kind of it’s open and you discover things as you go. One way is sort of a combination of that, but you are also kind of on rails, so when you attach yourself to a certain story point you follow that little quest and you’re kind of on rails with it. Or you have choices between things to follow. That exists. And I think that when John says games, I think he’s right that this feels more about games to me than movies.

Movies and books and television shows are entirely passive experiences for the audience. They have always been so, with rare exception, and I don’t see any reason why that’s going to go away. That experience is actually the fundamental narrative experience. To read a book. To watch a play. To see a movie. To listen to a song. And we will always come up with other ways to have that experience, but the fundamental experience will always be there. No new technology has gotten rid of the technologies before it. None.

I don’t think there are any story type of technologies that have just simply been eliminated. We just accrue more of them, which I find fascinating.

There are some examples of things that are happening. One of the people that we want to talk to is Ed Solomon who has put together this crazy thing with I think Soderbergh, right?

**John:** Yeah, exactly. Mosaic.

**Craig:** Yeah, Mosaic, which is very much a kind of, OK, choose your own adventure style parallel storyline. Everything all adds up. Lots of different points. And it will end differently depending on what you’re doing. But, of course, no matter how complex you make these things, and we will talk to Ed about it, it comes down to, well, it’s written right? It’s written.

So, yes, these things are kinds of storytelling. They are all sorts of storytelling. And just as there are simple children’s books you can read and then these very complicated children’s books that aren’t really for children but more like for adults that involve moving back and around and turning things upside down.

Did you ever read – there’s just all these multimedia things and ways to do storytelling. And so I guess I’m going to say, Nicole, all of it is going to happen. None of it is going to eliminate anything else. That’s my crazy point of view. It will accumulate, but it will not eliminate.

**John:** Absolutely. I think the question that’s sort of underlying what Nicole is asking is how do you write it. How will we figure out how to write it? And we’re still grappling with that. I think we’re still grappling with how to write certain kinds of videogames. Like videogame writing has improved dramatically, but it’s a very different kind of writing than what we’re used to. Because usually when we’re talking about a book, we’re talking about a play, we’re talking about a movie, it’s one shot straight through. And we know exactly what we’re going to be looking at. We can direct the viewer’s attention completely.

But in a videogame you may not have that option because the character could do a thousand different things. It’s a forking branching paths, and so you have to plan your writing for all the different scenarios they could come across.

A similar thing happens with immersive theater. So, Sleep No More, New York, or I went to Safe House 77 here in Los Angeles, and those are situations where parts of it are clearly written and controlled and there’s a whole plan for this is going to happen at this moment. There’s a timeline in which things happen. But you can’t know for sure that a certain person in that audience was looking where you wanted them to look, or was interacting the way you wanted them to interact. You can direct your actors to do certain things, but the audience can change that as well. They have to be able to sometimes improvise based on what’s happening in the space. So every time is different.

So that’s still playwriting to some degree, but it’s also a different thing. And I think to try to force it to become the future of something, or to be like something else, is limiting its potential.

I would say when you’re grappling with AR/VR/360/some new storytelling mechanism/an alternative reality game, always great to take lessons from what other things have done before it, but you really are walking into uncharted lands. And enjoy that uncharted landness. I think it’s important to be able to not limit yourself because the movie version of it would have done this. Well, you’re not making a movie. You’re making something else. What is going to be the cool experience? What is going to be the thing that people will take with them?

And one of Nicole’s great questions is are you a spectator or a participant as a viewer? Are you changing the story? Are you making the story move around? Or are you a fly on the wall? Both can work, but that’s a fundamental choice you’re going to have to make early on in any of these projects is to what degree are you participating in the story versus watching.

Jordan Mechner who did Prince of Persia, he really describes his games as being like you are the hero of the game. You have to think about every action being you are the protagonist doing it. So, if you’re watching people have a scene around you that is a failure. You have to be driving the scenes that you’re in.

**Craig:** Yeah. A lot of it reminds me of magic in the sense that you are implying a certain amount of choice to the audience that they don’t have. Pick a card, any card. I know what card you’re picking. Or it doesn’t matter what card you’re picking. You’re going to think that it’s this card. This is what craft is all about, right? So, when we do these things, I think videogames do it all the time, they make you think that you’re making a million choices. They make you think that you are somehow going to change the ending of something. But sooner or later the debt comes to be owed.

And the debt is to story. It’s to narrative. Mass Effect had a little bit of a problem when they arrived at the end of their trilogy of a billion user choices only to realize, “Uh, we have to give an ending. And the ending has to cover at least an enormous amount of these possible choices. So, let’s go with three of them,” and everybody went bananas.

And I understood why they went bananas, because the game had promised a certain kind of something it could not deliver. I played it. I played them. They made you feel like the choices you made mattered and you had many, many multiple choices. But in the end really they were kind of squishing you towards two poles, which were manageable narratively. And then some other things that occurred, which were managed narratively, but you know, it comes down to decision tree. No game, no piece of art can offer you a decision tree that is as complex as just walking down the street to the 7-11 is in real life. Because there is an end, right? The show ends, therefore work backwards from that.

So, I think, Nicole, no matter what happens it’s our brains that will always be the sticking point. That’s sort of the log jam. We have to deal with our brains. And people’s brains do require a certain kind of firm narrative to cling to one way or the other.

**John:** Circling back to Dr. Cakey’s question, I feel like this is also a case of the contract you’re making with the viewer, the participant, whatever you want to call the person who is experiencing the art that you’re making. It’s quite early on, the first few minutes, you are going to be establishing these are the kinds of things that can happen. These are going to be your responsibilities. These are going to be my responsibilities. Together we’re going to make this all work. And in a film or television show, it’s one kind of contract. In an immersive theater piece or in AR/VR, something that’s 360, it’s a different kind of contract. But it has to be there and you have to recognize that whether you’re explicitly stating it or just sort of implying it, people are going to have expectations about where you’re going. And so as long as you’re going in a place that meets their expectations and hopefully surpasses their expectations you’ll have a good experience.

Where it’s just confusing, or I just don’t even know what I’m supposed to be looking at, that’s where these projects tend to fall apart.

**Craig:** Yep. 100%.

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

**Craig:** Yeah, Melissa in Eugene, Oregon, not too far from where I am now, asks, “I’m writing because last year I made it to the semifinal round of the Nicholl Fellowship,” congrats Melissa, “and ended up getting some inquiries from managers and producers based on that. The majority of people that reached out asked for the whole script, but two people asked for a writing sample.

“Is there an industry standard as to what a writing sample should consist of? The first ten pages? Any ten pages? The first act? Or is this generally up to the individual writer? Any advice you can give would be appreciated.”

John, what do you make of this?

**John:** Great. I don’t really know what to make of it because I’ve never been asked to send in a writing sample that wasn’t the whole thing. Because honestly I feel like you can send the whole script and if they just didn’t finish the script that’s up to them. We talk to a lot of people who read scripts for a living, who are staffing, and they stop whenever they stop, or they skim through stuff. We had these agents on for the last Three Page Challenge and they said like, “Yeah, we’ll start reading and then when we get bored we’ll skim.”

If they’re asking for a sample, it makes it sound clear that they don’t want the whole script, I would send them ten pages. And ten pages doesn’t feel like a lot and I think if you’re sending ten pages, I’d send them the first ten pages I should stress. And that’s not a lot. If they like the ten pages they can always ask for more. Craig, what’s your instinct?

**Craig:** I wouldn’t do that. Because here’s the thing. You have gotten inquiries, Melissa, from managers and producers based on making it to the semifinal round. The majority of people will ask for the whole script. That implies to me they haven’t read it. Two people asked for a writing sample, I wonder if that means we’ve read your script that was in the semifinal round. Can you please send more?

No matter what, I would never send anything less than a complete script. Because like John said, especially now in the age of PDFs where we’re not creating extra weight on their desk, they can read as much as they want. The script is a writing sample, top to bottom. If you send ten pages and they love it, the problem is they may go, “Great. I’ll ask her for the rest of those later,” but then a couple days go by and something happens and they’ve forgotten. But a script is a script. So, I would just send the whole script every time. If they ask for a writing sample and you’re not sure if they’ve read your Nicholl script, send the Nicholl script and something else.

If you don’t have another script, just resend the Nicholl script and say this is what I have so far.

**John:** Yeah. I think you are right and I’m going to sort of retract my previous advice. I guess I really can’t make a strong case for the ten pages. I think I may have been thinking about writing packet submissions, which are for a very specific kind of thing, and the WGA has been addressing abuses in that world.

The other thing I’ll say is it’s not even that we’re shipping big chunks of paper around, or even attaching PDFS. If you stick a link on there saying here are some things I’ve written that you may enjoy, then you’re sending two of those things and they’re basically just Dropbox links they’re going to open or not open.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Great. You’re really creating very little burden for them to do it. Just make sure you’re steering them to the thing you think is your best work, the thing that is going to best showcase what you’re able to bring.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. You know what? Every now and then, John, I feel like we actually answer a question.

**John:** Oh, that’s so nice.

**Craig:** A lot of times, you know, listen, I’m not dissuading people from writing in. We do our best. Some of these questions you people ask are not answerable. You realize that. We do our best. But every now and then I feel like we nail it. And we’re definitely going to nail this next one. Definitely.

**John:** All right. Let’s bring in our next and our last one. It’s the last one in our list here. It’s from Will in Toronto. He writes, “How feasible is adapting a novel into a screenplay? Does the red tape of IP and rights make an adaptation virtually unreasonable to focus on or even impossible? I came across a novel in the past few months that would serve as a brilliant screenplay, but should I give it my undivided time and effort if it’s going to be ultimately denied?”

So, this is a very fundamental question but also a naïve question and I think a question that we can frame out for Will here in this discussion. Yes, a lot of books are adapted into movies. And sometimes those books are optioned by studios or producers who say like, “Hey, let us borrow the rights to your book and we may make a movie out of it. We’ll pay you a small amount of money. We’ll pay you more money if we make it. We’re going to hire a writer to work on this.”

That happens. That’s a lot of what I do is adapting books into movies. Individual writers can also option books. So, you, Will, in Toronto, if there’s a book that you love that you thought could be a movie and you felt like you could convince that author to sign over the rights, to option those rights to you, you could option those rights from that author and do it.

I’m sure on previous episodes we’ve talked about optioning stuff, about adapting other work. But I think you are fundamentally asking is this a thing you should be thinking about doing. I don’t think it’s the first script you should write is an adaptation. I think you need to learn how to write screenplays first. And I think you need to write one or two screenplays that are just yours, that are just entirely your things that you own every piece of.

And then if you want to circle back around to that book to adapt, go for it. Craig, what do you think?

**Craig:** I think you did it. I think you nailed it, John. I predicted that this question would get answered firmly and completely and you did it. I have nothing to add except this tiny piece of information. When John says, “Hey Will, maybe you could find this author and option the rights yourself.” That is absolutely true. And it may cost you a dollar. It may cost you nothing. Right?

It depends on who the author and the book is. If no one is asking them about their book, it’s an obscure book, or there wasn’t any interest. You’re the only person interested. What does it cost them to say, “All right, well you know what, give me ten bucks and you have a year to set this up somewhere, at which point somebody will have to purchase the rights to this book, but you have the exclusive right to go ahead and create a screenplay based on it and go and try and sell it.”

**John:** Yeah. Back in the day, when I was a young screenwriter, there was a book that I really wanted to option. And the only way to figure out how to get to the author was to call the sub-rights department of the publisher. So let’s say it was Macmillan, you would find the number for Macmillan in New York. You’d call the operator at the Macmillan switchboard and ask for sub-rights. And you get to someone in sub-rights and say I’m looking for the film rights for this book. And they would look up in some sort of catalog and then they would tell you who the person was. Or later on you’d email or you’d fax something through and they’d fax you back information.

Now with the Internet, you find the author, you find the author’s Twitter thing, and you ask them. You find an email address for them and you email them directly. The few times that I’ve optioned the rights to books myself, I just figured out who the author was and how to reach them and started the process myself.

**Craig:** That sounds exactly like the way to go. Will, we’ve done it. We’ve answered your question. I feel really good about it.

**John:** I feel great about it.

All right, it’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is Bathe in my Milk. Craig, have you clicked this link yet?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Click the link. Clink the link, Craig.

**Craig:** Batheinmymilk.com. OK.

**John:** Now, please describe what you see.

**Craig:** OK. So I see a photo. Oh, all right. So, it’s a photo of a bathroom. It’s a bad bathroom. Peeling wallpaper. An elderly white woman is standing in a shabby white nightgown, cleaning products at her feet. There is a torn tassel rope and then a standalone tube. There is an African American man also about her age I would say sitting in the tub and the tub has apparently got milk in it. But maybe just soapy water.

And then her head is casting a shadow against the window. It’s not good. Should I keep scrolling?

**John:** Keep scrolling.

**Craig:** Oh god. OK. So now she has repositioned herself on the other side of the room and now there is a younger Asian man in the same tub. Nothing else has changed except a plunger has appeared in the cleaning – oh god. What is the story here? What is happening? Every single photo is the same except that there is a different man in her tub of weird, creepy, milky water.

Oh, there’s a big boy at the end. He’s big.

**John:** Yeah. He barely fits into the tub.

**Craig:** Yes he does. Oof. Yikes.

**John:** All right. So, Craig, tell me your theory. What the hell is going on here?

**Craig:** OK. Well, theory number one, this is a very, very low rent spa. This is a spa that costs $0.14.

Now, I think this is some kind of art project. I can’t imagine it’s anything else. The bathroom doesn’t – it’s – what could possibly be happening here? Oh my god, there’s one picture where she’s outside looking in through the window. Did you see that one?

**John:** [laughs] I saw that one, too.

**Craig:** That’s horrifying. So in one of the pictures she’s not even in the room. She’s outside of the room looking. Yeah, this is just a weird art project.

**John:** All right. So now you can click through to the New York Post thing which shows the actual flyer this all comes from. So it’s a flyer that’s mounted onto a telephone post. It says Bathe in my Milk. It has one of the photos there. It says Bathe in my Milk. Offer open to men only. Soy, almond, or traditional. Use my sponge. I will watch you. And then it has a link to the batheinmymilk.com.

**Craig:** So what the hell is it? It is a prank. Should we tell people?

**John:** It’s a prank, yet it is a meme. It is a creation, this guy Alan Wagner, and his friend Sydney Marquez helped him build it. He’s a guy who just does these things. They’re kind of art projects. They’re just like sort of little bits of cultural stuff that go out there. And this is an especially effective one, I thought. I just thought it was delightful.

**Craig:** Yeah, this is great. I like this line. He says, “Nobody seems to be enjoying it, and yet they are partaking in it.” That’s a great description of what these people are like. Yeah.

**John:** So I’m going to put up a link to the New York Post article which goes into sort of the backstory of it. So, Alan Wagner is a USC film school grad. I suspect he might be a listener, so Alan if you’re listening, hello.

**Craig:** Well done.

**John:** And basically he built that bathroom set in his garage. He just did it for the giggles. It looks like all those actors are from Craigslist. I just thought it was a nice example of just making something for the hell of making it. And a wonderfully creepy sort of disturbing thing to float out there in the world.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s got a bit of the Saw bathroom kind of going on in this. It’s creepy.

**John:** It does. Yeah.

**Craig:** Very creepy.

**John:** It also reminded me a little bit of escape rooms. You can sort of imagine that there’s some escape room that’s kind of like this bathroom. That is just so disturbing.

**Craig:** Yeah. There will be a Bathe in my Milk Escape Room. Well, god —

**John:** Top that.

**Craig:** I won’t. I will go right underneath that with the most mundane One Cool Thing ever, but you know I’ve got this Apple Pencil. I don’t use it. It’s just there. I have it. I don’t know what to do with it. And finally I just thought, you know, I had to go somewhere and just jot down some notes and I didn’t want to bring my laptop. So I brought my iPad. I just said, screw it, I’m just going to do the pencil, the Apple Pencil note thing. I’m just going to plunge in. I’m not going to read instructions about anything. I looked to see there’s two apps that people use. There’s Notability and then there’s another one. I can’t remember what it’s called.

And I just flipped a coin, went for Notability. And you know what? It’s actually not bad. I don’t know if this is a One Cool Thing as much as a one begrudgingly, yeah, it actually works pretty well. I guess the nicest part of it, the part that made me happiest was I’m writing these notes down and it just automatically puts an image of the notes that I’ve taken on my computer when I’m at home via the magic of Dropbox of iCloud or whatever. But, you know, yeah, it’s OK. I mean, it’s not Bathe in my Milk, but it does the trick.

I’m not like fully into it. I’m OK with it.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t use my pencil for very much, but when I do need to go through a script and do some markup on it, I find it’s actually really good. So, even doing Three Page Challenges, I will find I usually use my Apple Pencil for that. So I’m looking at the PDF. I use a PDF Expert for that. And then I use the little pen function on that and circle things, highlight things, mark things. And it’s quite good for that.

And I agree that the iCloud aspect of it is incredibly important because then when I’m on my computer and we’re recording an episode I can pull up that same PDF with all of my markup in it and sort of see what I wanted to talk about.

So, I do use my pencil some. I think the pencil is remarkable. I just don’t have as much use for it as I’d hoped I would.

**Craig:** I’m there with you. Look, this is a better method for me than what I normally do, and what I normally have done, which is to just write notes on a regular piece of paper and then take a picture of that with my phone so in case I lose the note I have an image of it. But that’s sort of dopey.

The one thing I wish they could do differently is I don’t like that the Apple Pencil makes a little click when it contacts the glass of your iPad. I wish that there was no click. Because there’s something about graphite on paper, you know don’t get a click. You know what I mean?

**John:** I don’t hear that click. Are you sure you have the nib screwed all the way in?

**Craig:** No, it’s not a click-click. It’s more just – it feels hard. There’s no give, basically, right? There’s a little bit of give to paper and a little bit of give to graphite, because the graphite is wearing away as you’re drawing, right? And the paper is wearing away as you’re writing and drawing. But there’s nothing – it’s a fully inelastic collision between the nib of the Apple Pencil and the service of the iPad. And I wish it was slightly – I wish there was just a touch of give.

**John:** I get it. I get it. My wish for the Apple Pencil 2.0 or whatever is some stylists in the past have had a thing where you flip it over, and it’s like an eraser on the other side.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** I keep trying to do that and to try to erase and instead you have to click the little erase thing and that’s just frustrating. There are also great apps out there that are doing innovative things where you’re touching with your finger while you’re using the thing. And you watch people do it and it’s amazing and it’s magic. I just don’t have a need for those things right now.

**Craig:** Also, I don’t have any talent with anything that involves dexterity and some sort of fine art instrument like a pencil, a crayon, a marker. I’m a disaster.

**John:** Yeah. I’m good at craft. I’m good at wrapping up things and that stuff.

**Craig:** You are.

**John:** But I’m not good with the little fine motor skill stuff whatsoever.

**Craig:** I’m also bad at craft.

**John:** I remember during the strike you were so impressed with my duct-taping abilities as we were duct-taping signs.

**Craig:** I still think about it. Yeah, we had this job of like, so, you know, these picket signs are made of two posters that are stapled together over a stick. Not even a stick. Like a slat.

**John:** It’s like a yard stick.

**Craig:** Yeah, like a yard stick. It’s a piece of crap piece of wood. And if you were to just walk around holding it your hands would be shredded with these terrible splinters from these things. So you have to duct tape them so that people can walk around and hold them without shredding their skin. And so John and I spent an hour at the Writers Guild one morning in 2007, I guess it was.

**John:** I guess.

**Craig:** Duct-taping these things. And my method, you know, just because again I don’t understand craft. I just figured, you know, I’m just going to start winding duct tape around this thing. And eventually I’ll stop. And then John’s method, everything was at a perfect slant. Each layer overlapped the other layer perfectly, so it just looked professional.

**John:** I’m a professional picket sign maker.

**Craig:** Yeah, it was really good. So I tried to do it like you were doing it, but I wasn’t as good.

**John:** Yeah. No, I really love that. I love that kind of stuff. I love wrapping presents. There’s something really calming about that. Like me and Martha Stewart, we love to wrap presents. Love it. Love it.

**Craig:** I still can’t do it. I’m almost a 47-year-old man, and when I have to wrap a gift I go to Melissa and I just say can you please wrap this for me. Because I don’t know how to do it. [laughs]

**John:** I kind of feel bad for my daughter because I will still wrap gifts that she’s giving out for presents for people and like I’m denying her the ability to actually learn how to do it, but I just love it so much that I always want to do it.

**Craig:** You know what I do? My one crafty thing is tiling out large D&D maps and then taping them back together.

**John:** That’s quite a skill. I’m not good at that. So nicely done.

**Craig:** That I rock. I knew that somehow this would come around in my favor. I just didn’t know how it would happen. So exciting. This is why VR struggles because you could never predict that.

**John:** No. They would never know that like Craig’s ability to tile things is crucial.

**Craig:** It’s going to be the ending. Like who could have seen that that was the ending? Our show is produced by… [laughs]

**John:** This Sunday, Craig, we get to play the next installment of Storm Kings Thunder. I could not be more excited.

**Craig:** Oh I know. I mean, it’s all I want to do every day.

**John:** Our adventuring party is headed into some place along the spine of the world and we have a giant who is a friend, so it’s going to be great.

**Craig:** It’s going to be great. And there will be blood.

**John:** There will be blood.

**Craig:** There will be blood.

**John:** 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 send questions like the ones we answered. We love it when you record your audio with your question because it just makes it easier, because that way we don’t have to read your question. And also we get to hear the voices of our people. We get to hear your accents. The way you pronounce words in Canadian and/or Italian accents is fascinating for us.

But short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We are on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on Apple Podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes or really any place you get podcasts. Leave us a review. That’s always so lovely. It helps people find us.

The show notes for this episode and all episodes are at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts. They go up within a week of the episode airing. And for all the back episodes you need to go to Scriptnotes.net. It is $2 a month for all the back episodes and the special episodes. We are crucially close to having 3,000 paid subscribers, which is remarkable.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** So if you are the person who pushes us over, I will be eternally thankful, because that would just be kind of cool.

**Craig:** I won’t care because it means nothing for me. [laughs]

**John:** It means nothing for Craig.

**Craig:** Nothing.

**John:** Other than something else for him to complain about.

**Craig:** Ooh. Yay.

**John:** That’s a gift that keeps giving.

**Craig:** Come on people. Help me out here. One away.

**John:** We also have some of the Scriptnotes USB drives in the store. So that’s store.johnaugust.com. That has the first 300 episodes of the show in one handy little package.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. I’ll see you next week.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Bathe in my Milk](http://batheinmymilk.com) and the [NY Post article](https://nypost.com/2017/12/22/the-story-behind-creepy-as-hell-milk-bath-flyers/) about it.
* The [Apple Pencil](https://www.apple.com/apple-pencil/) works pretty well! You can use it with [Notability](http://gingerlabs.com/).
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](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_333.mp3).