Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/a-cops-cop-show).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 330 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, it’s a special episode. This is left over from the Austin Film Festival, but it actually has its roots before then. At a live show we did in Los Angeles we played this little game show thing. And the guy who won the game show had the opportunity to have us read his script. And this is us talking to that guy whose script we read.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. So, his name is Andrew Thalheimer. It is a pilot. And so as we’re recording this Craig and I have read his first script. He’s gone back and done a revision based on what we talked about. If that script is available we will link to both versions of the script.

**Craig:** I hope it is. That actually would be kind of interesting for people to see.

**John:** Yeah. But it was a really good discussion. So, we were just chatting in Austin about sort of what he’d written and sort of why he wrote it. Andrew’s background was really interesting. He’s a former police officer. He wrote this police comedy-drama. It had a really interesting tone. I think a lot of our conversation was about the tone. So, this is that conversation. I hope you enjoy it. And we’ll be back with a more normal episode next week.

Andrew, welcome to this little special edition.

**Andrew Thalheimer:** Thank you very much for having me here.

**Craig:** Welcome Andrew.

**John:** So, tell us about yourself as a writer. You sent through a one-hour pilot. Is this the first thing you’ve written? How much other stuff have you written?

**Andrew:** This is the first complete one-hour pilot I’ve written. I’ve been writing my whole life. Screenwriting for a few years. I actually went to graduate school in Boston for screenwriting.

**Craig:** You went to graduate school for screenwriting?

**Andrew:** I see you jumped in on that.

**Craig:** That must have cost a lot of money.

**Andrew:** It didn’t.

**Craig:** Oh good.

**Andrew:** Yeah, I got all the assistantships and all that kind of stuff. Otherwise a very terrible decision.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So talk us through a little bit more. You grow up. What did you do for undergraduate? What was your degree?

**Andrew:** So I’ve bounced around the country and also bounced around colleges. I started out pre-med. Didn’t last for long. Journalism. Didn’t like the who-what-when questions. Realized I liked the why and how questions. Eventually got my English degree, which is completely worthless also. But somewhere along the way I found screenwriting. That was in Albuquerque. Their film industry was getting pretty big at the time. And it was just a format that I enjoyed the medium, the visual of it. And not that I was a die-hard movie fan growing up. But I liked them enough and the fact that I was writing things that could be seen instantly excited me.

**John:** And so why graduate film school? Why this particular program? Which program did you go to?

**Andrew:** I went to the Boston University Screenwriting program. I was living in Boston, for some reason doing construction. Just like renovating 250-year-old homes. And driving home one day in December in Boston and I said this is terrible and I don’t want to do this for three more months even, let alone the rest of my life.

So, I applied to that program. And I had still been writing all that time but I guess in my warped mind that the comfort of going back to school was going to make it all right.

**Craig:** Sure. I think that’s exactly what they offer. And there is value to it. I mean, it’s a scary prospect because the world of professional screenwriting has no ranks, no paths, no milestones. It just is this weird thing and you sometimes don’t even know if you’ve made it or not. I mean, we’ve talked about like nobody really makes it exactly. It’s really amorphous. And so there actually is great value, at least early on, in having some kind of regimented path for yourself. And sounds like you managed to get through it without it costing you any real money.

I mean, that’s the most important thing.

**John:** So, was that one year, two years? How long was the program?

**Andrew:** They have a four-semester program and optional semester out in LA, which I did that as well. And I’m fortunate enough to have a wife who is a teacher to support my–

**Craig:** Screenwriting habit.

**Andrew:** Stupid endeavor.

**Craig:** I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t say that.

**John:** So after Boston you moved out to Los Angeles and you’re living on the West Side now. Your wife is a teacher?

**Andrew:** Yeah.

**John:** And are you working as well?

**Andrew:** I am working for a development company, yeah. So reading scripts, running bizarre errands.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** That’s good actually. The reading of scripts I think is probably quite enlightening.

**Andrew:** Absolutely. Absolutely.

**Craig:** I mean, you did that, right?

**John:** I did that, yeah. So, I read for a company called Prelude which is based out of Paramount. I read for TriStar for a year. And you end up recognizing a lot of patterns of like these are things I don’t like, things I never want to do, things that would never work for me on the page.

So, what you’re reading, is that mostly features? Is it TV? Is it everything?

**Andrew:** It’s everything. Probably more TV now. And the thing probably that I’ve learned the most being there, besides getting into the scripts and seeing what I like and dislike is how they go through the development process. Even just in the idea phase, which has always been a struggle for me. Finding – you were calling it the central dramatic argument yesterday.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Andrew:** It’s always very vague for me. I have it there, but bringing it out has always been a real struggle. So, being in the development – in a development company has really helped with that.

**Craig:** You start to see how it’s important for other people’s work.

**Andrew:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And what it does for it. Good. Great.

**John:** Cool. Let’s talk about this script. So it was written by Andrew Thalheimer. Story by Robert Kulb and you. Who is Robert Kulb?

**Andrew:** He’s a friend of mine from Philadelphia. We went through the Philadelphia Police Academy together in 2004. I lasted three years as a cop. And that was plenty for me. I actually worked in the neighborhood that Rocky lived in in the first couple of Rocky films. It was a lot nicer 40 years ago than it was when I was there.

He’s still there. He’s a sergeant in Philadelphia. But we were friends from the beginning because we talked about books and writing and bizarrely that’s not what most cops talk about.

**John:** So this feels like a crucial piece of bio that you sort of gave short-shrift to, because your background as a police officer going through the academy is so helpful for like framing context around this. So, if I read this script without knowing this, and knowing this, I think it changes my perception of the read. It changes on sort of like what I’m going into with expectations. And I think it helps to know that you are a former cop going into this, because it makes me sort of – I don’t know, it gives me a little more benefit of the doubt of some of the things that could seem unlikely.

And it also helps frame for me that we’re going over the course of a night and it’s sort of like the routine, but also the surprises that happen over the course of the night.

**Craig:** I agree. It is good context to have. In my mind I presumed that your dad was maybe a cop. That you had a police officer in your family. But it’s really interesting to know that you were the police officer. I do think that’s very helpful for people to know. I mean, I don’t know how you exactly convey that information when you send this script around, but hopefully you do. Because it will add a legitimacy to things. No one will ever pause and go, “Has this guy done his research? Do cops really do these things?”

**Andrew:** It’s super bizarre.

**John:** So talk us through where you’re at right now. So, you’ve written this script. Do you have an agent, a manager, any of that stuff? Has that happened yet?

**Andrew:** No. It hasn’t happened yet. I’ve been in LA just about a year. Sort of second year goal is to see if I can some kind of representation.

**John:** All right. Well let’s get into it. So, as I was about halfway through the script I realized it was a different thing than I thought it was going to be. And I thought it was going to be Jack and his original partner and then I realized, oh no-no, it’s actually in a weird way kind of like Hill Street Blues but in a world where Training Day exists. So, it’s about the routine life of police over the course of a night but in a world where bigger, badder things have happened and can happen. And where language is more realistic, the heightened way that we sort of do our things right now.

And if I keyed into that a little earlier I think I would have been more on for the ride. I don’t know about you, Craig, but I had a hard time sort of getting placed within the story at the start. I like the frenzy, I like the partner and sort of how wild and weird stuff was at the beginning, but it was so disorienting I didn’t know kind of what movie I was in, or what kind of pilot I was in for probably quite a ways into pages. You?

**Craig:** Yeah. There definitely is some tonal confusion going on. So I want to know how I’m supposed to feel about moments. I mean, really that’s tone ultimately does. It gives us a sense of the rules of the universe we’re stepping into. Obviously in this room there’s a certain tone that we have. And then when you’re out with your friends at a bar there’s another tone.

When this opens up, there is almost a kind of – I guess I would call it a black comedy kind of tone to it, because these are two cops. One of them is under surveillance. And it feels like a comedy. The way he’s reacting to the way the cops are and suiting up and getting hit with the bean bag and going in and going out. And meanwhile there’s gazpacho going on. All of that stuff feels very broad actually.

So, what the rules of the beginning are telling me is this isn’t really serious. It’s not Police Academy goofy, but it’s somewhere in the middle like a Raising Arizona version of a police story.

**John:** To me it almost felt like a Bad Boys. That sense of like – and you’re making a terrible face at that – but the sense of like it almost felt flashy and exaggerated in ways that the rest of your script doesn’t really get to that place. So like he’s pulling a flashbang out of a plastic jack-o’-lantern. That doesn’t feel like the rest of your script at all. And so because it’s the very first thing we’re seeing, that’s what I kind of expect the world of this universe to be.

So, talk to us about sort of your decision to open with the former partner and getting arrested and that stuff rather than starting on Jack and Daniel.

**Andrew:** Can I go pre starting the script just for a little context? I don’t like cop shows. I guess I liked them a little bit before I was one, and then I didn’t. And then after being a cop I despise them. I always thought that the realest cop show was Reno 911! I think I have a line in there about the absurdity of policing and I can’t remember the other word I use there. But it really is. Nothing really makes sense. And narrative tries to make sense of it in movies and TV. And then it’s not real.

And I know we have to entertain and we experience it through narrative, so that beginning was my effort at giving a story engine to this series and to this world that is very episodic and bizarre.

**Craig:** Well, it’s really interesting because part of the beginning, you were at the Scott Frank thing, right? So Scott and I talked about the first ten pages and how important all of that stuff is. So part of the beginning is you’re educating me about the way this is going to work. So the first thing I think it’s really important to do is put yourself in the shoes of everybody that knows nothing.

And we have expectations. One of our expectations is we’ve seen a whole bunch of cop shows. If your purpose, and I think it’s an admirable one, is to say I don’t like cop shows. They actually all suck and they’re not true to reality. Reality is bizarre. I think first though you need to put me in a cop show. And then you need to go, wah. Right?

So the opening is this ain’t your dad’s cop show, but that means first let’s set up some – put my feet up on the ground first. Because I start this way without my feet on the ground, I have no idea what I’m in. And I don’t know if the point is this is how reality works or just this is a broad show. Because when I watch Reno 911! I take it as a comedy that doesn’t look like reality at all, because that’s how they intended.

So, in your script here what’s the moment where you go that’s this tiny thing that epitomizes the real bizarre absurdity of being a cop?

**Andrew:** This isn’t really crime related, but the scene with the newspaper chicken man. Today actually my friend Bob Kulb sent me a screenshot from Facebook, this is the four-year anniversary of when he actually experienced that–

**Craig:** The guy making the chicken in the empty newspaper?

**Andrew:** Right. And he was a guy that my friend encountered on the street regularly and they got into conversations, got to know each other, exchanged recipes.

**Craig:** See, OK. That was a very cool moment. But then that moment to guide me in – by the way, that’s a more interesting beginning to your show, I think, than what you have, crazily enough. And to guide me in, I see a cop pulling up on a homeless guy and there’s a fire. And you’re like, oh boy, here we go. Right? And he gets out of the car and I think this is going to be a show where a cop harasses a homeless guy. Maybe the homeless guy has started a fire. Who knows what’s going on?

And he walks up to him and he’s like, “So what’s it tonight?” And they have a discussion and we see then he’s cooking the chicken and they have a discussion. He’s like, “All right man, take it easy.” And he gets back in the car and drives away with a wing or something. You go that’s what policing actually is like. But it has to start, literally the first shot has to I think welcome me into something I’m familiar with before you pull the rug out. I guess that’s how I would put it.

What do you think about that?

**John:** I get the idea of the inciting incident being that the original partner is gone, but with the original partner gone I didn’t know sort of who was important in that twosome and so then when the partner is gone I didn’t know that I was supposed to be focusing on Jack, because I thought maybe I was supposed to be focusing on the other guy. And I got confused where I was at. By the time – like within this first initial sequence, then this badge gets pulled out, and then there’s a graduation. And that all felt like at such a different scale than sort of like the people are storming down the castles that I had a hard time believing that moment right then.

You know, it’s interesting that on page four is the first time that he said like, “If we weren’t cops, if we weren’t white cops, then this would all be going very differently.” But before that point I assumed, and I think you kind of wanted me to assume, that these were bad guys. That these were somehow genuine criminals in that sense. So start – finding a different way into it that feels more like your show I think is going to help you, because the rest of your show doesn’t feel like that first initial thing.

And I get the drive to have something big and exciting to have some sort of scale at the start, but I don’t know that that’s especially going to help you. And it’s not setting you up for the contract that you’re going to make with your audience which is basically we’re going to follow in largely kind of real time, or at least continuous time over the course of this day, and all the things that will happen along the way. And things will be set up and payed off, but sort of sequentially. And that there’s a central twosome that we’re going to follow, but there’s an ensemble of other characters who are going to keep recurring throughout this night.

It’s a more familiar pattern, but it’s also within that familiarity, within that expectation you can sort of show all the things that are different from the normal.

**Andrew:** It’s actually unsurprising to me that you guys got so caught up on that opening, because I wrote I think eight openings, completely different openings. And, you know, this is my first finished TV pilot. So, how to actually write a successful pilot is tough.

**Craig:** Well, the beginning is sort of the big advertisement for what you are and what you’re about. Think about how The Shield began. That sort of established exactly what you needed to know about that show, right? We’ll begin with a regular cop show. Uh-oh, pull the rug out from under you and that’s going to be your series from here on out. This is a bad cop. We get the deal.

And so I think you just – of all your eight openings look at the one that you think kind of does the best job of selling the heart of your show and what’s special about it which is the natural viewpoint of a realistic day on the beat.

Now, you have certain requirements. So we talked about how translating real life into movie life can sometimes just turn into boring movie, right? So, you have so many things going on here. I feel like you kind of were like, oh my god, I’ve got 20 freaking great stories. Let me shove in like 17 of them. You don’t have to do it quite like that. I think you can pick your two or three favorites.

Then there is this traditional narrative you kind of have to move our heads toward. Because we love the little stories, we love the touches, but the traditional narrative is the thing we’re going to stick with. Something has gone very wrong in the beginning. And I think a police officer getting arrested for some kind of crime is serious. And being paired with your own son is kind of crazy. And how that pays off at the end. That narrative, which is all fictional, I think needs to be the focus. Not all the stories. Those stories are great to be informative, but I do feel like sometimes you’re working really hard to get them all in.

**John:** Yeah. I do wonder if you’re asking us to take two big leaps right at the start. The first is that this guy’s partner is being arrested and that he’s under suspicion. The second is that he’s going to be partnered with his own son. Both of those things feel unlikely. And two unlikelys together is a big ask of the audience.

So, there’s an argument to be made for we don’t see the partner. You know, the partner is set up and that he’s gone away, but we don’t see that as being a big focus. We don’t establish him as an individual character we’re going to meet. That the only ask you’re making of the audience is he’s getting partnered with his son and there should be maybe a little bit stronger a story point for like why they’re doing that. There’s a specific thing. So the guy who is making the assignment is doing it for a very specific reason. Essentially he knows that Jack won’t be able to do certain things because his son is going to be with him. Or some logic for that. There’s a reason why they got stuck together. And that creates a good tension.

Because I don’t see Daniel ever really asking the question like how did we get partnered together? Because it seems unlikely and I don’t see Daniel ask at any point in the story how this happened. He just sort of rolls with it.

Is it natural to be partnered with a family member?

**Andrew:** It’s not. And that was actually the original premise of the series. But as this is not enough to drive a series. And so I imposed the partner thing. And then I created a whole series arc for that.

**Craig:** Well, you know, the series is about an experience of a world, because this isn’t a miniseries right? It’s meant to go on and on right? So it’s like Hill Street Blues, you are creating a world of characters that have a soap opera relationship with each other. And I never mean that in a bad way. I mean, Hill Street Blues is a great, great show.

And then each week stuff is happening. And I think that John’s right. You have these two major shifts in this man’s life. One is losing a partner. And one is being partnered with his son. A traditional narrative way to do this, which isn’t always the worst thing in the world, is in the beginning of the show his partner is arrested. He goes to see his son graduate. He and his son have clearly a difficult relationship. The two of them split up. The son is now on the beat with some other person as a rookie. The father is starting to investigate what’s happened with his partner. And the two of them intersect. And by the end of the show they decide they should be partners, or they are told they are going to be partners for some reason that’s logical. So, your show ends with a big “Oh God” this is the new real.

When we start it that way you’ve immediately let a lot of air out of the balloon I think. Because we’re like, wow, god, we get it. This is the series. Father and son on the beat together. And…there they go. Right?

You have I think probably cheated yourself a little bit of some great conflict. The other issue with the father and the son right now is you’ve done I think an excellent job of conveying believably the reality of life on the street for a cop. But then there’s the reality of the life between two human beings you have fictionalized. And I’m not quite believing the relationship there between the two of them.

They don’t really seem like they have a history together. They don’t feel lived in. Fathers and sons have very complicated relationships. There is so much to say about a father who is a cop and then a son who decides he wants to be a cop. There’s a lot to say about that. Particularly if maybe they don’t get along. Now I’m all ears. Because I love that stuff. I don’t like you but I’m trying to be like you? Oh, this is good, right?

But that history, that lived in thing, their discussions, their reference points. I know the way it is with my son, who is 16 now. At some point you teach them, you teach them, you teach them, and then at some point they’re like, “Stop telling me how to do things. I’d rather just fall and fail on my own.” Well, now we have a father and a son. The son is grown. He’s a man. He’s a cop. But the father knows way more than the son does. How does that work? All that stuff is really juicy.

And that I think is more interesting to follow. It’s like what Scott was saying, the character part. That’s ultimately what will keep people watching.

**John:** If I had skipped over the part where it explained that they were father and son and just like if I did that thing that they talked about on the Three Page Challenge where they read the first few pages and skipped and read the middle pages, I would have guessed that they were uncle and nephew. Because it honestly felt a little bit more like what their relationship was in the sense of they knew each other, but they weren’t close. They were family but they weren’t – I didn’t feel like the father authority kind of thing very much happening in here.

And I felt like they got along fine. I didn’t feel the tensions I would expect to see between a father and a son. I’m not saying that’s a better pitch for that, but I think right now it feels – I’m not feeling the father and son. And I never got a sense that Daniel was ever going to turn on Jack, or could turn on Jack. And in a weird way because he’s his father it would be very unlikely that if he found information that Jack really was dirty that he would turn on him.

I would say just be thinking about where you want the audience to be sitting in terms of their feelings about each character. And I think it’s great that they have some real questions about what Jack has been up to and what Daniel is really doing there. If we found out that there’s a second conversation happening with Daniel about keeping an eye on Jack, that’s really interesting, too.

**Craig:** Like IA suddenly gets their hooks into Daniel. I mean, look, the son and father being teamed up as partners on the street is really interesting. The fact that the father might be dirty and the son is super straight-laced is really interesting. The fact that the father is innocent and maybe keeping his son out of trouble and we think it’s the other way around – there’s so many things you can do with that.

Do you have kids, by the way?

**Andrew:** No.

**Craig:** OK. But you had a dad?

**Andrew:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And still do?

**Andrew:** Yeah. Who is not a cop.

**Craig:** Got it. But you have a dad is my point. So you know how you are with your dad. And if you guys were on a job together just imagine that day. And there’s just stuff. There’s a whole lifetime of stuff. And I think it actually is great. I think the concept of it is great. It’s really fertile territory. You just have to now start planting seeds and growing it. And concentrating on that.

It’s so much more important for us to believe that and find what’s fascinating about that than for instance some of the kind of interesting garnish that comes on about people trading food for beer for favors. Which is all fun, but the father/son story is where this is at I think. So that’s where I would start. I would dig in hard on that.

**John:** Yeah. Because if you think about it, this is going to probably be the most time they’ve spent together for quite a long time. To be next to each other for an entire shift, that’s a lot of time to be spending with your dad. And so I think that could be an interesting dynamic you stick in there, too. Because you know your partner should be a confidant but also your coworker and all that stuff. But when it’s also your dad, it puts in a weird extra pressure on it.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. Yeah. Typically when we put two people together like this neither one of them likes the idea of it. And for good reason. If you’re going to put a father and son together on the job, I want to know that both of them are going to say, “You’re out of your mind. Absolutely not.” And why are they being put together? Two reasons. One, the reason that you cook up in your show. Two, you’re the writer and you’re forcing them together because this is what needs to happen with these two. And that is where it gets fun.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk about the words on the page. Because the writing reads fine. It reads really well. And so I had no trouble getting what you were going at and your descriptions of actions were really good. But I had a hard time though, sometimes I finished a scene and I’m like, wait, what was that about? And some of that I think is a deliberate choice you’re making that the world is just sort of chaotic and stuff just kind of happens. And that’s good, until the point where I can’t sort of figure out why did you show me that thing.

And there were definitely times along the way where I was like I don’t know quite why you showed me that thing and I didn’t have enough connective tissue to understand why that scene was there rather than three pages earlier or three pages later.

An example of something you come back to rhyming a couple of times is the stuff with the pools and the guy who drove through and smashed the pools and then coming back, replacing the pools. I felt like there was an opportunity to take an event that happens at the end with the Vietnamese restaurant.

**Craig:** It was like a convenience store.

**John:** The convenience store. I felt like that might be a useful thing to sort of layer in earlier on. Like this is a place we either visited earlier on and then there’s a thing, so then when it gets to the end that whole sequence, which is bloody and gory, it’s something we’re surprised by but also expecting. I mean, that sounds contradictory, but it’s a place that’s familiar to us and it was in one context at the start of the show and it’s a very different context now. Where if it was just a place where this is the place where my dad and I had this annoying fight about this stuff and then suddenly this is actually a place where like a guy is bleeding out, that’s really interesting.

And that also gives me some confidence as a viewer and a reader that there’s a reason why the writer took me to these places earlier on.

**Craig:** I mean that’s really important. The kind of notion of deliberate plotting. So the things that happen are paying off things that we have seen. And it does kind of come back to this question, the thing that you said you’re still kind of digging into, which is this theme or the point. We don’t have to say central dramatic conflict. That’s just my baloney lecture term.

**Andrew:** That’s very guru-y.

**Craig:** Very guru-y. What is the point of this? What are you trying to infect in my head with this?

**Andrew:** So the point of this, the theme, is what I started with. I never wanted to write cop dramas. But with all the police stuff going on, don’t even have to elaborate at all, something that was very intense in policing and you hear about the brotherhood is just loyalty. And it’s a great value and you know you hear it with Trump and how important loyalty is and how it’s above everything else. But it’s also total garbage sometimes to put that above every other value and I saw that as the reason for so many issues in policing.

And not even this major external stuff like covering for a partner who has committed crimes. Continuing with the way the institution does stuff, being loyal to the institution, being loyal to other people who are loyal to the institution. And I don’t know how that changes.

**John:** So let’s try and get that down to a single statement and see if we can get that down to–

**Andrew:** Here’s the theme. Here’s the theme–

**John:** So you actually have a dedication page where you talk about how cops are essentially all lone wolves, or it was better phrased than that.

**Craig:** They’re a pack of wolves, but–

**John:** But they’re all lone wolves. And you’re trying to get to that loyalty point. Is your central thesis or your question like is loyalty toxic, or loyalty is toxic. Loyalty is a corrosive force. Loyalty will drown us all. Like I think those are all really fascinating things and you’re actually well set up to explore those things, particularly with the bond of are you loyal to your family. Are you loyal to this oath you’ve taken which is sort of internal loyalty? Are you loyal to your fellow cops? That’s really interesting and compelling. And I think that is a great thing to build all these branches off of.

**Craig:** I agree. I think that now that I hear you say that it seems to me if I were working on this episode, this pilot, and I know that’s your intention, I have a father who has a very nuanced, experienced, muddled up understanding of loyalty because he’s had to live it, right, is to walk the line. And he knows he has made bad choices and he’s made good choices. He’s not a bad guy, but he knows he’s covered for bad guys. Right? He’s in, he’s up to it to his waist. He’s not in over his head but he’s up to his waist.

And here’s his son who doesn’t want to put up with any of it. His son who believes that – who is modern. Who has come into policing in the midst of a policing crisis and who believes that his loyalty is to oath and justice. And at the end of that episode if that son lies to cover for his own father, I know why I watched this episode. Because I have now seen a little bit of the mud rise up and now I’ve seen the father realize what it’s doing to his kid and I’ve seen the kid realize that he has the same problem inside of him as his dad. And now it’s universal and I totally get it.

If that’s what came through. So that’s what I talk about like in the structure thing. If I can go from that, I can go backwards and now start engineering things. So I know I want to end in this bloody mess at Tran’s, right, then in the beginning there’s going to be something where that kid is saying to his father, “You’re doing this wrong.” And his father saying, “This is kind of how it has to be.”

And at the end the thing the kid warned him about has come true. People are dead. And even so the kid backs up his dad. Now I have unity. So it’s really thinking through from that point. Let that point guide you.

And then you have – once that point has kind of driven you through and you understand how this story is serving that, then you have the gift of all your knowledge, of the things you have that nobody else has. Lindsay Doran always says, “What can our movie do that no one else can do?” Well, what can your show do that no one else can do? Chickens in the empty newspaper box. Right?

So do that. For sure. But that’s your thing, right? That’s what makes your show special. But, got to drive to that point. And then I think you will find yourself far more organized. And you won’t have that feeling that John has where he’s like why did I just watch that scene exactly, because you’ll know why it’s there.

**John:** So this morning you were at my lecture on want, right? This is only a couple hours later, so you probably haven’t thought through everything in terms of that, but I’d ask you to look at especially Jack and Daniel in terms of what they want. And what they want in the short term, but what their overall goals are.

So I think I hear Daniel articulate a bit about sort of his vision for what he sees the role of a police officer to be. I’d love to know that a little bit more clearly. Again, I always say like if this was a musical what would the song be? How would he express what he’s hoping for someday to get to a place? And I want to hear the same thing from Jack. And especially what does Jack want for himself but also in terms of his son? And sort of what choices is he going to make to get himself closer to those things?

There were times where I think I was confused in scenes because I didn’t know what they wanted literally in the moment. What were they trying to do? And so I would see them do things and I guess that’s a thing that a police officer does, but I didn’t see what their ambition was or motivation was right in that moment.

And then I would finally say the degree to which you can show us some private wants, things that each of them wants individually that the other one doesn’t know about, that’s also super helpful. So that may be just layering in the conversation with another character that one doesn’t hear, or the thing which we as an audience can see that the other character doesn’t see, so we get a little bit closer to them. And we get some insight that nobody else in this world has. That’s really helpful when you do that.

**Craig:** You know what I was just thinking, I really like that – I assume this is part of your realism that there’s a stolen car, they see the stolen car, they pursue the guys who flood the stolen car. They catch the guys. And when they come back someone else has stolen the car. I assume that really happened. Ish.

**Andrew:** To that effect, yeah.

**Craig:** That’s great. And I believed it. Like I saw that and I’m like, yeah, I bet that happens all the time. That’s, now put that in the context of the relationship between these two people. It’s the old bull and the young bull. And here’s the son saying, “No, we got to do this right.” And the guy is saying, “Forget it. Let it go.” And the end of that scene is, “See, dumb-dumb,” except that in the end-end if the guys they let go – and I know you bring it back, you bring the car back, but it’s almost like a random thing that came in. And I wanted it to be meaningful. I wanted it to be like that car kills someone.

The point being you can’t let it go. Right? But you just have to sort of deal with the insanity of it and keep trying. Just finding the relevance of these things so that it all fits and knits together. And what John is saying is 100% correct. You can’t get there unless you know from the start what it is – like I know what Daniel wants, I think. He wants justice. He wants to be a good cop. He wants to make a difference. Make the world a better place. Right? But what Jack wants – that’s where it gets interesting. And I’d love to know.

I’d love to know. And I think then you get him out of just comically cynical old cop who has seen it all and into a human being who has an agenda and unfortunately his job and his agenda don’t always match.

**John:** Where is your head at, Andrew? What do you see Jack wanting right now?

**Andrew:** So you had mentioned earlier how you sort of give away the series premise like seven minutes in, or I give away, and my reason for that was to immediately put Jack at a crossroads in his life where his way of being a cop for 20-plus years was just loyalty to cops, to copping. And now he has got a son who is idealistic, questioning his every past conception of how things should be done, and it’s dissonance for him.

**Craig:** That’s how he feels.

**Andrew:** Right.

**Craig:** And, by the way, he can feel that way prior to actually being teamed up with his son. In other words, the fact that his partner just got busted I think is a huge crossroads for him, or is about to be busted. And the fact that his son is now a police officer to me puts him at a crossroads, even if he’s just wandering around. But what does he want?

**John:** Does he want his son’s respect? Does he want his son’s admiration? Does he want his son to be partnered with somebody else so that he doesn’t have responsibility for him? Does he want his son to not be a cop?

**Craig:** Does he want something that has nothing to do with his son? Does he want to retire with money?

**Andrew:** I would say all of those things he wants and there’s not that clear driving want in this episode.

**Craig:** Well, I think there has to be a clear driving want. And I think it has to be sitting over his entire existence in a sense. Because make the world a better place is something that sits over your entire existence. And it predates the show. Because Daniel graduates from police academy in this episode which means he’s already been there for a while. This has been going on for him for a long time.

Jack has been a cop for 20-plus years, right. And he now wants something for sure before this episode starts. Something big. Retire. Get out. Maybe he, too, wants to make a difference in the world, make the world a better place, and he’s trying. And he just doesn’t quite know how. Maybe he’s trying to get off the hook for something.

It could be a hundred different things. Maybe he’s trying to make up for a mistake he’s made. Whatever it is, it has to drive him. And then what happens is you put these two people back together who have helped make each other. And you watch as they begin to interfere with what each other one wants. And then you got a show.

**John:** Let’s talk about next steps for this. Because I feel like this show coming from a former police officer is much more meaningful than this show coming from some random writer. So I think your bio is always going to be part of this show. In the next draft of this, in the draft that’s good and tight and sort of thematically works for that I think it’s a really interesting sample and I think it presents really well as you’re trying to find managers and stuff.

What else are you writing? What’s the other things that are high on your list to get written?

**Andrew:** So you had talked earlier about the tone being different at times, which is really just a combination of the different tones that I write. So, dark comedy, some supernatural thriller, a little magical realism in there.

**John:** Magical realism like in a Guillermo del Toro? Or a Tim Burton?

**Andrew:** Guillermo del Toro. Maybe a little toned down. I’m not having a whole lot of monsters, but curses and that kind of thing.

**Craig:** Well, this is the time when you should be writing as much as possible. Especially because you don’t have kids. You may one day have kids soon and they, as John and I have mentioned many times, they do sap away your life force, because the universe is aware that you’ve replaced yourself.

So this is a wonderful time for you to write-write-write. And, look, you’re reading during the day, you’re working during the day which is super important for your own mental health and sanity and economic viability in the world. But then you have time before you go in, there’s time after you go in. And I would say be really rigorous now with yourself and just keep going ahead.

**Andrew:** Absolutely.

**John:** Who else has read this script that we read?

**Andrew:** You are the first actually.

**John:** Well, Megan was the first, but we’re second and third.

**Andrew:** When I won I was like let me see how fast I can get something out that I care about. Because the best thing I’ve written is the thing I’m about to write.

**Craig:** By the way, true for us all and it never changes. And it’s important to actually appreciate that. That you keep getting better. Every single one of these experiences changes you and makes you better.

John and I have both been in this bucket before. I’m telling you, Scott Frank left me in a curled up ball one day. And it was remarkable. There’s a kernel here of something fascinating. There is a world that you’re on the verge of that’s fascinating. Really thinking about how you begin and just these two people. And let all the rest of that stuff go away and just think about how do I begin and who are these two people. Just them.

And you heard Scott talking about how he’ll just write that isn’t screenwriting but notes and things and we were saying you need to know more about the world than what you’re showing, because it will always inform everything. All the little cracks will feel weirdly filled in, even if you’re not spelling it out, because you know more. That’s the kind of work that needs to be done.

And then when you have that done, then you move onto your next most important character. And then you really start doing it with them. And you just work it, work it, work it.

**John:** Yeah. I would really focus on mapping out that central relationship and what’s going to be fascinating. And just take a step back and ignore the plot and sort of police world of it all, because you know all that stuff. And that all felt really, really true to me. Just focus on what we want to see from them.

It might be useful because you’re thinking of this as a TV show, think about sort of where this would go over the course of eight episodes or something and then what would be the most interesting thing to see in that first episode. And what would really lock you in. Because with a pilot writing sample you’re trying to show really great writing and really great development within the course of that one episode, but also that sense of there really could be a show here. He actually understands what – this isn’t just a short movie. This is actually something that can keep going. That you gave us a lot, but there’s still a lot more to give. And I think you’re going to have that stuff. World-wise, you definitely have that stuff. Make sure we feel that character-wise you’re going to have that stuff and that we’d want to keep coming back to see what was going to happen next to these two guys.

**Craig:** Exactly. Like here’s a great example from your script. At one point they go to talk to the guy that does the police horses in the stable. Interesting side trip. Felt educational. Felt sort of like here’s a bunch of stuff that you didn’t know about horses, like why they wear the wagons and stuff, why police horses have the blanket stuff. Not helpful to the relationship, the world, the character, the building.

If it came out through something that mattered, and it was impacting their relationship, or their purpose, or their connection, anything, if they grew up riding horses. If he used to put him on top of the horse when he was a little kid. Do you see what I’m saying? Suddenly it’s about them. Like then I get it.

But if it’s not about people stuff that is universal to all people, not just cops, then it becomes a little show and tell. And that’s interesting. It’s not dramatic. You know what I mean? That’s the key.

**John:** The other thing I would say is as you’re talking to people about this pilot and sort of what your intentions are, we have an expectation of police procedurals that they are going to solve a mystery, and you don’t seem to be interested in solving a mystery at all, which is great. So it’s about policing, which in a weird way is just like keeping a tamper down on things, making sure it doesn’t get crazy. As you describe to people I would make sure you’d describe what kind of show this is. So in your pitch that I was a cop, I don’t like cop shows, so I wanted to write something that was more true to what I thought was fascinating about this universe, that may be a useful thing to talk about is it’s not about the mystery of the week, it’s about how do you navigate through this insane world.

**Andrew:** You know, throughout the writing of it I really felt like it’s not possible to write a police show about cops on the street without having the larger, The Shield, or The Wire, the larger stuff going on. So, if anything it was an experiment in seeing if that’s possible.

**John:** So I think what we’re pitching here is essentially that central dynamic, which is the heroes, it is that father and son, that is what we’re pitching as being the unique thing–

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s what’s unique. I think that that’s what – look, if you’re going to have a cop show that means occasionally cop things will happen. Sitcoms will get away with it. Like you can have a sitcom like for instance Wings. Remember Wings? They’re in an airport. There’s very little travel-related plot stuff going on. Because it’s really about what happens in between the job. So, you’re not doing that. You’re doing an hour-long show, single-camera show, you’re following them around. Yeah, police stuff is going to happen, of course.

But what you’re showing is first of all the realer police stuff that goes on. And the little pieces of things that are fascinating like a jerk cop, you know, driving down the street and ruining things and another cop quietly coming up and making it good. But you’re also showing the relationship between these two people. And then I’m kind of into that.

So I wouldn’t panic so much about reacting to other shows, or standing apart from other shows. You just write your show as best you can. And I think your show is a show about a father and a son who are doing a job that puts them both in very difficult moral situations vis-à-vis their work, the law, and each other.

**John:** A good way to start in terms of figuring them out might just be to have – let them have a conversation. And so that’s sort of writing off the page. You’re not trying to stick them in any given scene. You’re just hearing them talking to each other. And just let them talk for pages, and pages, and pages and hear their voices separately. Hear where stuff is digging in. That might be a useful exercise for you getting a bit of their voice in there and understanding how they’re going to approach different stuff. And sometimes you’ll end up copying and pasting out some of those great moments for later scenes, but mostly it’s just getting yourself really good at writing those two guys in their voice so you can stick them anywhere.

**Andrew:** Cool.

**John:** Andrew, thank you for showing–

**Craig:** Thanks Andrew.

**Andrew:** Thank you for all the abuse. I mean, it’s super helpful.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s what we do.

**John:** All right. Thanks.

**Craig:** Thanks.

Links:

* [The Harrows (original draft)](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/9-13_Thalheimer_pilot.pdf) by Andrew Thalheimer, Story by Robert Kulb & Andrew Thalheimer)
* [The Harrows (rewrite)](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/12-17_Thalheimer_Pilot.pdf) by Andrew Thalheimer, Story by Robert Kulb & Andrew Thalheimer
* [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 Andy Roninson ([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_330.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/five-star-podnerships).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So today’s episode contains some explicit language. You might want to listen on headphones. Thanks.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** Craig, you have reindeer ears. This is our live holiday Scriptnotes show. Thank you guys all so much for coming. It’s the end of 2017. Thank you for braving fires for being here. You’re awesome. Craig, what a year. It’s been just a huge year. So much has happened.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Something that on Twitter this producer pointed out that the movie Kong Skull Island, that came out in March. That movie is from this year. This has been the most endless year of all years.

**Craig:** I want this stop. Perfect miserable discordant.

**John:** Absolutely. But that’s actually sort of the meme of this moment because as you guys all know as we’re recording this it looks like Disney and Fox, well, Disney is going to buy Fox. That’s a huge change. So we talked about that on the–

**Craig:** Dox.

**John:** Yes. They will call it Dox. Bart Simpson and Mickey Mouse together.

**Craig:** Ooh. Wow.

**John:** Something there.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, I don’t think that’s ever going to happen. It is fascinating to see how they are – I mean, it’s not done-done, but they are doing this very careful carving up of Fox. So they’re taking Fox Television. That’s the part that produces the TV shows, but they’re leaving the network because you can’t own two networks, because Disney owns ABC. And they’re taking the movies. They’re taking the movie library. They’re taking the television library.

Nobody knows what they’re going to do with the animation studio. Blue Sky?

**John:** Blue Sky, yeah.

**Craig:** Fox News, not taking Fox News with them. Crafty Disney. Very crafty. And also they’re leaving the sports behind because they have ESPN. So it’s very strange. And I don’t know what’s going to happen to the lot. Do you know what’s going to happen to the lot?

**John:** I have no idea. So you have these two giant powerhouse companies. You have Disney and 21st Century Fox combining and something you said on the last podcast is like, you know, other companies are going to need to figure out what their plan is to do because you don’t want to be the last person without a partner.

**Craig:** Correct. Otherwise you’re in a competitive disadvantage.

**John:** So, Craig, what I want to talk about tonight is we need to be thinking about the future of our media empire and what we’re going to do because consolidation is sort of inevitable, so we need to figure out–

**Craig:** I don’t want to lose the money I’m not getting.

**John:** Yeah, so it’s crucial. We need to find ourselves–

**Craig:** We have to protect.

**John:** We need a podnership is what we need. And so I want to talk through some options. I put together a little small deck to talk through some of the options. If we need to merge up with somebody else–

**Craig:** Is that a small deck?

**John:** This is a small deck.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** So it’s only about eight slides that can talk you through my vision for what can happen down the road.

**Craig:** I’m super ready.

**John:** So we can survive.

**Craig:** Thank you, by the way, for consulting me.

**John:** Yeah. You’re welcome. First let’s talk through goals. What are the goals of this merger?

**Craig:** Money.

**John:** And what do we want to get out of this?

**Craig:** Money.

**John:** Well, yeah, we want to maximize shareholder value.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s crucial. So–

**Craig:** Do I have shares?

**John:** Well, you have a lot of emotional investment in this show, right? You have fans. You have people. People like Craig. You can’t buy love, Craig.

**Craig:** But you can’t eat applause either, right?

**John:** You also – we want to make sure we can exploit our library of valuable characters. And that’s where you kind of come in. Because you think about – a lot of the characters on this podcast, they’re Craig characters.

**Craig:** All of them.

**John:** A lot of them are.

**Craig:** There’s Robot, that’s you. You’ve got that.

**John:** I’ve got Robot, yeah.

**Craig:** But I got Sexy Craig.

**John:** Yeah, Sexy Craig problematic in this era. I just want to point that out.

**Craig:** Sexy Craig, actually there may be an article dropping. I don’t want to freak anybody out, but there may be an article dropping.

**John:** But there’s Whole Foods Craig.

**Craig:** Whole Foods Craig.

**John:** A lot of good synergies with Whole Foods Craig.

**Craig:** And Umbrage Craig.

**John:** But that’s just Craig.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Finally, I want to position us to be able to compete with Netflix, because that’s really the goal, because it’s clear that Netflix is going to become giant. And so we need to make sure that we’re ready when they do become giant.

**Craig:** What do we do?

**John:** Well, we need to look for another podcast we could merge with and sort of synergize with.

**Craig:** Oh, mega podcast.

**John:** And so maybe even sell ourselves out to somebody bigger so we can actually survive.

**Craig:** I just have to think of another podcast.

**John:** How about Pod Save America. So, Craig was actually a guest on Pod Save America and you were fantastic, Craig.

**Craig:** Oh, thank you. Thank you. I wasn’t really quite sure what it was until after I did it, which infuriated John by the way. Made him crazy. I love that part of it. That was a fun show. I actually did Lovett or Leave it which is the–

**John:** It’s part of the whole empire.

**Craig:** It’s part of the Pod Save America empire.

**John:** So maybe we can join their empire.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I think what would be good about it is you share a hatred of Ted Cruz. So that’s good.

**Craig:** I think that everyone qualifies on–

**John:** That’s true. They have really fun live shows.

**Craig:** True.

**John:** We have live shows, they have live shows. They do it every week. But we could do more live shows.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, we’ll step it up.

**John:** All right. Down sides.

**Craig:** Apparently they don’t want to be here every week.

**John:** There are too many Johns. So their show has Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, there’s me. So something has to go.

**Craig:** I’m honestly OK with it.

**John:** Finally, America may be done. So, that may be – the brand may be – I don’t know what the value is – what is the future of Pod Save America after America–?

**Craig:** You’re talking about the brand? You’re not talking about, like, just because Armageddon in general should be a negative for all of these.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t know that America has enough future to support a podcast called Pod Save America.

**Craig:** Right. The runway is starting to get a little short for us, isn’t it?

**John:** Shorter.

**Craig:** Yeah, shorter and shorter.

**John:** So we might need to go to like a narrative podcast.

**Craig:** Oh, great idea. Is it Stone?

**John:** No, it’s S Town, or Shit Town is the other thing you can call it.

**Craig:** Well, that’s just outrageous.

**John:** So Craig does not listen to podcasts. This is a thing. By applause, who has listened to S Town?

**Craig:** Liars.

**John:** So, S Town follows this reporter who goes to visit this guy. It’s a real thing. You would love this show because here’s some things you would love about this show. It talks about a grumpy loner with opinions on everything.

**Craig:** Oh, I remember hearing about this. And making a decision to not listen to it. Yep. Yep.

**John:** And he’s really fascinating. And there would be so many opportunities for How Would This Be a Movie. Because like pretty much everything he touches. He has a maze on his property.

**Craig:** Do you think that How Would This Be a Movie deserves its own acronym, really?

**John:** Totally does.

**Craig:** It’s not like Return of the Jedi.

**John:** In the outlines it’s actually called How Would This Be a Movie. Yeah, if you read the outlines?

**Craig:** But it gets a HWTBAM?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** HWTBAM.

**Craig:** HWTBAM. Okay.

**John:** Some downsides. Can you think of any downsides for this?

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t listen to this show.

**John:** Yeah. And also it’s too acclaimed. Craig, that might scare you aware.

**Craig:** I don’t like the tinsel. I don’t truck in awards.

**John:** And the show is also about whether this main character John was hiding gold on his property and that’s a little familiar for us.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Yeah. There’s gold hidden here.

**Craig:** He’s so rich because of this.

**John:** Dirty John. Who listened to Dirty John? So not as popular. It’s a coproduction with LA Times. Really fascinating. You know about this?

**Craig:** I read it.

**John:** So you know the history of this. So tell us a little bit about Dirty John.

**Craig:** I watched the podcast with my eyes.

**John:** So tell us about what it’s like to read a podcast.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. It’s just like you remember reading things, and that.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** Dirty John, great long story of a horrendous, sociopathic, manipulative man and a woman that he cons. One of many women that he had conned in his life. And it’s about her and her family learning the truth of him and trying to get free of him. And it ends in the most spectacularly violent way. It’s remarkable.

**John:** Yeah. It was a really enjoyable listen or read. So I feel like this is a natural brand extension.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Easy. Dirty John & Craig. Just you add an ampersand. We add you to the mix.

**Craig:** Dirty John & Craig. That’s like a great ‘70s band.

**John:** Absolutely. So, the main character, the main bad guy in the show, what was his profession? Do you remember?

**Craig:** Well, he claimed to be a nurse, right?

**John:** He claimed to be a medical professional, sort of like you.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So like he had a medical background, so that fits in really well with you. So those are good synergies.

**Craig:** Great point. I do know a lot.

**John:** You know a lot.

**Craig:** I know a lot.

**John:** Yeah. Some downsides of this? What do you think?

**Craig:** Somebody give me something.

**John:** I would say it’s in Orange County. We got to go to Orange County.

**Craig:** I forgot that it was in Orange County.

**John:** And if you listened to the podcast you’d hear the Orange County accents. It would drive you crazy.

**Craig:** What is the Orange County accent?

**John:** Listen to it and you’ll just claw your ears out.

**Craig:** Is anyone here from?

**John:** You agree with me guys, right?

**Craig:** Oh, there we go. Man.

**John:** That was tough.

**Craig:** You’re not going to do it?

**Audience Member:** What do you want me to say?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That was it?

**John:** That was it, yeah. Sort of curious but indignant.

**Craig:** Actually sounded like she was from London. What do you want me to say?

**John:** The last thing I’ll say is you don’t listen to podcasts but there’s these Hunt a Killer subscription boxes that were so creepy and I don’t want to go back to that. I don’t want subscription boxes on our show.

**Craig:** That one just didn’t work for me.

**John:** Because you didn’t see the show.

**Craig:** Oh, no, no, the Hunt a Killer thing. I got the box.

**John:** Oh, you got the box. Great. Did you find the killer?

**Craig:** I didn’t go past the first month.

**John:** I’m sorry. Yeah. Sorry.

**Craig:** Didn’t work.

**John:** Didn’t work for you. So you’d be a bad advertiser for that because you didn’t enjoy hunting the killer.

**Craig:** Yeah, we probably should stay ad-free just because of my–

**John:** Yeah. So finally Missing Richard Simmons. Did you listen to Missing Richard Simmons?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. It was a very popular podcast. Who listened to Missing Richard Simmons?

**Craig:** Why?

**John:** Because they like podcasts. They like our podcast.

**Craig:** I also don’t understand that.

**John:** So here’s what possibly could work about Missing Richard Simmons. Screenwriters as a whole are not necessarily the fittest bunch.

**Craig:** True.

**John:** So there’s opportunity for fitness.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Screenwriters not so healthy. He gets them–

**Craig:** He cries with us. We cry with him.

**John:** So here’s the other thing I need to tell you about this. Aline Brosh McKenna is obsessed with this show. She loved this show. So that’s a plus.

**Craig:** That’s a downside as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** It’s also a downside, too. A plus and a minus.

**Craig:** Nailed it.

**John:** And Richard Simmons, he also just wants to be left alone. That’s ultimately what you come out of the show learning.

**Craig:** Is that literally the big secret of Missing Richard Simmons is that he just wants people to F off?

**John:** Kind of yeah.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** That’s really Craig’s secret. He basically just wants to be left alone.

**Craig:** That’s not a secret.

**John:** So let’s take a look at the numbers so we can run through and figure out what we’re worth. We have about 50,000 listeners, a solid 50,000 a week.

**Craig:** That’s pretty good.

**John:** That’s pretty good. We’ll take that. People here in the room. We make money selling t-shirts and so t-shirts we sold $1,429 is how much we made on t-shirts off of this last thing. So thank you everyone who bought a t-shirt. Thank you very much for that. Yeah, absolutely. We’re rolling in cash.

**Craig:** My share of that is?

**John:** Is what you’ve always gotten.

**Craig:** Gotten. Gotten. God.

**John:** And we have monetized through advertising, which was zero dollars in advertising. Now, the Disney/Fox deal is about $60 billion is what I heard with the Disney/Fox deal, so I’m thinking maybe – keep it a little simple – maybe $59 billion.

**Craig:** To be fair, we bought about–

**John:** We will take Apple Pay, so.

**Craig:** We bought about 100,000 bitcoin about 12 years ago.

**John:** Yes. So we’re doing this for kicks and giggles.

**Craig:** That’s really what we’re selling. We’re just selling the bitcoin.

**John:** So if anybody wants to make a bid for $59 billion for us, Megan is here. She has her Square c ash reader, too. So anyway you want to pay, Megan is here in front. But let’s get on with the show.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** We have three amazing guests for you tonight. Our first guest is Julie Plec. Julie Plec is the co-creator and showrunner of Vampire Diaries, its spinoff The Originals. Also Containment. She developed Tomorrow People. And has written for Kyle XY. Julie Plec, welcome.

**Julie Plec:** Oh hi.

**John:** And so we need to tell everybody that Julie Plec is actually taking a red eye after this show. That’s how much she is devoted to the–

**Craig:** She showed up with luggage.

**Julie:** I did. I walked in with my suitcase. My parka.

**John:** Nice. Next we have Michael Green. He is the co-creator and showrunner of American Gods and Kings. He’s also the screenwriter of every movie you saw this year. Murder on the Orient Express, Blade Runner 2049, and Logan. Michael Green, welcome.

**Michael Green:** Hello. Good to be here.

**Julie:** Amazing.

**John:** Justin Marks who wrote the live action Jungle Book and its sequel. His TV series Counterpart debuts January 21 on Starz. Welcome the three of you. Thank you guys very much for coming here.

**Craig:** What a bunch of losers!

**John:** Oh, they’re fantastic. We know very little about TV, even though Craig is about to do a TV show, so I thought we’d—

**Michael:** Oh, why?

**Craig:** Well, it’s a miniseries. So I think of it as just a long movie.

**Michael:** Same.

**Craig:** No, because it ends. Isn’t that the problem with TV is that it keeps going and going and going? Justin, isn’t that the problem?

**Justin Marks:** Yes.

**Craig:** It just won’t stop.

**Justin:** Yes. That is definitely the problem with TV. It just will never leave your life.

**Michael:** In success you run till you die.

**Craig:** Till you die.

**John:** Julie Plec, your shows have run for a very long time. You’ve been on incredibly successful shows that run a long time. Originals is just about to end. I think that’s actually where you’re headed is to go to the wrap party for this. What is it like coming back season after season on a show? Is it great? Is it bad? Should Craig run away from it? Should he run towards it? What do is it like having a —

**Julie:** It’s sort of like to each their own, right? I’ve worked with writers who get two years in and they’re like, “Get me out. I can’t.” Their brain, their mind, just atrophies and they feel like nothing they do is fresh and nothing that they do has any value, et cetera, et cetera. Basic self-loathing stuff.

For me I get so much personal and emotional value out of building the community. When you make a movie you’re, you know, a few months in, six months, whatever. In and out. And you might never see any of those people again. And in television you can – year after year after year you’re working in success with the same people and you’re watching them grow from the bottom of their position all the way up the ladder till you’re partners. And there’s just something so emotionally fulfilling about that that above and beyond the storytelling it’s really – it’s a very full life. So even when it’s hard you still feel really satisfied by it.

**John:** Julie, you’re doing a traditional show where you are writing and shooting the show and editing the show all at the same time, but you guys had a more – the new wave experience where you guys – on both American Gods and on Counterpart didn’t you write everything before you started shooting? Is that correct? Justin, why don’t you start?

**Justin:** Yeah. We wrote the entire first season before we started the first season. And it has its advantages and it definitely has its disadvantages, too. But the hard thing is that you can’t, you know, you write these roles and it’s great – in TV you’re supposed to be able to see the actors and how they gel with it and how it works. And then you have these things and there are just a number of opportunities where you look at a role that you’ve written for ten episodes and then you see someone there and you’re like, oh my god, this person is in the show for the next nine episodes. And the other way around, too, sometimes people come on for two episodes and you’re like, oh my god, this person is great and you’re stuck with it. I mean, you’ve shot – everything is planned out and everything is done. So that ten-hour movie thing has, you know, some strengths. Some strengths.

**Craig:** Ten-hours is a lot.

**John:** Michael, so American Gods–

**Michael:** We were somewhere between the two for the first season of American Gods. And I should point out, so I’m the recently disgraced showrunner of American Gods.

**Craig:** What happened?

**Michael:** My partner and I on the show were let go last week. It’s in Deadline.

**Craig:** Why are we bringing this up in this show?

**Michael:** But I loved the experience. I’m very proud of it and happy to talk about it.

**Julie:** Shame!

**Michael:** Shame!

**John:** Shame!

**Michael:** I’ll answer the now boring question. We wrote about two-thirds of the season and made sure to leave the ending so that we could course correct and rewrote the hell out of the middle of it. Because it’s the best of both worlds. We were able to put in a bunch and know where we wanted to go but also say, you know what, we see the actor who we want to lean in to and can craft towards them and do the things that television does really well.

**John:** One of the things that TV did a lot of in 2017 was not just sort of like do shows that were like previous shows, but they literally just did the same show again. So we had Will and Grace come back. We have Roseanne coming back. Dynasty is back. As you guys, and Julie especially you’re writing for network, is there a pressure to just like come into them with a thing that is like exactly either – is literally the same thing they’ve done before? Do you get approached about like why don’t you reboot this series that already existed?

**Julie:** No. You know, weirdly I’ve managed to avoid the “just take that thing and make it different and preferably better” pitfalls. I think it’s because ultimately I’ve been locked in my own franchise for the last eight years, so I just keep making those again and again.

I was talking to somebody the other day and they said something like 80% of the stuff in development at the network is IP, whether it’s remake or whatever.

**Craig:** Welcome to movies. And so the golden age of television died.

**John:** Well, but there’s also just so much more TV being made. So you’re saying 80% at network, but it feels like where you guys are doing it, so on Starz or on Netflix—

**Michael:** Well, I worked on something that was IP. It was based on a book. But you had an original.

**Justin:** Yeah, it was original.

**Julie:** Hey, how was that?

**John:** That’s true. American Gods is based on a book. That’s right. I forget.

**Craig:** But it was based on a book, but there is a sense that in television now they’re starting to do this thing that they’ve been doing in movies forever where they take something that honestly really should have just been left alone, like—

**Michael:** Slinky the show.

**Craig:** Or Battleship, the movie. And Battleship. Still the best story ever told. And where is Earth? And they make a movie out of it and now they’re going and digging up these shows. Like for instance, a few years ago – you guys probably all got this call to write a Dynasty movie. I think it was at Fox. And now they’re like, ah, you know what, that’s a dumb idea. We’re not doing that anymore. For a while we were doing that. Now let’s just make the Dynasty show again.

**Julie:** But the thing that I don’t get is that like, I mean, I’m 45 and I watched Dynasty in high school. It was one of my favorite shows. But I’m not tuning in to watch younger Dynasty necessarily. Like I just–

**Craig:** You want those Dynasty people.

**Michael:** I would watch Dynasty reruns. I mean, I’m older than you. I loved – watched the shit out of it. And the more ridiculous it was, the more we loved it. Someone needs to have that experience.

**Craig:** Yeah, but like Melrose Place. I don’t need to see Melrose Place again. Like a new Melrose Place.

**Justin:** I really have to say as the resident person here, I have no idea what Dynasty is.

**Julie:** What?! Young child.

**Justin:** And I don’t know if that goes to your argument.

**Michael:** So there’s Alexis Morell Carrington Colby Dexter Colby. Look it up.

**Craig:** Dynasty was the show that came about because Dallas was popular. Have you ever heard of Dallas? Who shot JR and all of that?

**Justin:** Yeah. I know it’s in Texas.

**Craig:** Yes. Correct. So then Dynasty was like the Pepsi to Dallas’s Coke. It was not great.

**Julie:** Yeah, I mean, my point is like if you’re marketing – and by the way, all my Vampire Diaries crew ended up going to work on Dynasty. So yay Dynasty. And I hope it survives forever. But you’re building off of a franchise name or a brand or whatever, but it’s like so old that the people that remember it as being a popular viable brand are so far out of your demo that like what are you doing. That’s my question.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I will say, this is a very mild defense, but as a father of a 12-year-old daughter, there’s things – she won’t watch things that were shot before a certain time. Like she won’t watch things that are shot square, in like 4-3 format. She can just tell like, oh, this is old school, old style. And so like I tried to get her to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is brilliant, and she won’t because it looks old to her. It looks old-fashioned to her.

**Michael:** It’s like we wouldn’t watch the black and white Gilligan’s Island?

**John:** Yeah.

**Michael:** Those are the old episodes.

**Craig:** I would watch those. I was that kind of guy.

**John:** Justin, a question for you though, because Jungle Book is an example of taking an existing property and making it in a whole new way because you have new technology to do it.

**Justin:** But that’s what I don’t understand. I mean, not to pick, I don’t understand the – you know, parents who grew up on a movie like Jungle Book or something like that, it’s bring your kids. Is anyone really saying like, “I watched Dynasty, I’m going to tune in with my kids?”

**Craig:** Not a person.

**Justin:** Anyway, I interrupted the–

**John:** No, but I wanted to go back to sort of your sense of when you were doing Jungle Book, the degree to which how much are you trying to reinvent the story of Jungle Book or how much are you trying to do it with the same story with a new technology? Because I faced that with Aladdin, which was the pressure of are we trying to reinvent the whole thing and rethink everything, or are we trying to Beauty and Beast it and literally just do the cartoon? And you must have faced that same pressure?

**Justin:** I think it’s harder the better the original movie gets in that sense and the more complete the story is. In the case of Jungle Book, you know, it’s from a certain era and there’s a sort of episodic nature to it. And we just had a list of here are the things that you remember without being aided, you know, from the original movie. And you just sort of live with that. And then everything else in between you evaluate and you interrogate and you say is this as good as it could be, or can we make this better? Can we make this richer and more, you know, a little deeper, motivate the villain a little better? Anything like that.

But, you know, there was definitely a list of like half a dozen moments/images/ideas that absolutely had to be in the movie because I feel like no matter what you feel about the original you would want to see it again. That’s how you associate it.

**Craig:** And are you – this is a question for both of you guys, because you both move between movies and television. How is the balance? I mean, how do you work that out? Is it something that you are kind of edging one way or the other, or are you perfectly divided up here?

**Justin:** I think I’d like to know from the person who wrote four movies this year.

**Julie:** Four movies. Four credited movies. God knows what else you did.

**John:** It was really the year before was a lot of that, but still.

**Michael:** I can’t say there’s any balance at all. It’s like any project or when you’re balancing two or more things. It’s whatever bullet is coming at you, dodge that. Look for the next bullet. Dodge that. You know, and just get through it. I mean, look, four movies in a year is the product of five years of development, just all sort of like “fuck you it’s happening.”

**Craig:** Yeah, I think sometimes people think that you just went, like here’s a mountain of coke, and whaaa….

Yeah.

**Michael:** But there was definitely the weird summer last year when I was hopping between three sets. And I don’t recommend it. It’s not the way to do your best work. You know, if you have a family and you like them, or even better love them, you know, that’s not a good thing to do.

But it was mostly about, if I made any conscious decision it was television is getting so strange and volatile and new and unrecognizable, and features the same. So, I thought why don’t I just try to do two careers at once and maybe one will win out or be dominant at that point. And that means there are some times where you’re not doing shit in either. And then there are time when both suddenly the tinder lights.

**Craig:** And there’s neither one medium nor the other holds a greater personal or creative satisfaction for you?

**Michael:** No, I think like everything else whatever I’m doing I wish it was the other.

**Craig:** Ah. That is a Jewish Christmas.

**John:** Michael, I want to get back to the question that Justin tackled which was there’s an existing piece of thing out there that people are familiar with and then you’re going back and you’re tweaking it, you’re redoing it. So Murder on the Orient Express, there’s a book, everyone has read the book. Everyone – lots of people have seen the movie. Lots of people come into it knowing the twist. So how do you approach – like what were your first conversations about this property as you sat down to tackle it? What was your way in?

**Michael:** It was a bizarrely wonderful experience, because I went in to the studio. I had already worked with the producers on it. And it was the, “Hey, do you want to do this?” And the answer was yeah. And they said, “Well what would you do?” And I said, well, let’s do the book. Like let’s not fuck with what’s great. I don’t want to out Agatha Christie Agatha Christie. Yes, there’s an ending. I’m pretty sure Americans don’t remember it. If they do, then it’s like Bare Necessities in your – you know, these are the things we want to get to. And then they’ll look for how did you present it, can you make it emotionally resonant, can you add to it so that you do, “Yes, and?” But also like I’m just not going to try to beat out that, nor am I going to blow up the train. Nor am I going to set it in space.

But if you’re OK with that, let’s write the movie. And it was with Fox. And they were like, “That sounds great. That sounds like what we want to do.” And gave them a script and it was one of those things where everyone wanted to do the same thing. The planets aligned, so the gravitational pull was to the same direction, down to when you’re lucky enough to get Ken Branagh to direct it, and say he wants to star in it. Ok, now we know that it’s going to feel like the kind of movie we’ve been talking about.

So, it was the lucky thing of never having a moment where someone was trying to turn it into something weird or other. But that said, it’s IP. It is familiar. It’s British civil religion. They certainly remember the ending there, but they don’t mind that. They want the security of the Americans aren’t going to fuck it up. And we told them we wouldn’t by hiring–

**John:** Kenneth Branagh.

**Michael:** Their best guy.

**John:** Hire the Shakespeare guy to do it.

**Michael:** The most British man there is.

**John:** Basically they’re giant British fans for the original Agatha Christie, so they will know all that stuff.

**Michael:** Yeah, they’re rabid. That’s their baseball as I understand it.

**John:** Now, Julie, you have rabid fans from what I understand.

**Julie:** I do. Yes.

**John:** So, Nima who works for us is a rabid fan. He’s seen every episode of Vampire Diaries. And so he wrote a question which I’m going to now paraphrase for you. And you don’t even have to answer the question, but I want to sort of answer the meta question of this kind of question.

**Julie:** OK. OK.

**John:** So his question is on Vampire Diaries vampires have the ability to compel humans to obey their will. Could a vampire compel a human to not obey another vampire’s compulsion, or compelling?

**Julie:** Whoa.

**John:** See, yeah. Nima is excited that you said whoa on that.

**Julie:** Yeah. Maybe. Shoot, eight years, we never went down that road.

**Craig:** Probably because it’s the nerdiest road ever.

**Julie:** Should have gone nine.

**Craig:** Just saying.

**John:** So, my meta question is about that kind of question, because you must get that stuff all the time which is like someone who is a huge, huge fan of what you’re doing but wants to needle or poke or just ask things that either you don’t have an answer for or, you know, it just kind of doesn’t matter. How do you deal with that?

**Julie:** Most of my fan engagement and interaction has been on Twitter. And for the first four or five years I was very, very heavily involved in and invested in Twitter. And I would read all my mentions. And I would spend hours and hours. And that particular group of fans that I was engaging with heavily weren’t concerned with that kind of shit. Like literally they were like very worried about who Elena was going to end up in bed with. And it was very important. And when it didn’t go their way they were very mean.

Like if somebody had tweeted me that I would have been like, “Let’s talk man. This is great. I’m so excited.”

**Craig:** Finally something to discuss dispassionately.

**John:** Nima is here. He’s very excited to meet you. There’s Nima.

**Julie:** Oh hi!

**Craig:** But there is a certain kind of interaction now between television producers, particularly shows like yours which do have a very visceral connection for an audience. And I think a lot of the shows that I see, generally speaking sci-fi shows, horror shows, superhero shows, there’s a certain kind of fandom that gets really intense. And I watch it from the side and I will sometimes see these reactions happening on Twitter and I will get frightened just standing near it for the people that are making the show.

**Julie:** Yeah, well, you know, it got ugly. And it got sad and ugly because then I had to stop reading my mentions and I had to not engage on Twitter in that way. And for the last couple years I mean at best scroll through every now and then, just wanting to find that one person who is like asking, “Hey, how did you get into writing,” so at least to reward the good behavior, you know?

I mean, we could have a symposium on this. And I’m only really focusing right now on the negative side of it because obviously there’s a tremendous amount of positives. But the negative side of it is just this entitlement that is so toxic. Like just you are ruining the thing that I love, therefore you are terrible. And yet I’m like, but I wrote the thing that you love. You know, and it’s like, I mean, you love that. It just becomes so personal and it becomes not just about, “Oh, I’m not happy with the way this storyline is going,” it becomes about, “You’re fat. And you’re ugly. And no one is ever going to marry you. Thank god you don’t have children because they’d be ugly.”

I mean, like it’s all that stuff.

**Craig:** I should not have said any of that. I just—

**Julie:** And it’s just extraordinary. And it’s a high level, in a weird way because I noticed it all happening over the first couple years and I thought, hmm, like the world is going to a dark place and I’m seeing it happen through the sort of Twitter fandom. And then the world went to a dark place and now everybody talks to each other like that. And I saw it first.

**Craig:** It is frightening. I just wanted to say that I think that a lot of the people – I think anybody that falls in love with any television show or any movie, when we say we like it or we love it, what we’re really describing is a relationship that we have with it. That’s why people change their minds about things, right? We have changing relationships. As we grow older our attitudes towards things change. We revisit. I think people sometimes can have a very bad relationship with a show. It means something to them you did not intend. It is providing a function or serving a function for them. And then when you don’t do what they want or you kill the wrong person, because as we know sometimes that person is just wah-wah-wah, and so they’ve got to go. Right?

**Julie:** Yeah. [laughs]

**Craig:** These people lose their minds because you are disrupting this thing that they have an unhealthy relationship with.

**Julie:** Yeah, and I remember in early seasons them saying like, “You don’t understand this relationship.” Two and half seasons I have painstakingly laid in every little nuance and detail of the time their hands just sort of brushed, and the way that she looks at his lips before she looks in his eyes when they’re staring at each other. I like gave you that relationship that you love detail by detail. And now you’re, you know, you’re coming at me in such an aggressive way.

**Craig:** Geez Louise.

**Michael:** I liked when you touched my hand.

**Julie:** That was nice.

**Michael:** By the way, wait, to go back to your first question because Julie, who has had a brilliant career that I admire and tell everyone about because she’s one of the heroes, has gotten to work on her shows for long enough for people to have that relationship.

**Julie:** Yeah.

**Michael:** That is not a miniseries relationship.

**Craig:** Right.

**Julie:** That’s true.

**Michael:** And so the exchange rate for having – to be able to steep, to be able to play that long game, to be able to have your own emotional investment be reflected back in your audience’s emotional investment, the exchange for that is your life and health in like 15 years.

**Julie:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, you know, Dan and Dave, we had Dan and Dave on our show – Dan Weiss and David Benioff who do Game of Thrones – and those guys don’t look at anything. They have never looked at anything. And it has been fascinating, because every now and then I’ll be like, “Hey, how you are guys – oh, yeah, you don’t even know. Never mind. You don’t know about the firestorm that just occurred because of the episode in which blah-blah-blah happened.” Nor do they know when people are like, “Oh my god…” They are just completely isolated.

And, now it works for them because they are – well, they’re weird.

**Michael:** But do you read reviews?

**Craig:** I stopped. I have stopped.

**John:** So I, generally I stopped–

**Craig:** I have good reason to stop.

**John:** But this last time with Big Fish opening in London I was not going to read reviews, and so I was putting my phone away and someone tweeted at me, “Shame about the London reviews.”

**Craig:** Oh that, ugh.

**John:** Why are you doing this? And so I had an early flight, so I had already taken a Xanax so I could fall asleep. So like, you know what? Fuck it. I’m going to read all the reviews. And so I was already pre-medicated and I read all of them. And in a weird way it was good. I’m glad I did it because there were like two-star and five-star reviews, so it was a real range. And it was actually really good to actually know what it was, because there are times where I haven’t read reviews and I’m just kind of wandering around in a fog like I don’t know what’s out there. And so for me it was good to know–

**Craig:** I suppose in the limited circumstance where I can pill myself up and be on a plane, I’ll go ahead and read a few reviews.

**John:** Justin Marks, will you read reviews of your show when it comes out, Counterpart?

**Justin:** You know, it’s really hard because with the show especially you’re much more accountable to those reviews than you are on a movie where it’s done. I mean, there’s nothing else, what can I do? Can I go back and change the movie? No. So I’m curious for the people who do television, because I’ve never been through this process before. I think I kind of have to. I think I kind of have to know what’s working and what’s not working if there’s a collective consensus about something.

**Michael:** You don’t have to. You work for Starz, so here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to get an email every day with the headline of whatever review came in and a parenthetical that says, “Positive, negative, mixed.”

**Justin:** And so you just look through it like that?

**Michael:** That was more than I needed.

**Julie:** I will say like I’m personally one of the writers who in television believes that there’s a social contract between a storyteller and the viewer. And I could introduce you to 50 writers who completely disagree with that and say I’m telling my story the way I want to tell the story and the viewer either likes it or they don’t. I like the fluidity of understanding what people are connecting to. And then trying to absorb why, you know.

And conversely, you know, I learned a lot about even just racial representation on my show through social media. Things that I had never considered, ever considered being a problem, and then sort of confronted with that. And that was so illuminating. I mean, I was mortified. And learned a lot in a way that nobody would have stopped me on the street and been like, “Do you realize that that person of color had two lines?” You know, that kind of stuff.

And so I wouldn’t ever want to like tune out from that relationship because it is a sort of focus group feedback that I think is really valuable.

**Michael:** There was one – we did an interview with this podcast Fan Bros and it’s a black audience for genre stuff. And they were great. And they kind of took us to task and said, “Well, we really love the show, but your black lead you’re doing a terrible job.” And we’re like tell us about that. And it was very helpful and our response was we hired them. We put them on staff. Because had we not heard that – they weren’t allowed to write reviews about the show anymore.

**Craig:** That’s how you get a job is you start a podcast—

**Michael:** Tell the showrunner it stinks.

**Craig:** Tell white people they’re fucking up.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** I could do that.

**John:** All right, so while we’re talking about reviews I thought we might play a little game. So, let’s move on. We’ve had some good reviews, some bad reviews, but this is Christmas, or the holidays, let’s have only five-star reviews. So underneath your seat you have some five-star reviews.

**Julie:** Oh my gosh.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** So we are properly set up here.

**Craig:** So excited.

**John:** So these all come from iTunes. And so we went on iTunes and we found reviews of different projects we worked on. And we’re going to read them now and we’re going to have to figure out – titles of these things are not on here so we’re going to have to figure out among us what they are talking about in these five-star reviews.

**Craig:** And the ones that we have in our hands, could these be any of our movies?

**John:** Any of our movies.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** All right, so I’m going to start us off. So this comes from Skip Hunt.

**Craig:** That’s not real. That’s like Mike Hunt.

**John:** So, “Not sure how I found this podcast. I think I was searching for info about the fountain.io markup stuff.” A nerd. “Anyway, I’m hooked and I’ve added this podcast to my regular playlist. I have not interfaced with Mark Mazin, but John August has been very generous and helpful with his time. Thanks for putting this podcast out. I’ve found most of it very helpful. Smiley Face.”

**Craig:** Now we’re supposed to guess what that’s for?

**John:** Yeah, I think we can figure that one out. That’s a pretty easy one.

**Craig:** Fucking Mark Mazin. I’ll tell you. That guy–

**John:** So that was Scriptnotes. Craig, read us another five-star review.

**Craig:** All right. This one is titled “Impressed,” by MJ Gingsham. “Very nice directing and editing. Actors are very decent and acceptable. The music is very cool aswell. 5 stars!” Huh? Music is very cool, as well.

**John:** As well. As well. This is punctuated exactly the way it was there.

**Craig:** Hmm, what do you guys think?

**John:** What do you think? What could that be?

**Craig:** I’m kind of leaning towards—

**Julie:** Are these all movies?

**Craig:** No, it could be a TV show, right?

**John:** It could be a movie or a TV show.

**Julie:** Oh, oh, oh.

**Craig:** Is it the Vamp? Is it Vamp Di?

**Julie:** I feel like if it’s just generally across the board a mediocre five-star review, that’s probably mine.

**John:** Julie Plec, you’re correct. Julie Plec, read us a review.

**Julie:** OK, from I Am Romanov 2, “This movie was much better than the Passion of Christ.”

**Craig:** The Passion of Christ. Oof.

**Julie:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It feels like Jungle Book to me.

**John:** It could be Jungle Book. Lots of choices here.

**Craig:** Well, has anybody dabbled in a Christ movie other than Passion? No? No. No. Well, maybe Corpse Bride.

**John:** Could be Corpse Bride.

**Craig:** Because Christ.

**John:** Christ. Death. Resurrection. Yeah.

**Michael:** Frankenweenie. Same thing.

**Craig:** Frankenweenie.

**John:** Sure.

**Julie:** Who did Frankenweenie? Nice.

**John:** The answer is Michael Green for Green Lantern.

**Craig:** Why would you compare Green Lantern to Passion of Christ?

**Michael:** I don’t know. They were both hard to get through. They both hurt my soul for different reasons.

**Craig:** And the heroes did have super powers, so.

**Michael:** Also the CG suits.

**Craig:** CG suits. CG suits.

**John:** Yep. Nudity. Michael Green, read us a five-star review.

**Craig:** I would have never thought of that one. Your turn. You can read it right there.

**Michael:** OK, “Best movie of the year — This film did better than do the original justice. It’s a masterpiece!Ryan Reynolds stole the show and all the other actors did well too. Not to mention Hans Zimmers score completely fit and mixed in with this awesome epic of a film“

**Julie:** Is this the same movie?

**Craig:** That feels like Green Lantern again.

**Justin:** But Ryan Reynolds was great in–

**Michael:** Hans Zimmer did not do the score. So I’m thinking this is a Ryan flub.

**Julie:** Yeah.

**John:** So, what are you predicting?

**Michael:** Blade Runner.

**John:** Blade Runner 2049.

**Michael:** And you’re not fat.

**Craig:** Fooled me.

**John:** Justin Marks?

**Justin:** “I love this one by Ishiro Honda would be proud.”

**Craig:** How is that a name?

**Justin:** “This is the best movie I’ve seen so far this year and I’ve only seen 2 good movies this year. Amazing special effects, great characters and I felt like a kid again watching this movie. See it if you haven’t already.”

**Craig:** Jungle Book, right? It feels like Jungle Book.

**Michael:** Jungle Book.

**John:** It’s Jungle Book. All right. Next up, Miss Shorty Rocks says, “loved it — if u ppl have nothing good to say than don’t say nothing at all cause this move was good i liked it was really good i would watch it again again why dnt u all do me a fav n put the shut to up that means shut up.”

**Craig:** That has to be one of my fans. I mean, for a bunch of reasons not the least of which is she’s clearly arguing with the majority of people who are upset. So I got to – that’s got to be one of my people.

**John:** You’d be wrong.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** That is for Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li. Justin Marks.

**Justin:** Yeah, my mom does write under that Miss Shorty Rocks.

**Craig:** Wasn’t Ishiro Honda in Street Fighter? Wasn’t he one of the characters?

**Justin:** Was that a character? Don’t ask the writer of Street Fighter.

**John:** Craig Mazin?

**Craig:** Oh, I’ve got one here. “Wow,” by Edward Elrick Fan. “I wish I was bloating like the girl.i always wanted to bloat like that girl in the movie I wish I was her SERIOUSLY!”

OK, this has to be Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

**John:** It’s a movie about bloating. I love that he’s a bloat fetishist who is like you know what, I’ve got some time, I’ll leave five stars for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

**Michael:** Violet, you’re carrying water, Violet.

**Julie:** That’s amazing.

**Craig:** I was most just concerned with the lack of the subjective mood here.

**John:** Yes, that really is the biggest cue of that.

**Craig:** Edward, you wish you were bloating like her.

**John:** Seriously.

**Craig:** Were Edward.

**John:** Julie Plec.

**Julie:** Sponge Bob Girl 101 says, “You have your options in what movies you like. People say it was horrible and some people say it was good just give it a chance if ur not interested in cussing and comedy i recommend that u do not watch this movie. I enjoyed this movie a lot it was so funny. And i didn’t watch the trailer thats probably why i didn’t hate it”

**Craig:** Again, that feels like one of my people.

**John:** Yeah. Which movie though?

**Craig:** Notice fighting off others. Any one of them, honestly.

**Julie:** Cussing.

**Craig:** Not Winter’s War.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** I’ll go with Identity Thief.

**John:** Identity Thief it is. And Michael Green, I think you have the last one.

**Michael:** Mine is not a five-star review.

**Craig:** It’s a two.

**Julie:** Ouch. That’s mine.

**John:** Go for it.

**Michael:** OK. I think things are going to get mean. “Box of Bisquick,” by Woody Wood 123. Because there were 122 other Woody Woods. “Am I the only one who deleted this podcast after three episodes because, while the information was useful,” at least you’re using that well, “I just couldn’t get past John August’s manner of speaking like he just swallowed a box of Bisquick.”

**John:** Just swallowed Bisquick. I love that.

**Michael:** “Sometimes he’s barely intelligible. Good this he’s a writer.” Good this he’s a writer should be like. Oh. “A shame. I would have liked to be a follower.”

**Craig:** I would have liked to have be a follower. We would have liked for him to have be a fan. Just, this person was hearing the best of you, by the way. I just want to point out.

**John:** Absolutely. That’s after Matthew’s edited me carefully. So.

**Craig:** I don’t think it’s Bisquick.

**John:** What would you say I have in my mouth?

**Craig:** Quikrete.

**John:** Oh yeah. Something quick that fixes.

**Craig:** Some sort of marble and cement product.

**John:** Yes. I want to ask a practical question of our TV folks here in the room which is you guys are all not just writers but you are hiring writers to work on your TV programs. If someone is – as you’re reading through scripts and trying to put together a staff, what are you looking for in writers that you’re trying to hire onto your shows?

**Julie:** For me, just a voice. You know, like a distinct voice. Somebody that can write a funny line. Something that makes me laugh, even if it’s in a drama. Has a personality. Has some kind of cool twang to it. Because I don’t have time as I’m reading material to really dissect like, oh, structurally that was really excellent and I would have slid act two later. Like I’m reading it for my own enjoyment and if it grabs me, the voice grabs me if it’s got sparkle, I tend to read the whole thing. And if there’s no sparkle, even if it’s a great script, I just put it aside.

**John:** So how many pages will you read before you detect if there’s a sparkle.

**Julie:** About ten.

**John:** Ten. OK. Michael Green, what are you looking for as you read scripts?

**Michael:** Very similar. I’m looking for someone who I see something that will make my show better and different. I remember a showrunner I worked for back in the “22 episodes a year I don’t know how we did it days,” and I don’t know how you do it. But he said when he was hiring, and this stuck with me as a bad idea, he was looking for ten little hims. And I thought that’s terrible because you can already write like you. You know, and I can write like me all the time. I can’t stop. It’s awful. So I want people who can do what I can’t do. And then I suddenly realize reading that voice that if that voice was in my show, my show would be better. So that please.

Specificity in ten pages. Sadly, that does bear out. Showrunners read about ten pages because if it isn’t excellent in ten pages it’s never better by 20. It just doesn’t. And so polish the shit out of the first ten, please.

**John:** Justin Marks. What are you looking for?

**Justin:** I really try to look for writers who make me jealous. I think that’s really the thing that I feel like if there’s something – because I completely agree. That idea, and we’ve talked about this in the room a lot, like I can do me. I can do me pretty well. Like I feel like I know me and I can write for me and understand that. But if I am reading someone who really writes from a place, a voice that I’ve never really been able to bring out of myself then that’s exactly what I want to do.

And I will also say, I mean, yes, the question is about reading. So it’s leading in that sense. But I do think from a place, for me at least, the meeting is everything. We’re not having the meeting unless that spark has happened on the script. But I find that the best collaboration with writers in the room are people who – it also brings the best part of me out when we’re having this conversation and we’re talking about our favorite movies, or our favorite TV show, or our favorite book. You know, that’s the dynamic in the writer’s room every single day.

You know, you can bring a lot of diverse voices together, but if you don’t like the same stuff and want to do the same stuff I feel like that’s where you run afoul. So, yeah, I think it’s a combination of the two. And in some ways, depending on I guess the way everyone writes their show, I think it’s that meeting. What do we bring out of each other? That’s a hugely important thing.

**Craig:** Did you ever have any problems with control issues having come from a place of, look, I write by myself. I write. This is mine. And now I have to let you do it?

**Justin:** So badly for me. I mean, like so badly. I was so bad at it at the beginning. And fortunately the writers are really good when it comes to knowing that I was a first-time showrunner. But my thing was really like I just kept using this phrase, “I have to wrap my head around this.” And the only way I can wrap my head around it is to sort of just run through it and see it and keep doing it and keep doing it. And I realized I was making so much more work for myself. Like so much more work for myself to such diminishing returns as you’re doing it. Because it’s really like maybe it seems big to you as you’re sort of going through each page and each scene and each line of dialogue, but like you’ve hired brilliant people who can write this stuff. And, I mean, you’ve all worked it through together in the room and unless something has really just run sideways on the page, like there’s no reason to do it.

So, I had a hard time with that at the very beginning. And really like the first season was a tough journey to realizing like there are people around you. Ask them for help. That was a really tough thing. I wish I had learned that. I wish I had worked on a show. They should only, only let people run shows who have worked on shows. They should not have hired me.

**Michael:** The best day on your first season show isn’t when you get picked up for the second season. It’s when one of your writers gives you a draft that you don’t have to touch. Because it means you can now have a weekend, or now you just tell that person, “I’m sorry, you’re fucked. You’re going to write a lot.” Because otherwise you’re going to have to do every page and that’s not – there’d be dragons.

**John:** We’re going to have time for about four questions. I want to ask you guys about, you’re not just reading, and you’re not meeting with folks, but you’re also managing folks. And it feels like the management of a writing staff has become a – Harvey Weinstein was two months ago. It feels like it was six months ago, but it’s only two months ago. Has anything changed in the sense of how you guys are approaching life in the room? How you guys are approaching your shows in the wake of the sexual harassment stuff that’s come up?

**Julie:** I was just talking about this today. We had our little holiday lunch and I said – I said what is it going to be like for us moving forward in a writer’s room? And I was at a table full of women, so it was a very easy conversation to have. But I said, you know, we have to be as respectful of everybody’s space as we’re asking men to be of ours. And we can’t sit around and talk about like bras and periods all day long either, you know.

**Craig:** Aw.

**Julie:** I know. I know. There has to be a sense of mutual respect for everybody in the room. But on the other hand, I mean, when you go back to what they teach you at Warner Bros. in the sexual harassment training that I’m sure will be wholly revamped before next year is about the Friends lawsuit. And the Friends lawsuit back in the day was a woman who was in the writer’s room as a writer’s assistant, I think, who basically was just like the things discussed in the room, the words used in the room, the ideas discussed in the room were unacceptable to me and made me uncomfortable. And the defense, which turned out to be a winning defense, was but we’re in a creative space in which we are supposed to be allowed to be free to express ourselves without filter and without judgment.

And I really do believe that. And I think it’s just a difference between if someone is expressing themselves freely without filter but are also an asshole, then there are lines that have to be drawn. And a woman that I was talking to said, “If we could just get more comfortable saying, ‘Oh, that’s too far for me, or that’s too much.’” Or even better, if we don’t have to say it at all, she said, “I would love nothing more than to never be the woman in the room that says, ‘You know, hold on.’ But if some guy would tap his buddy and be like, dude.” And just move on. Say that’s a little too much. Hey bro, back off. And let it go. And don’t make a woman or a man or whoever is feeling objectified, or persecuted, or just offended have to be the one to sort of raise the Debbie Downer flag and be like, come on guys.

Although we did have a bell in my last room where like a writer brought in a bell and every time somebody swore inappropriately she’d be like, “Ding.” And then we’d laugh and we’d move on.

**Craig:** That’s not a bad idea. I mean, systems that are based on the male observational power generally are doomed. But if you have a situation where someone, like OK, you know that there’s a guy. Like let’s say I’m in your room and you can look at me and be like, and I’m like, OK, got it. Dude. Right? And then we just have a thing and then I know because I do need to be told. I think a lot of men need to be told. Because we’re just a little duh.

**John:** Let’s go to a question. Sir, your question.

**Male Audience Member:** So this is a bit of a champagne problem, but I hope there’s some general advice in here. So, it’s taken me ten years to get to this moment. And I have a spec script that’s going around town. And I got an agent. We had to move very quickly with that. And I’m at this lovely moment where every manager in town wants to meet with me, take me to lovely lunches. And I don’t quite know what’s the right way to pick a person to work with, hopefully for the long term. Like what is the trait to optimize. There are bigger places. There are smaller places. There are people that function like agents. There are people that develop.

You guys have experience. I will never have the opportunity to ask people like you this again. So I’m curious–

**Craig:** Correct. We all disappear after this.

**Julie:** What do you need in your creative process? Like if you had a perfect creative relationship with someone else that was on your team, would it be sit in a room with me for eight hours and help me break this story? Would it be I need really great comprehensive notes on my material? Or would it be like I wrote this, shut up and sell it? Where in that is what you would wish for?

Male Audience Member: I think frankly my agent team can take the shut up and sell it side of stuff. I’d like someone that I could kind of work with almost like a producer. I can call, I can game plan. I can be a little bit closer with. I don’t necessarily need day-to-day notes. I don’t need – I’m a grownup. I don’t need hand-holding. I don’t want to be told what to write. But I’d love someone to read stuff and give some feedback.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Some general advice I give to anybody who is looking for new representation is pick somebody who you won’t dread getting a phone call from. Because sometimes people will be like, “Oh, he’s a shark but he’s great. He’s on my side.” But if you don’t want to answer the phone, if you don’t want to talk to him, that’s not the person for you.

Julie’s question is very smart about just in terms of like knowing what you’re actually looking for. So are you looking for a bad cop? Are you looking for a good guy? Figure out what it is you’re going after. And Justin Marks, you and I have had a lot of discussions about managers because I was down on managers for a long time and you were like, “No, no, John, you don’t understand what’s actually going on.” Talk to us about managers.

**Justin:** Yeah. I think – and it’s interesting because I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately as you get on a show and you’re just doing one job this whole time. And so my manager’s role in my life has changed significantly from the beginning. But in the beginning when I was just starting out I really think, and it’s only because I can count on less than one hand the number times a month I’ll speak to agents now. And my manager is the person who I’m always in the trenches with. He knows what I’m writing on a given day. He knows, you know, are you moving on to this? Are you getting this done? They’re calling about this. You have to get that finished. Whatever it may be, he’s the person who is really like a partner.

And I’ve had my manager since I was in college from the very beginning. We’ve been together and I have a very comfortable rapport. He’s the only person in my life who can tell me when something is truly terrible. He’s the person who calls to deliver bad news. And can do it fairly and without spin which is really important to me.

So, I feel like in this – and this is where our discussion was originally is I don’t think agents do anymore what they used to do.

**John:** I think everyone agrees with you there.

**Justin:** And maybe it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy because managers have come about. But I think it’s a very important thing especially because this is not true of all agents but I’ll just say it, I think the attention spans are very short. And if you have a good manager that’s not what it’s about. They have a very long attention span.

But you only get one shot of giving a piece of material to even your agent in that sense. You don’t want to damage that relationship. So to have a manager who you can really vet your material with and to do multiple iterations on it with I think is a really important thing.

Now my relationship with my manager is very different. I mean, he’s like my therapist more than anything. Or he’ll come to set and just sit around for a little while, and then we’ll go for walks where we just go for walks like in movies where someone is really down and going for a walk. That’s what we do.

So I guess it’s worth 10%. Right?

**Julie:** Well, I mean, I’ve always been down on managers, too, because working in television I always tell people don’t get a fucking manager, for god’s sake. That’s 10% of your income. You want to buy a house. You want to raise a child. You want to put him in college. You want to keep your money. Like for the love of god, don’t get a manager who is just going to put you on a show and then cash a paycheck for nine months out of the year.

But, what you get for that 10% is a fulfilling relationship if that’s what you need. You know? Whether it’s breaking every story with you beat for beat, or just walking around the block with you. If that’s how you want to spend your money to have that relationship, then just make sure it’s someone who is going to give it to you. Because there are way too many managers in this town who just operate like agents who will stay on the phone with you longer. And I think it’s total bullshit.

**Craig:** I agree with her 100%. And I will say you don’t have to sweat this decision. Pick one of them. And if you don’t like him or you don’t like her, fire their ass and pick another one. Because there’s a thousand of them.

**Julie:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Great. And just in case you are a Michael Green in a couple of years and you have four movies in a year, what’s your name?

**Male Audience Member:** Jeremy Cohen.

**Julie:** Good luck, Jeremy.

**John:** Jeremy Cohen. There’s probably a few other Jeremy Cohen’s on IMDb, I think, but–

**Craig:** You can only have one Michael Green or one Jeremy Cohen. You can’t have Michael Green and Jeremy Cohen. We’ll have to figure this out.

**John:** All right, on this side. A question.

**Female Audience Member:** So Craig is always talking about how he doesn’t make any money from the podcast. So what is going on there?

**Craig:** Thank you! Oh my god! Like all this time I’ve been waiting for somebody to ask the obvious question. What is going on?

**John:** So, I can actually honestly answer you. So that number about the t-shirts, that is true.

**Craig:** Oh god. This is going to be bad.

**John:** So, a bunch of you are premium subscribers. Yes, some people in the audience here. So people who get all those back episodes, that’s $2 a month. We get a dollar of that back from Libsyn. So that ends up being – we have almost 3,000 of those, so that’s $3,000 a month that’s coming in. So that’s good.

That helps pay for Megan’s salary. It pays for Matthew. And our transcripts. And so that’s kind of what it covers. There are podcasts that make good money, like those Pod Save America podcasts, they’re making bank. And it’s a whole different world. But we just decided we didn’t want to sell Casper Mattresses.

I mean.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Julie:** They do it so well. I mean, that’s part of the novelty of Pod Save America is they–

**John:** They do a great job of that.

**Julie:** The way they do their advertising is so funny and enjoyable.

**Craig:** I’m sorry. We would crush it.

**Julie:** You guys would crush it. It would be amazing.

**Craig:** We’re professional writers.

**Julie:** I want to hear you talk about–

**Craig:** By the way, you know who we should advertise?

**John:** Who?

**Craig:** Bisquick.

**John:** Bisquick. Yeah. Bisquick would be a fantastic thing. And so I can tell you guys here tonight, I think for the first time, that I am going to be doing another podcast in the New Year and that one will have ads in it. And so that will be a very different world for me. And it’s been an incredibly different experience learning how all of that works, because it’s not just two guys talking–

**Craig:** That’s not going to last a long time though is it?

**John:** No. It’s a miniseries just like yours.

**Craig:** Oh, OK.

**John:** Yeah, it’s fine.

**Craig:** No, you go and you have your thing.

**John:** Yeah. It’s fine. We can each do our own little thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. You love someone, set them free.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** The truth is I do love talking about it because it’s hysterical to me, but John really does all of the work. That’s the other thing I often repeat. And between Megan and Matthew who edits and then the hosting costs and all of the other stuff, it is – we break even.

**John:** Yeah. I should say Craig used to have to write me a check every month for the hosting and stuff. Craig used to write money out of his pocket. So that doesn’t happen anymore.

**Craig:** So like that’s how I get paid now is by not having to pay money. But if we did advertise, how much money do you think we could make?

**John:** We could make good money. We’ve gotten approached a couple times. Because you guys are obviously incredibly upwardly mobile people and–

**Craig:** That one guy is.

**John:** Yeah, that guy.

**Julie:** Jeremy Cohen.

**John:** We could advertise only to Jeremy Cohen.

**Michael:** You could advertise him.

**John:** Yeah. Absolutely. Be that guy.

**Craig:** Stuff that Jeremy likes.

**John:** Cool. Great, thanks. Another question.

**Male Audience Member:** As you guys have sort of underscored throughout the evening, it’s been quite a year. And I’m wondering how the sort of world climate/political climate, the darkness of the moment has influenced the creative decisions you’re making, both on a day to day level in terms of scene work, character work on the page, but also the projects you’re taking or the stories you’re interested in telling.

**Craig:** That’s a great question. Great question.

**John:** Yeah, it’s hard whenever you have a villain to sort of not go into a place where it’s like, oh, is it this kind of villain or is it this kind of darkness. It’s hard to write dystopian story now that doesn’t feel like, oh, you see outside your window.

So I’ve definitely been mindful of that stuff. But I would say that I was in France during a lot of this and then I was also writing my book for 10 to 12 year olds. So that was great to sort of have that escape hatch and not be sort of in the thick of it all the time creatively. How about you guys?

You wrote Chernobyl.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. Actually great timing. Here’s a story about Russian lies. And what’s been happening over the last year has been actually very influential.

I started working on Chernobyl about four years ago. And just a week ago I rewrote the very first lines of the show. There was a time when the show was at its foundation about a thing. I mean, obviously it’s about Chernobyl but what human point is there to all of this. And as I started writing through the episodes by the time I got to the end I realized it had become something else and it’s something that is far more relevant to what is happening now in the world around me.

I think in general as a writer I have become vastly more concerned about representation of characters. It is on the forefront of my mind. I am constantly asking myself questions like just checking the pitfalls. The pitfall of default white. The pitfall of this character doesn’t deserve a name. You know, all of these things. And just constantly running that tape in my head. Whereas before, honestly, nobody ever asked you to do that. Nobody expected you to do it. And if you did, they would ask you why.

Like I remember years and years ago, my gosh, it was for the Weinsteins. There was a script and there was a discussion that a character had with a guy who was just like at a reception desk for a hospital. And the guy at the reception desk I just happened to make Southeast Asian. And they were befuddled. Why did you do that? And I’m like because there are a lot of them. And they’re people in the world. Now it’s the opposite. And that’s wonderful.

I think actually in a great way the response to the fucked-up-ness has been really good for me as a writer. I think it’s been great for our business in general, not just in terms of weeding out terrible people, but also just in the day to day business of how we approach storytelling and how we approach each other as human beings. There is a strange optimism. It’s just every time I start to feel good then some other asshole comes along. So anyway.

**Julie:** Yeah. I’ve had a two-pronged experience which has been sort of fascinating and concerning, but also really great. So the fascinating/concerning part was I write, you know, Vampire Diaries was – it’s gothic romance. And all of the origins of that kind of like the bad boy, the murderous bad boy, and the love triangle, and vampires in general, vampires throughout literature are very sexual beings. And so I use a lot of bodice-ripper kind of influence and all the Harlequin romance novels that I read growing up, and soap operas.

And I remember hitting like Season Seven and I’m pitching, “OK, and then this happens, and she doesn’t want to go. And she’s refusing to go, and so he breaks her neck, throws her in the back of the car, and she wakes up and she’s in a hotel room against her will.” And the whole room went, “You can’t do that.” And I was like, “Why? You know, she’s a vampire. She would do it to him.” And they were like, “Because that’s rapey. It’s like rape culture shit.” And I was like, oh, god, you guys. And I’m being very glib right now to make my point. But I said “This is the show. Like the gothic romance. I’m a feminist. I’m a strong woman. I’m not advocating abuse here. I’m just – there is a quality of sort of titillating fun to this that has built the empire of the show. And now if I can’t dip into that well then what the hell are we going to do, you know?”

And I was filled with despair and it actually launched into this great conversation in which we agreed to disagree and ultimately modified the beat so she had more agency, which I outlawed that word for a year in my writer’s room. I’m like the buzz words.

**Craig:** The buzz words. Because executives have stolen them.

**Julie:** But, you know, and then you realize, OK, but there are now limits to what you really should feel comfortable representing. And so that was my sort of growing experience. And the sort of wonderful experience was after the election and our despair and coming back to the writer’s room of The Originals this year we were like, OK, what stories are we going to tell? And someone was like, “Well what if there’s this faction of vampires who think that only a certain kind of vampires are cool. And like they want to get rid of all the other kind of vampires. And they certainly hate werewolves. And they really hate witches. And they were like kind of vampire purists.”

And so just basically made our whole season about like–

**Craig:** Alt-Right Vampires.

**Julie:** Trump supporters, you know. And it has been the most liberating, wonderful, it’s just amazing. And it’s so on the nose you guys, and I’m going to apologize in advance. I was watching a playback today and I’m like, ooh, that’s really on the nose. But it felt so good all year. And we loved it. Loved it.

**Michael:** Sometimes you got to punch right on the nose.

**Julie:** Exactly.

**John:** Michael Green, how has it changed your process?

**Michael:** Largely a lot of angry writing. A lot of just channeling that. Actually I should say it’s a pendulum swing between escapist bullshit and really, really angry writing. So, Season Two of American Gods, like Season One we wrote in a progressive administration, assuming we were going into a progressive administration, before America decided to shit the bed. And it’s not funny, but we had written a lot of things about immigration, very culturally diverse. But it was kind of accidental that we were doing it. We were just writing what we thought would be positive and suddenly it became a sparkplug. Up until last week we were leaning into that with a lot more ferocity. And part of the reason we parted ways was we wanted to defend that stuff when circumstances would have prevailed that we might have had to not do it.

On the other hand, escapist bullshit. Like I was on the set of Murder on the Orient Express, or I went the next day after the election. And I was never so glad, like I walked across fake snow to a fake train. And I’m like 1930s! And all of a sudden I realized that 1930s Europe suddenly felt idealistic.

**John:** Justin, how has it changed you?

**Justin:** I will say, I’m sure it’s the same for all rooms, but so much of our time is taken up talking about this stuff now, just every single day of how bad everything has gotten. But what’s really interesting, we have a show about identity. That’s sort of the idea. It’s two worlds and it becomes a show about who would you be under a different set of circumstances and all these things. And so very often in the first season we’re exploring ideas of gender identity, of sexual identity. And then we come to this season and the conversation feels very different now.

And we have a very diverse room. It’s a very important part of what makes this show what it is. But at no point had we really had the conversation about racial identity and what that means. And it was suddenly like we’re having this conversation. It was a really interesting day when we started to talk about it because, you know, we take place in sort of Berlin and then an alternate Berlin in another world. And there’s all these kind of throwback themes to espionage in it. You know, this conversation started like, well, do we always have to have this conversation as it relates to it? And someone said, and it was the best thing, and it was just like a glass of cold water to the face for the whole room of, “We’re already having this conversation whether we want to be or not. It’s time we actually start engaging with it.”

And that changed everything for us. It suddenly became this, and you know, we tried to create I think a better way of also just talking to each other. It may be a sexual remark, but it may also be a racial remark or something like that. To sort of get a form of discourse where people are comfortable, not just criticizing but also being criticized, and not taking it personally. You know, especially I think the white male point of view immediately goes to a place of, well, hold on, but I voted for Obama. It’s like one of the good guys thing.

And it’s like, no, you really have to take a step back and listen to yourself and hear yourself in that way and feel – and ask aloud to a diverse room around you, “Is this OK? I mean, how does this make everyone feel if I say this. It’s different if I say this than if you say this, right? Is that what it is? Or, no, what is it?”

And it becomes a really interesting thing. And I’ve got to say, I can’t believe that it has taken this long for these kinds of conversations to happen so comfortably and so much in the open. So in that sense it is – I do share that feeling of optimism. I do share that feeling of – I mean, what else do we have? It’s like the stories, you read that Sebastian Younger book about a tribe where no one was happier than when they were in London during the blitz being bombed every day because at least they had a community. Like that’s kind of how I feel now with it is like—

**Julie:** Well, yeah, it goes to what we were saying about making something comfortable in the room. So, I am a very energetic room personality. And when we’re in a flow and we’re talking story and when I get onto an idea and I’m pitching a thread, I’m like oh and this, and boom, and that. And nothing – nothing ruins that more for me than someone is like, “Well, you can’t do that because that’s not – I’m going to blanket it not PC. But it’s basically that’s racist, or that’s this.” And I’m like, come on, you know. And you get so frustrated because the air is cut out of your momentum. And you’re like that’s not sexist. Or that’s not rapey. Or that’s not whatever.

But, somebody in the room thinks it is. And somebody in the room had the balls to say that to you. And especially somebody like me who is then going to have a sort of hilarious, never angry, but a hilarious meltdown of like, “Oh, the energy just got sucked out of my soul.” We have to create these environments where people, especially young staff writers, et cetera, can feel free to be like, “Um, hello, you can’t do that and here’s why.” And where I will then come off of my sort of downward spiral and say, “OK, no really, tell me.” And then I can still decide you know what I disagree or I hear you or whatever. But to make sure the conversation happens.

**John:** Cool. Thank you very much. We usually end with One Cool Things. We’re going to do something special this time. This is our new little thing called, let’s see if the slide will change, Secret Santa or Lump of Coal. So there’s no emoji for lump of coal, so we used a smiley pile of poop.

So this is something great from the last year that we want to make sure people are aware of, and something from the last year which we could do without. So, My Secret Santa would be this was the final season for both Please Like Me, which is a series I loved, and Girls, which I loved to death. And we can forget that these great things happened in this year. So, my Secret Santa are those two shows. Go check them out if you’ve not checked them out. Their last seasons were both great.

My lump of coal goes to post-credit scenes on superhero movies. Just stop. I mean, like I kind of dug it at first. It’s like, oh, it’s an Easter egg. It’s a little bonus thing for the fans. But now a movie will end and like, ugh, I’m pulling up Wikipedia, like is there a tag scene? Ugh. And by the time it actually gets to it, like ten minutes later, I’m like it was not worth it to stay. So, let’s just stop. We could all stop. We can all agree to be done. Or do it within one minute, but then it be done and say, OK, no, there’s no more. Done.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m with you. My Secret Santa, is that what the good one is? Secret Santa? Is something I talked about on the show before, but it’s become an integral part of my life. 1Password. You don’t have to use 1Password. There’s other things like 1Password. But here’s why I’m actually evangelizing this.

So, for those of you who don’t know it’s a password management thing on your computer. You put all of your passwords in it. It generates good passwords for you, really strong ones so that not everything is Baloney1. And it’s great.

But, here’s the best part about One Password. So now it’s like a subscription-based thing the way all software is going, which is annoying, but my wife and I now share a subscription and so we have all of it now as a family. So the point is if I croak, she has everything there. And we have to start coming to terms with this that when we die now we leave behind this minefield of digital shit behind us. And we also have these accounts and things and banks. So now your partner has access to it all.

So, be a good digital citizen and get yourself something like that.

Lump of coal. You don’t like those post-credit sequences on movies, what I cannot have any more are these stupid mini-trailers in front of the trailer. Show me the trailer. What is that fucking thing at the beginning of the – I’m already watching the trailer. You know I’m watching it. If I’m going to see your thing, that means I’m watching the trailer. The thing lasts like four seconds. It’s a mini-trailer in front of the trailer.

Go on YouTube, go to a trailer, and watch what happens. Oh, I’m going to watch this trailer. First there’s a mini-trailer. It’s four seconds long. It’s insane.

And then you watch the regular trailer. What is that? Make it stop!

**John:** Done.

**Julie:** Amazing. Amazing. OK, so my Secret Santa, we already covered Pod Save America, which has just been my absolute salvation this year. And I would like to be on it if anybody knows anybody. Honestly, Reed Morano and Susanne Bier I want to say is the last name, Byer, but it’s two female directors in television, Handmaid’s Tale and The Night Manager. And what these two women did visually was so spectacular. Just the art direction, the cinematography, the actual – the visual point of view. That’s where you really can understand a director at least kind of knows their shit a little bit. They’re not just telling a story. They’re presenting a world, a beautiful world to you. And female directors in television, the good ones are few and far between and growing by the day.

But I was so wildly impressed by their work and I think that they, along with Patty Jenkins, and of course Ava DuVernay, on the movie side have really just planted their flag this year and made us all look good.

And then my lump of coal is the six-act structure in broadcast television. It is the death of good storytelling. It is the quagmire of where formerly good writers go to die. It is – when you think about it, it’s really seven-act structure because your title card comes in there and then you’ve got to – every 3.5 minutes you have to turn something and twist something. And it’s horrible.

And somebody today said that finally networks are starting to say, good networks like cable networks, are starting to say, “Oh, we don’t care about the act out. We’ll like act out in the middle of a word if we want. Don’t worry about building to that.” And that is interesting at least to explore because it’s the worst.

**Craig:** Is this for commercial interruptions?

**Julie:** Yeah. The worst.

**Craig:** That’s bad.

**John:** Michael Green?

**Michael:** Secret Santa, The Leftovers.

**Julie:** Ah!

**Michael:** If you haven’t seen it, you do. If you’ve seen it, watch it again. Damon Lindelof, Mimi Leder, speaking of female directors, she’s an authorial voice in there that demands mention and notice. If you haven’t seen it, there was probably a reason. It felt like, oh, that’s too hard. Or maybe there’s some homework. And you know what? First couple episodes, yes. Yes. And there are 450 shows on the air. Anything that takes a couple episodes to get going, I get it. You don’t want to. Like why should I acquire a taste? It’s gross.

No. Just to get to the pleasure of seeing what real writing and what real television – I mean, what it can get to in the third season. It would be worth running a marathon and I will never run a marathon. It is gorgeous. It is liturgy. It’s beautiful. I admire it.

**Julie:** It’s a masterpiece.

**Michael:** It really is. It’s a masterpiece. And just to see how you can end a show by choice, word felt. I watched it and went, “I want to try harder, do better.” And it made me want to.

Lump of shit. This is probably not the room to say this in, but there’s this hashtag I see a lot, #amwriting.

**Craig:** Thank you. I know.

**Michael:** Like if you did that, you’re not. Secondly, writing is like, you know, if you’re a writer that’s hygiene. Like #ambrushingmyteeth. Or worse, it’s like people who declare they’re in love publicly. Then you’re not. #inlove. Like blast fuck you.

Just write and turn your wireless off and shut the fuck up.

**Craig:** That is a man after my own heart. No romance. None.

**Michael:** The romance about writing, just–

**Craig:** Oh, it’s the worst.

**Michael:** Just do your shit.

**John:** Justin Marks, bring us home.

**Justin:** My Secret Santa, and I can’t believe that I even have to say this in 2017, but I would say the thing I’m most grateful for this year is a free press. More specifically, and I want to see it around next year, and I think that especially the kind of press that values good investigative journalism and checking sources. And I think we’ve seen it both on a very high level and then in the last couple months here in this industry how much it can change things. And I really hope that we keep – in the age of the Internet when we’re just sort of pushing free journalism left and right, I hope we all have a newspaper subscription. I really, really do. Or at least the one that gives you the online version of it. That’s my earnest one.

The pile of poop, this is a thing, and I have it here. The fact that cell phones these days, they’re just getting bigger. I have the iPhone SE and this is too big still. I want a smaller phone than this. And I don’t understand why there’s not a choice. Michael has a new phone that I don’t know how it can fit in your pocket. And that’s what the thing is. We live in this age where technology is everything you can fit in a pocket, and yet it can no longer fit in your pocket.

And I just don’t understand why I cannot have a phone the size that I want it to be.

**Julie:** Right. But you’re not 40 yet are you?

**Justin:** No.

**Julie:** Because the vision starts to go and then you can’t see. And I’m like I need a bigger goddamn phone because I can’t read anything.

**Craig:** You ageist.

**John:** So for young bucks like Justin Marks, we want small phones.

**Justin:** Small things. Like really small, like the Zoolander phone. I don’t know why we don’t have that in smartphone technology.

**John:** Yeah, movies promised you the Zoolander phone and it never came.

All right. That is our show for this week. Guys, thank you so much. We have so many people to thank, so let us thank them.

We’ll start off with Chris from the Writers Guild Foundation for putting us on. Writers Guild Foundation, you’re the best. Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you, Chris.

**John:** We need to thank The Los Angeles Film School for hosting us, especially Daniel who did our AV. Daniel, thank you very much.

**Craig:** Thank you, Daniel.

**John:** We need to thank Dustin Bocks and Nima Yousefi for putting together all of these slides and stuff you saw.

As always, our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. Megan! It is edited by Matthew Chilelli who is in Japan, so cheer loudly for Matthew.

Our intro this week which truly was great, and so you’ll hear it on the real podcast, is Jon Spurney.

**Craig:** Brought to you by the devil.

**John:** Our outro is by Andy Roninson. If you have questions for us, write into ask@johnaugust.com, or find us on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is…?

**Craig:** @clmazin.

**John:** What are you guys on Twitter?

**Julie:** @julieplec.

**Michael:** @andmichaelgreen.

**Justin:** I’m really annoying. It’s @justin_marks_ because there’s a NASCAR driver named Justin Marks and it’s really bizarre.

**John:** That’s fine.

**Justin:** Don’t tweet him.

**John:** You can find the show notes for this and all episodes at johnaugust.com, or all of the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. You guys are the best. Thank you very much and have a happy rest of your 2017.

**Craig:** Merry Christmas.

Links:

* [Show slides](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/Scriptnotes-Dec7-Live-Show.zip), in case you want to follow along at home.
* [Pod Save America](https://crooked.com/podcast-series/pod-save-america/)
* [S Town](https://stownpodcast.org)
* Dirty John to [listen to](http://wondery.com/wondery/shows/dirtyjohn/) or [read](http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-dirty-john/)
* [Missing Richard Simmons](https://www.missingrichardsimmons.com)
* Julie Plec on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0687096/)
* Michael Green on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0338169/)
* Justin Marks on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1098479/) and check out his new show [Counterpart](https://www.starz.com/series/counterpart/featured)
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [Julie Plec](https://twitter.com/julieplec), [Michael Green](https://twitter.com/andmichaelgreen) and [Justin Marks](https://twitter.com/Justin_Marks_) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Intro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jon Spurney and [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Andy Roninson ([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_329.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/pitching-television-or-being-a-passionate-widget).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 328 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the program we’ll be looking at how you pitch a television show. We’ll also wade back into the turbulent waters of sexual harassment to discuss what the responsibilities are of men, women, and labor unions to remedy it.

**Craig:** That’s not at all a minefield.

**John:** Not a bit of one. But a reminder, we have a live show coming up. That’s next week. Actually this week as you’re hearing this. This Thursday, December 7, in Hollywood we will be welcoming guests Julie Plec, Justin Marks, and Michael Green to talk about wonderful things, including television programs, so you should come. If there’s still tickets you should come.

**Craig:** That’s quite a group there. I mean, got some big movies in there and some big time writers and producers. And as always it benefits the Writers Guild Foundation, which is our favorite charity.

**John:** It is a fantastic charity. If you would like tickets go to wgfoundation.org/events and you will see us there and you can grab yourself a ticket. So, we still haven’t planned everything that’s happening, but I will have some surprises for you, Craig. Things you do not even see coming.

**Craig:** The good news is I don’t ever see anything coming. Everything is an endless surprise to me. I’m like a child.

**John:** Yeah. It’s lovely. You know, persistence of memory, you know, you cover something over with a napkin, oh my god it’s a surprise to you.

**Craig:** Right. You can play peekaboo with me and it still works.

**John:** That’s fantastic. It’s good stuff.

**Craig:** It is good stuff. Great stuff. That’s how I stay young.

**John:** It is. So, let’s get into sexual harassment because this is essentially follow up because in a previous episode we were talking about sexual harassment. Craig, you had some suggestions and guidelines you wanted to propose. And you got some feedback from that, so why don’t you take it from here.

**Craig:** Sure. I got a really interesting email from somebody that I know and I wanted to share it. And I spoke with her and so we’re going to leave her name out of it. We just agreed on the guidelines of things. And I’m editing down the email a little bit, but I think I’m hitting the important points. So I’m just going to go ahead and read this from an anonymous friend.

“Craig, you know that you’re one of my favorite humans.” You know, I wish I could I just stop there, John, honestly, because that’s amazing, right?

**John:** Like on a little thank you card, just write that. Just send it.

**Craig:** Just send it. Because I really appreciate that. Well, it goes on.

“Craig, you know that you’re one of my favorite humans but I feel compelled to disagree with some of what you guys said on the latest episode. I’ve been incredibly lucky to have had a minimal amount of weird and inappropriate interactions in my work life. I happened to have worked for mostly gay men and women. I’m cautious by nature and tend to remove myself when I feel uncomfortable. I’ve worked mostly in progressive areas in well-respected organizations and none of that has stopped me from having awful moments and interactions I would like to forget.

“You said that no one will be offended if you say you’re uncomfortable and I simply cannot stress how untrue that is. Offended may look different on different people. It may come off as anger, acting dismissive, annoyed, patronizing, etc. But it will be there every single time.

“I have been told I have offended people for far less than standing up for myself after a moment of questionable behavior by a colleague. The result of offended, no matter what it looks like, is the same. You will be someone that no one wants to work with.

“You also said to remove yourself when something feels rapey. Two things. I can’t ever remember worrying that a colleague would rape me. It’s almost never that cut and dry. If someone has a rapist t-shirt then, yeah, you should leave. Short of that, it will often just feel like you’re dealing with a guy who is maybe a little too interested but not crossing any big red lines.

“Second thing. If I remove myself from every workplace where there were someone that I had a bad gut feeling about, I wouldn’t ever work again. The conversation I would much rather have is around how do we talk to men about this situation. For women, this is almost mundane. It is such a part of our lives. Rather than us twisting ourselves in knots to figure out workarounds, can we talk about how men treat women?

“Let me tell you why this matters to me. The situations I had didn’t physically scar me or even traumatize me. Again, I’ve been very lucky. What they did do is slowly chip away at my sense of self-worth. They subtly tell you that the only reason you’re in the room is because you’re young and female and that your voice or opinions are irrelevant. You don’t get attention when you succeed or when you fail, which are net positive things. You get attention when you look nice and no other time.”

So, I read this and I thought this is a very fair criticism. I mean, first of all there’s a lot of great insights in there that I think you and I probably wouldn’t be able to have access to because we’re not in the same situation that women are in, so I really appreciated that point. And I also think that the larger point that she’s making which is it’s not easy to just say I’m offended and I’m walking away is true. And they’re right about that. They meaning anyone who agrees with that.

And I also think that it is true that even though we are trying to do a service by telling people how to manage difficult situations that are imposed upon them, it is true that we – I think you and I have a responsibility if we’re going to talk about that part of it to talk about the other part which is, “OK boys, how are you supposed to behave.”

**John:** Yeah. Fair. I think what I got so much out of her letter is that how do you deal with these difficult situations without being labeled difficult. And that she wants to be in that room. She wants to be doing her work and she feels like if she calls anybody on their behavior she’s immediately sort of ostracized as that person who is like, “Oh, she can’t play. She can’t hang. She’s not one of us.”

And that is a terrible situation. And so I think you’re right. We need to look at what are the responsibilities of men, women, and everybody else in that room and in those working situations to not let that happen. Because I think your advice was well-intentioned. You said that if you feel that you’re at an unsafe place, get yourself out of that place. And that is one end of this horrible spectrum of behaviors we’re seeing where there are literal attacks and assaults happening.

But in attempting to get yourself out of those possible bad situations, she’s saying you are opening yourself up for the other kind of bad thing that we see happening on the other end of the spectrum which is just like opportunities being taken away because you’re not longer seen as cool.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think we heard a bit of this too from Dara Resnik and from Daley Haggar when they were on. And it’s a sense of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. If you don’t say anything and you just stay there, you become a victim. If say something, protest, or try and get out, you become a complainer. And so what I think we’re hearing here, and it makes total sense, is that there are certain situations where there are no behaviors that women can engage in that end in a kind of victory. That really it’s just a competition between negative outcomes and you’re trying to look for the least worst situation, which isn’t ideal, so maybe we should be coming at this from the other side which is what can we say to the people perpetrating this stuff so that women aren’t in this situation of having to pick the lesser of evils.

**John:** Yeah. So I mean a couple thoughts. First is to listen to letters like this that make it clear that these situations happen. Because I feel like a lot of times I think men aren’t aware that they’re creating these impossible situations for the women they’re working with.

**Craig:** I agree. I think that that is very much part of what happens. I also think that there are a lot of guys who know exactly what they’re doing and just don’t care. And maybe, perhaps I’m naïve, but maybe if we just codify certain things it will be a little harder for them to get away with it.

**John:** Well let’s talk about codifying things, because I had a great conversation with a writer who is on a TV show this last week and he said that they’re looking in their room as they’re sort of figuring out for next season. They want to come in with a list of like “These are going to be the house rules. This is what we’re going to be doing. This is how it’s all going to work.” And the writing staff is going to vote anonymously on those things. And any one of those rules that gets like two people voting for it is part of the rules for that room. It’s part of the rules for how that show is going to work with the writers.

Will that solve everything? No, it won’t. But at least there’s a thing you can point to saying like, “Hey, this is how we’re going to do it.” And so if someone is breaking one of those rules, everybody sees that he is breaking one of those rules. And I think that helps not only the woman who is being harassed or bullied. It helps everyone else in that room be able to point out like, “Hey, this is not right. We agreed this was not right. You’re breaking the norms of what’s happening here.”

I think with rules you can help set norms. And norms are what’s not being followed here.

**Craig:** I totally agree. I think that’s actually really important that we distinguish between norms, social mores, and laws. It is illegal to sexually assault someone. But it is not illegal to make a joke that makes someone uncomfortable. And what it is is just a violation of a social norm and a social more. And I think a lot of times what happens is people throw up their hands and say, “Well you can’t legislate behavior.”

No, you absolutely can. Here’s an example. Let’s say I work in a writer’s room. And it’s lunch time. And we all eat lunch around the table. When lunch comes, I have the soup. And I decide to eat it with my hands. I just lift up handfuls of soup and just rub them into my face. That’s not illegal. There’s no law against that. It’s weird. It’s creepy. It’s wrong. It is a violation of a social norm.

Similarly, I can’t take my socks and shoes off and put my bare feet up on the table. It’s gross. We all know this. But somehow when it comes to creating a sense of social mores around the way we respect each other and particularly the way men respect women in a room, we get – we become uber libertarians who can’t imagine the notion of any kind of restraint.

Well, I have a bunch of restraints I’d like to suggest.

**John:** Well, Craig, I will say though both your soup example and your taking off your shoes and socks and putting your feet on the table, I have not worked on a lot of TV staffs, but I will guarantee you that someone could write in saying like that exact thing happened on our TV show. And the more powerful the person is who is taking off the socks or eating soup with his hands, the harder it is for other people in the room to call him out on that behavior. And so that’s I think part of the reason why you want to have some written out thing of like these are the things we – like if it says on the wall “Don’t take off your shoes and socks and put your feel on the table,” then we know not to do that.

And that is I think what I’m asking for people to try to do is to have a little bit more codifying of what it is that’s going to be OK and what is not OK.

**Craig:** I completely agree. I mean, I only really raise that point to say as a response to people who can’t imagine that it’s even possible to create rules.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So I have some rules.

**John:** Go for it. I want to hear them.

**Craig:** I have ideas of rules. Here’s an easy one. Keep your hands to yourself.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** I mean, this is a nursery school rule. This is kindergarten stuff. Apparently it’s difficult for some people. So, let’s just make it a rule. Keep your hands to yourself. I don’t need to touch anybody to do my job. We’re not massage therapists.

**John:** Josh Friedman had an interesting tweet back as all this stuff was starting to break that when he is in a work situation, like when someone is a writer on one of the shows that he’s working on, like even if that woman is a friend they’re not hugging. They’re not hugging in the room because it’s just this weird moment. And so let’s just maybe not touch each other.

**Craig:** Keep your hands to yourself. And then when it comes to things like jokes, which seems to be an area where a lot of things go wrong, here’s a general guideline and I think these are all incredibly followable. I try to follow them myself. Until you have a sense that a certain area of comedy is safe with another person, just presume that their mom or dad is there with you. Then you’re not going to say that certain kind of thing. You got to find out if someone is OK with some sort of comedy before you get there. And we all know what we’re talking about. We all understand that some humor pushes the envelope. Some humor is edgy. Some isn’t.

You know what? Hold off on the super edgy stuff until you get a sense of whether or not it’s OK with the other person. And if you think it is, and it turns out you were wrong, and the person is upset, stop. Just stop. Apologize. You misread it. That’s it. Say you’re sorry and don’t do it again. That’s that.

**John:** So when Dara and Daley were on the show they talked about you have to have a freedom in the writer’s room to sort of pitch out stuff and not censor yourself from bad ideas, bad jokes, and sort of going into dangerous territory. I get that. And also people are going to point out the Friends’ decision which I will quickly summarize by saying there was a lawsuit against the Friends TV show by someone who was working in that writer’s room and she lost. And essentially you could read it to say all is fair game in the writer’s room. That’s too broad a reading of that. That was a very specific situation.

What I would point you to is like there’s still the possibility of sexual harassment in a writer’s room if things go too far, if you create a situation where people feel unsafe.

Here’s a good tip for a joke. Pitch a joke about a character. Don’t pitch a joke about somebody in the room. Don’t aim stuff at people who are in the room in general. Just let it be about the characters and the show, not about the folks who are sitting around you.

**Craig:** I agree. And look when I talk about a sense of humor, a show has a sense of humor. If you go to work on a show that is dark, then the room will be dark, because people are trying to pitch for the dark show. If you go into The Simpsons, then you know what that sense of humor is. You should be pitching within it. This is less to me about what you’re pitching in a room to try and get comedy going. It’s more about what you’re doing when you bump into somebody by the coffee machine, or in the hallway. That’s what I’m talking about.

I think that’s where it gets particularly pernicious when you’re just invading somebody with a sense of humor that they don’t like. What is the point of a sense of humor if the other person isn’t laughing? Just stop.

**John:** Yep. Agreed.

**Craig:** Physical guidelines like — there’s certain rules that people generally follow, I’m talking to boys. You meet somebody, a woman, in professional situation. You don’t know her, or you vaguely know her. Maybe you met once a long time ago. It’s a handshake.

When you are working with women and you know each other very frequently, it is just very common in our business that people will hug. There’s nothing wrong with it. I call it the business hug. Nothing wrong with a business hug. But make it a business hug. There’s apparently a problem where people don’t understand how hugging works. It’s about a second long. And the purpose of the hug is to finish the hug as fast as you can. That’s the way I look at it. There’s no squeezing. There’s no holding on. It’s not a real hug. I mean, how did people miss this? It’s not a real hug. It’s not the way you hug your child or your spouse. It’s a quick business hug. It is a formal act.

Same with the cheek kiss. I don’t really like the cheek kiss.

**John:** I don’t like the cheek kiss either. Let’s rule out the cheek kiss. This isn’t France.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It was lovely while I was living in Paris. We don’t need it here. Here’s what I’ll say about the hug is it should be the same kind of hug if you’re hugging a guy or you’re hugging a woman. And guys hug here. It’s fine. It’s natural. But it’s quick. It’s really quick. So don’t linger. It doesn’t need to linger.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, that’s a great guideline. Basically you’re hugging this person because they’re a professional and this is what we do to greet each other as professionals and that’s it. So the hug is the same for a man. It’s the same for a woman. That’s that. Real simple.

And I would also say — another guideline I would give to boys is – I like saying boys, by the way. We don’t say boys enough.

**John:** Boys.

**Craig:** Women refer to each other as girls all the time. It’s affectionate.

**John:** Craig, I would say though does boys infantilize or take away some of the sting of it. So essentially you know like, “Oh, they’re just being boys.” That’s my only worry about the “boys” term.

**Craig:** All right. They’re men. They’re people with XY chromosomes who are moving through the world and they’re adults. Men.

**John:** Men.

**Craig:** Don’t be a physical reviewer in the workspace. It’s fine every now and then if somebody changes their hair to say, “Whoa, cool. Nice haircut.” And it’s perfectly fine if somebody walks in with some awesome new shirt or some amazing new kicks to go, “Oh, I like that. I like the shirt. I like the sneakers.” But otherwise just shut up about it. Nobody cares. Nobody wants to hear your opinions about how people look about their hair, their makeup, their clothes, their body type, their shoes, whether or not they smile, whether or not they don’t smile, their funny eyes, their beautiful eyes, their stupid eyes. Whatever. Just shut up. Nobody cares. That’s not why people are there.

So when our friend writes in and says you get attention when you look nice and no other time, that is such a disaster. And if you are in a workplace and you are sharing your workplace with women, as I imagine you are and should be, then you just have to get it through their head that they’re there because of their minds.

I mean, we are creative people. We’re not doing physical labor. They’re there because of their minds. Comment on the quality of their minds. That’s it.

**John:** So, here’s an opportunity. If you are about to make a comment about someone’s physical appearance, you might stop and think if there’s something else you could say. I mean, you’re basically just trying to start a conversation or just like to fill an awkward silence or just do the normal social interactions of things, think of something else you can say rather than commenting on how the person looks.

**Craig:** I think that you and I have a decent starting list here, but this is by no means all-encompassing and I’m sure that different places have different call for different rules and different guidelines.

I think the important thing though is that men in this business have to start talking to each other about generally speaking how we’re supposed to be. And I do believe that if you are in a situation where you are saying things that you know would be hurtful to somebody but they’re not there and they’re never going to be there. Look, humor does as humor does. And there’s different levels of intention.

I know that people are flawed and imperfect. This isn’t about perfection. This is about when you are with people and it’s about not making life miserable for these other human beings. And I cannot promise you that you’re doing it because it’s going to make your life easier. I’m just telling you you should do it because it makes you a better person. It makes you a more honorable person. It’s just basic human decency. And I think we’re all better off for it.

**John:** Yeah. So I would say that if people have additional suggestions for things that should be on that list of like how not to be a jerk as a man, tweet at us. Send us an email. And we can certainly add to this list and maybe post this for things that people can think over as they’re moving out into the world.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We have an email from Carlton who writes, “I wonder if you could see any role for the WGA in preventing sexual harassment in your industry. Could you imagine the WGA or other unions calling for a mini-strike at a company where there are allegations of sexual harassment or assault, which are safety issues if nothing else? One thing that victims have been saying in all these stories is that there was no point going to HR or even no HR department at all these companies. I know if I had a problem at my workplace I could always go to my union.”

So, Carlton has a fair question. You know, unions are set up to help the workers of an industry. Basically we are there to provide workplace protection. And this is a situation where some of our workers are either physically not safe or they are being treated poorly on the job.

So, yes, that is that is a union concern. It is a concern for the WGA, for the DGA, for SAG, for everyone below the line. Yes, every union needs to be thinking about sexual harassment and how they can make sure that their members who are working at these places are being treated OK.

So, there’s a lot kind of going on behind the scenes. And so I would say that you’re going to see a lot of stuff in the New Year about what happens next in terms of how the unions can address this individually but also impressively together to have systems that help protect workers in these situations.

**Craig:** well that’s good to hear. I don’t think that we can pull strikes per se legally against an entire company. Like I don’t think if somebody experiences sexual harassment at CBS that the Writers Guild could strike all of CBS. I don’t think we could do that legally. But certainly the union should be involved in these things. All those unions you mentioned should be.

Interestingly and trick-ily, who are the people that are doing the sexual harassment? Sometimes it is management. Sometimes it is our own members. I mean, when we talk about some of the showrunners, we’re talking about Writers Guild members. When we’re talking about a director with an actor, we’re talking about DGA members. So it’s not quite as clear cut as it might be say for somebody who is working in food services at a plant and so you’ve got your shop steward saying, OK, management is doing something to one of the workers. It’s complicated.

**John:** It’s also complicated because sometimes if it is management or if it’s a producer or if it’s somebody else, a manager, that is a person who is not under any sort of union control. So how do you – and that same person could be harassing writers and harassing PAs and harassing actors. And so how do you keep track of all that? Well, I think there has to be an industry-wide response to these situations.

Carlton’s also question about going to HR, well in order to file some of these lawsuits to get some of these actions to take effect you do need to go to HR. But what I’d urge anyone listening to this to know is that you also need to go to your union. And so the same time you go to file an HR complaint, you go to the union and the union can come with you. I know it’s true for the WGA. I’m sure it’s true for SAG and for DGA.

So there’s people there who have your back. And so it’s important to sort of like – the union has a role to play here and so does every member of a union.

**Craig:** Do we have a specific person at the Writers Guild that people should be contacting?

**John:** Yes. And so I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. So, yes, there’s a whole plan. And you’re going to see more stuff coming out from the Guild about exactly what steps to take if you’re encountering these situations.

**Craig:** Great. That’s very useful. Good.

**John:** Cool. A follow up question from Ben in Colorado. “On a recent episode you were both talking about how the screenwriters should not end dialogue with a parenthetical under it, except in animation. Can you talk about this exception and some of the other differences between writing for live action versus animation?”

All right, I can take this. So, in animation you do sometimes leave parentheticals underneath actor’s dialogue for sound effects or for like gasps. For things like that that would just be assumed in live action, but because you’re recording audio separately you actually mark all those gasps in there or like sneezes and other little things. You put them all in dialogue to make sure they actually get recorded when they go in to do the sound recording.

**Craig:** Efforts.

**John:** Efforts. Yes. The grunts. The groans. All that stuff. You put that in the dialogue track whereas you might drop that into action in a live action feature. Otherwise, animation scripts look almost exactly the same. The numbering happens a little bit differently because they do things by kind of these sequences, these reels situations. But other than that there’s not huge differences between the script that we as screenwriters are doing and for animation and what we would be doing in live action.

There’s, of course, a second step. So it goes from the screenplay into storyboards. And storyboards are these picture versions of our scripts. And things do change in that process. And so a lot of times the screenwriter will have to come back in and tweak dialogue based on the order of shots and sort of how the scene is shaping out when they actually board it. But script-wise it doesn’t look that different.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wouldn’t get hung up on it.

**John:** Last bit of follow up, the switch from documentary to narrative film. We had several people writing in to offer examples of adapted documentaries. On a previous thing you had said like, “Oh, it’s not a common thing to do to go from a documentary to a feature.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Apparently it happens literally every day. Sometimes I’m so wrong it’s like shocking.

**John:** Yeah. So do you want to read through some of these?

**Craig:** Well sure. So some examples that people sent in. Hands on a Hard Body was a documentary that follows a competition to win a new truck which Doug Wright and Trey Anastasio turned into a Broadway musical. A Broadway musical I saw.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Hunter Foster, brother of Sutton Foster, was starring in that one.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Man on Wire becoming Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk. And Loving based in part on the documentary the Loving Story. So, those were three. But it was like a cascade of them. And someone even said like, you know, I used to work in acquisitions where all we did was try and find documentaries and turn them into movies. So, I’m an idiot basically is the point.

And it’s important to say to people, you know, you can’t just trust people because they have a stupid podcast. That doesn’t mean a damn thing. Just don’t trust me.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Not a word.

**John:** I’d also say that it’s important when you are wrong to admit that you’re wrong and to say it on subsequent episodes.

**Craig:** Oh god, yeah. Sometimes I’m not just wrong. Sometimes I’m gloriously wrong. I actually feel like that’s really the goal. It’s not very interesting to be slightly wrong. You know? Like you stumble and people don’t really notice. But if you can really trip and land with your hands to your side, so you’re catching the ground with your face, that’s fun.

**John:** That’s the way you do it.

**Craig:** That’s how you do it.

**John:** All right. Let’s see if we can be gloriously wrong in our next segment which is about pitching television.

**Craig:** Oh, no, I’m going to nail this. This one I’ve got. Yeah.

**John:** Previously on Scriptnotes we’ve done episodes about producers and pitching. That was Episode 55. And pitching an open writing assignment. That was Episode 248.

But we got an email about how do I go out and pitch a TV show. And some of our other writer friends have been chatting about that recently, too, so I thought we’d just dig into what it’s like to pitch a TV show. Because I’ve done this three times. Craig, you did it for your Chernobyl show, but have you pitched other TV shows? Or was that the only one?

**Craig:** That’s the only one.

**John:** Great. So I can go through my experiences and we can hear what Craig’s experience was with Chernobyl. But it’s a lot like a feature pitch but you’re pitching some different parameters and they’re looking for very different things as you go into that room. So, let’s talk through pitches in a very general sense because this is what happens in every pitch meeting. You go into a room. There’s five minutes of chitchat. And eventually you transition into, OK, now we’re going to start talking about the thing that you’re here for.

What’s different about television versus feature pitches is in television they’ve invited you in for a specific reason. So, either you’re going into the studio or you’re going into the network. They know in a general sense what the story area is. They want you to be in that room. They’re in theory happy to hear your pitch.

In features, previously we talked about the elevator pitches, that really tight version of a pitch which you don’t use that much. We’ll have pitches where we’ll go into pitch on an assignment that started there, so it’s like an open writing assignment or it’s based on a property.

With these TV pitches it’s this weird kind of middle form where you’re going in and they know the general area that you’re pitching but you have to really walk them through the whole idea. And so a pitch might be 15 minutes. It might be 30 minutes. But it has to be a really complete package, not just for what the pilot is going to be, but for what this series is going to be and why they need to bid right now to get this series so they can make it for their season.

**Craig:** Yes. I find it to be a very different kind of pitch than a feature pitch only because of the nature of the medium itself. I feel like it’s actually much easier to pitch television because what you’re trying to do is create a sense of ongoing interest. And in features you’re trying to create something that is whole and finished. It’s really hard to pitch something to somebody and then tell them how it evolves and then tell them how it ends. It’s hard.

And in television you’re just – I think your job is to get them as excited about the potential as you are. In features, it’s not about potential. It’s about you’ve done it.

**John:** Well, it goes back to the very nature of what is a feature versus what is a series is that a feature is about a story that can only be told once. A television show is a story that can repeat itself, or can grow and change and become a different thing. And so for a feature you’re pitching this is exactly what I’m going to give you, versus a TV show. This is the area in which this thing would go. Like you’re pointing towards a trajectory rather than one destination.

**Craig:** Right. See, in television I always feel like you’re pitching – I always feel like. I pitched one thing for television, but in my mind if I go and pitch another thing this is what I believe. You’re pitching an experience. And in features you’re pitching a product.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it’s natural, I think, for feature purchasers to want you to give them more of a sense of completion and more of a sense of the details having been worked out because you have one thing that you’re pitching, a beginning, middle, and end. In television, I think there’s a general relief valve. No one is expecting you to be able to pitch the beginning, middle, and end of ten episodes or 22 episodes. Not at all.

So, you can talk more about what the nature of the experience will be. I find that to be much more engaging for me. And I can only assume it’s more engaging for them.

**John:** So a writer colleague passed along this list by Peter Micelli who is an agent at CAA. I assume this is the list that he sends to his clients to send out. But it was a very good general sense of this is the flow of what a lot of TV pitches are like. You start by talking about the inspiration. Really like what the idea means to you. What you’re trying to convey is that this is, you know, something that is deeply emotionally connected to you, because remember you’re pitching not just this idea, but that you are the person to bring this idea to life. And that you are the person who is going to work 23 hours a day to get this show exactly right and perfect. That you’re passionate about it. So they want to hear that kind of from the start.

Then you’re pitching the general themes and sort of the concepts of it. This is what areas this touches on. This can also be the answer to the question why now. Why would we do this TV show in 2018 versus 2005? What is it about today’s world that makes this show especially compelling and really demands to have this kind of show be on the air? Why does it fit?

And only then are you sort of getting into kind of the show itself. You’re giving them the sense of the kinds of things that happen in the show. You’re starting to introduce the characters. But really at first you’re pitching a vision – a personal vision and then sort of a global vision. And only then are you getting into the meat of like so here are the characters, here’s how we’re seeing the characters do their thing. This is what happens in the pilot, but these are the intriguing things that are happening. These are open threads that are going to carry us through to future episodes, and ideally in the fantasy world into season two.

Was that at all your experience going into Chernobyl? Did you start with your personal connection, Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah. I had not seen this, but this is essentially what I did. And this is a guess, because I never sit in a room, nor have I ever sat in a room to hear a writer pitch me something to get me to give them money for it. But I have to imagine that the thing that person fears the most is somebody coming in there in order to get money from them. There are people, I mean, writing is a tough gig, and sometimes people need work. And sometimes people are desperate and sometimes people are trying. Sometimes people are trying to manipulate the system or game the system or get some employment. Whatever it is. And they come in and they just start going through the mechanics. And on the other side of the table they’re like, “But where is the heart? Where is the soul here? Why? I feel like you just want to get a job.”

And bizarrely that’s the worst way to get a job. It would never occur to me to walk into a pitch for a television show that I wanted to do and not begin with, “I want to do a crazy thing. It is going to take me a long time. It is going to be really, really hard, and I really want to do it. And here’s why.” Simple as that.

**John:** Simple as that. When we had Benioff and Weiss on to talk about Game of Thrones, their backstory on Game of Thrones was that they were just obsessed with the book. And I remember an anecdote where one of the HBO guys was at the gym and he saw – I think it was D.B. Weiss – just like going – like D.B Weiss was on the treadmill but still going through the book and marking stuff. And that’s when he saw like, oh, the passion. These guys are obsessed with making this TV show. That’s what networks and studios want is obsessed people who will work to death to try to make these shows happen.

So you have to start with that sense of like this is something I must do. I am the perfect person for this because of XYZ and this is the perfect time to do this kind of show.

**Craig:** Yeah. You become a force of nature then. See, like when I came into pitch my miniseries, I think they must have noticed that I was kind of on fire about it. And I had been thinking about it and researching it for a long time. A long, long time. And I was able to answer a lot of questions. And I was able to talk about specific moments. And really instead of trying to convince them of anything, all I was doing was sharing what had convinced me. So, that’s kind of the deal.

Nobody wants you to manipulate them into a decision. What they want from a good pitch, and I think this is true for features, too, is they want to be able to see, and feel, and experience what you saw and felt and experienced when you fell in love. And then, listen, sometimes they say, “You know what? You look at that and you see beauty, I look at it and I don’t. So, it won’t work out here.” But a lot of times they say, “Oh my god, yes, I’m seeing this through your eyes now and I’m excited.”

That’s the most important thing.

**John:** I’ve sold three TV shows as pilots. And in each case I genuinely loved it. I was genuinely obsessed with the idea and I could completely see what the vision was for the show. And I’d say – so I pitched to studios, and then I had to pitch to networks. And in every one of those meetings I was just as passionate about it. And some of them were like, “Yes, yes, we absolutely want this show.” And some of them were like, “Nah, not for us.”

And a lot of times I could feel as I left the room it was like, oh, that did not go well. That is not going to work for them. But in each time I was conveying the same excitement and the same enthusiasm because I really genuinely did want to do this. I wanted to put aside feature stuff to try to do this TV show. And they respond to that. They see that.

And even the places that didn’t pick it, they didn’t pick it because they didn’t believe in me. It just wasn’t a good fit for them. That’s still going to happen. You’re still going to have situations where they say no. But you’re going to have a much better likelihood of saying yes if they see that you are the right obsessed person for it.

**Craig:** That’s a really good distinction to make. I think for a lot of people that work regularly as screenwriters, television writers, we are being asked to come and help on things. And at that point what they’re saying is we want you. We want you for you. And there may be writers who hear, “OK, there’s an open writing assignment. A rewrite on blah-blah-blah. And so you’re going to go in and pitch on it.” And five other people are pitching on it. And what you’re pitching is you and your suitability for their needs. And when they reject you or pass on you, it is about you. And that can hurt.

When you’re pitching your own material it’s not about you at all. It’s about the material. They may love you, they just don’t want to make a movie about this. They may love you, but they have a television show already in development that’s kind of close to the one you have, or they once made a show that was a little bit like yours and it was a disaster for them so they just don’t want to deal with it. So it’s not about you. And that actually psychologically I think is a nice benefit if you are aware of it.

**John:** Absolutely. So, I would say it is about you in terms of like they want to see your passion and your excitement, but they can still see that and pass. And if they’re passing, then it’s not about you. It really is truly about sort of how it fits in their plan for what they’re going to try to make.

So when you were pitching Chernobyl, did you talk about the characters by their names? Did you talk about actor names? How were you describing the principal people who were going to be in your show?

**Craig:** Well, I narrowed it down to the three that I felt were the most important. And then a fourth that was important just so we understood what was happening with the other three. There are something like 100 speaking parts on this show. You can easily drown somebody in details. But ultimately I was able to say this is why I wanted to do this because of this person. And what this meant. Not only what they did, but what their whole connection to this whole process was. What it did to them. What it signified. And what it signifies for all of us. And their key relationships with these two other people.

And you sort of use that as a touchstone, because I do believe whether it’s features or television you should never talk about something that happens in a show or a movie without pointing out why it matters to a relationship, hopefully a relationship, but at a minimum to a character.

**John:** Absolutely. So when you are talking about these three characters, you used their – they’re based on real people – do you use their character names or do you refer to them as a Stellan Skarsgard?

**Craig:** No, I use their names. And because I don’t want to seem, I don’t know, too desperate or showy. I also feel like when you start mentioning actors you’re giving too much rope to the other side of the table with which to hang you. Because they may not like those actors for some reason. They may have worked with those actors and hated them. They may decide that your interest in those actors implies a certain poor taste.

You never know. So, what I like to do is only discuss that at the end if there seems like real interest. And then they say, “Well who do you see?” And then I’ll say, well, these are the kinds of people that I’ve been thinking about. And I never just put one down. But I have the one that I want.

And at that point I’m really kind of now – now I feel like I have them and now I’m actually kind of checking on them to see if they’re on board with me.

**John:** Absolutely. That can be a very useful thing. In a pitch I did last year, I needed to convey that it was a certain type of person. And so I ended up falling on it’s a Chris. It’s a Chris Evans, it’s a Chris Pratt. It’s a Chris Pine. It’s one of the Chris’s. Which was a useful sort of joke in terms of like there are a bunch of people who are sort of in that space who could do one of those things.

If you were in a TV show situation you could say, “Sort of like a TV Chris Pine.” That is a thing we can sort of understand. And so it provides a context for like the kind of person you should picture in your head for this role. And it was just helpful just for the pitch. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to cast a Chris Pine-type in that part, but just to get them through this 15 minutes of story it’s helpful if they have some image in their head of who this person is.

Some writers will bring in little boards with pictures on them to show different characters. I’ve done that. Sometimes it’s really helpful.

What can be helpful about having a physical thing is then when they’re going back through the pitch or they’re asking you questions they can point to the board that you were talking about then and it helps to remind them like, OK yeah, there was that moment. Tell me more about this guy again. And so having something physical they can point to can be useful.

Did you bring in anything in for Chernobyl?

**Craig:** Not a thing. And, you know, listening to you talk about the image board it strikes me that one of the mistakes that so-called gurus make, other than advertising themselves as gurus and taking people’s money, which they shouldn’t, is that they prescribe solutions as if this is the way to do things.

It seems to me that we are all very, very different. And the most important thing you can take with you into a pitch is your best move. The move that makes you most comfortable and the move that advertises your strength. And it’s not necessarily your strength as a writer you’re advertising, but your strength as an employee. So, you go in there and you show them this board and these images, because you’re comfortable – that’s your safe place. That’s a good place for you. You’re organized. You’ve thought it through. You’re planned. You have this thing here.

And for me, I find that more of an ad-libbed conversation, a back and forth, like a sense of mutual discovery of the show together is kind of – that’s how I’m happy. And while I’m doing it of course I’m leading the conversation. But I like a conversation. And whatever it is that works for you, do that. I mean, for god’s sake never let anybody tell you that you can’t do something like bring in an image board or just show up and talk if that’s what you’re best at.

**John:** Definitely. I had the opportunity to be on the other side of the table once for a project. We were going to do Tower of Terror over at Disney. And it all fell apart because it no longer exists as a ride.

**Craig:** That’s a good reason.

**John:** That’s a good reason. It no longer exists. I got the opportunity to sit across from three writers, or three writing teams, who had come in to pitch their version of it. And they were all fantastic. And I would have loved to have hired all three of them. We hired none of them because it never existed as a project.

But it was fascinating to see the different ways they were approaching the same material and the different ways they were approaching the process of pitching. And some of them were – they were all writing teams, so in some cases one person just did all the pitching and then the other person would come in for the questions and stuff.

Other times you could see it was a much rehearsed, like they’d worked through the whole thing. It was all a bit. It was funny along the way. Other times it’s just like one guy reads a paragraph, the other guy reads a paragraph. They can all work. The last one was probably the hardest to get through.

**Craig:** That’s a little rough.

**John:** But I will say that the ones that stuck with me most was not a person reading off a piece of paper. Because I can read. I don’t need you to read something to me. I need to see you describe it to me. And I need to see what your vision for this really is. And that’s especially important in television where they are making a long-term contract with you to be creating this show, running this show, to be there when everything goes horrible. So they need to see in your eyes that you really do have a vision for how this is going to work.

**Craig:** Such a great point. Because in features, in the back of their minds they’re always thinking, “Well, it’s a great idea. Let’s just—“

**John:** “Who could I have write that?”

**Craig:** Yeah. “You know what? Let’s pay this dude whatever we got to pay him, and then let’s bring her in because she’s great and we’ll pay her a lot. And she’s really going to write it.”

You can’t do that in television. I mean it’s theoretically possible. Occasionally it happens. But by and large they’re trying to avoid that.

So you’re absolutely right. For television they really are looking for long-term partners. I can only imagine they respond much more readily to confidence than to sweatiness. When you sound desperate, feel desperate, seem desperate, you are just immediately less attractive. There’s just no way around it. As an employee. There’s just no way around it. I’m not even sure that’s fair, because I think that a lot of people are not confident in that situation. But then would be remarkably confident in the room. And hopefully you have somebody on the other side of the table who can price that in. But generally speaking if you can be confident and most importantly if you can seem alive and interested.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Then I think there’s something to hold onto. You want to be near people who have that positive passion.

**John:** Definitely. So a thing I think we should stress is that if you’re being invited in to pitch to the network, to pitch to the studio, you’re probably not a brand new writer. You’re probably a writer who has some credit under your belt. Either you were staffed on a TV show or there’s some other reason why you’re interesting or notable.

But that reason could be something really small or recent. So like when I came in to do my first TV show, D.C., my first feature Go had shot but hadn’t come out yet. I was newly hot. And so they were excited to meet with me because they liked my writing, they thought I was going to be a pretty big deal. And so I was able to convince them and convey that I’m the person who could do this show. But I was also coming in with an established producer who they had as a fallback. So they could look at my eyes and see the passion. They could look in his eyes and see that he can at least get a show on the air. And that was the combo.

So, it may seem like we’re pitching this pitching topic to the folks who are already staff writers on something or who are moving up the food chain, or the feature writers who are switching over to TV. But I really do think it’s not that far in the future for really anybody as a writer.

**Craig:** I agree. I mean, sooner or later, right?

**John:** Sooner or later.

**Craig:** I think everybody is going to be in a situation where they’re pitching something and they have nothing going for them. It may not be in TV, it may be in features, but I mean you and I both had those experiences. Every writer has that experience at least once.

**John:** Yep. The Duffer Brothers were just brothers at one point.

**Craig:** They were just brothers. [laughs]

**John:** The Duffer Brothers.

**Craig:** That’s right. And I remember those days and I remember understanding, OK, so I’m being brought in as a widget. They don’t know who I am. Their expectations are incredibly low. Every other widget is a certain kind of widget. I’m going to surprise them. I’m going to be memorable. I’m going to be smart and I’m going to be passionate. I’m going to get myself out of widget category. Sometimes you can. Sometimes – I remember very early on in my career I was pitching something — I won’t say who the executive is. I don’t think he’s in the business anymore.

And he just looked so bored. And so I just stopped and I said, “You know what? I’m boring you. I don’t want to bore you. Let’s just wrap it up. Let’s wrap it up.”

And he’s like, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. You weren’t boring me. You weren’t boring me.”

I’m like, “It’s OK. It’s OK.”

And he goes, “Oh, you know, I’m tired.” And he had some excuses, but I got out of there. Because–

**John:** I’ve gotten out of that room, too. And I wasn’t so forthright to say like, “Oh, I’m boring you. This is done.” But you’ve ripped cords in your pitch. And we’re going to jump through and now we’re done. Clearly it’s just not going to connect.

**Craig:** Let’s just get to the end here as fast as we can.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** For those of you who are yet to do this, to have this experience, there are some bad pitches in your future. And nobody – nobody – manages to avoid them. At some point they will happen. Generally speaking part of the problem is, aside from the fact that you are new, because you’re new you’re pitching to people who are also either new or even worse not new but just slowly sliding down the ladder of Hollywood.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s the worst. Just the worst. And those are just awful because now everyone seems desperate. It’s like, “Oh my god, Willy Loman has come in to pitch Willy Loman.” Ugh.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah, both of you are just thinking let’s make this work. We could rub some nickels together.

**Craig:** Right. Everyone is just pathetic. It’s just like Jack Lemmon from Glengarry Glen Ross and Willy Loman. It’s the worst. And everyone is sweaty and sad and you didn’t even know what’s going on, or why. They’re coming. You can’t avoid them.

**John:** Yep. It’s gonna happen. All right, let’s do our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is super simple. It is a hair brush that was recommended on Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools, which is another thing you should check out because it’s a really good blog. I’ll put a link to that.

But my daughter has long straight hair and it is just a disaster to try to get a hairbrush through it some mornings. And so I’m usually the person who has to do that and I get sort of elbowed for hurting her.

**Craig:** Ah yes.

**John:** This hairbrush is really good. It’s called the Tangle Teezer. It sort of looks more like something you’d use to brush a horse. It has these really thin plastic things and you think, well, this wouldn’t work. But it works remarkably well. So you just go zip-zip-zip and it’s just a great piece of technology in plastic form. So I would recommend if you have long hair or hair that is difficult to brush with normal brushes, I’d say check this out because I was skeptical and incredibly impressed.

**Craig:** Yeah, the stuff that you and I know about hair. Oh boy.

**John:** Oh my gosh. Yes.

**Craig:** I’m lucky my daughter has always liked having her hair short. She has very thick hair and very straight hair, but she likes it short and purple. I think it’s currently purple.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** So I don’t have to worry about that. I do recall when she was younger and she had longer hair I remember hearing Melissa and her just having that classic argument. The ow…stop…you’re hurting…you have to…ugh.

See, oh man, your daughter is lucky she has you because if I were her dad she would just go to school with crazy hair. Real simple. Real simple.

I have a One Cool Thing this week that I just started with but I’m so far – so far so good. So far I’m impressed. It’s an app for iPhone and iPad called Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock, which is a bizarrely generic name for what it does.

So, it uses the microphone on your iOS device and it essentially analyzes your sleep and your snoring. And what it’s doing is it’s listening to you and it’s gauging how frequently you’re moving around. So we’ll put the snoring aside, just the moving around. Generally speaking, the deeper our sleep the less we move. The lighter our sleep, the more we kind of turn over or toss or wiggle.

And by listening to it and doing this analysis over a few days it starts to show you, OK, here’s how your sleep cycle is working. And it also will record you if you start to snore. So you can see how frequently you might have snored during the night and how loud it was. And you can play it back.

It’s also pretty smart. It knows to ignore your partner on the other side of the bed. It also knows to ignore kind of steady noise like a white noise machine or a fan. So it’s really looking for changes closer to it. It’s very smart. So far so good. I’m kind of digging it.

Oh, and the other thing it does is after it kind of gets you down, then you say, OK, look, I want to wake up – like I need to wake up tomorrow at 7:30. So you’ll say, OK, I need to wake up around 7:30. And it will say, “OK, we’re going to wake you up between 7:15 and 7:35. And we’re basically going to try and catch you on the upswing towards lighter sleep.” Pretty smart.

**John:** That’s nice. That’s very smart. So, I’ll check back in in two weeks and see whether you’re still using it.

**Craig:** Or find that just like, “Oh my god, I’m so tired. This thing is wrong.”

**John:** It would also be great if it was transmitting all your snoring data to be analyzed by machines or like if you’re talking in your sleep they’re building up evidence against you.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s probably what’s happening.

**John:** That’s probably what’s happening.

**Craig:** Now that you’ve said it that actually does make the most sense.

**John:** Yeah. Maybe we could have a podcast that’s just Craig snoring.

**Craig:** I still wouldn’t listen to it. [laughs]

**John:** All right. That is our show for this week. It is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Phil Baker.

**Craig:** Oh, he’s new.

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

We are on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on Apple Podcasts at Scriptnotes. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there, leave us a review. That helps people find us. Also, if you’re listening on some other platform, there are other platforms, yeah, leave us a review there. That’s always great.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. I’ll also put up the outlines I have for the three TV shows I sold. So, basically I have kind of the pitch document that I went into the room with. It’s not exactly sort of what happens in the room, but it’s a good representation of the things I was talking about.

**Craig:** That’s good. You know, after Chernobyl airs, so we’re about–

**John:** [laughs] Three years away.

**Craig:** Well, a year and a half. About a year and a half away. But once it airs I will put all of that – I’ll put the scripts, the pitch documents, the bible. Everything. I’ll put it all up on your site.

**John:** Fantastic. You can find the transcripts for this episode and back episodes at johnaugust.com as well. Come join us on Thursday so we can talk to you and Julie Plec and Michael Green and Justin Marks about television and features and other great things. We’ll see you there at the live holiday show. Go to wgafoundation.org to get your tickets.

And if you want any of the back episodes, go to Scriptnotes.net. That is your best source. We also have a few of the USB drives left. They are $30 I want to say. They’re at store.johnaugust.com. They have the first 300 episodes of the program.

**Craig:** Doesn’t matter to me how much they cost because I don’t get any of the money.

**John:** You get none of the money Craig.

**Craig:** Go ahead. Charge $1,000. I don’t care.

**John:** Absolutely. The more we charge for them, the more we have to pay Megan and Matthew.

**Craig:** And to steal from me.

**John:** Yes. That’s the goal. Have a great week.

**Craig:** You too, John. See you soon.

**John:** See you, bye.

Links:

* Holiday Live Show [tickets](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-holiday-live-show-john-august-craig-mazin/) are available.
* A sexual harrassment [resource guide](https://www.wgaeast.org/resources/sexual-harassment-resource-guide/) from the WGA.
* The [Tangle Teezer](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001S261Q6/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) hair brush as recommended on Kevin Kelly’s [Cool Tools](http://kk.org/cooltools/)
* [Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sleep-cycle-alarm-clock/id320606217?mt=8)
* Initial write ups/pitch documents for [DC](http://johnaugust.com/downloads_ripley/dc-what-it-is.pdf), [The Circle (a.k.a. Alaska)](http://johnaugust.com/downloads_ripley/alaska_writeup.pdf), and [Ops](http://johnaugust.com/downloads_ripley/ops_writeup.pdf).
* [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 Phil Baker ([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_328.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/mergers-and-breakups).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 327 of Scriptnotes, of podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’ll be discussing mergers, such as the proposed union of Fox and Disney. Then we’ll transition to breakups. It’s a new installment of This Kind of Scene, this time looking at how characters say goodbye for the last time.

**Craig:** Oh. This isn’t like a weird way for you to be breaking up with me, is it?

**John:** We’ll see if we get to the end of the episode.

**Craig:** Huh.

**John:** Yeah. But we should warn our listeners that there will be some bad words in this episode because some of the clips have some foul language. So if you are driving in the car with your kids, this is the standard warning about that.

**Craig:** Earmuffs.

**John:** Earmuffs. We have some follow up and news, exciting stuff. So, our live show, which we talked about last week on the episode, it is December 7, here in Hollywood. It is another event proposed and thrown by the Writers Guild Foundation. But we have guests now. It’s not just me and Craig. We have a bunch of showrunners joining us up on stage. So excited to announce that Julie Plec from Vampire Diaries and The Originals will be with us, along with Michael Green. He did American Gods and The Ripper. He also wrote some movies, Murder on the Orient Express, Blade Runner 2049, Logan.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** Yeah, busy guy.

**Craig:** Heard of a few of them. You know what? He’s not lazy. That’s as far as I’ll go.

**John:** Absolutely. I think maybe his not laziness is one of the reasons why he’s somewhat successful.

**Craig:** Possibly.

**John:** Finally, Justin Marks. Justin Marks has a new show coming out called Counterpart. The trailer is great. I’m so excited to see his show. He also wrote this little movie called Jungle Book. And so the last time he was on the show we talked about Jungle Book, so now we will be talking about his television program which he filmed in Germany.

**Craig:** We get the best guests.

**John:** We do consistently get the best guests.

**Craig:** And the tickets are available now.

**John:** They are.

**Craig:** And I assume we’re going to be selling out, as we usually do, because we are the Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts.

**John:** I would hope we would sell out. But if you want to make sure you can get your ticket right now, don’t even look for the link in the show notes. You could look for that, but you could also just go to wgafoundation.org. Go to events and we are there for you to buy your tickets.

**Craig:** Yeah. And the Christmas show – I like to call it a Christmas show.

**John:** Yeah. No war on Christmas show.

**Craig:** Yeah. We don’t do that. Because you know, as a Jew, I have the privileged position of being able to declare that Chanukah is silly. It’s a silly holiday and it’s not an important holiday religiously. So, I appreciate Christmas. I think a lot of American Jews secretly appreciate Christmas because it’s so much better than Chanukah. And I don’t mind getting in trouble for this, by the way, not even in the slightest. Go ahead. Go ahead. Send emails about how great Chanukah is. I prefer Christmas as a secular Jew.

So our Christmas shows generally are a lot of fun. Everybody is in – you know what everyone is in? The holiday spirit.

**John:** The holiday spirit is a mighty good place to start any podcast and hopefully spirits are even more raised by the end of this show.

**Craig:** When you dump me? [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] On our last show, we had Scott Frank on to talk about his show Godless. Godless is now available to the whole world on Netflix.

**Craig:** That’s right. Have you started yet?

**John:** I have not. So I have only seen trailers. And so this is a thing which will make Scott sad, but he should also be happy. So I’m going to put it all on my iPad to take with me on my Christmas holiday travels because Mike will not watch it with me. I want to watch it. I will have ample time on planes over the holidays. So I’ll watch it with my good Bose headphones and I will enjoy it so much.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s what Scott was hoping that you would watch it on your iPad. That’s his greatest – hey, by the way, how do you watch Netflix things on your iPad? Is there an app? A Netflix app?

**John:** There’s a Netflix app and you just click and download them. And it’s fantastic.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** This past week I was traveling. I went to San Francisco, Chicago, and New York to do Arlo Finch book events, and so I had Stranger Things on my iPad saved. And so I could watch it on my iPad. It was delicious.

**Craig:** So you finished Stranger Things season two?

**John:** I have finished Stranger Things season two.

**Craig:** As have I. That was my London show. Pretty good, except that one episode. I just didn’t understand. And I don’t like saying bad things about shows, so I really enjoyed the series. I loved season one and I really enjoyed season two.

**John:** I really enjoyed season two also.

**Craig:** I was puzzled by Episode Seven. Just puzzled.

**John:** I was puzzled as well. And I thought you were subtweeting me when you said like I don’t say negative things about shows, because someone asked me about Episode Seven.

**Craig:** Oh, no. No, no. I think it’s fair to say that Episode Seven is – because look, if you like a show and the Duffer Brothers have done a tremendous job and once again the cast for Stranger Things is fantastic. And I watched all the way through, Episodes One through Nine. So they had me.

I like their show. But I feel then you’re allowed to say, “But, I’m also just puzzled by this one piece of it.” I think they are aware that it’s a polarizing episode.

**John:** For sure. Absolutely. I feel the same way as you do. I in many ways respected the effort and the attempt. It was like, oh, that was probably a fascinating idea on the whiteboard. I just didn’t think it actually became as good an hour as the rest of the hours.

**Craig:** We should get these guys on the show. This is a question I have. Because I’m really curious about it. And for those of you who have watched this show, you’ll understand. And if you haven’t, no spoilers here.

**John:** None.

**Craig:** Whatsoever. Do you think that part of the deal with Episode Seven was that they were essentially intentionally mimicking those kinds of movies from the ‘80s, in other words the tone of the characters, and that place, and the setting and all that stuff was essentially designed to be that way? Or were they just not hitting the mark of reality?

**John:** That is an absolutely fair and valid question. I feel like the overall style of those characters, I can see that as being you’re trying to pull from those other movie references. Great. I love that. But I didn’t believe them within the context of the world.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because once you bring in a character that you’re meant to believe is real, like Eleven, then it doesn’t quite connect up does it?

**John:** It does not quite connect up.

**Craig:** Doesn’t quite connect up. All right.

**John:** But I would love to ask the Duffer Brothers that question, because I think they made a remarkable run of terrific shows.

**Craig:** As do I. Yeah, come on the show guys.

**John:** That would be great. Lastly, I will say that if you would like to read the first five chapters of Arlo Finch, they are now up. That happened over the Thanksgiving holiday.

**Craig:** For free?

**John:** For free. So, just go to arlofinchbooks.com and you can look at the first five chapters there. There’s preorder links for the North American copy. But if you just want to read it, read it. And if you do take a look at it, it may be helpful to know essentially what you’re reading is kind of what I sold. Like that was what sold the book to Macmillan. Plus one additional chapter which is not included which is from later on in the book. But just a glimpse in to sort of what the book looked like before the whole book was written.

**Craig:** All right. Well, good luck with the sales. I expect this thing to be number one.

**John:** Well I hope to be somewhere on some list at some point and not of like the Most Disappointing Books of 2018.

**Craig:** Or Best Books You’ve Never Heard Of.

**John:** Yeah. Your daughter actually read it. Your daughter read an early–

**Craig:** Yep. She was a big fan. Big fan. She’ll show up for Arlo Finch 2.

**John:** Fantastic. So down the road I will be doing a book tour, so on future podcasts I’ll let you know. If you want to see me in some city near you, you can come out and see me as I sign books and talk to folks.

**Craig:** Yeah. Although anybody that comes out to see you will no doubt miss me.

**John:** That’s pretty much what it is. I’m going to travel around with a cardboard standee of Craig and maybe we’ll just record little bits of select umbrage. So people walk up and you just say something to them about them. That might be it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just so they can get their fix.

**John:** Yeah. You just say “specificity” a lot.

**Craig:** And “intentionality.”

**John:** Intentionality is very good. There was a moment of intentionality–

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** — the past two weeks. We sort of missed it on this last episode because it was a rerun, but Disney was in talks to buy 20th Century Fox.

**Craig:** And still are, right?

**John:** And still are. And also Comcast/Universal is apparently kicking the tires of Fox as well. So, I thought we’d start by talking about what this is and what it means. Because on previous episodes we’ve talked about integrations. We’ve talked about vertical integrations where because of consent decrees, like studios are not allowed to own exhibitors. They’re not allowed to own national movie houses. But this is an example of horizontal integration, where two competitors are merging and becoming like one bigger thing. And while there’s some fascinating things that could happen in terms of fandom unification and cinematic universes being combined, I don’t think it would be a great outcome for writers. I’m curious what you think.

**Craig:** Well, jury is out on that, I think. What they’re talking about buying is Fox’s movie production studio, 20th Century Fox films, or I guess 21st Century Fox films. And they’re also talking about buying Fox’s television production arm, which is Fox Television, but not Fox the network, not Fox News, not Fox Sports, and for reasons we’ll get into.

The question is what happens if one of the major movie studios seemingly disappears. And so two of this dwindling number of movie studios becomes one movie studio. One way of looking at it is, well, that’s that many fewer jobs for screenwriters. Another way of looking at is probably – I mean, unless a studio is considering buying Fox just for the library, the odds are that they’re still going to continue to put movies out and that in fact it’s not writers, producers, directors, and actors who will lose jobs, it’s studio employees who will ultimately be laid off. Because you don’t need – there is a certain economy of scale. You don’t need two full marketing departments to run Disney Fox. You need one slightly larger marketing department to run Disney Fox.

So, that’s where I think jobs will be lost. Now, it’s possible that they’re just buying it for the library sake and for certain rights, in which case then that’s a problem.

**John:** So when the news first broke I went back and looked at the 2016 box office. And if you add Fox and Disney together they control 39% of the US box office. That’s a huge figure. And so I think we have to be approaching this thinking like not only will this change the nature of Marvel things all coming together, or Disney would control The Simpsons which is a huge thing, too. It would really be a huge game changer just in terms of the overall industry.

If you are Paramount, or Sony, or Warners, suddenly you’re competing against this thing which is three times your size.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you’re absolutely right about that. Now, one thing that may come into play to sort of help out a little bit is that Disney has a certain brand contract with its customers that no other studio has. Everyone understands that Disney puts out a certain kind of movie. Now, back when we started in the business Disney had an arm that could put out Rated R films, and they did.

**John:** Hollywood Pictures.

**Craig:** Hollywood Pictures. If it’s the sphinx it stinks. And Touchstone also was able to put out Rated R movies. And some of them were really Rated R. And at that time Disney didn’t quite have the same sort of all row in one direction philosophy. They don’t make Rated R movies at all. They don’t make films for grownups per se. They make all-audiences movies.

So, one thing that may happen is they may say, look, we don’t want this company to be called Disney Fox. We’ll be Disney, you’ll be Fox, obviously everybody is owned by the same parent corporation, but Fox can still make Fox movies, because that is a different brand. And that the purchase here, aside from the library, is about pulling in some of the properties that they wish they had that Fox has the rights to like X-Men, and so on and so forth. And also I would say probably limiting competition in the animation space, which is disconcerting for animation writers.

But I could see a version of this where actually the individual control on a day to day basis maybe is kind of separate. And so the person that runs the Walt Disney Pictures slate is not also overseeing the Fox slate. But, I’ll tell you one area where this is very disturbing and disconcerting, and that’s when it comes time every three years for the companies to negotiate with the unions. Because if you have one company that is responsible for as you say essentially 40% of the box office, they become the biggest voice in the room. And that can be a real issue.

**John:** Definitely. I think my concern even if you do keep Fox as a whole separate label and a whole separate brand, that only goes to a certain distance. I know from times where we’ve been trying to sell a spec script for a feature screenplay or to sell a TV series, ultimately they may say they’re separate buyers. They talk about things individually. But if you have a feature project going into Fox it may be going to big Fox, it might be going to Fox 2000 or Fox Animation. But they’re not going to compete against each other for a property. And I think the same thing would happen between Disney and Fox. If they both want something, ultimately some big person at Disney will decide, OK, this is where it’s going to go. They’re not going to get into a bidding war with each other.

**Craig:** Yeah. In all likelihood that is correct. There are provisions for those things and they do occasionally happen. Actually happened weirdly in a way with our sheep movie. But generally speaking you’re right. And Disney I think is probably less inclined to do that than any other studio would be. So, generally speaking this is going to be a terrific deal for Disney. I guess for the larger Fox Corporation this is about getting a premium on their library and so forth and just retreating to their core businesses which is “news” and actual sports.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t fully understand it from Fox’s point of view. I can understand if Fox decided like, you know what, we’re going to sell off all this stuff. Disney is the best buyer for it because you know Disney will pay a premium because Disney can get the most value out of it. I guess I just don’t see the benefit for the Murdoch Company to get rid of Fox. I think Fox feels profitable. It feels like a business you want to be in because people are still going to need these things.

I’ve heard it said that they are concerned that they’re not going to have the power to be able to stand up against a Netflix, against Amazon, as streaming becomes more dominant as we sort of move to a post-cable universe. But I just don’t fully get it. I don’t fully see that it’s a better idea just to sell off what I perceive to be a tremendous amount of value in these titles and in the things you’re going to be making down the road.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a little bit of a sign that they know something we don’t. You know what I mean? Because we can’t quite tell why they’re steering their boat to the shore. Perhaps we can’t see the waterfall ahead that they can. It may be that everyone at the corporate level has looked ahead and decided that if they can’t compete with Netflix, Amazon, Apple, etc. as their own streaming entity controlling their own material that they will suffer. And then that ultimately reduces their value and reduces their leverage. So, maybe Fox is saying, look, we can’t get there on our own. But we can get top dollar right now if we sell to Disney. Disney can get there on their own. And it will be even easier for them to get there this way. Because Disney is essentially going to create a competitor with Netflix.

**John:** Let’s take a look at the roadblocks in the way to making this kind of deal happen. So, theoretically the government could step in and say no-no that’s a monopoly situation or near monopoly situation. You already have sort of an oligopoly situation in terms of the limited number of buyers for certain kinds of properties.

The US government hasn’t seemed to be very interested in enforcing anti-trust rules or sort of going into new territory. They seem to perceive anti-trust as being anything that would hurt consumers. And it’s not clear that this deal would necessarily hurt consumers. There’s no evidence here that there’s any reason why prices would go up for consumers which seems to be the litmus test for a lot of anti-trust decisions.

Do you see any reason why the government would get involved?

**Craig:** I don’t. I mean, they’ll get involved to the extent that they have to vet the deal. But Disney apparently has removed the roadblocks prospectively. There was never going to be a chance where they could own two studios like Fox and ABC, for instance. There was never going to be a situation where they could control two major news sources like ABC News and Fox News. Nor would I think would Disney want to go anywhere near Fox News right now.

And then sports-wise, the biggest monopolistic or market control concern would be if ESPN and Fox Sports were the same company. Those are the two largest sports broadcasters, I believe.

So, no, I don’t think that there is anything in the way in terms of monopolies. Even monopolies technically can survive if they don’t appear to be harming consumers. There doesn’t appear to be any ability to squash competition here. There is still plenty of vibrant competition. No, I don’t see any reason that this wouldn’t go through.

**John:** So the other obstacles along the way would be someone else coming in and saying, “You know what? If you’re going to sell, we’re going to buy and we’re going to pay a premium that Disney isn’t willing to pay.” And it would have to be probably a huge company and a huge amount of money. But Apple could pay for it. Netflix maybe could pay for it. Amazon might be able to pay for it. Because especially Netflix and Amazon, they have a really good interest in sort of making sure that Disney doesn’t get too huge and keep them from getting access to some of the content that they want.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s absolutely possible. Maybe the problem with Amazon and Netflix or Apple purchasing Fox is they wouldn’t really know what to do with it. They don’t want it. In other words the only reason to buy it would be to keep Disney from having it.

So, I don’t know. It’s a fascinating thing to watch. If I’m going to be pessimistic, my big concern isn’t that these two companies might be combining. My concern is that this is the beginning of the great combine of 2020 where suddenly we end up with three movie studios.

**John:** Do you ever play those simulations where you have little planets and you have other little planets circling and eventually they get too close and they glob together and gravity kicks in? That is also the vision I sort of see here. These two things combined become so big that the gravity sucks in Paramount. It sucks in maybe Warners, certainly Sony. I feel like lots of those little things could just become – you know, just three giant companies.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You know, in talking with booksellers this last week it’s fascinating to look at sort of the consolidation that is happening in publishing. And so you have to say Penguin Random House which just seems like too long of a name for something. But these giant entities are merged. And that’s challenging for everybody involved.

**Craig:** And generally speaking when two big companies merge, everybody that is remaining starts to look at each other saying, ‘Oh, apparently we’re pairing up for a big dance here so you/me, how about you and me?” Because you don’t want to become an also ran. And there’s a long history of studios that were once powerful and then sort of disappeared. MGM was once a real studio.

**John:** Oh yeah. RKO. Yeah.

**Craig:** RKO was once a real studio. United Artists. Orion. They existed. And then they stopped existing in part because it wasn’t that they maybe failed or got super small relative to where they began. It’s that they got super small relative to the size that everybody else was growing at. And so I could see where this leads to Warners/Universal, which would be really complicated. I’m not sure how any of that works.

**John:** Yeah. It would be very, very complicated. They would have a lot of land but what would their future be?

**Craig:** I was wondering how this would work out with the Fox lot in Century City, whether Disney would also be purchasing that lot or if the lot would be owned – I would imagine it would still be owned by Fox but then they would be renting space back to – or does Disney not even care about that lot?

**John:** Yeah. The real estate history of Hollywood and the film industry is fascinating. So I’ll try to find a good article we can put in the show notes for basically Los Angeles was in some ways shaped by where these studios set up their different home bases. And so Century City is called Century City because it was 20th Century Fox. And after I think it was Cleopatra, 20th Century Fox had to sell off a lot of their land because of their losses and that became Century City. Disney still has a big footprint. Paramount used to have a bigger footprint in Hollywood. It’s fascinating the degree to which these big sections of Los Angeles were all just film studios.

**Craig:** And at some point the land starts to become more valuable than the studio. I mean, Paramount for instance right now, I would imagine their greatest asset is their land.

**John:** It’s got to be. And I was reading an article recently, I’ll put a link in the show notes to this as well, that CBS Television Studios on Fairfax is looking at selling because that land now is incredibly valuable.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** So, right now they film soap operas out of there and they film soap operas out of there and they film The Survivor finale – hi Jeff Probst, if you’re listening.

**Craig:** Hey Jeff.

**John:** You know, that land is worth so much right now. It’s right next to the Grove. That’s prime LA real estate. And so–

**Craig:** And they can shoot those things anywhere. They can shoot The Price is Right in Pacoima. They don’t need to be right there at the corner, you know, right next to Fairfax High and the Grove. So you’re right. And similarly when you look at – in particular you look at Fox. I mean, that real estate, even though it’s smaller than the Paramount Lot, I believe–

**John:** Yeah, still great real estate.

**Craig:** The location, I would assume that real estate is on an aggregate basis worth even more than Paramount. So, I don’t know what’s going to – this is all fascinating.

But you know what, John? This is what the money people do and think about. We – we don’t have to think about this.

**John:** No. Because we think of the creative decisions. We think about what’s happening in the movies. And so let’s make our big transition the feature topic for today which is Breakups. So, last time we did a segment on This Kind of Scene, people afterwards suggested other things. And I think it was Alex Blagg in my Twitter feed who suggested, oh, you should do one on breakups, which is a great idea. Because so many movies have breakups. They’re kind of a crucial way of either putting a character out on a path or forcing a character to confront sort of a worst of a worst at the end of the second act as they go into the next phase of their life.

There’s a tremendous way of just revealing what’s going on inside a character and the choices the character has to make going forward.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it is an interesting kind of scene because unlike a lot of them it really can serve two wildly different purposes. And you’ve basically put your finger on it, right? If you have a movie about somebody that is recovering from a wound you want to start them with the breakup. And if it’s a movie where somebody is outgrowing a relationship or the relationship needs to be tested and either succeed or fail, or somebody is moving past something to go onto something bigger then the breakup can come later on in the movie. But they’re two completely different purposes. And also tonally breakups are incredibly flexible. You can do a really funny one. You can do a really sad one. You can do one that’s quiet. You could do one that’s screaming.

Think of a breakup really as a set piece. I mean, it’s as flexible as the notion of stopping your movie to do an event. Like a car chase or physical comedy scene or a fist fight or a montage.

**John:** Absolutely. And once that moment happens, the rest of the movie is different. By definition, you’ve changed the trajectory of the movie greatly once that breakup has occurred.

So on Twitter I asked people for their suggestions for breakup scenes. Once again, we have the best listeners in the entire universe. People suggested six or seven movies we’re going to take a listen to today. But let’s start with our first clip. Any discussion of film I think it’s required to include Casablanca at some point and we’ve never done that. So this–

**Craig:** That’s crazy.

**John:** This is from Casablanca, screenplay by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch, Directed by Michael Curtis. Let’s take a listen.

[Casablanca clip plays]

And scene. Craig Mazin, not only classic lines in this little piece, but also a character is speaking his truth. Tell me about the scene.

**Craig:** Well, first of all just aside from the writing and the story, it always makes me wistful when I see this because there is something that we have lost. There’s just a look of these people, you know, just Bergman and Bogie and just their faces and the way the black and white works. It’s just remarkable.

This is a breakup scene you can’t do anymore. It’s very much a scene where someone is dumping somebody else but for noble reasons, even when he says it’s not noble. But then he explains why it is noble and we understand it. And really what it comes down to is one person is telling another one why he has figured out what is best for the two of them.

From a story point of view, there are times when you need two people to break up, and you don’t want to feel bad about it. You want the audience to feel wistful, but you want them to feel like, you know what, this is what needs to happen here. Let’s be sad about it but accept it. It’s a tricky thing to do because of course in reality that’s nearly impossible to break up with somebody so cleanly, so romantically.

I mean, the thing about this scene is somehow my feminine side is even more in love with Bogie after he’s dumped me. [laughs] Which is remarkable. But, you know, look, there’s an enormous amount of old school patriarchy here. “I did the thinking for both of us.” And even the line, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” I mean, it’s so infantilizing. But he really is just laying it out for her.

You know, she is an international person who has been involved in politics and intrigue and now he’s explaining to her why their love story doesn’t matter because there’s more important things in the world. You know, “the problems of three people don’t amount to a hill of beans.”

Look, in a modern analysis it’s incredibly patronizing. But, inside of it it is a little bit of a masterclass on how to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse, because you do end up understanding on an emotional level, putting all the politics aside, when Ilsa looks at him at the end there you know that she loves him for what is happening right there in the moment. And that’s an achievement.

**John:** Yeah. It struck me listening to this scene and then going through some of the ones we’re about to approach that breakups tend to be monologues, or essentially sort of slightly interrupted monologues, where one person basically lays out the case for why this breakup is happening. And the other person just has to respond. And there are a couple of cases we’re going to get to where it’s a little bit more even split between the two of them, but a lot of times it’s one character is driving the decision for why this has to end. Why this is the best choice or the only choice going forward.

And this is a very classic – this is – often you’ll see the breakup in the first act, really more the first ten pages, or going into the third act. But this is we’re walking off into the sunset. This is it’s all going to be over. This is the final parting. So it has a very different feeling. And I think you’re right, you’ve made this contract with your audience about what’s going to happen, and so part of that contract has to be respecting the investment they’ve made into this relationship and that you’re ending it in a way that leaves them hopeful for the characters. I think a crueler breakup, a crueler just like get out of here would not satisfy that contract you’ve made with the audience.

**Craig:** Yeah. Especially in the time. I mean, look, happy endings were the name of the game. And we’ll see an older film soon enough in our list here where it is the typical happy ending. So you can almost imagine the discussions that were happening when they were talking to the Epsteins. “OK, well, guys, we get that you don’t want them to have the happy ending, but you have to make us feel happy about it.” And they were like, “well, what if he sort of underlines how they have more important things to do?” And they’re like, “OK, yeah, but it’s not very romantic.”

“Well, what if he says to her that they once had a great love and that has now been rekindled in a way that they can carry with them in their own hearts separately?” “OK, that’s better.” Right? So this whole bit, “We’ll always have Paris,” we had it once and then we lost it, but now we have it again.

Look, there is a way to read this scene where it’s just a masterful sociopath manipulating this woman. I mean, because, look what is screenwriting after all but the manipulation of people. We’re using our left brain in combination with our right brain to create emotional feelings in the audience that we’re designing. It is definitionally manipulative. But we have to believe it and then believe that it feels OK. And certainly for the time I think they did a masterful job in making us feel OK about it.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s take a listen to another clip, this one almost completely the opposite in every way from Casablanca. This is from Forgetting Sarah Marshall by Jason Segel. Directed by Nick Stoller. And this one, it’s a little bit strange of a clip for us to be playing in a podcast because it’s really quiet. But I should give you some context if you haven’t seen the scene or don’t remember the movie.

As Kristen Bell enters the scene, Jason Segel is walking out of the bathroom just wearing a towel. He then drops a towel and flings his penis side to side, so that is the flapping you hear is his penis hitting on his–

**Craig:** Thighs.

**John:** His thighs basically. Let’s take a listen.

[Forgetting Sarah Marshall clip plays]

What I love so much about this clip is that it is so quiet. That it’s not – there’s no big talking. There’s no big explanation. He catches on just as we sort of catch on just by the vibe of the room. Like, oh no, this is terrible, this is going to end. And the notion of “if I put some clothes on then this is really over,” he wants to hang out in this really uncomfortable moment because at least he’s in this uncomfortable moment with her. And whenever this transition comes where he’s not in this horrible moment with her, he’s not with her at all.

So, it’s such a great notion that this is awful, but I’d rather stay in this awful than get on to the next thing.

**Craig:** Did I ever talk about David Zucker’s comedy term “driving instructor?”

**John:** No, tell me about that.

**Craig:** So, they were making Naked Gun and at one point they needed a car chase. And they wanted it to be funny, but they were struggling because they were just putting funny things that he was doing into the car chase. Like he would mistakenly hit something that he shouldn’t hit, or you know, stop at a light when he shouldn’t be stopping. Whatever it was. And it was just not working.

And then they landed on this idea that he was going to take over somebody else’s car. And that that car was in fact – there was a driving instructor – John Houseman, the great John Houseman – sitting in the passenger seat. And then a typical teenage girl sitting behind the wheel petrified because she’s never driven before. And he gets in the back and says, “Follow that car.”

So, John Houseman says, “All right.” He never changes his tone. He goes, “Put the car in drive. Proceed forward.” And so the driving instructor was the comic engine that allowed them to be funny throughout. It was the thing that gave a spine to this piece and gave them the ability to do multiple jokes.

And here it’s so smart that the driving instructor here is “I am hanging on, I don’t want you to leave me. I don’t want to break up. And I feel,” as you said, “if I put my pants on then our typical boyfriend/girlfriend intimacy is gone and it will be gone permanently. So, I have to keep doing stuff while I have not pants on.”

**John:** Yeah, John Houseman is basically Jason Segel’s penis.

**Craig:** That’s right. Which, you know, listen, that’s not an original observation. It’s been said many times. But that’s absolutely correct.

But this breakup scene is a fantastic example of a breakup scene that is designed to draw us to a character and make us love them. This scene is designed to evoke terrible empathy/pity. We now have an immediate rooting interest in this character getting happy again.

**John:** Absolutely. And I think what’s also crucial is we don’t hate Sarah Marshall. There’s a thousand versions where she’s the worst person on earth and we do not want him to pursue her at all, because we hate her. But because she still remains sympathetic through the scene, we are invested in like “maybe he has a shot. Maybe it’s not complete folly for him to go after her again.” And that’s what you need. That’s the driving engine of this whole plot. This is the premise scene of because of the nature of this scene he’s going to go on this journey to try to get her back.

**Craig:** Yeah. It would actually ruin the moment and drive us away from Jason’s character if she were somehow antagonistic. Because then we would think you’re better off without her, so I guess we’re just waiting around for you to figure that out. That’s unsatisfying. We don’t like to be ahead of our characters. I think probably every human has felt this at some point or another unfortunately. And it’s the feeling of rejection.

And we don’t feel that feeling when somebody we don’t like rejects us. We feel it when somebody we really, really love rejects us. And I think for us to identify with Jason’s character we need to also be able to look at Sarah Marshall, at Kristen’s character, and say “yeah I could see why he’s so in love with you.”

**John:** Yeah. Completely. All right, let’s take a listen to our next movie which is 500 Days of Summer by Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber, directed by Marc Webb. So, in the clip you’re about to hear we hear both Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel in sort of real time having a conversation, but we also hear Joseph Gordon-Levitt recapping what happened in the scene to I think it’s his sister, Chloe Grace Moretz. So that’s the cross-cutting you hear.

[500 Days of Summer clip plays]

All right, Craig, so this scene is sort of doing both things. It’s talking about the end of a relationship but it’s structurally at the start of the movie because things are happening out of sequence in the film.

**Craig:** Yeah. So it’s a real shot across the bow. I mean, we just said you can open your movie with this breakup scene the way that Sarah Marshall does and we understand the movie is about you somehow healing that wound. You can end a movie like they did in Casablanca with a break, which is about two characters ascending to some higher plane separately without each other.

Here, right off the bat, Scott and Michael and Marc say to us, hey, we’re not doing the normal story. We are going to be telling a romance story. These people are going to meet. They’re going to fall in love. We’re going to show you that they broke up right off the bat. You’re never going to have to worry that you’re ahead of us. We’re just going to lay it all out there because that’s not what this movie is about. This movie is about the spaces in between. It’s not about the story, or the what. It’s about the why.

That said, it’s a terrific breakup scene. Even if it had been in sequence. Because it’s so cruel.

**John:** Yeah. It’s cruel with a smile in a way that’s really sort of important. And what I find so fascinating is because it’s recognizing that the audience is catching up with these characters, it has to be very methodical and very clever in how it’s letting you know who these characters are at different points in the relationship. It needs to know what you are thinking, what the characters are thinking.

I have to imagine even on the set as they were shooting these scenes they had to be just really careful with not only where the characters were at, but where the audience was at based on what the audience already knew about the characters.

**Craig:** Yeah. But it’s very brave. They are not really holding your hand too much. They are right on the edge of confusion. And the important thing for us watching it is we may not quite understand how he so quickly gets that she’s dumping him because we haven’t seen the relationship yet.

Once you get through the movie, you go back and watch it again, you’re like, “oh yeah, I completely get it now. I, too, would also know what she’s doing here.” But it was enough for us to know that he knew.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And when he walks out, Scott and Michael give us a little gift. So, congratulations, you’re not puzzled. She’s going to say, “But we can still be friends.” Yes, we knew what was going on. We got it right.

**John:** Yeah. For sure. All right, next let’s take a listen to Love & Basketball. It’s written and directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood. This is a scene between Sanaa Lathan and Omar Epps. And in the longer clip you’ll see that she actually is talking about how busy she is before it gets into the section that we’re going to listen to. But let’s take a listen to their breakup scene. This is happening in the second act.

[Love & Basketball clip plays]

Craig, Omar Epps would still like to be friends.

**Craig:** So, we can still be friends is the universal oh-god-no statement. And, again, I believe everyone at some point or another has heard another person say that to them, completely sincerely, or insincerely, but unironically. I love this scene. This is my kind of breakup scene.

So, this is traditional. I think of this scene as a traditional breakup scene where two people who are in a relationship have a fight. So there’s a back and forth. There is a parrying and I think far truer to the way real breakups work where there is a back and forth and essentially a blame game. And both people are trying to kind of get the perspective advantage on the other person. I’m seeing this from a bigger point of view. No I am. No I am, no I am. Back and forth. Back and forth.

What I love about this scene is that there’s a shape to it. A lot of times fights will be flabby. They just sort of run along. As they do in real life. They go in circles and things are repeated and they run along. This is very well structured. And there’s a surprise. The breakup part is a surprise. And I think this is the challenge we have as writers when we’re doing traditional scenes. And Gina Prince-Bythewood does exactly what you need to do, which is figure out a way to be fresh. She decides what I’m going to do is I’m going to do a breakup scene but I’m going to make it seem like the point of the breakup scene is “how do we stay together.” And then at the end he reveals, “no-no-no, you think that’s what this argument is. What I’m building up to is I’m dumping you.” And that’s really smart.

**John:** Absolutely. So she’s trying like how do we save this relationship because he’s already pulling the rip cord.

Another crucial thing which I think we need to talk about is this scene is semi-public. And by semi-public means they are having a conversation just between the two of them, but at a certain point people cross through the scene. And so they have to stop arguing so that people can get past them. And it forms a very natural break in the scene. So it’s useful writing wise because it gives a chance to pivot. But it’s also a thing that happens in the real world. It makes it feel more grounded and real. Suddenly not everyone has left the college campus just so these two people can have this argument.

Like letting some other people drift through the argument gives these characters a little more ground and a little more reality and makes the scene feel appropriately real for this kind of movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I really liked the reactions that were going on because there isn’t tears. There isn’t sobbing. There isn’t screaming or yelling. It actually operates in a way that I think again most breakups do operate. They are spoken. The tears come after. The screaming, and the crying, and the sobbing comes after, unless you’re trying to be comedic like Forgetting Sarah Marshall where you should go over the top. That’s the point.

But here it’s really more of a sense of being stunned. That is what you’re kind of getting to is that shock of having the rug pulled out from under you. And that’s why it’s so important when you’re writing a scene like this to shock the audience as well as the character, otherwise when she’s shocked we’re not.

**John:** Yeah. So once again she’s the Jason Segel character from Forgetting Sarah Marshall. This has come as a surprise to her. The difference is it’s not clear that Omar Epps walked into the scene knowing that he was going to say what he was going to say. It just sort of happened in the course of the scene. It’s a longer scene and as the fight began it got to this point, versus Sarah Marshall where she shows up with an agenda. I’m going to end this thing.

**Craig:** Right. And you can believe that he may have thought in the back of his mind, “All right. I’m going to give this one more shot here.” And it just quickly goes south.

When these things happen, when you tell somebody that you don’t want to be with them anymore, I think oftentimes they are the result of an emotional snap. It’s rarely planned out ahead of time. I think a lot of people are trying to kind of keep it going. And then finally you just go, “oh god, I have to listen to myself at last. The pain of this confrontation, of guilt, of having to absorb the burdens of the feelings I’m about to create in another person are no longer as burdensome to me as my need to stop this.”

So, I believed it.

**John:** Yeah. It’s also fascinating when you see quiet people having fights. Because this isn’t a big loud shouting fight. Last year when we were in Paris, we were waiting to pick my daughter up at school and we were crossing this bridge and there was this couple that was having the loudest fight I’ve ever seen. Screaming at the top of their lungs. And to the point where we kind of interceded because we were trying to make sure that the woman felt safe and stuff. And both these people fighting turned on us and said like, “Stay out of our business.” And then they proceeded to keep yelling at each other.

It was such a weird moment, but I realized that as a basically quiet person I could not even perceive that you could have a fight at that level. And this is a thing that could happen in the real world. I kept looking around for cameras, like who has this kind of fight.

**Craig:** This cartoon fight?

**John:** But they kept walking and shouting at each other until they finally faded in the distance. These characters in Love & Basketball are not those big loud shouters. And so they have the same feelings, but they’re quieter feelings. And when they come out this is what they sound like. So I was impressed by the reality of this.

**Craig:** I like that somewhere there is a French couple that talks about this nosy American.

**John:** Totally, yeah.

**Craig:** Who took it upon himself to solve their – they weren’t even having a real – it wasn’t like one of their real fights where they burn each other with cigarettes. It was just one of their average fights where they scream at the top of their lungs.

**John:** They were throwing trash at each other. Like they would go through trash cans and pull stuff out and throw it at each other.

**Craig:** Those two people actually sound amazing. Like I wish – Melissa and I have never loved each other enough to throw trash at each other, you know. We have a more subdued love.

**John:** You know who had a really subdued love?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s those two guys in Brokeback Mountain. So that’s our next clip.

**Craig:** Very subdued.

**John:** So a screenplay by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. This movie is directed by Ang Lee. It is delightful but I’d not watched it since it came out and I had not listened to it. So let’s take a listen to this clip. This is the one that has the most bad language, so warning on that. Let’s take a listen.

[Brokeback Mountain clip plays]

Oh, Jack and Ennis. Craig Mazin, did you wince a little bit when they said Brokeback Mountain?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. It’s just one of those things where when you say the title of the film you’re like, oh no, no you didn’t just do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. They did it. They did it. But, you know, the thing is we all know the name now. I guess when I saw the movie it was still a term that hadn’t been said a billion times. Also, this is one of those lines like that we always misremember. So I always remembered it as, “I can’t quit you.” But it’s actually, “I wish I could quit you,” right?

**John:** “I wish I knew how to quit you.”

**Craig:** “I wish I knew how to quit you.” It’s such a great line. So, here’s an example where people are shouting at each other and it’s incredibly high drama. Like super high drama. Everything is pitched at a nine or a ten, including a full breakdown and everything. But, it is in fact the culmination of a very long, quiet, repressed, volcano of a romance. So it makes sense.

And really this breakup scene isn’t so much about them breaking up as it is about Ennis turning his back on himself and the man he loves.

**John:** Yeah. I think so many breakup scenes though are really about a character’s sense of their own identity. Do they see themselves as existing independently of this other person? Who do they want to be beyond this point?

And you have two characters here who want different things out of each other. And they cannot come to terms with that and that’s the nature of the conflict between them.

But, I mean, in many cases every relationship is about each person wants some different things. And in this case it’s just the most extreme version of that.

**Craig:** It is an example though of how you need to identify with one of the sparring partners. So when we look at Love & Basketball for instance, I’m identifying with Sanaa Lathan because she’s the one who is about to be surprised, so I get surprised with her. And also she’s trying to explain herself. It just feels more like her scene. And similarly here I identify with Heath Ledger because I feel like he’s the one who is going through this other thing. And in a weird way they’re having this argument and I think that Jack is right. You know, I mean, they’re screaming at each other but Jack is correct. Because Ennis is going to pull this baloney on him and basically say “if you’re sleeping around with other guys, if I were to know that I might kill you.”

And Jack basically reads him the riot act and he’s totally right. And this is where Ennis, Heath Ledger’s character, just cannot – ultimately can’t handle it. He just cannot let the lie go. And they both know at that point it’s over. That’s it. He’s made his choice.

So, there’s a perspective there that I think is really important to keep in mind when we write these scenes. It should be a good argument, but sometimes it’s OK if the argument is out of whack in the sense that we’re like, “no-no-no, that person is absolutely correct. They win the argument.” Because the person who loses the argument, there is information in why they lost that could be very valuable.

**John:** Well, always be mindful of the audience’s expectations and the audience’s hopes. And so I think the audience’s hope at this point is that Jack will convince Ennis that, you know what, we really do belong together. Let’s make this all work out. And that is sort of why we’re on Jack’s side. That’s why we’re rooting for Jack to succeed here.

But I think this is an interesting scene in that so often in breakups all of our energy is with one character. Like we can only really see one character’s perspective. And the other character is a monster. Here I am very sympathetic to Heath Ledger’s plight. And because we spent quite a bit of time with him as well.

So often in these stories you really have your protagonist and you have the love interest who is attached to the protagonist but you’re not seeing their point of view independently. And in this case we are seeing what their lives are like separately and we understand a lot more what’s going on with Heath Ledger. And so it’s a tragedy because we know why they’re not together, but we still are hoping somehow they will get together.

**Craig:** That’s right. And I think that this scene is a great guideline for the sort of character and story meat that needs to be there to warrant this level of drama.

**John:** For sure.

**Craig:** Which is bordering on melodrama. You basically have to have somebody not just breaking up with someone. They have to be torpedoing their entire life. Otherwise it just feels like soap opera. And soap operas get a bad rep in part because they just indulge in this sort of melodrama without these kind of enormous upheavals going on underneath. But when you’re writing a movie you can do it. You just need to earn it. And in this case they earn it because of what happens with Heath Ledger. If it didn’t end that way, then that scene would have been a bit ridiculous I think.

**John:** Yeah. We always say that movies are about stories that can only happen once. And this is a scene that can only happen once between these two characters. If it happened more than once then you’re annoyed with these people because you can only have this fight once.

**Craig:** [laughs] You’re just like, I was totally into you emotionally, and now I realize you’re just annoying, screamy me-mes who like to just yell at each other all the time. And you don’t have any real – like you’re just nuts. That’s the problem with you two. You guys are just crazy.

So, you’re right. You can only do this once.

**John:** Yeah. I won’t single out any one picture for it, but a lot of times in biopics I will see basically they go to the same scene like three times. It’s like, no I’m done. This scene, this happened once. We’re done. Let’s move on. But because they’re biopics, in real life people do kind of linger around each other, or they fight and they make up and they stay together. But in a movie I want it once. I don’t want it again and again.

**Craig:** No question. It just loses its impact if it happens more than once.

**John:** All right. For our final scene let’s take a listen to Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It is by George Axelrod, based on the novel by Truman Capote. This movie directed by Blake Edwards. I always forgot that Blake Edwards directed this movie. Let’s take a listen.

[Breakfast at Tiffany’s clip plays]

So, a thing you may not have caught from the audio clip is she has her cat and she puts her cat out in the rain. And then we see this single shot of this cat, just like drenched in rain, staring back at the car as it drives off. I have never been so angry as I’m seeing this cat just sitting there in the rain.

Craig, talk me off my ledge.

**Craig:** Someone left their cat out in the rain. That’s the most melodramatic song ever written. MacArthur Park. Not about a cat, but a cake.

Well, this is dated.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** You know, Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a movie that is beloved for all sorts of good reasons. It is also remarkably dated for so many reasons, most notably perhaps the single most racist performance in film history. And that’s saying something when film history includes Birth of a Nation. So it’s dated.

This is a very operatic sort of thing. And they’re making this point. We would do this so differently now, because I just think we’re more sophisticated now. The idea is that this is going to be a breakup that unbreaks-up. And it unbreaks-up because this man delivers a kind of stinging rebuke of this woman’s problem. He states her problem. He summarizes her problem. It’s all incredibly written. I mean, nobody talks like this. Nobody has the presence of mind to deliver this. We would say now that feels written.

But the whole point is you’re afraid of being in love, which is a very shopworn problem that movie characters have far more than real people. I’m still waiting to meet a real person that is afraid of being in love. Yes, she realizes that he’s right, of course, and then runs after him. But the cat becomes a symbol of their love, and she threw it out of the cab. And then about two minutes later she desperately wants it back. Finds it. Is super happy. And then they’re together and they kiss.

It’s very simplistic. And I think this is sort of an example of what to no longer do.

**John:** Yeah, it’s interesting that we’re bookending this with Casablanca and Breakfast at Tiffany’s because they’re both classic movies and loved for reasons they should be loved. But in both situations the female characters are not being well-served by their male screenwriters. Casablanca, you get sort of why it is this way. But to have the man explain to the woman what’s really going on and what she should want is a frustrating trope.

**Craig:** It is. And they’ve also stacked the deck. They’ve made it so that she has this glaring problem that he can just summarize before stepping away from a cab. This also, in general I think when characters do things like unceremoniously get rid of a symbol of their love, like the cat, we’d like a little bit more time to pass before they go looking for the cat again. I think in today’s world the cat would be gotten rid of. She would go home. He would go home. She would be alone. She would miss the cat. She would go out at night to try and find the cat. It would take some time, you know.

It’s all so compressed. And I think fake. And I don’t mean to beat up Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Again, there’s a classic romantic aspect to it. And we generally are able to put these films in their time period and emotionally adjust on the fly. But the ending never struck me as particularly compelling. I never felt it, you know? Whereas the ending of Casablanca I absolutely feel because Ingrid Bergman sells me 100% that she feels in that moment. And that’s the key, you know, is that she feels through that thing, even though the screenplay completely robs her of agency at the very end, which is a disaster. But at least emotionally she feels true.

And here I actually don’t feel that Audrey Hepburn is emotionally true. It seems like it’s all being acted.

**John:** Yeah. I would agree with you here. So what lessons can we take overall from these breakup scenes? I guess I would look for breakups are this opportunity to really have characters talk about their feelings or expose their feelings that would be hard to get out in normal scenes. We’ve used the term operatic a few times here. But operas have songs. They have the ability to give introspection and let people sing things they wouldn’t otherwise say. And I think sometimes these heightened moments let characters kind of speak their subtext more, where we’re comfortable with them saying things that would be weird to say in other scenes because they are pitched up a little bit.

Even this Love & Basketball scene, which was overall pretty quiet, they are talking more about their inner wants than characters would normally be able to do in a scene.

**Craig:** That’s a great observation. It is a chance for you to maybe not be so concerned about burying everything under layers of subtext. Although in the case of 500 Days of Summer they did a pretty good job there burying things, maybe as a function of where it was in the movie. But I agree with you. I think that it is an opportunity to have characters state these things in an on-the-nose way. And in that opportunity one finds tremendous potential for danger.

So, things to watch out for when you’re writing breakup scenes. If you’re going big and melodramatic, the result of that breakup has to be more than just a breakup. There needs to be something bigger happening. Some larger relevance so we understand that something is being permanently damaged.

We want to keep that as sort of the high point emotionally, not in terms of positivity but just intensity. That is the most intense scene you want I think in your movie if you’re going in that direction. And also when you’re structuring a breakup scene, particularly if it’s a traditional breakup scene, you want to maintain some sense of surprise. If it starts out like a breakup scene and then an argument ensues and then it ends with a breakup that is going to feel very weak. Whereas if it starts one way and then it reveals itself to be a breakup scene, then you have the potential for a character to experience shock and the audience to feel something with them.

**John:** All the scenes we looked at today were romantic partners who were breaking up, but I think the same general lessons about breakups could apply to any kind of two character – sometimes even three character – situations where you have this tight group, this tight bond, that is being split. And so it could be best friends. It could be people on a mission together. It could be – there are other kinds of relationships which can break apart and really function in much the same way as these breakups. So we picked sort of all romantic relationships here.

But I think the same general rules apply. And you should look at, you know, whenever you have your protagonist and another character who are this tight couple, is there a reason why you need to split them apart. There’s something that could come between them. And is that an interesting thing for your story?

You know, if you’re making a romantic tragedy or a romantic comedy that’s probably going to be more likely to happen, but I love to see breakups that are part of stories that aren’t all about romance.

**Craig:** I agree. And whether you’re looking at a non-romantic breakup, like for instance we just had our Thanksgiving here in the United States, so Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Classic non-romantic breakup. But whether you’re doing the non-romantic or the romantic breakup, one thing to be aware of is if the breakup happens in a moment because one character says this incredibly cutting thing to the other person, which is exactly what happens by the way at the end of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, whether the audience knows it or not consciously, they will have an expectation that if that cutting truth is true, and if it weren’t why else would be so cutting, the person to whom it is said will come around to recognize the truth of it. And in recognizing the truth of it that relationship will be healed.

So just know when you fire that particular missile you are setting up an expectation that the breakup is not permanent.

**John:** Very good point. So, thank you again for suggesting all these movies for this breakup episode. If you would like to suggest another This Kind of Scene for a future episode, hit us on Twitter and let us know what you think we should do for a future installment of This Kind of Scene.

All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is the Merriam-Webster Time Traveler. And so it is a website you can go to and you can look at the year you were born, or any year that you care to look at, and see what words were new that year. So basically the first known occurrences of these words on that year.

And so for the year I was born, 1970, first appearances of dorky, micro-aggression, op-ed, survivalist, herstory, Tourette’s Syndrome, and viewshed, which I didn’t even know what viewshed was. I had to look it up.

**Craig:** What’s viewshed?

**John:** Viewshed is the area you can see from a place. And so it’s basically what’s visible from where you’re standing. I think it’s important for sight lines and for protecting one’s view from a building.

**Craig:** Hmm. Interesting. OK.

**John:** But I love this kind of stuff. I would have assumed that dorky was older than that. I would have assumed micro-aggression was much newer than that. Op-ed feels like it should have always been around.

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure. I’m looking at my year. 1971. Sexual assault and sexual harassment.

**John:** All right. So they started with you.

**Craig:** They started with me. Also sadly post-racial. Not yet, 1971. Not even close. Still haven’t gotten there as far as I can tell. But there are some nice ones like minibar. We all love a minibar. HMO, not so good. Homophobe, 1971.

**John:** Yeah. There wasn’t even such a thing.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, there were definitely homophobes but now they knew what to call themselves. [laughs]

**John:** And wiseass.

**Craig:** Wiseass. You’re right.

**John:** So this is the Merriam-Webster version of this. But I’ll say another really good thing to take a look at is Google’s n-gram viewer. I think this is a previous One Cool Thing for me, but I used this a lot with Arlo Finch to figure out whether certain words existed at a time, or like which of two variants of a word was more popular.

So, if you go to books.google.com/n-grams, basically all the books that Google has digitized, you can look through and figure out when the first occurrences of a word were in books overall in print. And that’s a fascinating time hole to be falling into.

**Craig:** One movie word that came into use in 1971, high-concept.

**John:** Oh, very nice.

**Craig:** Yeah, before that everything was high-concept.

**John:** Yes. Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** I sure don’t.

**John:** You’ve got nothing?

**Craig:** Yeah, I’ve got nothing. You know what? It was Thanksgiving. A lot of confusion going on in my head. And I just thought, you know, is there One Cool Thing in the world right now? No. No Cool Things.

**John:** You just didn’t do your minimum amount of work required.

**Craig:** That is an alternative explanation for what I just said.

**John:** So while Megan and I were going through these clips and figuring out what movies we should be doing, you didn’t do any of this work whatsoever.

**Craig:** No, that’s right.

**John:** All right, so I understand that’s your prerogative. You want to do that, that’s fine. So you don’t want to do it, that’s fine.

**Craig:** So we’re breaking up? [laughs]

**John:** I mean, I hope we can still be friends.

**Craig:** This is, by the way, a bad way to end the breakup scene. Well, maybe it’s a good way for somebody to say, “Wait, are we breaking up? Is it happening? It’s happening right now.”

**John:** I’m sure there’s a scene that’s done this where like you as the audience are way ahead of the other character and you know they’re breaking up and the character has no idea that they’re being broken up with.

**Craig:** No question. There’s definitely a bunch of those. No, you can’t quit me.

**John:** I can’t quit you, at least not before the live show. So people should come to see that.

**Craig:** That doesn’t sound positive.

**John:** Live show tickets are available right now. They are December 7 here in Hollywood. It is at the LA Film School across from ArcLight. You should come see us, along with our terrific guests. If you would like to read the first five chapters of Arlo Finch, that is at arlofinchbooks.com.

Our outro this week is by Jukebox Experiment. It is a great one. It turns out we had more outros than I thought. They had just been put in a folder I did not expect them to be in. So, we have some great ones, but we would always love more great outros. So, just write in to ask@johnaugust.com with a link to your outro. Here’s a reminder. I’ve listened to a couple recently where it’s like that’s lovely music. It has nothing to do with our theme. So, all of our outros use the five notes of our theme. So, [hums]. Or, [hums]. Something like that. Minor is also OK. But I have to be able to hear that it actually has the Scriptnotes theme in it, otherwise it’s just lovely music.

**Craig:** Hmm. And John is rigorous about these things.

**John:** I’m very rigorous. I’m a rule follower. I’m a rule maker and a rule follower. But not as much as Megan McDonnell who is our producer. Thank you Megan for getting together our clips this week.

Our show is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Apologies to Matthew because we just messed up a ton this week. Probably a new record for how much we messed up this week.

**Craig:** I don’t know if I would say “we.”

**John:** Well, you had a few yourself.

**Craig:** I had a few. For me relatively speaking it was a bad week.

**John:** If you have a question for us, you can write in to ask@johnaugust.com. But on Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. So, tweet at us and tell us what you’d like for the next installment of This Kind of Scene.

You can find us on Facebook and on Apple Podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes while you’re there. That’s always lovely.

The notes for this episode, including the PDFs for all the scenes we talked about, is at johnaugust.com. Just search for this episode. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts for the back episodes.

You can find all those back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. It’s $2 a month. And we have more of the USB drives which have the first 300 episodes, plus all the bonus episodes available at store.johnaugust.com. Delightful Christmas shopping if you’d like to stick on in your friend’s stocking. That sounds so disturbing.

**Craig:** [laughs] If you’d like to stick one in your friend’s stocking.

**John:** No, that’s never a good thing to do.

**Craig:** Go to store.johnaugust.com.

**John:** Yeah. That’s where we have them.

**Craig:** Stick it in.

**John:** I hope we can still be friends.

**Craig:** You know, I think Stick It In is a fantastic holiday motto for us, John.

**John:** Yeah. Stick It In.

**Craig:** Stick It In. Great show. And for all of you out there listening, please do get your tickets now because they’re going fast. Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts.

**John:** See you.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* Holiday Live Show [tickets](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-holiday-live-show-john-august-craig-mazin/) are available.
* [Godless](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godless_(TV_series)) on [Netflix](https://www.netflix.com/title/80097141)
* The first 5 chapters of [Arlo Finch in the Valley of Fire](http://read.macmillan.com/mcpg/arlo-finch/) are online.
* Hollywood studio real estate-related articles about [Studio City](https://la.curbed.com/2017/8/9/15975172/studio-city-valley-cbs-studios-history), [Century City](https://la.curbed.com/2013/9/26/10193620/the-secret-cowboycleopatratin-foil-origins-of-century-city), the [history of the Disney Studio](https://www.mouseplanet.com/10903/Walt_Disneys_Hollywood_Studios) and CBS’ possible move to sell [Television City](http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-cbs-television-city-20170928-story.html).
* Casablanca [scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEWaqUVac3M&feature=youtu.be) and [script](http://www.vincasa.com/casabla.pdf), with the scene starting on page 119.
* Forgetting Sarah Marshall [scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOJd5U3FsQw), [pages](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/Forgetting-Sarah-Marshall-Scene.pdf), and [script](http://www.joblo.com/scripts/forgetting-sarah-marshall.pdf).
* (500) Days of Summer [scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUVgAwLr1GQ), [pages](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/500-Days-of-Summer-Scene.pdf), and [script](http://readwatchwrite.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/500DaysofSummer.pdf).
* Love and Basketball [scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvv5qjmF2nM), [pages](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/Love_and_Basketball_Scene.pdf), and [script](http://nldslab.soe.ucsc.edu/charactercreator/film_corpus/film_2012xxxx/imsdb.com/Love-and-Basketball.html).
* Brokeback Mountain [scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVK6yLqY54w), [pages](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/Brokeback-Mountain-Scene.pdf), and [script](http://screenplayexplorer.com/wp-content/scripts/brokeback_mountain.pdf).
* Breakfast at Tiffany’s [scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnOfomPgETs), [pages](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/Breakfast-at-Tiffanys-Scene.pdf), and [script](http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/BreakfastatTiffany’s.pdf).
* [Merriam-Webster Time Traveler](https://www.merriam-webster.com/time-traveler/1969) will show you the words that were added in any given year.
* If you like that, you might like the [Google n-gram viewer](https://books.google.com/ngrams/) which graphs frequency of word use.
* [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 Arbitrary Jukebox ([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_327.mp3).