The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, so on today’s show Craig says the F-word a couple times because he gets angry about a writer who is taking advantage of people. So that’s a warning if you’re in the car with your kids or someplace where you could just put in headphones, do that.
Craig Mazin: The kids need to know, too.
John: The kids need to be warned about Svengalis.
Craig: That’s right.
John: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: And this is Episode 520 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show the screenplay is often described as the blueprint for a movie, but how do the artists and craftspeople who actually make movies use these blueprints. We’ll look at some of the most important people to read a script and how they do their jobs. We’ll also talk about predatory writers, getting in over your head, and what it’s like to have no visual imagination.
And in our bonus segment for premium members, fine, let’s get into that whole bad art friend situation. The thing that was all over my Twitter that Craig sent to me as an – ugh, now I had to read this.
Craig: I mean, kinda.
John: Kinda. You sort of kinda had to read it. You missed out on the episode where I think Liz Hannah was on the show and she and I talked through the Cat Person discourse. And so it’s another round of that. And Cat Person is actually referenced in it, so it’s all nesting dolls of appropriation.
Craig: Yeah. It’s pretty screwed up. Yeah. I enjoyed reading about. And I enjoyed not being a part of it more than anything.
John: Yes. I really enjoyed not being involved in any of those text chains.
Craig: My new sort of joy is not being involved in things.
John: Yes. Love it. I love that for you. It’s a good look. But first some follow up. Last week we discussed the upcoming IATSE strike authorization vote. Craig, what was the result of the strike authorization vote?
Craig: A resounding yes. Not only did 98% of the vote come back in as a yes, which is not uncommon for these things, but the really fascinating number was that 90% of IATSE actually showed up to vote. If 90% of the Writers Guild shows up to vote that’s a pretty great number, but it represents a few thousand people. If 90% of IATSE shows up to vote we’re talking tens of thousands of people.
John: Yeah. Good sized towns of people.
Craig: Yes. So there is no question about IATSE’s willingness to go on strike. And this was not kind of even a show vote. They weren’t even doing the thing that the Writers Guild annoyingly does where it’s like you have to vote yes. They were like, no, no, no, everyone was like, please, give me the ballot. I insist on voting yes right now because there is a pent up demand for action. And it is justified.
So, what happens is they go back and they sit down with the AMPTP who at this point would be beyond foolish if they didn’t arrive at a place that thwarted a strike in my opinion.
John: Absolutely. Because we recorded this show on a Saturday and it comes out on a Tuesday maybe it will all be resolved by then and we’ll again be living in the past. So, for our listeners who are living in the future, hey, tell us what happened because we don’t know yet.
Craig: Yeah. I mean, my gut tells me there will not be a strike. I still keep thinking that because I feel like the impact of an IATSE strike is so dramatic. And because it would open that can of worms permanently. I just feel, I feel like the companies are going to have to give on a number of issues. If they don’t it is almost tantamount to them declaring that the era of unionization of labor in the entertainment business is over and that the Amazonian era has begun. And we don’t want that.
John: No, we don’t.
Craig: No.
John: In last week’s episode we wondered aloud why Netflix was choosing two minutes as the threshold for viewing a program. Craig was mocking them and asking, hey, why are you doing that. Several writers wrote in with possible answers. So, the first one really comes down to intentionality. Doug writes, “Viewing something for two minutes is long enough to say ‘that person was interested in this’ and that is a valuable metric for Netflix because the constant release of curiosity-worthy material is enough to keep people subscribing, even if they don’t finish everything they start.”
So if you clicked that and you’re watching it for two minutes you meant to click it and it wasn’t accidental. This was something that you thought was going to be interesting to you. And so that’s really kind of what they’re most concerned about. Because remember they kind of don’t care whether you watch the whole thing. They’d be delighted if you did watch the whole thing. They basically don’t want you to stop subscribing to Netflix. That’s really their goal.
Craig: Yeah. I get that completely. But I think Doug is stating something as fact in which I don’t really know if it is. If everybody constantly watched just two minutes of stuff on Netflix and went “garbage, moving on,” and then never found stuff that they really, really loved at some point people would turn it off. The two minutes is not a threshold – I mean, we’re acknowledging there is a threshold that implies interested in. But at that point why is it two minutes? Why isn’t it one minute? Why isn’t it 40 seconds?
It seems to me that there has to be a number that implies interested in and appreciated to some small amount. And two minutes ain’t it. At all. So I would suggest that Netflix has picked two minutes because more than anything it makes their numbers look amazing. That’s why.
John: That’s very, very possible. I would also be certain that if people are actually watching two minutes, if there’s that kind of churn from program to program to program to program Netflix has a whole team that’s studying that, too, to make sure that that’s not going to be a person that we’re going to lose. So, they certainly have their data scientists there. Another listener wrote in to point out that when you buy a ticket to see a movie in a theater no one kind of cares whether you actually sat through the whole movie. So it’s like buying the ticket is sort of the intentionality. That’s the money coming into the thing so that’s kind of all you care about. And so it’s not about did this person watch the whole thing.
Craig: Yeah. It’s also a weird point.
John: It’s a weird point.
Craig: Because we don’t pay per view on Netflix, we pay for months. It’s really more akin to you got a MoviePass, remember those John?
John: Oh, I remember MoviePass. Yeah. Why didn’t that work? I was rooting for MoviePass.
Craig: It seemed like a great idea. The fundamentals were sound.
So if you got a MoviePass and then you hopped into a movie and then walked out after two minutes should Universal declare a victory? I don’t think so.
John: Well, I think Universal got paid, though. They got the money from MoviePass for it, so.
Craig: Yeah.
John: MoviePass was not happy.
Craig: In general I don’t think they can suggest that this is a victory for them or a hit. I mean, the whole point is you want more, don’t you want another, you want a second one, you want a third movie. I don’t know. Anyway, at some point this is what happens. The Internet tries to gaslight you into believing that people watching something for two minutes and then turning it off is a good thing. It is not. Stop it.
John: It’s not an artistic triumph.
Craig: No. You’re writing into a podcast for writers. And you’re suggesting that we should be happy that people watched our thing for two minutes and then went, “Nope.” I don’t think so. It’s just not great. It’s not great for them either. They don’t – by the way you know they adjusted it. It used to be a much longer number. And then they adjusted it. Because now they can say four billion people watched a show.
John: Yeah. I think I probably referenced this obliquely in the past, saying like there’s a Broadway producer who is notorious for showing up for like ten minutes of a show and then walking out. And I probably didn’t give his name because I didn’t want to anger him, but now it’s Scott Rudin, because we can just say his name. Scott Rudin was notorious for just first-acting, second-acting things, or having people buy a ticket and just watch ten minutes of it and then walk out. And so frustrating as a person who is making theater, but that’s what you got with Scott Rudin.
Craig: Yeah. He’s a bad person. There was a wonderful little story out last week. Elijah Wood, who is an excellent person. We ought to have him on the show. He’s a lovely guy. Have you met Elijah Wood by the way?
John: I’ve never met him.
Craig: He’s fantastic. He was saying that originally Bob and Harvey Weinstein – so Miramax had the rights to Lord of the Rings. Peter Jackson wanted to make three movies. And Harvey said he only wanted to make two. And eventually New Line got the rights. And Peter Jackson really did not like Harvey. No one did. And so there’s an orc. Somewhere in those movies there’s an orc that is modeled after Harvey. And I’m like I’ve seen those movies so many times and I’m like I’ve got to watch again just to find the Harvey orc now.
John: Yeah. I’m sure Elijah could point you to him, maybe.
Craig: I’m going to ask him to do that. That’s fair.
John: Wrapping up our Netflix talk here, Quinn my friend pointed me to this Twitter thread by Trung Phan who looks at how the thumbnail artwork for a show on Netflix is generated and how it is tested. And I know they were procedurally done. I knew there was some A/B Testing. But it’s actually much more complicated than you would ever think or believe. And there’s a reason why those things are designed in the rule of thirds. They know based on what you’ve done before, what you’ve looked at before, this is what’s going to appeal to you about this particular show. So even though this actress is only in like two out of ten episodes, she might be the marquee face that they’re going to show you for that program because they know that you like her face.
So it’s a fascinating sort of dystopian look at how they make their decisions.
Craig: Yeah. Market research is a barren wasteland where no soul can thrive. It’s effective. There’s no question about it. We’ve always known that. It’s nothing you. You see a trailer for a movie and it makes a big deal about an actor being in it and they’re in it for two seconds. This is pretty standard stuff. But it’s a bummer.
John: Yeah. Normal real marketing, like when you have a movie coming out, it’s not like it’s some artistic we’re making this poster for all the right reasons. It is such a workplace of committees and random opinions and that executive hates the color blue. It’s a mess that way, too.
Craig: It’s a mess. And they do test everything and eventually I think if you’ve been around enough testing you start to come to the inevitable conclusion that you can use the testing to justify any answer you want.
John: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Craig: And that pretty much is what happens.
John: Yup. All right, so this past week I was listening to the Slate Working podcast which I highly recommend and they had a guest on, she was a costume designer named Dana Covarrubias. And she was talking about how they came up with the wardrobe for Only Murders in the Building. And Craig you don’t watch a lot of TV, so you probably have not seen Only Murders in the Building.
Craig: No.
John: I think you would genuinely love it. It is a Steve Martin, Martin Short, Selena Gomez. It is like a Serial true crime thing, but also a comedy. It’s all in this upscale Upper West Side apartment building. It’s really, really well done. And the costumes are fantastic and they’re so smart and so specific. What I loved about the conversation on the podcast though is they were really talking about what is the process of getting started to think about costumes. You would think that, oh, she must talk to the director or the showrunner or the actors. And it really starts with she reads the script. And she talked about her process of sitting down, reading the script. Reading it once just for pleasure. And really just getting a sense of the tone before she then approaches like, OK, now let me think about days and nights and where is this character coming from, where they’re going to, and building out full threads on who this person really is and why they’re making the choices they are doing.
And you and I have talked so much about hair and makeup and looks and all the other things that a writer may be thinking about for characters and for their scripts. But I don’t think we’ve talked about all the other people who are getting handed that script and having to make choices based on what they’re reading there even independently of the other folks they’re talking with. So I really want to take a look at the script as a blueprint and then look at all these incredibly talented people who have to take this blueprint and figure out how to build the thing.
Craig: I’ve always struggled with the word blueprints because blueprints are rather bloodless and they’re incredibly thorough in that they tell you exactly what to do. This goes here. This goes here. This goes here. And it is absolutely true that every head of every department working on a television show or a movie if they’re good, and one would hope that they are, they do read to understand. They are trying to get inside of the heart of it and they’re trying to see how it functions from a character point of view. At some point they’re going to have to put other hats on.
It is remarkable to see how essential it is to everybody that works in our business creatively to also be organized. Because each department has to feel it with their soul and understand why and how they should be dressing people a certain way, putting hair on a certain way, stunts in a certain tone, but also they need to figure out how to actually pull it off with the money they have, the time they have. And people who can do both at the same time are worth their weight in gold and that’s what makes the good ones great.
John: Yeah. So as you approach doing your TV shows, or as you’ve been involved in movies too, it always is striking to me that in order to get these people signed on they’re generally reading the script. And so they have known who else was involved, but they have to read the script and they have to really respond to the script. And they have to say, OK, this is a project I want to work on because I think the project will be good on the whole. I think it will turn out well. I think I will be proud of the work I can do here. And I think it will present interesting challenges to me. These people may not be taking the easiest jobs, or the jobs that they’re used to, but OK this offers some cool challenges for me. Because I know sometimes the projects I want to take as a writer are also the ones that are like, wow, I’ve never gotten a chance to do this before and this is exciting to me.
And so whether it’s a costume designer who has never gotten to do this period before, or a cinematographer who has never gotten to shoot in these environments, that’s really compelling. And the first experience about what that’s going to look like, feel like, be like is going to be in that script. And that’s why it’s all so important. It’s not just these are the scenes, these are the characters, this is what’s happening. It’s what the script feels like because that’s their first vision of what the final movie hopefully is going to be.
Craig: Yeah. You know one of the things they’ve been saying in terms of the IATSE action right now is that for those of us who are below the line we tend to think of production as something that comes along every now and again, for people who do these kinds of jobs they’re in production all the time. They’re either in prep or they’re in production. And so you’re absolutely right, the notion of being able to show off a different muscle, a different kind of vibe, that would be incredibly attractive to them. But that means they need to understand what makes it special. So, there are situations also where just the size may be attractive to them.
But size and novelty will wear off. And also size and novelty only maybe inspires you to say yes to the gig. It’s not going to help you design it.
John: No.
Craig: Ultimately you do need to get inside the tone and that means you need to also have a relationship with the one or two people that holds that knowledge inside. And you need to get in their heads and you need to share it.
John: Realistically on most features the person who is going to be making a lot of those decisions is going to be the director. But on something like a television pilot that showrunner/creator and the pilot director will have a lot of very direct connection about this is what the vision for how we’re going to shoot this is going to look like. This is what we’re going for. This is tonally what we’re going for. And that will radiate from all the departments. And so ideally early on in the process you’ll hire on a production designer who is responsible for like, OK, here is the very big swatches of color kind of look for things. This is the time. This is the general look. And then those decisions will then radiate through to the other costume departments and art departments and props and everybody else.
But if that vision doesn’t actually match what’s on the page in the script it’s going to be a real challenge to sort of be going back and forth between like this is what we’re seeing on the art boards versus this is what’s on the page. How do we actually marry that? If there’s a grand vision for sort of these giant 1930s cityscapes but it’s all taking place on interior sound stages that’s not going to actually work.
Craig: Does sound like the person who wrote the script should be involved, doesn’t it?
John: Doesn’t it sound like it?
Craig: Yeah, which is why I do find working in television now so satisfying, because that’s what I do now. And it is nice to be able to say, ah, here’s what I think. And here’s why I think it. And wonderful early discussions that bore a lot of fruit while we were in prep on The Last of Us, we’re going through the choices we could make. I mean, there have been a lot of shows that occurred after the apocalypse. So, you know, in talking with our costume designer, Cynthia Summers, about how we wanted to do this. Neil and I, we obviously had things from the game that informed us, but we also had general philosophical notions and ideas that are a bit different. It’s a very similar thing that we did with [Unintelligible] and Johan Renck and I. And it’s a wonderful thing to talk about that stuff. I love talking about that. Entirely within the framework of tone.
Costumes will blow up or preserve or reinforce tone. So will hair. All of it. It’s all essential. And the more you dig into the details the more you appreciate the people who do read the script and care about the script. And it’s the ones who don’t who can be tricky sometimes. Sometimes they’re brilliant, too, but they need more attention.
John: Yeah. And we should say that there’s a certain point in sort of the hierarchy on the set where like maybe it’s not essential that this person knows the overall vision for the movie or for the series because they are there to sort of get this day’s work done. And literally moving the lights and getting this lit they may not need to know the grander scheme of things.
But I also had the experience of on movies, big movies, where I really kind of felt like, oh, they only looked at the scene in a vacuum and didn’t really notice what was happening before and after and so they lit it as sort of the wrong kind of dawn. And like, oh, that actually doesn’t track with the shot that’s going to come directly beforehand. And that’s something that an editor in reading through the script would have noticed like, oh, it’s going to be really important–
Craig: Sorry, I have to interrupt you. An editor read through the script? [laughs] Where is this magical editor? I would like to meet this person.
John: So I want to have a whole discussion on postproduction because editors are notorious for not reading through scripts. And just like, oh, I found the movie as it came in. It was like documentary footage that sort of came across the transom and I decided to cut something together.
Craig: They do exist. I’m joking. They exist. But a lot of them really are sort of infamous for not reading the script.
John: But I would say that editor would notice like, oh shit, this could have been an amazing transition if you’d actually lit it the way it was sort of written on the page and you didn’t notice that. And so that can be a problem because it can become very atomic when it gets down to production where they’re just looking this scene, this scene, this scene, this scene, and not seeing the overall flow. And one of the things I so appreciate this costume designer Dana talking about her plan for things is they really are looking – costume designers are really good at this – looking for like where was this person earlier in the day. How did they get to this place? Because they are always worried about continuity and making sure that they had a scarf there. They would still have that scarf.
Craig: Ah, yes.
John: That stuff is remarkable. And they are building out these boards and notebooks that actually detail all of this.
Craig: I’m just laughing because Cynthia Summers is our costume designer, but on the day-to-day work on the set we have two gentlemen, the two Steves, and the two Steves are in charge of both handling the application of wardrobe to our actors on the day, but also preserving and maintaining continuity. Considering continuity and the attention to detail there is startling. And they will occasionally walk up to me and say, “Quick question for you. Seven months from now we’re going to be somewhere,” and then I’m like oh my god, oh my god you guys. But it’s essential. And it doesn’t matter what you do. If somebody is wearing the wrong shirt from one cut to the next it’s over. It’s done.
John: Yeah.
Craig: It’s funny actually. I looked over the shoulder. They watch the video feed. And they don’t have contacts, our little portable, they don’t care what anyone is watching at all. They’re watching moving clothes. And I said to you this shows just clothing moving around and they’re like, “Yeah.” And it’s awesome. And they’re really great at it. It’s remarkable to watch.
John: Now back in the day they would all be taking Polaroids. Now I’m sure they’re using their iPhones or they’re screenshotting what they’re seeing there so they can have references for this. But another reason why this is so important, like you can have a plan going in, but then a pandemic can stop production for a year and then you have to pick up scenes that you started shooting before you shut down. And they can just do it because they can. Because they’re remarkably organized and talented. It’s that creative brain which you absolutely need to do these jobs, and also this meticulous detail brain which is so essential. And I think many screenwriters don’t appreciate the importance.
Craig: I mean, nothing gets shot in chronological order. Inside of an episode things are being shot out of order. And then even episodes themselves may not be shot in order. We had to shoot slightly out of order episodically because of weather. Just accounting for how the weather would impact the episodes we were shooting. So, sometimes you’re shooting things and then you realize, ah, stuff happened in between. What needs to happen to the clothing, the hair, the makeup?
John: Oh yeah.
Craig: The scars? The bruises? Whatever it is. All of that math has to be done and it’s constantly being figured out and thank god these brilliant people that we have are so dedicated and committed to getting it right. And they really are. And we would be utterly lost without them.
But I will say this machine that processes details – that’s what it is, a detail machine, and it’s like details is its fuel and it’s just churning and churning. It needs detail fuel. If you don’t write the detail people are just going to fill it in for you. And this is my constant refrain. If I taught a class at the University of [Gibberish] it would just be called Details. That’s what it is. It’s how to write details. Because if you don’t then you’ve failed before you started.
John: Yeah. And again one of the biggest challenges of screenwriting is kind of knowing all these details and recognizing how many details you can put in before you sort of choke the life out of scenes. Where like those details get in the way and people stop reading. And that’s challenging. And that’s the craft.
Craig: It is. And there is a certain amount of detail that the viewer can’t take in. So there’s an amount and then there’s a kind of way to inform detail without spelling it all out. You know, if you say this room is full of blank-blank era stuff, most of which was heavily used but has been brought back to life, that guides everyone. Props. Art direction. All of it.
John: Just like a fight sequence does not label every punch. You’re not labeling everything on the shelf. You’re just making sure that you’re creating a space where there would be shelves full of things.
Craig: Yes.
John: Now, before we get to editors, because we should talk a little bit about editors and scripts, the person who is staring at the script the entire time is the script supervisor who I know we’ve talked about scripties before on the show, but I do want to sort of call them out again because the same way that hair and makeup and wardrobe is keeping track of all these continuity things, the scripty is keeping track of every line that is said, every take, making sure that as you cut from angle to angle it’s actually making sense, that things aren’t drifting.
They can be an absolute godsend. So I just want to speak up for the script supervisors on set.
Craig: Have we talked about how crazy that job is, even that it exists. It should not be one job. I just want to run down the things the script supervisor has to do. First, they need to make sure that the actors are saying the lines as written, or that somebody signs off on a change. Second, they need to record what lines are being said on camera and what lines are being said off-camera while it’s happening. Third, they need to handle all continuity. That means what things have moved, drinks and glasses, did you pick it up with your right hand or your left hand. All of it. When did you turn? On what line did you open the door? All of it needs to be recorded. Every single take.
Then they also need to record what time the first shot of the day was. They need to record what the lens. They need to record what camera roll you’re on. They need to tell the camera assistants if we’re going up a letter in takes or if we’re staying on take six. They have to do all of that, plus they have to time the whole script out ahead of time to see what the timing would be. It’s crazy. And eye lines. And that’s the other thing. They need to know on a scene where you’re shooting 12 people sitting around a table, when you get to a particular line should they be looking to the left of the camera or the right of camera. This should be 12 different jobs and it’s a job for one person. They are essential.
John: And they’re heroic. And we should say when we say recording all this is happening they’re literally taking notes in pencil on a script page. And so there’s a whole coding system they use and squiggly lines for like this take, this take, this take. This is where we moved to 6A and this is 6B. They can do all this stuff. And so a script supervisor can look back at those notes and say like, OK, this is how we did this thing and the reason why you’re keeping track of lens sizes and such is so like OK we need to go back and reshoot something or fix something you know exactly how you did it.
Craig: Even later in the day when you’re like, OK, we’ve turned around. It was hours ago. What lens we’re we on because we have to match it on this side? It is I would say probably rare to find a script supervisor that is still doing it with pencil and paper. There are some excellent programs that people have been using for a long time. And now I think a lot of it is done on iPad. Our script supervisor works on an iPad and sometimes I just sort of peek over and watch what he’s doing and it’s crazy. I was talking to him, I’m like how does anybody survive doing this job for the first year as you’re learning? And you know he said, “You kind of just make it up.” He said early on there’s no way, there’s no way you can do it. So you’re sort of like, yeah, they were holding it in their left. And then you’re like, oh boy, I hope they were holding it in the left hand. Because it just takes time for your brain to expand, to firehose that much information constantly all the time.
But, yeah, I mean, look, there’s a reason why it’s practically in my contract that our script supervisor on Chernobyl is the same one on The Last of Us. And I intend to have him by my side always. Because he is too good. He’s just too good.
John: Absolutely. And of course in modern productions it is theoretically possible to sort of go back and say, OK, we can actually check the tape and see – when I say pencil notes, I’m thinking back to like Go and it’s literally shot on film. So there’s no record, there’s no way to actually look at sort of what hand someone was holding it in. So we would just have to look to our script supervisor and ask her what was it. And she knows. Because she’s always right by the camera lens, even if you’re on a dolly truck going down a street in Downtown LA. She’s there because she has to see everything with her own two eyes. So, it’s a remarkable job.
Craig: It’s pretty amazing.
John: Now in theory all of those notes go to the editors who obviously they have to take the footage and then break it into the proper bins and start assembling the movie. And in theory you’d think like, oh, they can just look at the script pages and see what the scene is supposed to be. In practice a lot of times they sort of look at all the footage and then start cutting scenes their own way.
Craig: Yeah. Which is understandable to an extent. You don’t necessarily want to deprive yourself of their instincts. And when they look at footage they may feel something and they may drift toward it and that makes total sense. However, I do always appreciate and ask of my editors that they do read the scene carefully before they start cutting it because there are as I like to call it clues buried all over this thing. It’s like a little clue book.
John: It’s almost like someone wanted you to find your way out of this [unintelligible] box.
Craig: Absolutely. Sometimes you’ll sit there and they’re like “I just didn’t quite know what to do in this moment.” And I’m like did you check the clue book? And then they look and they’re like, “Oh, that’s what that is.” Yes. It’s in the clue book.
The other big clue book is in fact the notes generated by the script supervisor. So a lot of times what will happen is I’ll be sitting there and I’ll go why don’t we have that shot where he turns and looks at her in the wide? And they’re like we didn’t do it. And I’m like we did. No, it’s not there. Yes it is, I know it. And then we look in the script – oh, there it is. We found it.
John: There it is. It’s right there. One of the things we also notice that the script supervisor is doing is marking which of the takes are, we used to say “print the takes,” because now everything is basically printed. But circling the takes is like these are the ones we think have the performance that we’re actually going after. So if you shot five takes, takes two and take five may be the ones that have the stuff that you want.
Craig: Yeah. And that was something we used to do when it actually cost money to print takes. So you would say, OK, well that obviously was a garbage take. But now what I’ve discovered along the way, and I’m thinking probably everybody sort of figured out early on, too, is even the takes, you sometimes have to go into that bin of the castoffs because what you needed was somebody just looking up and then looking to the left.
John: 100%.
Craig: Yeah. One of the best bits of directorial advice I can give anybody is wait longer than you think you have to before you say cut. Because stuff happens back there that could just be gold.
John: All right. So some takeaways from thinking about how other people are using the script is just to remember that I think so often as writers like, OK, I’m going to write this script and then I’ll hand it into the studio and the producer will read it and we’ll get a director on board. And then I guess the actors will learn their lines. But that’s not even the beginning of the process really.
Craig: No.
John: Everyone else has to take this thing and actually make it a thing. And blueprint may be the wrong term for it, but I guess you can have a blueprint for how you’re actually going to physically build the building, but that’s not furnishing the building. That’s not doing all the other stuff that sort of makes a place you can actually live inside. And that’s what all these other amazing artisans and craftspeople are doing is really making this thing be a place you can live inside.
Craig: Yeah. A long time ago when I used to have a blog, do you remember back then?
John: I do remember that.
Craig: I wrote a thing called You Can’t Just Walk Into a Building. Because if you say somebody walks into a building, which I think a lot of writers do, somebody has to figure out what building. Where? What does it look like? How does it function? And if you haven’t designed it, meaning you haven’t described what the function and nature and feeling of the building is then as I said other people are going to do it for you. And so the more you can participate in the direction, and when I say direction I don’t mean film direction. I mean creative direction.
John: The design.
Craig: The overall direction of the film or television show the better off that film and television show is going to be. They need the benefit of all the things you know and you will always know more than you can fit on the page.
John: Now Craig you are making my segue way too easily here. Because back in Episode 519 Craig said, “I am a huge believer in the visual imagination of the space. I need to know what it looks like, how close they are together, whether the lights are on or off, if there’s a fire in the fireplace, if it’s warm or hot.” And we got a couple of responses back on this and a whole new branch of things to talk through. Megana, could you read us what Dave wrote for us?
Megana Rao: So Dave wrote in, “A year or so ago at age 51 I discovered I have aphantasia. This means I’m unable to visualize, or put another way I have no mind’s eye. It was a surprise to me as I have a strong sense of imagination, work in creative fields, and write screenplays for pleasure. The latter being the reason I discovered Scriptnotes. For me imagination is narrative and conceptual, but not visual. When I read a book and the character description says she was tall and had blonde hair I know what this means but don’t form a picture in my head. It’s the same when my yoga instructor asks me to imagine a balloon inflating and deflating as I breathe.
“This revelation has led me to realize many things about my life. For example I now know it takes me longer to learn new things, especially physical ones because I’m reading through a set of instructions rather than playing back a video clip or looking at pictures of the activity. And when it comes to my writing I see now that I tend to over-describe because I want to make sure people see the character or place as I see, or in fact don’t see them. It’s suggested that perhaps 3 to 5% of people are aphantasiac. So perhaps as many as 2,000 listeners to Scriptnotes could be. I wonder how this affects their personal and professional lives. For me it’s not at all.
“There are some notable examples of aphantasiacs working in Hollywood, such as Ed Catmull, formerly at Pixar, which might suggest this to be true for others. Anyhow, keep up the good work. I’m always inspired by your weekly discussions, even if I can’t picture any of the things you touch upon, which in the case of Sexy Craig might not be a bad thing.”
Craig: Oh, you don’t have to see anything. You just have to listen. That’s all. Dave, you just got to listen.
John: Let Sexy Craig wash all over you. I really thank Dave for writing in with this because I’ve seen this term a little bit popping up on Twitter and I didn’t really know what it meant. And it’s not a disorder, it’s the range of how people imagine information and how the visual system works for people. But it is really interesting because I think I just have bias to assume well everyone’s brain works the way my brain works. And my brain, I can absolutely picture things in my head. I can imagine smells and textures, and tastes. I can sort of completely put myself in a place pretty easily and I set myself there and I write what I see. And that’s writing for me. And that’s not going to be the same experience Dave is having.
Craig: No. And I want to call out the most important word I suppose in the quote that Dave brings up here, and that’s the word “eye.” I believe in it. It certainly works for me. It’s important part of my process. But here’s another thing I know. Dave, I cannot draw at all. I can’t illustrate. I mean, my hands work. But a cube is barely within my reach. And only because I practiced it. So I can imagine things very vividly and very accurately, but I cannot reproduce them through drawing at all. And then there are people I think who may be able to produce things by drawing perfectly but perhaps don’t see them in the mind’s eye.
So, this is not a prison sentence by any stretch as you yourself have noted. However, I will say because it is a visual medium, and we know we’re telling a visual story, you need to have some method to create specificity and completion of visual work. Whether it is happening in your mind or whether you are sketching it out in a series of storyboards, your illustrations, or whether you have a really specific connection to words and the words connect to images as you write them. Whatever it is you need something because ultimately it’s film.
John: Yeah. I do wonder if someone who is writing strictly a stage play, with characters on a stage talking, it would impact their process less if they didn’t have to see the whole thing, but it was literally just about the words and the talking and sort of how this all goes. But there’s also, and we can look up what the actual term is, but the same way that some people don’t have a mind’s eye, there’s people who don’t have a mind’s voice, or they don’t have a voice in their head. They don’t have the ability to imagine conversations. And that would probably be a greater hindrance to doing the kinds of things that we’re doing because so much of what we do as screenwriters is think, OK, if they say this then that’s the answer – it’s putting yourself in the middle of imaginary conversations. And that’s a sort of crucial skill. And I think it’s also a source of anxiety and sort of negative repetition.
I do find that so often I will have arguments in my head with people and it’s like well that’s just really stupid because they’re actually not here to hear the other side of this argument.
Craig: Yeah. That’s crazy. You should stop doing that.
John: Because Craig you never do that. You never actually–
Craig: I don’t really.
John: Have imaginary arguments?
Craig: I don’t. No. You’ve said this before. In fact I believe, because I remember it making quite an impression on me, it was one of your New Year’s resolutions to stop having arguments with people who weren’t there. I mean, I’ve definitely had the thing, there’s a German word for it, where you walk away from a conversation and then you think, oh, I should have said this or this.
John: The staircase thing, yeah.
Craig: The staircase logic. But it’s rare that I will sit and have a debate with somebody who is not there because they’re not there. It seems like a total waste of good fighting.
John: Yeah. But again it’s a range of experiences. And so I think, you know, there’s people who are going to be, I think there’s a term hyperphantasia, people who have extremely visual internal lives and that can be great, but it can also be challenging because apparently it ties into PTSD and other things. They kind of keep re-seeing these things. And it’s not just a reported phenomenon. Like one of the things I liked in this New York Times piece that we’ll link to, they actually can do scientific studies where they say, OK, we want you to visualize a bright white triangle and while they’re doing this they’re measuring your pupil dilation and people who have a situation where they don’t have a mind’s eye, their pupils will not contract where other people’s pupils will contract. And so it really is a thing – it’s a deeper brain thing and not just how people report the experience.
Craig: It’s a good reminder that what we do is brain work.
John: Yeah.
Craig: And everybody’s brain is different and I don’t necessarily think, unless we’re talking about specific injury, or clear malfunction, or dysfunction, some of these things are just a question of how the imperfect system is balanced.
John: Yeah.
Craig: I mean, you can only say that you are hyperphantasic if we have a number that is a normal amount of phantasic.
John: And we don’t.
Craig: We don’t. It’s a spectrum, like you say. There’s a range of brain function and, you know.
John: Here’s I think what might be useful for listeners though is if you feel – if you listen to our conversation and say like, OK, they describe as seeing yourself in a place and imagining all these things around you and that doesn’t even make sense to me. I don’t even know how a person does that. That could be a sign like, oh, maybe you actually are on this edge of this experience. Maybe it’s good to know, because if it is your situation then look for ways to address that. You may not be doing something wrong. It may just be how your brain works.
Craig: Yeah. Like I don’t understand why anyone believes in god. My brain doesn’t work that way. And wouldn’t it be amazing if I got to judgment day and stood before god and went, oh, whoa.
John: Yeah.
Craig: You’re real. And he said, or she said, “Yes.” And I said but I just – even now I really don’t quite believe. And then he or she said, “Yeah, that’s because you had a brain problem.”
John: Yeah.
Craig: And then I would say, OK, so does that get me out of burning in a lake of fire for eternity? And I suspect that’s where they would say, “No.” [laughs]
John: But then again the question is well then who designed your bad, broken brain? It all sort of snaps back. As you were describing that were you visualizing?
Craig: Of course I was.
John: Of course.
Craig: Of course I was. I can see everything. I could see all of it. I think I might be hyperphantasic.
John: I think I might be as well. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a common trait among screenwriters and writers in general.
Craig: Makes sense.
John: When I was doing the Arlo Finch books because as a screenwriter we’re only looking at what we can see and what we can hear, like texture, and taste, and smell, like those are not things that we’re actively describing in our scene description, but suddenly in a book I was doing all of those things and I did feel like my world had gotten a little bit more full. It was nice to be able to look at those senses that I normally can’t describe on the page and everything did just feel a little bit brighter for it.
Craig: Nice.
John: Nice. Let’s get to some more listener questions. Megana, what have you got for us?
Megana: Great. So Stupid Luck asks, “I found myself in the most wonderful but terrifying situation. A pilot that I helped to develop and write was sold earlier this year and despite my having zero experience working on a TV show beyond assistant gigs nearly 20 years ago I have been given a higher title than I surely deserve, leapfrogging several low and midlevel positions. Am I doomed to fail? Will my complete and total ignorance of how this all works make me seem irrelevant? I’ve already been included on a ton of conference calls but besides weighing in on the development and my take on writer’s samples I pretty much stay silent. I’m trying to learn and absorb as much as I can, as quickly as I can, but the learning curve is steep. Any advice on how to approach this situation? How to balance my inexperience with the desire to contribute in a meaningful way? How to show appropriate deference to those who have been doing this a lot longer than I have while still taking my shot?”
Craig: Wow. Stupid Luck, you are kind of a dream. You seem to have missed the memo that in order to succeed in Hollywood you have to be a total psychopath with no shame and who has no problem talking when you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. You know, I think this is actually really good news, the fact that you’re even thinking this way is really good news. No, you’re not doomed to fail at all. Don’t be fooled by the militarization and rankifization of the television business. There are people whose value, experience level has nothing to do with their title, both for good and for bad. You are where you are, now forget about it. It doesn’t matter.
In any meeting the best idea is the best idea. And the person who is the most impressive is the person who impresses the most. So it makes total sense to listen and to learn, but you shouldn’t be afraid to weigh in. You should not worry that people are going to judge you. And if you make a mistake you make a mistake. You have a natural humility about you. As long as you don’t take things personally and you keep moving forward and you show other people respect and you don’t trample on them in an effort to get somewhere they will be OK with that. They will be perfectly fine. It’s the only way you can learn. So I think you’re doing great.
John: Well let’s imagine another scenario in which Stupid Luck developed and wrote this thing, it was sold, and then comes in as a staff writer on it. That also would not make sense because you are the person who co-created this project. You are naturally going to be up a few ranks there because you are going to have some decision-making capability. You helped create this world. You know things about this world that no one else does. So you’re not going to enter in at the bottom.
When I sold my first TV show I was brought in and my first title was Co-EP, but I was really the showrunner but I really didn’t know what I was doing. I had the disaster that I think you’re fearing that you may have. But it sounds like you have people around you who really do know what they’re doing and can actually support you and sort of make all the stuff happen. I wouldn’t worry so much about it.
Or my first movie, Craig you probably had a similar experience, the first time being on set for a movie, you kind of don’t know a lot.
Craig: No.
John: And you’re scared like am I allowed to eat at crafts service. It’s all kind of new. But you do have a place there. You do belong there. It’s finding out how you can be useful and how to get out of the way when literally they just need to turn the set around.
Craig: And people actually want to help. They want to teach. Nobody walks onto a production and knows what’s going on just naturally. No one. It’s very weird. A lot of it is strange and there are things still to this day I get confused by. I’ve been doing this forever. I run my own show. And I repeatedly confuse who is in charge of beards.
John: Oh yes.
Craig: It’s hair or makeup depending whether it’s this kind of beard or that kind of beard. All the time these things happen and then you just go, OK, right, sorry, let me…
And it’s perfectly fine as long as you don’t bluster about and take it out on people when they gently correct you. And you’re going to be fine. And, by the way, don’t say Stupid Luck. I would say there is no such thing.
John: Good Fortune, sure. But you also worked hard to get there.
Craig: You worked hard. And you did something. And it is something that is now employing lots of people. So, I wouldn’t say Stupid Luck. I wouldn’t say it was inevitability either. I would say you achieved something. You should be proud of it, while staying humble, and move forward.
John: Agreed. Megana, can you give us another question here?
Megana: Casey writes in, “I’m a screenwriter based in LA who has yet to break in but I have had a pilot in development for the past couple of years. I wrote it on spec for producers and we have an older, more established writer attached to showrunner who has guided me through the development process. I wrote the pilot but we worked together to create the pitch. It’s been years now and I’m beginning to feel emotionally detached from and frustrated with the project. In working with the producers I have less and less confidence in their ability to get this thing across the finish line. And I have also come to discover that the showrunner and I have very different world views with regards to race, social justice, and gender.
“I also keep being asked to do free work on a project that hasn’t gone anywhere in two years. My question is am I shackled to this project until it’s officially dead or until it gets bought? How do I navigate this strange situation?”
Craig: Hmmm.
John: Casey, I wish I could tell you this was a strange situation. There are sort of like zombie projects that aren’t really alive and aren’t really dead that are just kind of always out there and you have to decide, you know what, I’m done. I don’t believe this thing is going to move forward. I don’t believe it’s going to move forward with these people on board.
You wrote this script, this other showrunner person helped you, or helped guide you through the pitch. Maybe contractually they’re involved. You can see. My hunch is that you have a good writing sample that you should be using to get you other jobs. But this project is dead is my guess.
Craig: Dead or alive, it’s your decision. That’s the good news. You’re not shackled to it. It’s yours. You own the copyright. You haven’t sold it. You’ve written it on spec. No one has bought it. So, you could just do whatever you want with it. And, you know, as far as the showrunner, the showrunner is not the showrunner because there’s no show. That’s just a person. And if you don’t like the person and you don’t feel connected with them then you make a change. Because it’s your material. They can’t go on without you.
John: Yeah.
Craig: Because they haven’t sold it yet. And when you say being asked to do free work, you’re not being asked to do free work. There is no work, meaning employment. You are choosing – this is what it comes down to, and this is a hard one to hear Casey, but you’re choosing to continue to work on something that you own. It is your property. The day you sell it is the day everything changes and the work is about employment and then it is a question of being taken advantage of by people who should be paying you because you’re not a copyright owner but you’re an employee. Until that day you have to act like the person you are in this situation, which is believe it or not, the boss.
John: Yeah. I will say that emotionally you may have moved on from this project as well. And so I want to give you permission to say like I learned some things from that and now I’m going to step aside and Craig and I both have things that we’ve wrote that’s just like I like this script, there’s things I like about this script, but it is not going to be worth my time to pay any more attention to it. It’s on the shelf now and I’m moving forward with new things. Just give yourself permission to say this is not what I’m interested in working on right now. And that’s great. Don’t feel like you have to finish everything.
Craig: Yeah. Just make sure that your lack of interest is not a lack of interest in people as opposed to material. If you’re still interested in the material but the people are wrong it’s time to find different people. And, of course, the other ones may say, well, if you sell it then we get a title and we get money. OK, well we’ll figure that out down the road. But in the meantime it sounds like this marriage has come to an end.
John: I think so. I have a thing that’s actually not a question, but I want to point to this Twitter thread by Ariel Rutherford about this white male writer with credits who puts out a call for a diverse female writer to help him on a project and then he tries to swing this kind of Svengali mentor situation where he’s like I’m creating a writer’s room and stuff. I’m not going to go in depth on the Twitter thread, but there’s a link in the show notes, so click through this link. Be warned that this kind of behavior exists out there. Especially because it turns out another writer @awkwardgirlla had the exact same situation with the exact same writer. So it’s a guy who is just doing this repeatedly.
This is just shitty behavior. And I don’t know who this writer is, but this writer should not be doing this. And it was just a new spin on sort of like a person with some credits taking advantage of writers with no credits. And so it drove me crazy. I just wanted to shine a little spotlight on it here.
Craig: Yeah. Anybody that suggests that you should join their mentor group you should view as a cult leader. There are no mentor groups. That’s not a thing. The mentor groups that exist are not generated by individuals like that. There may be something like the kind of thing that you and I have done where there have been organizations that have put together established writers with up and coming writers. And they have a discussion and it’s formalized and then they move on. There is not sort of you join my little mini church and then you also do all of my work for me and you clean my clothes and then eventually I have 12 babies with four of you. This is not good. You don’t want this. You don’t want to go down that road.
You don’t need it. That’s the other thing. Anybody that’s offering you that, it ain’t real. Real mentors are desperate to not mentor people. That’s the god’s honest truth. You or I, we’re not looking for extra people to do this stuff with. We have to be asked. We have to forced and shamed into it.
John: And so here I think is this guy’s clever trick, it’s almost like it’s a negging kind of thing he’s doing, those pickup artist books. Basically he’s saying like, “Hey, I need help. Would someone out there want to help me?” It’s almost like a white guy in a van saying hey would you help me find my lost dog. He’s asking for help and so then someone will say, “I can help you.” And he’s like, “Oh, you’re actually not good enough, but I think you could get better if you just come join my writers group.” That’s what drives me crazy. Because it’s not even the normal scam which is that like, oh, we’re going to help you polish up your script. It has that first level of I need help because I’m a white male writer who needs a diverse female voice on this thing.
Craig: Also, if you’re a white male writer and you’re on the Internet asking randos to help you be less white, fuck off. Go do your own work. Do your work. Research. Figure it out. Study. Interview people. Don’t make them do your work for you. Don’t ask that. What is that? That is something you pay people for. It’s called writing or producing or consulting. It’s a job. It’s not free.
Geez, fucking guy.
John: I should say also that he was offering pay at the start. So basically the hook was like oh I will pay you to be a consultant on this thing.
Craig: Yeah, but like what? When I say pay I mean like you work for Fox or Disney and you get paid, like a real salary. Not like some guy is like, “Here you go. I guarantee you $100.”
John: All right. Now it’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a thing I did last year which I highly recommend for people in LA. It’s called the LA County Adopt a Family for the Holidays program. It’s done through the county and you go to a really boring website, a poorly designed form, but you put in your information and they match you up with a family in LA County who receives Medicaid or basically needs some help because they would not be otherwise able to buy Christmas presents for their kids. And so you get matched up with a family. You exchange text messages to find out who they are and what their kids are like and what their situation is. You buy some presents. You wrap presents. Everyone knows I love wrapping presents.
Craig: Oh my god. You’re so good at it.
John: I love wrapping presents. And then you drop off the presents and then you go and it’s lovely and it’s nice and it’s such a good thing. A friend tipped me off to it and I’m sending out the word to other friends. It’s just a really good, smart program. So if you are a person in Los Angeles who feels like you know what I’d love to buy some Christmas presents for people who could really stand have a better holiday, really recommend the LA County Adopt a Family for the Holidays program. And we’ll put a link in the show notes to it.
Craig: That does sound pretty good.
John: It’s pretty good.
Craig: I can probably steal that. You know, I don’t know how to wrap gifts. Did you know that?
John: Oh.
Craig: I don’t even know how to do it. Melissa does it.
John: I love, I genuinely love doing it. I didn’t realize people didn’t know how to do it until Rawson Thurber, who was my assistant at one point, just literally could not do it and so I would wrap all of his presents.
Craig: So basically I start to wrap something and then everything goes wrong. It’s sort of like me and drawing. I can wrap it in a square and then there’s the extra part sticking out and I know there’s some folding involved, but the folds don’t work right. And inevitably it ends up looking like a large Tootsie Roll inevitably. I just start twisting the ends. Megana, do you know how to wrap gifts.
Megana: I’m really bad at it. And it’s so embarrassing to bring something that I’ve tried to wrap in front of John because I can just feel his judgment so heavily.
Craig: He’s pretty judgy.
John: But Craig I don’t know if you know that Megana actually draws really well. She’s actually, give her a pen and some time and she can draw you up something lovely.
Megana: I do like to doodle.
Craig: I know that because Megana got me one of the nicest things ever. She made a painting of my dog.
John: She made a painting of my dog, too. That’s your thing.
Megana: It actually really wasn’t. You guys are the only two that – I’m like what do these guys care about? And the answer is consistently your dogs.
Craig: I have another dog now, Megana. I’m just saying.
My One Cool Thing is Megana’s ability to draw my dog.
John: That’s a very cool thing indeed. And that’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Layn Pieratt. Really good outro. Thank you, Layn.
If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@dev.johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter Craig is sometimes @clmazin. And I am always @johnaugust.
You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing. This last week’s was about naming characters and I just went through this big project where I had to name, I can’t even tell you how many characters, but so many characters and it was just fun to go back through this newsletter and look at how other people name their characters.
We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. And you can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on a Bad Art Friend, or maybe two bad art friends. We’ll discuss. But only for our premium members. Thank you Craig. Thank you Megana.
Megana: Thanks guys.
Craig: Thank you.
[Bonus segment]
John: Oh, Craig. Oh Craig. All right, so welcome all our premium members. You are true friends. You are true art friends. And we would never turn on you in our text channel, our text thread about you. Craig, can you give us the briefest recap of the situation between these two women and this writer community?
Craig: Yeah. So this has been zinging around and there’s a big article in the New York Times Magazine. Long and short of it is there was a woman who was more of an up and coming writer. And she decided to donate a kidney to a person that she didn’t know. A little bit like the way you just adopted a family. But this was a rather extreme thing. She was like I decided just to be a really good person. I’m going to offer my kidney to somebody in need of a kidney. And just somebody. And in fact there was somebody in need and she did in fact have the surgery. She donated her kidney. And she talked a lot about it. She talked a lot about it on a Facebook group. Facebook, of course, root of all evil.
John: Mm-hmm.
Craig: And while she was talking about it she had an acquaintance, or she thought was a friend, was another writer who is a little bit more of an established writer who wrote a story that included something about a woman who donates a kidney to somebody. And the kidney donor was a bit irked because initially she just didn’t feel like this other woman was paying enough attention to her kidney donation.
John: Yeah.
Craig: Which is where I got stuck. Cause I think it’s sort of like that’s not why you donate a kidney. Anyway, and that writer, Sonya Larson, said, “Yeah, no, no, I saw that you donated a kidney. Good for you.” And then later she released this story and Dawn Dorland, the woman who donated a kidney, was aghast and believed and accused Sonya Larson of essentially lifting her story because she included this element of a person donating a kidney. But what was really weird and where this story actually got kind of confusing and muddled is indeed Sonya Larson did lift a sentence or two from an email that Dawn Dorland had written, or a Facebook post, one of those two. I can’t remember.
So actually there was sort of like a little bit of technical plagiarism there. But not much. And this story has lit up everyone. I guess you either are Team Dawn or you’re Team Sonya, or as somebody on Facebook [unintelligible] what this story really shows more than anything is that writers are annoying. [laughs] And that is absolutely true. So, OK, John, Megana, what do we make of this?
John: So I’ve only read the Robert Kolker New York Times story, so my only point into it. I know there’s a discourse that goes well beyond the edged the edges of this because it’s 2021 and the discourse has to spill everywhere. And like these people themselves are probably also involved in the conversation.
God, it made me – as you start to read the story and you start to see Dawn saying like why aren’t people commending me enough for donating a kidney. That is a great character. That is a great moment.
Craig: Nuts.
John: And at the same time I think oh my god you want to use that character in a story. And then it seems like Sonya Larson did that and then also – which was probably defensible as using that idea of that character. But then to actually use those words seems so dumb. And that’s a thing I couldn’t get past.
Craig: Yeah. So everybody fucked up to some extent. Although my sympathies will always be with the person who does the work. And in this case the person who did the work was Sonya Larson. The fact that she was inspired by someone’s story of donating a kidney is normal. People are inspired by real life stuff all the time. Nobody owns that. If you donate a kidney to somebody you don’t own everybody’s short story from now until the end of time about somebody donating a kidney.
Yes, she clearly screwed up by cribbing that line from an email and that was wrong. Also, it didn’t really cause any damage because as far as I could tell Sonya Larson’s short story has not led to any kind of real financial success. It was just out there, but it wasn’t some huge thing. Now it’s a huge thing.
And also Sonya Larson appears to be a legitimate writer who is doing work. And so I feel like if you do the work you do the work. So she made a mistake and she has owned that mistake. The other thing that was going on in a very kind of typical Internet way there are a bunch of people who are on this Facebook page–
John: Oh yeah.
Craig: –where they see Dawn Dorland going on about her kidney donation ad nauseam and wondering why people aren’t telling her more about how wonderful she is for her donation. And they start back-channeling and gossiping about how much they hate her. And I totally understand that because I think I probably would have done the same thing. Totally. I’m like Megana I have to at this point – you seem like the nicest person in the world. Every interaction I’ve ever had with you you seem quite pure. Like you were delivered on angel wings to the world to save us all.
But, have you never just sort of seen somebody acting like this super thirsty annoying person and then kind of back-channeled some catty commentary?
Megana: Yeah. I mean, I so sympathize for Dawn because I think we’ve all had that experience of thinking that people are our friends, or that people are saying – you know, just that infuriating feeling of not getting the joke or not being in on the thing is so devastating. Nobody is talking about the violation of privacy here and I would never want my personal private group chats with my girlfriends to be public.
John: That is absolutely crucial. So we should say those became public because of discovery. Because there were lawsuits going back and forth between the two of them. And so once it got to that point I’m just like oh my god everything has gone off the rails because there are so many conversations I’ve had with people that I would not want to show up on discovery. And I’ve been through discovery. Discovery sucks. So I don’t want that done. Yes.
Megana: But also the context, because sometimes my friends are like really in the wrong, but when you have your friend’s back and you know. I don’t need everyone reading the New York Times how I’m trying to support my friend in that way. I don’t know, it’s just so–
Craig: Totally.
Megana: Ugh.
Craig: It’s a real mess. I do love just how this all started. And the way it started was that she was posting on Facebook celebrating herself and what she did. And then what’s so great is she just looked to see that some of the people she invited into her self-congratulatory look-at-what-I-did group hadn’t reacted to any of her posts. Now, at that point it’s getting stalky. What does she do? She writes an email to Sonya Larson and the email basically is why haven’t you said anything? Mother-fucker, nobody owes you a comment. We’re reading it. And what was kind of shocking was the message to her was, “I think you’re aware I donated my kidney this summer, right?” [laughs] Like what the hell is that? What kind of crazy world is that?
John: I want that printed on a t-shirt, please.
Craig: I think you’re aware that I donated my kidney this summer. Yeah? Mm-hmm. Like I would have been like, “Mm-hmm.” But Sonya Larson said, “Ah, yes, I did see on Facebook that you donated your kidney. What a tremendous thing,” which is pretty much the polite thing to say to somebody when what you really want to say is, “Yeah, what do you want? What do you want? You want a cookie?”
And then in response to that Dawn Dorland wondered if Sonya really thought it was great why did she need reminding that it happened. Which reminded me of that thing in Airplane. Hmm, he never has more than one cup of coffee at home. So stupid. Like what narcissism. Anyway, it’s kind of like I guess the person who has her kidney is like I don’t care about any of that. I’m alive. So, good on you, Dawn Dorland. But this got crazy. And, look, underneath all of it the reason I suggested it, John, is because I think there is this – as we were talking about parasocial relationships last time, this thing happening with the Internet now where people overshare their lives and then are shocked to find that other humans who hoover up information about humans for their vocation and then recreate them into art are doing so. They can’t believe it. And they feel as though they’ve been violated. And to the extent that a story like this leads some people to think that writers shouldn’t be doing things like this, other than ripping that one line off from the email which shouldn’t have happened, writers should be doing things like this.
I’m very pro-writer in this regard.
John: One thing I did want to actually discuss is that idea of iteration. I thought it was interesting point of the Sonya Larson side of it all is that like they were going back to earlier versions of the story. Basically she kept working on the story and revising the story. And earlier versions of the stories might have been closer to this, but when is that story finished? Because it was going to be published this one time, and then she changed it more, and it got changed again. What is the draft that is actually the problem? And at what point in the process can you really say like that was infringement or she just hadn’t done the necessary editing to not make it infringe-y. And that’s an interesting ethical question as well.
Craig: What do you think, Megana?
Megana: The thing that I was going to say is that in our Cat Person discussion we talked about how easy it would have been for the person to change key details about where this worked, just completely lifting those directly. I think in the same way here, John I think said in Episode 500 like I like to use characters from real life because it proves that those people can exist in reality and that’s a believable thing. But I think you can take the spirit of that without taking the exact details. Like what I also find really troubling is that whether or not Sonya Larson liked Dawn Dorland, like they were a part of the same community. And Dawn was very vocal about this kidney donation. So presumably everyone in Dawn’s life who reads this short story is going to know that. And I just don’t understand why you couldn’t take the extra effort to obscure some of those details. I don’t think it would have changed the feeling of the story, but it would have protected this person whether or not you like them.
Craig: It sounds to me like that aspect of the story was fairly minor. That the story was not about kidney donation. It included somebody who had done so. But that the value of the story was in the writing and in the execution as is so often the case. That the concept – didn’t matter what the concept was. So, yes, she could have certainly done that, but I think it’s also reasonable to expect that if Sonya Larson doesn’t know Dawn Dorland and reads somebody’s repost of that and writes a story about it that she doesn’t owe Dawn anything. So what’s the difference?
I mean, basically it sounds like Dawn thought that they were a lot closer than they were and Sonya’s point of view was, yeah, I don’t know you. You know? I don’t know you like that as the memes say.
John: Now, Megana, you’re actually in writers groups and Craig and I are not. So has there been a discussion in your writers group about this situation and like what is your feeling about this kind of appropriation or even just we’re writing about the same area or space? Is that a thing that comes up in your group?
Megana: I don’t know that I have a great response. Because it is an icky situation and I think that sometimes you see people using similar plot devices or things creep up in multiple people’s works because they’re inspired or they’ve just been talking about it in the group. So, I don’t know. It’s really tricky and I wish that I had a better way of figuring that out. But so far we haven’t really had any conversations about that.
I think we’re also aware that in the process of iterating, yeah, maybe you are using something similar to someone else’s project to figure out a solution, but maybe in your next draft that’s going to be different, so it’s not worth litigating as a group.
Craig: Years and years ago I had a drum kit. It wasn’t a very good drum kit but I was learning on it. It didn’t sound great. And I knew a drummer, like a proper professional drummer who came by and I showed it to him and I was like it doesn’t sound that great, but it’s good enough to learn on. And he sat down and he played some and it sounded amazing. It was like the best drum kit ever because it’s not the drum kit. And it’s not the idea. It’s not the concept. It’s not the premise. None of that is what it’s about. That stuff is just the drum kit. It’s the drumming that matters. And in this case it’s the execution that matters. It’s the writing that matters. Anybody in any writing group, everybody could get the exact same prompt and 12 of those same details and you’ll get eight different stories, and you might even get eight stories that are really similar, but only one of them is good.
John: Yeah. Like the four gospels in the Bible. Only one of them is good?
Craig: Which one is that?
John: I’ll tell you off-mic.
Craig: Oh, is it John? Because your name is John? Is it John?
John: That’s what it is.
Craig: Oh, is John the crazy one that talked about the beast and the mark of the devil?
John: That’s Book of Revelation. Wow. No. That’s not a gospel.
Craig: OK, that’s a different god.
Megana: Can I say one other thing about the writing group though? I’m so shocked that no one in this group was like you should definitely change that text. You can’t just lift.
John: For all we know someone did. We’re not seeing the whole thread. Or maybe you have gone through all of the documents. Megana has been doing nothing else for the last three weeks. Just going through all this. She found the Zodiac Killer and now she’s figuring out who was the real bad friend in the bad friend group.
People throw this at us like How Would This Be a Movie. I’m going to say that I don’t think this is a movie because so much of what it really comes down to is appropriation of words on a page and plagiarism is not great movie material. If you look at the Melissa McCarthy movie, Can You Ever Forgive Me, was fantastic, but it’s not really plagiarism. It ends up being a very physical, visual thing she’s doing. She’s faking letters. Versus this I feel is just not going to work, to me.
Craig: John, question for you.
John: Please.
Craig: You’re aware that I donated my kidney this summer, right?
John: You know, I think it’s such a remarkable, selfless act. I have not been talking to any of my other friends about how much you bring that up.
Craig: If you really thought it was that great of an act I’m wondering why you needed reminding that it happened. Curious.
John: All right, well thanks. It’s been fun.
Craig: See you guys.
John: You can log off the Zoom now. Bye.
Craig: See you next week.
John: Bye.
Craig: Bye.
Links:
- Netflix 2-minute Viewership on ScreenRant
- Twitter Thread on Netflix Thumbnails
- Harvey Weinstein Orc in Lord of the Rings
- Dana Covarrubias explains “What the Clothes in Only Murders in the Building Say About the Show’s Characters” in Slate Working Podcast
- Aphantasia
- Many People Have a Vivid Mind’s Eye While Others Have None at All on the NYT
- LA County Adopt A Family
- Bad Art Friend by Robert Kolker
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
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- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Layn Pieratt (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
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