Drew Marquardt

The original post for this episode can now be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 509 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show how do prime the audience for what’s going to happen later? That’s right, it’s foreshadowing, [unintelligible] popular twin. We will look at examples and techniques to make foreshadowing feel clever rather than clunky.

Craig: We’ll also answer listener questions about Hallmark movies, friends who are bad bosses, and what to do when your movie is terrible.

John: Boy, not a happy topic.

Craig: I wouldn’t know about that.

John: But in our bonus segment for premium members we will discuss whatever happened to DVD commentaries and my theory is that Craig is partially to blame.

Craig: I’m going to hopefully upgrade that to completely to blame, but let’s see how it goes.

John: All right. Craig, this is one of the rare podcasts we are both out of town. So only Megana is holding down the Los Angeles fort. You are up there enjoying the Calgary Stampede, correct?

Craig: It’s not my cup of tea. I’m not a Stampede – from what I’ve seen it’s sort of half a stampede because of Covid and things. You can’t really get tourists in because no one is allowed to fly in unless they have a reason to be here. So I think it’s more of a Canada Folks only stampede, which is fine. There are a lot of fireworks. I do like fireworks. Not like LA fireworks that just happen constantly and for no reason. But scheduled. And professional. I don’t care about rodeo. It’s not my thing. I grew up on Staten Island. No surprise, didn’t have a lot of rodeos, so it’s not my culture.

But, you know, hopefully it’s putting some money in some folks’ pockets up here.

John: Yeah. I am back in New York City for the first time since the pandemic. It’s very exciting to back. We’ve just done a week-long visit of colleges with my daughter. And it’s kind of great. I mean, there’s been so many movies about kids’ college tours and stuff like that, so I’m not going to write that movie. But you can see sort of where that movie comes from because it’s just a lot of adventure. It’s been a good road trip.

Craig: That’s fantastic. And when you say New York City you’re on Staten Island?

John: I’m not on or near Staten Island. I’m on the Island of Manhattan.

Craig: Oh, OK.

John: Yeah. Craig, an innovation that probably happened before the pandemic but I had not experienced it yet was that now you can use Apple Pay on the subway and on busses which is just such a game-changer. So you don’t have to load up the stupid yellow cards anymore that never worked properly. You just tap your watch and it’s magic.

Craig: Yellow cards were already magic. I’m back in the tokens day.

John: Oh, the tokens days.

Craig: Or we had bus passes as students. So you’d get a bus pass and then you would show the bus pass to the bus driver. Otherwise you would have to put your coins in the weird – it was like a gumball machine in the front of the bus kind of thing. It was all bad. And now it’s good.

John: Yeah. Now Craig you were gone last week. Two bits of news to share with our listeners. We have new t-shirts and I’m so excited about our new t-shirts. They are our 10th anniversary t-shirts. They sort of slipped out a little bit earlier than we anticipated, but this way you can also wear them to celebrate our 10th anniversary which will be coming up next month in August.

Craig: Great.

John: Craig, do you recognize the reference that these t-shirts make?

Craig: That would require me to look at the t-shirt, wouldn’t it? [laughs] Let me go do that. I mean, I saw it briefly. I didn’t study it. I like the color and everything. So I’m going to take a look. Now I’m going to really study it.

John: All right. And maybe describe as this is an audio show, describe what this looks like.

Craig: Well, OK, maybe it’s not what you were going for, but to me it looks like the classic Zoom font from PBS.

John: Oh, yeah, that’s so interesting. That’s not the actual reference, but Zoom is a high quality throwback reference.

Craig: Oh, it’s some sort of maze.

John: It does look like a maze. But it actually says Scriptnotes, you see.

Craig: What?

John: So that actually is the words Scriptnotes.

Craig: Oh, it’s the perspective shifty one.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: Oh, I like that.

John: Yeah. But the other reference, because you don’t watch television you wouldn’t know that it is a reference to a small Marvel television show called Loki and it is in the style of the art from the TV show Loki.

Craig: No, I’d never know that. There would be no chance. I thought it was Zoom from 1976.

John: But it has a ’76 quality. It does feel like it is of an era. That it’s not our modern era.

Craig: I can’t tell you how many times – I don’t know what it is. I turned 50 and suddenly I started saying things that Bo, who is Megana’s age, so Megana and Bo are roughly the same age, that Bo just looks at me like what? Who?

John: What are you talking about?

Craig: We actually went to an escape room and in the escape room was a rotary phone and she had never used one before. That was kind of amazing. Megana, have you ever used a rotary phone?

Megana Rao: No. I had a fake Minnie Mouse rotary phone. It didn’t actually–

Craig: Spin?

Megana: Yeah. But it just looked like it should have when I was like five.

Craig: I can feel my own death. I can feel it. It’s coming. It’s chasing me down. The sort of weird crap that old people would say around me, now I say it.

John: Yeah. It feels like one of those, I think we’ve talked about Cook’s Illustrated and it will have a little sidebar column of like what is this gadget where they will show some gadget they found at a yard sale. What is this for? And it’s always a watermelon slicer or some kind of bizarre thing that you don’t really need but they sold at a certain point. Or a spoon for a very specific kind of dessert that no one eats anymore. It’s a hot custard spoon.

Craig: Oh, delicious. The whole world is like that for people in their 20s. There’s just a world of crap they just don’t know about.

John: Because who needs anything because you have your phone? Why do you need anything else?

Craig: What will be Megana’s thing? Like Megana when you’re 50, so how old are you now?

John: She doesn’t have to say that.

Craig: Oh, we’re not allowed to ask her how old she is.

Megana: I’m in my late 20s.

Craig: In your late 20s. Thank you. So throw in another 25 years. What are the things that you’re going to be remembering from your teenage years that kids will be like I’m sorry, what?

Megana: I mean, I guess I still had a flip phone when I was a teenager.

Craig: Oh my god. Flip phone. What?

Megana: Yeah. And I had like a Razr phone.

Craig: First of all, how about this? Phone? Because 25 years from now there’s not going to be one. It’s just going to be in your tooth, Megana. They’re just going to plant it in your tooth and then they’re going to go like phone?

John: I also feel like looking at my daughter’s age, and I’m sure your kids are the same, the idea of linear television is perplexing to them. The sense that all the channels are constantly broadcasting. Because she’s always just used to like I want to watch this show. I want to watch this show right now.

Craig: Correct.

John: And so when there are some shows that are happening live it’s just strange for them. Like sports obviously, we understand they are happening live, but everything else is just really weird, or what networks are. That will seem really strange 25 years from now.

Craig: No one knows.

Megana: I guess I used to carry around a digital camera when I was a high schooler.

Craig: Oh yeah.

Megana: And I recently found it and it’s just like a bunch of pictures of Ohio teens in basements, hanging out and eating cheese puffs. I think that’s already something that your daughters don’t do.

Craig: No. They do not have digital cameras. They don’t do that. No.

John: Why would you have that?

Craig: That’s ridiculous.

John: Or an iPod that is not also a phone.

Craig: Right.

John: Speaking of things changing and times moving on, also this past week it was announced that we have hired new people to run the Stark Program. So this is the Peter Stark Program at USC. It is the program I graduated from. It’s a producing program that I went through, Stuart went through, Megan, Chad, Matt, Dana Fox, Rawson, lots of people who are related to the show. The really great head of the Peter Stark Program, Larry Turman, was retiring and we needed to find a new person to run the program. And so I’ve spent six months on a search committee to help find this new person. And I actually learned a tremendous amount. So I want to talk about that.

But I also want to talk about the people who they hired to take over the program are Ed Saxon who is a very famous producer with Jonathan Demme. Won an Academy Award for Silence of the Lambs. Did other amazing movies. And Nina Yang Bongiovi whose credits include Fruitvale Station and a lot of other sort of amazing movies. So these are the two people who are going to be running the program. I’m just so excited for these folks to be sort of shepherding in the next generation of producers and sort of like what producers are becoming versus what they used to be back in the old days when it was a producer making a movie and now producers make TV shows and make all sorts of other things. So it’s been exciting to think about how you set up a program for success for the next 20 years.

Craig: I wasn’t interviewed. I don’t know why. I think I would have made a great head of the Stark Program. First order of business, eliminate the Stark Program. Oh wait, this is why I wasn’t interviewed. Of course.

John: I think that’s probably why. This is who can lead this program for ten years. It’s just such a different way of thinking about things.

Craig: Yeah. The guild will I think have a choice like that pretty soon for its executive director. That’s the sort of thing they have to figure out. Who is going to last for a while and who is going to do a good job?

John: But related to your concerns, Craig, also this last week there was an article in the Wall Street Journal called Financially Hobbled for Life which was talking about just how much debt people are taking on getting these graduate film degrees, or other degrees. And how tough it’s making their lives and sort of the real question of like when are these degrees worth it and when are they not worth it. Should we encourage people to get $100,000 in debt for something that cannot or is unlikely to pay off?

Craig: The answer is no. That’s an actual answer. There’s a fact. There’s a fact answer to this. I don’t think we should. I don’t think there is anywhere near the kind of return on investment that you would expect for something like that. It’s not even remotely close. And that’s a shame because the idea of what schools like for instance USC or the kind of school within the school like the Stark Program can do in and of itself is a good idea. But the cost is outrageous. It is unconscionable when you consider what you’re actually receiving. It is unethical.

John: Well, OK, but to push back against it, like I’m listing myself and the other eight people I just mentioned are all Stark grads, all of whom I think if you were to talk to them would feel like they would not have had their careers if they hadn’t gone through Stark. So for them it was–

Craig: I disagree with them.

John: You disagree.

Craig: Yes. I would push back on the pushback. Of course they would, because they’re talented. And the reason I know that is because look at all the people who went through the Stark Program who didn’t go anywhere? Because the Stark Program is not the answer. The Stark Program may speed things up. You know, sometimes they say a pool doesn’t raise the price of your house. Just makes it sell faster. Maybe that’s the case. I didn’t go to the Stark Program, or any film school program whatsoever.

There are just too many people who have had brilliant, wonderful careers as producers, writers, executives, directors, and so forth that haven’t gone through the Stark Program. And there have been too many people who have gone through who haven’t had amazing careers. Also, I’ve said this a million times, I think a lot of these institutions just cheat. They choose people who are clearly destined for success and then they claim credit for the success.

John: Well, I think with my former assistants I’ve tried to sort of do the opposite. If I’m picking them from the Stark Program they were already kind of preselected. They were already going to be tremendously successful. So, the fact that Rawson and Dana and Megan have done so great shouldn’t be a surprise because I was picking from a very small, limited pool. But I get that, too.

Craig: And that’s what the Stark Program does. So it looks like at somebody like Megana and they’re like, OK, you went to Harvard and you’re really smart and you’re a great interview and you’re just basically going to do really well. We’re going to let you in and then we’re going to tell everybody, look, if you come here you can be like Megana. No, Megana was already Megana. We’re not going to talk about Megana like she’s not here the whole time. This is great.

Megana, all right, Megana you didn’t go to the Stark Program?

Megana: I did not.

Craig: Did you do any film school?

Megana: I didn’t go to film school.

Craig: Great. You know what, Megana, you’re going to be all right. [laughs] You’re going to be all right. I’m down with that. And, again, I don’t mean to imply that the Stark Program is a bad program, at all. I think it’s a terrific program. Just costs too much. Way too much. Because how much does it cost? Are you allowed to say?

John: I’m allowed to say, but I actually don’t know what the number is. You can look it up. It’s on the website.

Craig: Got it. OK.

John: So it’s expensive, but it’s a two-year program. And I do think there are graduate programs, especially graduate film programs, that are probably not worth the money in the sense that you are not going to be able to justify having paid that much money. The Stark Program I personally feel like can justify that for people who are attempting to enter into careers that are highly paid and will pay them back. And so if you’re coming out of the Stark Program and you’re going to become a film executive, you’re going to become an agent, you’re going to become a producer-producer, there’s a good chance that it’s going to pay off in ways that I think some of the other programs it’s harder to justify.

If you’re coming out of a graduate film program to become a cinematographer that’s going to be harder to pay off. It just is what it is.

Craig: Yeah. Looks like the Stark Program per year not including room and board, etc., is $53,000.

John: That’s a lot of money.

Craig: That’s a lot.

John: That’s a lot of money. And it raises real issues about who can afford to pay $53,000 and what does it mean for the industry if the people who are coming out with this training and the skill set have to be able to pay $53,000. So those are all valid questions.

Craig: Yeah. So, you know, if it costs $5,000 I think it would be amazing. You know, some of these universities – side note. I know we did our university rant last time about AP tests and all that. But I was just thinking – I don’t even think, some of them have so much money, like my alma mater, Princeton University, has such an enormous endowment I’m not even sure what they’re charging tuition for anymore anyway. I mean, they have billions, with a B.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Many, many dozens of billions. It’s too much. They have too much money.

John: They have beautiful campuses. We’re doing the college tour and I’ve got to tell you some beautiful campuses up there. We’ve not visited Princeton, but I hope if I do get to visit Princeton I get to see the dorm room that they set aside which has a plaque for you and Ted Cruz. Because I hear it’s great and they’ve not updated it since then.

Craig: It was in fact torn down. That building was legitimately torn down. That is awful.

John: They did an exorcism.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Now if we were to do the Ted Cruz biopic, or the Craig Mazin biopic, there would be a scene of the two of you in college and your relationship then might be foreshadowing for the movie that is about to come.

Craig: Segue Man.

John: Which is our segue to our main topic today which is foreshadowing. And this came up because Megana and I were looking at a woman named Gayle wrote in to ask for follow up about spoilers. And spoilers are really kind of a form of foreshadowing. So Gayle writes, “Two psychologists at the University of San Diego conducted an experiment to determine whether people like hearing spoilers. I’ll spoil it for you. We think we don’t like spoilers but we actually do. When the researchers asked people if they like spoilers they would invariably say no, but then the researchers had one test group read a story and another test group read the same story but with a spoiler first. Each group then filled out a short questionnaire to determine how much they like the story.

“Turns out the spoiler enhanced the story. The spoiler group got greater satisfaction out of their story-reading experience than the non-spoiler group. The same held true across genres.”

Craig: Interesting.

John: Yeah. So what a spoiler is is the most extreme version of foreshadowing. Basically foreshadowing is giving you a sense of – helping you expect what is going to happen in the movie, the kinds of things to look out for. Obviously it’s an ancient technique. But I want to talk about it in terms of movies and TV shows and sort of why we use foreshadowing, how we use foreshadowing, and how much emphasis or non-emphasis should be placed on foreshadowing for the things that we are writing.

Craig: It’s funny, I never think about it. I must admit. I never think about it. It’s not anything I plan. That’s probably a good method to not plan for it. But it is also one of these very slippery terms. I think if you asked 12 different people what foreshadowing is you’ll get 12 different answers.

John: Yeah. And we tried to pull up examples or Googled for examples of foreshadowing and some of the examples were like well that’s just wrong. That’s actually not even related to what I think of about foreshadowing. So, some examples of foreshadowing, or techniques you sort of see for foreshadowing, is the small version of a thing. So it’s that foreshock before there’s a giant earthquake. There’s a kitchen fire and then later on in the movie there’s going to be a huge bonfire. You see an argument or a moment of snippiness between two characters that becomes a huge fight later on in the movie. So give you a sense of like here’s the small version of the thing, but the big thing is coming.

You also see people ask a question early on and the answer to that question pays off much later on. So, it’s setting up a payoff. Chekhov’s Gun we talk about all the time. That sense of if you see a gun hanging on the wall in the first act it’s going to need to go off in the third act or the audience is going to be frustrated. You only put in the relevant details. If a detail is not relevant it should be removed. And the corollary, if some detail seems like it’s being placed there we’re going to notice it as an audience and therefore be looking for it. And that could be very helpful in terms of managing expectation.

Craig: Yeah. I was looking at some of those lists as well and it struck me that there’s a confusion out there between symbolism and foreshadowing I think. Sometimes people confuse the two. Symbolism, which like any film technique can be used to great advantage or just stink, it’s basically the connection between visual or auditory motifs and dramatic motifs. So every time you see – the famous one is in The Godfather the use of oranges, the fruit. You know, the oranges are there and then people die and then the oranges are there and people die. That’s not foreshadowing. That’s just symbolism.

John: No, it’s symbolism.

Craig: It’s just not the same thing. Oftentimes they are occurring simultaneously. Whereas foreshadowing to me in its kind of purest, best dramatic usage is some sort of image or something that someone says or something that somebody does, or even the way their hair, or their clothes, or something that is metaphorically connected to something that occurs later in a very explicit way. So, you are walking along and you step on a toy car and you break it. And then 50 minutes later you’re in a car accident. That to me, and it’s not good foreshadowing, but that to me is the kind of thing I think of when I think of foreshadowing.

John: Yeah. I think you’re saying the word metaphorical I think is important, because there’s some stuff which is just clearly setup. Like we’re just setting up a thing that is going to pay off later on. So in Die Hard it’s like, oh, take off your shoes and rub your feet in the car, but that’s not really foreshadowing. That is just kind of a set up.

Craig: That’s a set up. Yeah.

John: It’s purely a set up. And jokes have setups. And sometimes there will be – a version of foreshadowing where I’m setting up that I’m going to take this act into a completely different place. And so it’s not sort of the thing you’re expecting, but in general setups are not the same thing as foreshadowing.

The most probably extreme example is some Shakespeare plays start with a dumb show, which is basically a little silent morality play that is just like a heightened version of what the whole thing is that you’re going to see. That’s sort of foreshadowing that there’s going to be a death here, there’s going to be a betrayal. There’s going to be a thing that’s happening here. That’s foreshadowing. It’s really setting some boundaries around what the story is going to be like so you’re expecting the genre, the tone, what’s possible to happen in the world of your story.

Craig: Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit practically about we do this and how we can help writers if they want to add a little bit of this zhoosh to their scripts.

John: Obviously like anything you have to sort of know where you’re going. And so you’re not going to foreshadow something until you see where things are ultimately going. To me it’s a question of tone and sort of like how are you introducing your audience and your readers to this is the kind of thing that could happen in the story. And you can’t do that unless you know sort of where you ultimately want to end up. That’s why I probably don’t write those scenes that have heavy foreshadowing until I’ve actually written the scenes later on that sort of do the thing that’s going to need to get there, because otherwise you don’t want to sort of foreshadow a thing that’s actually not going to happen or at least not going to be meaningfully resonant for the audience.

Craig: I think that’s absolutely crucial. I think if you try to foreshadow before you get to the thing that you want to foreshadow you are in danger of, well, here’s another swipe at film school, being a film school student. You can create something that is a bit up its own tushy as we say. It’s just a little self-indulgent.

Whereas just as we often will go back and set things up, OK, well you know what I need him to not have shoes here. Why? OK, if I do something back logically I can set something up. So setting up and paying off is about addressing logic issues often. When you have a moment that you think is really meaningful and interesting you can always ask is there something that happens earlier that can foreshadow this in such a way that – and I think this is key – when people watch it, the foreshadow moment, they don’t go, “Huh, foreshadowing.” And this is where the notion of surface sense comes into play.

So in cryptic crosswords, that’s right, I’m tying it back to puzzles, in cryptic crosswords these definitions are a lot of word play. Part of the definition is a word that is defining the answer, and then the rest is word play that will get you to the answer. So a very typical cryptic crossword, I’ve pulled this one from Wikipedia I think, “Utter nothing when there’s wickedness about.” In that case the definition word is “utter” and then “nothing when there’s wickedness about,” the nothing equals O like zero, and wickedness is vice. So you put vice around O and you get voice. And that is the answer, because utter is the same as voice as in the verb.

What makes that work as a clue is the surface sense that even though it’s a weird sentence it is a sentence. And it has some sort of meaning. It’s not syntactically garbage. And so when you’re creating these foreshadow moments you want to give them, I think, you want to land in this really sweet spot where it is not nothing, meaning it’s not something where, oh, if you go back there’s this incredibly subtle thing that people can debate over on Reddit because somebody thinks maybe it means something. You want to be able to go back and go oh that is clearly foreshadowing now that I know what happened. But when I was watching it in the moment it was neither something that blew by that I didn’t notice, nor was it something that had no other purpose except retroactive purpose.

And the example that you pulled out I think is great is the one from Jurassic Park.

John: Absolutely. So we talk about Jurassic Park a lot on the show. And I think we talk about how well handled the exposition was. We have the little film strip that talks through – it is an information dump, but it’s such an enjoyable information dump and our characters are getting the information that we’re going to get and it all works so well. But another moment from Jurassic Park that is worth paying attention to is obviously one of the thematic ideas is that nature finds a way. Even though they’ve made all these dinosaurs be female there can be ways that they can steal be breeding and they could be having extra babies.

There’s a moment early on in the story when they’re just arriving at the park and because the park is new he’s trying to put on his seatbelt but he only has two female adapters. And so he can’t actually fasten the seatbelt. And so he ends up tying the seatbelt together and making it work. And that is a great metaphor for what is going to actually happen to the dinosaurs in the park. Even though they’re just two female ends they found a way to breed.

And so it makes surface sense because it’s like, oh, he’s improvising a way to fasten a seatbelt. He’s solving a problem at the moment. And you don’t realize it is actually creating a metaphor for what’s going to be happening later on in the story. And that is foreshadowing that there’s going to be ways for these two female parts to actually generate a whole bunch of new dinosaurs.

Craig: Right. And there’s even a sense that there’s a point to that moment. The point is you’ve been telling me how great this park is and how advanced the technology is, but you screwed up the seatbelts. So it seems like a sign that you guys are actually maybe a little shoddy. And that is what we think that moment is. And that’s why I love that moment. It’s not just a thing. Actually you think you know why that’s there when it’s done. And then later upon looking back you realize it was actually doing quite a bit more work at that time than you understood. And that is really clever. And that’s an example of terrific foreshadowing.

John: Now, I would argue that foreshadowing can be useful in our two-hour dramatic features, but foreshadowing in our series and our limited series can honestly be even much more useful. Because you are going to be able to set up anticipation of events that are going to happen quite a bit later on down the story. So at the point where like you’ve kind of even forgotten that that thing was put out there, and then when it pays off you’re like oh my god that’s right, I had forgotten that that was a thing that could exist in this world. And now look at it.

And so there are many examples of things being foreshadowed in Game of Thrones for example that paid off well. I think there’s things that were foreshadowed in terms of in your own series Chernobyl. Those payoffs don’t happen within that first episode. They ripple through later on.

Craig: You’re absolutely right. I think that the television medium is so much conducive to foreshadowing because you can foreshadow eight episodes later. There could be something that you go all the way back. A lot of it again starts to blend with the concept of setup versus foreshadowing. But Watchmen is just an utter feast of foreshadowing. And setups and payoffs. It’s wonderful in that regard.

Yeah. You can do so much more. You can do really weird, interesting things and you can certainly screw around with time which helps the idea of foreshadowing. And even back-shadowing. So back-shadowing is kind of interesting – there is a moment – I learned a lesson by the way. I can’t talk about The Last of Us at all because I thought I said a very mild thing to say. We’re doing ten episodes. I just thought that wasn’t really – and then it was news. So I’m not doing any news. I’m going to just say that there is a moment in an episode that kind of weirdly back-shadows to something. It is like an echo of a thing.

And it’s small. But you can do these things with television that is very freeing. And one of the reasons why I’m never writing a movie again.

John: Yeah. I should say that people don’t really use – I’ve never heard the term back-shadow be used in a development sense.

Craig: No.

John: Back shadow or side shadow.

Craig: I think I may be the first person to ever say back-shadow. I just said it, yeah. Sorry.

John: So if you try to use back-shadow in a meeting with a development executive…

Craig: You’re fired.

John: They may walk out. Because they may recognize you heard that on Scriptnotes and it’s not a real thing. So we understand what it’s supposed to mean. There’s also a term which you can Google called side-shadowing. A literary critic, Gary Morson, created this thing. Which is setting up a detail that feels like it’s foreshadowing but deliberately is not foreshadowing something, which does feel true to life. There are things that seem, like ominous things that seem to come up and it’s like, oh, that must be setting up for some other thematic moment. And then it doesn’t because real life is full of things that seem like they have dramatic importance and ultimately don’t.

And so sometimes that can be a nice misdirection.

Craig: Yeah. Maybe shadow is what back-shadow is. Do we even need back on it?

John: Yeah, I don’t know.

Craig: Maybe fore was the thing that was changing the direction.

John: Yeah. There’s a light from behind shining forward onto the story you’re telling.

Craig: Shadows are things that come after something normally, like I’m here and then my shadow is behind me. And then…

John: I would say back-shadowing is a revelation happening in the present that recolors or recontextualizes what happened before. Does that feel like good back-shadowing?

Craig: Yeah. I think that that is absolutely – or sometimes I think the idea of back-shadowing is that somebody does something that is eerily familiar. Even though there would be no theoretical reason for them to do that. Or somebody says – I’m trying to think. There’s a movie where I feel like somebody says something at the end of the movie that a totally different character said in the beginning. And even though it’s a coincidence it’s very meaningful when you hear it. And you go, oh, that’s back-shadowing. I don’t know.

Maybe it’s just the end of foreshadowing. I don’t know.

John: Maybe it is. Maybe it’s just plot.

Craig: It’s the conclusion.

John: It’s the conclusion. I feel like perhaps setup and payoff are things we talk about in terms of plot and story versus foreshadowing is the kind of stuff that is just like theme and dramatic question. So it’s authorial intent. It is sort of why the story exists is that.

Craig: Yeah.

John: But it’s not the details or the mechanics of the story. And if you think about it that way that may be a reason why you don’t have to necessarily know all your foreshadowing as you sit down to write page one because those are things you’re going to discover over the course of writing your story.

Craig: Yeah. And I think practically speaking the two most important things to pull out of this discussion if you’re thinking about writing and using foreshadowing is that you definitely need less of this particular spice than you would think. It’s rather strong. And don’t force it in there. Wait for a moment to emerge later and then go back. Don’t start with foreshadowing. That’s bad.

John: That’s not going to work. All right. We have a bunch of listener questions saved up, so let’s ask Megana to read us some questions.

Megana: Great. Paul asks, “Do you have a home cinema set up or a cinema room? I was thinking about this as I had a home cinema set up for a long time but then ended up not having it for a while and I don’t miss it. Once the film or TV starts and I’m engrossed in the story having surround sound and all that stuff just doesn’t matter. I think the same thing applies to black and white films, too. For the first ten minutes you notice the lack of color, but after that it’s just the story that matters.”

John: Yeah. So we don’t have a home cinema set up. We have our library, which is our TV room, which is our only TV in the house. And it’s good. It’s fine. It sounds nice. But it’s not fancy by any stretch. It’s a couch and a TV. And I like great for that. And so I’ve never had the big home cinema set up. And kind of never wanted one.

At our old house we had this thing where we had a projector that would drop down and a screen that dropped down and we used it like three times. And we just vowed never, ever again to do that.

Craig: [laughs] I like that you guys vowed never, never again.

John: Never again. But Craig I’m curious. My perception is that your current house does not have really a home cinema, but I think your new house does.

Craig: Correct. Old house just has some TVs. There’s one room that has pretty good surround sound in it, so I guess that would roughly count. But, no, the new place has a proper little home cinema. And I personally suspect that I will not use it much. My wife loves it. And it’s a good social thing. So that’s probably why I won’t use it much.

John: For sure.

Craig: But people that like other people, they love it. They get to all sit together and watch stuff and have popcorn. And so I think it’s just a question of whether or not you like watching things with people or without. I’m perfectly fine, like Paul, I can watch something almost anywhere. What I need is good sound. That’s the most important thing to me.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Sound.

John: Sound. And, of course, to turn off motion smoothing.

Craig: Oh god.

John: The only thing that I will try to do in any hotel room I ever enter is to turn off motion smoothing, because it is just a curse against humanity.

Craig: I told you I played the trailer for Chernobyl for my lawyer. I was at my lawyer’s place and he was like can I see it. I was like, yeah, I’ve got it on my computer. I’ll use your AppleTV and we can play it on your TV. And he had motion smoothing on and I almost died.

John: Oh no. It looks like just bad home video.

Craig: I wanted to actually call up HBO and be like, “Sorry, cancel it. Don’t put this out. Apparently we shot a soap opera. I was not aware.” Ugh, it’s terrible.

John: It’s just the worst.

Craig: The worst.

John: We’re not the first people to observe this.

Craig: Mm-mm.

John: Let’s move onto, oh, this is the big question.

Craig: Oh, big question.

John: Megana, oh my god, so Megana steel yourself, because there’s a lot to dig in here.

Craig: Oh my god. Look at the size of this question. Megana, get yourself some hydration. Some oxygen. Here we go.

Megana: All right. Andy writes, “I want to start by saying thank you, not only for making Scriptnotes but for all the work you’ve done to raise assistant’s pay and secure us better treatment, which unfortunately is not why I’m writing. I was really distressed the other day to hear you mention a ‘friend’ on the show. A friend who happens to be my boss.”

Craig: Uh-oh.

Megana: “I stopped listening immediately. Working for this person has been a nightmare and they oversee an extremely toxic work environment. I get paid next to nothing and it’s clear they don’t really see me as a human being. This job has taken me to an absolute low point. Illegality shouldn’t be the standard for calling someone out, but as far as I know nothing has been done that’s been illegal. Violations of company policy for sure, but nothing that rises quite to that level. It goes beyond just being a bad boss, but he’s also not Scott Rudin, which shouldn’t be the standard either, but it’s something I’ve been keeping in mind.

“My boss seems like a pretty popular dude and I thought I was going nuts until I reached out to the person who had my job before me who basically reassured me and said you’re not going crazy, you’re in a toxic work environment and it’s OK to want out. Yet in that same conversation I was told if you stick it out this could be a great opportunity. And it’s totally possible that both are true. Now, I do want to be very clear. None of the above is your fault.”

Craig: Hold on. Pause for a second. Was there ever a question that this was our fault? I’m shook. All right, continue on.

Megana: But he is being clear that none of it is your fault.

Craig: OK. Thank you. [laughs]

Megana: “And I’m sure you have no way of knowing how your friends treat their subordinates. I’m sure some of the world’s worst bosses are lovely over dinner. Friendly to their peers. Et cetera. But I do want to know how do you hold other screenwriters and showrunners accountable? And what would you recommend I do next?”

Craig: Whoa.

John: Yeah. So, Andy wrote in and I actually emailed him back and said this is a combination of two discussions we had. I don’t know if Andy is male or female. I don’t know who he is writing about specifically. And so we have many friends who work in various bits of the film and television industry. And we’ve mentioned a lot of people on the show. So I don’t know who Andy is talking about.

And it’s tough because we’ve talked so much about treating people better and being good human beings and to hear that somebody who we know is not being a good human being to his assistant is frustrating and maddening. So I just want a conversation about what do we do.

Craig: Well, I don’t know what we can do. I mean, well first of all Andy I don’t know who you’re talking about. And I don’t know if it’s somebody that we’re both friends with, or if it’s just somebody that I’m friends with, or somebody that John is just friends with. But I don’t know who it is. And I definitely don’t – I will say I don’t know anybody that I’m friends with who I am aware treats their employees poorly. So, if I encountered that I would absolutely talk to them and kind of figure out what’s going on, unless I felt that there would be no point in talking to them, that that was who they were. At which point I think I would just detach myself from them, because that’s not cool.

Yeah. The only way I would think to hold each other accountable is if you’re dealing with a rational person is just to have a frank heart-to-heart, without – this is the hard part – without seeming like you’re being their parents, you know. Because nobody wants somebody to suddenly scold-y dad them.

So it’s hard.

John: Yeah. Something I wrote to Andy is that obviously we don’t know who this person is they’re talking about, but also we don’t mention people on the show who we know to be assholes.

Craig: That is true.

John: And so there’s people who – someone could do a forensic analysis of the show and there’s a reason why certain people are not mentioned on the show because they’re assholes.

Craig: We have not mentioned so many people. Just because we haven’t mentioned you doesn’t mean you’re an asshole.

John: That’s true. That’s true. But there’s been situations where you and I have known that a person is terrible and we felt like we’ve had to sort of step around talking about them.

Craig: Yup.

John: That’s the reality. But those people were not also being referred to as our friends. And so the folks who we’re bringing on as guests for example, like we believe them to be actually genuinely good people to work with. And if we found out information that was not that case we would have issues.

Craig: And we would always try to deal with that privately. This is not the kind of show – and I’m sure somebody is going to say you guys have an obligation to say who is and who is not an asshole. No we do not. It’s important to not punish people for helping. So we do a podcast to try and help people. We don’t charge any money. I mean, there’s the premium feed if you want to get the bonus episode, like today’s bonus episode, but you can listen to this show for free and that’s the way it’s been for so long. We don’t even have ads.

So we’re trying to help people. And I think sometimes there’s this deal where people go, well, since you’re out there helping people you should also – you have an obligation to do the following things that I demand you do. The last thing I would want to be is a show where we just start running down people and accusing them of being jerks, especially when we personally haven’t dealt with them.

What we do try and do is talk to each other behind the scenes. And I will say that most jerks are notorious. I don’t think I have any private information about a jerk that nobody else has, for instance.

So, in terms of Andy what you should do next. I think that everybody is a bit different. There is bad behavior that I think is the sort that everybody who works there will agree stinks. However, it affects people in different ways. And that doesn’t make one person strong and one person weak. It just means we’re different. We have different tolerances for different kinds of stresses.

Your friend said if you stick it out this could be a great opportunity. Mm-hmm. But probably not for you. Because it’s making your miserable. I don’t think if you’re feeling miserable you’re going to get to the place where suddenly a great opportunity emerges. I think it’s impossible to rise above that misery. It seems like you should be looking somewhere else.

John: I agree that Andy should be looking someplace else. It may be worth talking with other people in that office and just getting a sense of whether other people are aware of sort of what’s actually happening. Because they probably are, but maybe they’re not. If you are the only kind of assistant and everyone else is sort of at a different level they may not really be aware of that. So this is not to put out the big alert, but just say like, hey, I’m not happy here and I’m going to be moving on and looking for a different job, but I want to know whether you’re seeing what I’m seeing here, because this is not cool.

Because just like Craig and I feel like we have some responsibility to sort of like if there’s somebody who we know is behaving badly who we know about to sort of talk with them about that, you may feel some responsibility to sort of just let the others around know that this is what’s happening, because they may just not see it.

I think you exit. I don’t think you exit loudly. But I think you exit with making it clear that this is not working for you and this is the reason why it’s not working for you.

Craig: Yeah. I don’t know what the best way is to leave something. I just don’t know. I wish I did. I always worry about people. It’s hard out there. Also, sometimes I think we somewhat cavalierly say you should get out of there and do you have another job lined up? I mean, that’s the other issue is you’ve got to pay bills.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Andy, ultimately you have to listen to your own heart here. And figure out what your tolerances are and what will make you happy. But what I don’t think you should do is gamble your present on some possible future with this particular job. That is not – I did this way too many times myself. You get to the prize at the end of the road and you go that was not worth it at all. Because I think I could have got this thing I just got without going through all that misery.

So, at the very least start looking.

John: Yeah. You should. Cool.

Craig: All right, Megana, what’s next? Geez, that was heavy. Do we something lighter?

Megana: Oof.

John: This is going to be so light.

Craig: Oh, I just heard an “oof.”

Megana: OK, so the Captain asks, “OK, I just had my first film come out in theaters. I should be ridiculously happy, right? Nope. I literally just saw it. The film is horrible. I’m embarrassed by the film. I shared credit with the director and I was given the sole story by credit as well. I sold my original screenplay to a major studio. The director rewrote it. I was not involved at all. I was banished. The entire film is completely different from what I wrote. I mean, it’s utterly unrecognizable other than the glimpses of what could have been.

“My question is this – does this hurt my career? And how badly? And what if it’s actually successful or what if it bombs? I do have another film coming out this year, so there is light at the end of the tunnel. That film is the one I can stand behind. I also just sold a pitch to Netflix. So I’ve got some things going on, but this one kills my soul because it’s my first.

“Please tell me my career is not dead before I even get started. And what do you advise moving forward?”

John: Oh, Captain, My Captain.

Craig: My Captain.

John: So it’s OK to be bummed and be sad and so frustrated because you had hopes and expectations of this movie because you wrote something that you felt was good and what came out is just not good. And we’ve all been there. I’ve had had those frustrations of like, oh, that was not the movie I hoped to make at all and I just don’t know how it’s going to fare in the world. But, man, you’re so lucky because you got a movie following up on that. You sold a pitch. You’re doing great. And actually having a produced credit, even if it’s not spectacular, will kind of help you is my belief. Craig, what do you think?

Craig: Yeah. I mean, I was in this position. This happened to me. So I don’t think your career is dead. I wouldn’t catastrophize, although it is certainly a painful thing. My then writing partner, Greg, and I, the first movie we ever wrote was produced and the director, you know, did not do what I would have hoped tonally, etc. And I wouldn’t say that the movie utterly unrecognizable, but it definitely – it was kind of an oh-what-could-have-been sort of thing. And it was a flop.

And does it hurt your career? Generally speaking in features no. And here’s why. Everybody kind of knows the drill. Everybody. I think they finished shooting Borderlands. So I wrote a script for Borderlands movie and Eli Roth came on to direct it and they have this amazing cast. They have Cate Blanchett. And they have Jack Black. And they have Jamie Lee Curtis. And Kevin Hart. And it’s a really great cast. But, you know, I’ve been over here doing my TV stuff and he’s been over there. I mean, I had a couple of emails with Eli, you know, but I’m pretty sure that he kind of did his own pass on the script. And then they were shooting and I wasn’t there.

So, I don’t know, you know, and that’s kind of how it is in features. We sort of just disappear and other people carry the ball. Like we come out on the field and we sort of design a play and then we leave the field and we drive home and then at the end of the game someone calls us and says here’s what happened. You know, you root for it. And you hope it turns out well. But there are times when it doesn’t and then you are embarrassed. And frustrated. But angry. And then, of course, you’re also blamed for it. So, like Twitter or whatever.

But that all fades away. What we generally get credit for in features is writing something that gets produced. The people hiring us are studios. The people who decided to produce that movie, studio. And what did they base that decision on? The script. So you did your job. If they blame it on you, they have to blame it on themselves. And they’re not going to do that. They’ll just blame it on the director. So you did your job.

Having a hit helps. Having a bomb does not kill you. Definitely you and your reps did the right thing because as you say you have another film coming out this year. That means you capitalized on some of the heat of getting that screenplay produced. And you just sold a pitch. The key is you’ve got things going on.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Yes, your first – just like in sex a lot of times the first time is really bad. That’s kind of how it goes. It’s disappointing, muddled, uncomfortable, and you kind of wonder is that really all this is about. And then it’s not.

John: Craig, my first movie was Go and it was actually really very successful and well liked.

Craig: Some people have great first sex.

John: So I’m just saying I knocked it out of the park that first one. It didn’t actually make that much money. Craig is right. I think, you know, for a screenwriter it does not honestly hurt you that much because you got the movie made and that’s fantastic. A bad movie will hurt a director and put a director in director jail. There’s not really writer jail the same way. You’re going to be fine.

And when you go in for those general meetings at places it’s fair to say like, oh, you wrote that movie. Yeah, you know what it didn’t turn out the way I wanted it turn out and it was a little bit frustrating, but I was excited that it got made. You can say that and that’s great to say. And you’re being honest and everyone knows that stuff like that happens.

And the fact that you share, you and the director have an “and” between your names it’s clear of what the director did. The director is going to take most of the blame for that rewriting. Don’t be worried about sort of you’ll read reviews. If this movie gets bad reviews maybe your name will be mentioned as writing a terrible script. That’s frustrating but that’s just the business, too.

Craig: It is. And basic rule of thumb is that directors get blamed for features and writers get blamed for television. And that makes somewhat sense because directors are in charge of the features and writers are in charge of the television shows. And they focus in on that sort of thing. Don’t read the reviews. Don’t look at any of it. And I know that you are going to regret your first time out the gate not being wonderful and miraculous and beautiful. That’s OK. It just means when something good happens it’s going to feel great. When you match up with the director and it’s hand in glove and the art that emerges is what you intended or even better, that’ll feel great.

John: Yeah.

Craig: You’ve just got to prevail, Captain.

John: Captain, I do wonder if there was a moment thinking back was this situation foreshadowed. Because I will say that when I’ve had these movies that have gone south I can always think back to like, oh yeah, there was that meeting and that person said that thing. That giant red flag should have been there and I should have recognized like, oh, this is not going to work well.

Craig: Yeah. A lot of times you know. But sometimes you don’t. Sometimes it’s a big, yeah, what’s going to happen? It’s a surprise.

John: It’s a surprise. Megana, let’s do Doug from LA as our last question.

Megana: Doug from LA writes, “I’m curious about the Hallmark/Lifetime Christmas movie genre. They make a million of them because people love them. As I read a bunch of these scripts I’m finding them lacking in stakes, characters, and actual comedy. Even though they’re kind of considered rom-coms, or are they? Anyway, my question is if someone is trying to write a Hallmark style script would you follow this path that seems to work for them or try to go deeper in all of these areas while risking the notes or rejections ‘that’s not very Hallmark?’

“Are there specific holiday TV movie guidelines? I’d love to hear your thoughts?”

John: So Doug is asking really about they’re kind of programmers. I mean, I think the way that they used to sort of make movies of the week that would follow a really set template, there’s a Hallmark or Lifetime Christmas movie kind of template. And you’re putting your finger on it which is they do have kind of weird stakes, like very low stakes. And they’re funny-ish, but they’re not hilarious. And they’re romantic in a sense, but they’re not sort of doing full rom-com stuff.

There’s a very good Simpsons episode from I think last season where they’re shooting a Christmas movie in Springfield and it’s just a really great exploration of those tropes. Listen, I think if you were try to write one of these movies and completely blow up the genre then it would speak to sort of a misunderstanding of like what people actually really love about them which is probably some predictability and something about the form. So I don’t think you should try to write one of these movies because you don’t seem to like them.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, there is a version where the point of the movie is that it is a subversion and weird turn on the genre on its ear version of a Hallmark movie. But obviously that wouldn’t be for the Hallmark Channel. I think John is absolutely right. What we know the Hallmark Channel has figured out is what their audience likes. And we can get a little stuck in the trap of feeling like we’re separated from our audience. If you don’t know the people who are watching the Hallmark Christmas movies and you look at the Hallmark Christmas movies and all sorts of criticisms you may think that it’s worth your time to go in and fix it. Or you may just be judgmental of the people that are writing them.

But spend some time with the people who watch them. If you are making something for your friends, you’re probably not making it in such a way that would go down easily with your grandmother. And you don’t want to hurt your grandmother. You don’t want to hurt her feelings. You don’t want to disgust her or horrify her.

If you were going to make something for your grandmother, if she’s turning 90 and she wants special from you, she asks you to make a five-minute little movie for her you will make something that is comforting and wonderful for her. And that takes its own talent and skill. By the way, to write a Hallmark movie after there have been I don’t know how many Christmas movies they’ve made, but it’s actually really hard now. You know? You’ve got to come up with something new. There’s got to be some new version.

John: But not too new. I mean, there’s a form to it. And also I think it’s important to understand with all of these movies sometimes how they’re made dictates what actually happens in the story. Because they’re shot with incredibly specific schedules. And basically you have to hit a crazy number of pages per day, which means very few locations. Very few scenes. Longer scenes. And very simple coverage. There’s reasons why they have to be a certain way.

I think it was a previous One Cool Thing. This last year there were two gay sort of Hallmark/Lifetime Christmas movies that both sort of did the things but were also sort of like, you know, the gay versions of those things. And they were lovely. They were also examples of the form.

Craig: Yeah. I have a friend who writes Hallmark movies. I think quite a few of the Christmas ones. And he is gay. And they have been kind of growing up over there a little bit, which is nice.

But, yeah, I would say Doug unless you have a desire to skewer the genre and be kind of weird and cool in that regard, if you’re trying to write a hallmark style script then do it. Yeah. You follow the path and do the conventions. Try and be interesting. Just try and be better, maybe. If you think like, OK, I can stay within the conventions but maybe I can sparkle up the jokes a little bit, or sparkle up the this or that, if you think you can do better, do better. But I’ve got to tell you. You might not be able to. Because they’ve perfected that over there.

John: We were talking through Set it Up. Set it Up is a much better version of some of the tropes of that kind of rom-com. I guess it’s truly a rom-com, it’s not a holiday movie. But there’s a version of Set it Up which was more like a Hallmark movie or a Lifetime movie and she was able to elevate it and sort of be the more sparkly version of that. So, try to write the sparkly version of it. If it’s the same amount of dialogue to shoot they can do it. It’s just sometimes that form is really what’s dictating why the stories work the way they do.

Craig: Yeah. I have a feeling that the Hallmark executives have received 4,000 handwritten letters regarding the movies they make and they know what their – they know what their folks like and they know what they don’t.

John: Absolutely. All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is actually a genuinely cool One Cool Thing.

Craig: I saw this. So good.

John: This is so good. So I’ll link to an article by Pam Belluck writing for the New York Times, but this is a man who suffered from a stroke and lost the ability to speak and other abilities as well, but still had thinking thoughts and speech inside of him. And so usually what he was doing was using a special pointer so he could tip his head to aim at a pointer with all these letters on it and sort of spell that way. It’s incredibly slow.

What they did is they implanted wires into his brain to figure out basically he still had the instinct of speech, and so the neurons are firing into sort of make the mouth shapes and stuff. They were able to read those and do sort of AI machine learning to figure out what things are firing to try to make what shapes and actually be able to form words. And so he was actually able to generate speech or sort of written speech just based on his brain function.

And so it’s not that he’s thinking a thought and they’re creating that. It’s the intention to speak is being able to translate into actual speech which I think is amazing and really speaks to some great potential for new technologies down the road. I’m so excited about this.

Craig: Yeah. This is the kind of thing when you look at it you go, oh, we see what the end game is for sure. Because right now they’re using this algorithm to interpret the brain waves into the words that they think the brain waves would have formed. And in the article it says about 50% of the time when it comes to single words the algorithm gets it right. When he was given sentences on a screen to essentially repeat in his mind the algorithm did even better. Well, if it’s at 50% now it’s going to be at 100% at some point definitely. Whether that’s five years from now, or ten, we don’t know. Or, by the way, it could be one year from now. These things move quickly.

John: And of course it doesn’t have to be perfect to be incredibly helpful and useful. I think about the technologies we’ve used to sort of enable input and so like everything from glasses to cochlear implants to other things to help people get the information in. To be able to get the information out in a different way just feels really smart.

The same article was talking about how you still have the instinct to move your hands in certain ways. And so they sometimes can use that to actually figure out like, OK, it’s as if you’re typing but you’re not actually typing and then people can sort of mentally type to do stuff.

I was watching some of the most recent spelling bee and you know how kids will write on their hands for stuff? I noticed a lot of them were typing in the air to figure out how stuff is. I feel like we all know – so many people know how to type. I think that’s going to be another way to sort of get those letters out of people’s brains and into screens.

Craig: Yeah. That kind of visualization, translating. It’s a really cool thing. And to kind of unlock the experience of people so that they’re not trapped and they’re alone and simply passively observing but can interact I think is going to extend their lives. And if it doesn’t actually extend their lives it will certainly make their lives so much more enjoyable. And that’s wonderful.

So hooray for science. Science did it again. Not freaking crystals. And I would like to also point out that in the thousands of years that people have been praying to god, prayer has never done what these scientists did. Interesting. Just thought I’d throw that in there. Just a quick mention.

John: [laughs] Small little grenade tossed there at the end.

Craig: Just a tiny little grenade. Right there. Roll it on at the end.

My One Cool Thing is far less controversial than what I just said. It is a new game that I think is available on Steam and iOS and maybe on Android. I don’t know. I don’t pay attention to Android. And it’s called Chicken Police. And I have a link here to a review in the Washington Post. It is a delight. Chicken Police is a film noir story with some sort of mini puzzles throughout. But really more of a kind of whodunit that you’re following along with. And everyone is a human except for like their hands and their heads, which are animals. Some of them are chickens. Some of them are hedgehogs. Some of them are dogs. Some of them are cats. One is a deer.

And it’s fascinating. And it’s funny. It’s very clever. It’s sort of unto itself. It’s not a genre. It’s not like people are sitting around and going people should do the thing where we used to do film noirs but using animals. We should do that again. No. No one has ever done that. But now it is being done. And it’s a great way to wind down at night I find. So, highly recommend – and by the way the artwork is terrific. The voice acting is really good. They put money into this.

John: Great.

Craig: So my One Cool Thing this week is Chicken Police.

John: And what platform are you playing it on? Because do you have your PS4 up there in Calgary?

Craig: Well I have the PS5 up here in Calgary.

John: Oh, nice.

Craig: Hello.

John: I can’t even get one in LA. But you have one up there in Canada. It all makes sense.

Craig: I’m adapting a videogame.

John: That’s true. You are adapting a giant videogame.

Craig: I know a guy. [laughs]

John: You know a guy.

Craig: I know a guy at PlayStation. Yeah, you know. So that helped. Definitely the PlayStation connection was the key. I played a couple of cool games so far. Maybe I’ll save those for next One Cool Things.

John: Excellent. Well that is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced, as always, by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Michael Karman. 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 I am @johnaugust. Craig is not really on Twitter. But he sometimes will post a funny gif to things.

We have t-shirts and they’re lovely. You can find them at Cotton Bureau, including the brand new Scriptnotes 10th anniversary t-shirt.

We have some plans for our 10th anniversary that Craig doesn’t even know about yet. So, I’m going to tell him off-mic, but stick around because cool things are coming.

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.

You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the ones we’re about to record on DVD commentaries. Craig, Megana, thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you guys.

Megana: Thank you guys.

[Bonus segment]

John: So, Craig, do you remember DVD commentaries?

Craig: I sure do.

John: What DVD commentaries have you recorded? Where can we hear you do a DVD commentary?

Craig: I recorded DVD commentaries for Scary Movie 3 and for Scary Movie 4. I assume for Superhero. I don’t think I did any for Identity Thief. And I don’t think I did anything for like the movies before. So I’ve just done a few of them.

John: I’ve done a few as well. So I did the first Charlie’s Angels. I did the second Charlie’s Angels which is where I first met the Wibberleys who were the cowriters of that film. I did one for The Nines, which was my own movie, so that would make sense for me to record it. So I did one with Ryan Reynolds and I did one with Melissa McCarthy.

They were a thing. They were a thing that would be added onto the actual physical DVDs when physical DVDs were something that people bought and collected. And I just don’t hear about them anymore and I don’t think people are recording them the same way. Partly because DVDs just don’t sell the same way. And I don’t think there’s a pent up demand to have that extra thing on the disc to make the disc be more valuable than just the movie.

Craig: Yeah. And also they just kind of stank I found. I know that some people really enjoyed listening to them, but I don’t. I just want to watch the movie. I don’t want to hear somebody explain it while I’m watching it.

John: I don’t think I’ve ever actually watched a full DVD commentary. That’s actually part of the problem is that, you know, I don’t think it’s actually the right combination of form and function. If I want to hear a conversation about the movie I just want to hear the conversation and I don’t want it to be interspersed with the film underneath it.

Craig: Yeah. Nor do I want the person who is making the commentary forced to comment on what is onscreen. Because what ends up happening with DVD commentaries is like, OK, yeah, so this was an interesting day. Blah-blah. It’s like you’re constantly restarting a conversation. And you never really get anywhere. I don’t really know what the point is with those things.

John: Yeah. And they weren’t super expensive, but they were expensive enough that they really – it did count. And they had to decide like, OK, when are we going to get studio time to do this because most DVD commentaries were in the era before everyone had a microphone and we could just do this podcast. And I think honestly Craig you ruined them. I think you proved that we did not need them because it’s actually much more helpful than a year after the product came out to hear the commentary is to have commentary immediately after the episode aired, which is what you did with Chernobyl.

Craig: And to divorce that commentary from visuals. And just have a conversation with somebody so that the conversation could unfold naturally and allow – I think an inquisitor is really important. Having somebody ask questions as opposed to leaving somebody there alone to go, “Oh, yeah, OK, so this is blah-blah-blah.” You know? No. Let’s have a conversation. Much more interesting.

John: Yes. So you did the same with Damon Lindelof for Watchmen. And they became successful and highly listened to podcasts which makes a lot of sense. And I think because you’re splitting them from the linearity of the movie or the episode, like you’re not having to track this minute versus that minute, you could talk in an overall sense of like you’ve just watched the episode so now let’s have a discussion the same way that Talking Dead, that show that follows The Walking Dead, can have a discussion of like what happened in the episode rather than sort of minute-by-minute.

Craig: Yeah. And that was maybe the only thing that I actually did that was different was that it was me. It wasn’t people who were watching the show and then having a fan discussion after. There were a few such podcasts for Chernobyl, but I think it was the first one where the person who created the show sat there and kind of did this with an interviewer after each episode. And it was initially, the theory was just that there were things I wanted people to know that were not going to be in the show.

And the nice part about a podcast is, you know, so you didn’t pay for it. It’s not like you bought a DVD and then, oh, including exciting features. You’re like, well, that’s part of the reason I bought this was for the exciting feature. And then I listened to the feature and the podcast stank. It was free so if you didn’t like it you could just turn it off and not listen to it. And you could listen to it in your car. You didn’t have to be at home watching it on TV.

It was more fun doing the Watchmen one because I could be the inquisitor and I could be the fan and ask Damon all the questions that I really, really wanted to know. And put him on the seat. That was fun.

John: There’s also a different relationship to authority because anything that got put on that DVD would have to have sort of all the legal clearances and all that stuff. Versus anyone can record a podcast. And while I’m sure there were discussion with HBO about stuff on that podcast, there was more freedom than there would have been if you had recorded a commentary to go on the actual disc.

Craig: There was as far as I can tell total freedom. I don’t think we got any messages back. It was interesting. The first time I mentioned it to HBO, I don’t know if I’ve said this on the show before, they were interested, but they were tentative. Like it’s a large company and we don’t do new things quickly. We think about new things. We talk about new things. We have meetings about new things. And so they said we want to get on the phone to discuss this with you and there was a phone call with like 30 people on it from HBO.

And they were all kind of trying to wrap their heads around it. I was like guys let me just cut to the chase. It’s super easy. It costs almost nothing. And it’s going to be me and a guy talking for an hour on audio. And then you can listen to it. And if you hate it, just don’t put it out there. But if you like it, we will. That’s all you need to know. Don’t panic and don’t overthink it. It’s very simple.

And that is one of the beauties of the podcast format. Very simple.

John: Yeah. Now I think the other advantage to a podcast format is it’s not bound to time. It doesn’t have to come out the same time as the product came out. So Phil Hay, his One Cool Thing was An Invitation to The Invitation which was a podcast about The Invitation which he was not participating in but it was about the thing he had made. And could focus on that. Or listen to like Office Ladies which is two stars of The Office talking about going through given episodes of The Office ten years later. And it’s a way to sort of go back and celebrate ad thing that doesn’t have to be married to the physical disc or this new printing of The Office DVDs. It can just exist out there in the world by itself. And it can have folks who were involved in the original thing, like Office Ladies, or like Phil’s it doesn’t have to have the imprimatur of the actual artist there.

Craig: That’s right.

John: It’s actually a good use of film criticism degrees, to talk through what this thing meant when it came out and what the resonance is for it now.

Craig: And for the podcasts where you are dealing with the author of the show, one thing that’s nice is that it’s rather a throwback to the old days when you would have Dick Cavett sit with somebody and have a real discussion for an hour that was intelligent and thoughtful and was not bound by a need to titillate or amuse or excite, but really was just, look, we’re going to talk. And if you find this interesting you’ll listen.

But the object of the podcast – for instance for the Chernobyl podcast the real object was to be transparent about an adaptation of history. Not to sell tickets. Or to drive viewership. Because I presumed that nobody would find a podcast first and then an HBO television show second. It would be the other way around. So it really was motivated by a pro-social instinct to put something good out there that would be helpful. And that’s something that DVD commentaries, you just can tell that somebody was forced into a room by gunpoint to do this. [laughs] Nobody wants to be there.

That’s why my favorite ones are Ben Affleck talking about Armageddon, which is amazing. And Arnold Schwarzenegger talking about Conan the Barbarian which is also spectacular. Because one of them is drunk and cranky. And the other one is super into himself but in a childlike way. It’s really great. I love those two. The rest stink.

John: So I’m thinking about my two examples with the second Charlie’s Angels. So I recorded the DVD commentary with the Wibberleys about Charlie’s Angels 2 and we had actually sort of hashed out does that story point make any sense at all. Where did that come from? We just don’t even know. And we could have that conversation but we were also having to keep up with the movie itself a little bit. So we were always feeling like, oh, we can’t dig too deep into it because the movie keeps rolling forward.

Craig: Exactly. It keeps rolling.

John: And then a week or two ago I did an episode of this Spy Master’s podcast where we talked about the second Charlie’s Angels. I thought we were going to talk about the first Charlie’s Angels, which I love and the second Charlie’s Angels which I don’t love as much. But I also feel like I can be kind of honest on this because it’s like, you know, listen, there are some things that just don’t work about this and I have frustrations. And I could have those – I can have a conversation that would never make it onto the DVD copy because it doesn’t promote the movie. It doesn’t speak to the movie’s artistic success, but was just honest about sort of like this is what the intention was, this is what the reality was. And have those come out.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Nice.

Craig: Exactly.

John: Craig, so even though you destroyed DVD commentaries, I think in some ways–

Craig: Feels good.

John: In the destruction you liberated the form for the next.

Craig: I am the breaker of chains.

John: You are the breaker of chains. Don’t stop breaking those chains. And enjoy the Calgary Stampede.

Craig: Thanks John. I’ll see you next week.

John: Bye.

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The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 507 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show what is preproduction? Or what the hell is Craig doing right now?

Craig: That’s a great question.

John: Then it’s another round of How Would This Be a Movie where we take a look at stories we found in the news or just online somewhere and discuss how they could be filmed entertainment for the world to enjoy. We’ll also look at a related question: why do certain movies get made? What is it about some projects that make them more or less likely to actually go into production?

And then in our bonus segment for premium members, if you were a time traveler Craig what would you want on your cheat sheet? If you had like a one-page back and front of stuff you wanted to carry with you back into the past what stuff would you want to put on that sheet?

Craig: OK, well mostly prescription medications. But let’s get into it.

John: Let’s do it. All right. Let’s start with preproduction. So, Craig, you were gone last week because you were in the throes of preproduction. We described you as being buried under an avalanche of preproduction.

Craig: Indeed.

John: Talk to us about – I don’t think we’ve really talked about what preproduction is.

Craig: Yeah, I don’t think so.

John: So let’s really go through it both for a writer’s perspective but also a showrunner’s perspective which is different. So talk to us about the kinds of things that are involved in preproduction and really what are the boundaries of preproduction versus production and when does preproduction really start for you?

Craig: Well, the easiest question to answer is what the boundary is. The boundary is once the cameras start rolling you’re in production. Every day prior to that you’re in preproduction. On a television show where there are multiple episodes individual episodes will have prep going on while you’re producing other episodes.

The time you spend in advance of shooting in prep varies from project to project. The rule of thumb for feature films, for an average feature film, let’s say we’re talking about a $40 million movie, typically you’re looking at three or four months of prep. For a show like the one we’re doing we have been prepping for many, many, many months. And we will continue to prep throughout as new episodes come up. The basic gist of it is if you think about all the things that have to be in place when you’re shooting, all of those have to be planned. And that’s what’s happening in preproduction.

So every department is planning the locations you’re going to be shooting, the sets you’re going to be building, the clothing that the actors are going to be wearing, the casting of the actors, the stunt work that’s going to be required, the picture cars, meaning the cars that show up on the screen when you’re driving, what’s all that look like. What cameras do we need? How many cameras do we need? Do we need cranes? Do we need other special arms for the cameras? Who is going to be handling the video playback? Who is going to be recording the sound? Makeup. Hair. Visual effects.

Every single tiny little thing has to be figured out, including a bunch of things that I don’t necessarily concentrate on, but also have to be figured out like who is doing the catering and what are the trailers going to be. And, oh, props. All the fabrication of things. You know, everything actually happens in prep. And if it doesn’t, well, that’s going to be a sad day of shooting.

John: Well perhaps our listeners have watched a heist film. And so you’ve seen the preparation that goes into a heist. It really is kind of analogous because you are trying to plan for this event which is the start of production and you have to think about what are all the things we need and what are the things that could go wrong and how are we going to be ready for this. So you’re assembling a team. You’re getting the resources together. You’re figuring out how you’re going to do these things.

And what’s different about prep for a movie or prep for a pilot is that in this case of the series you have to be thinking about not just how you’re going to make this first episode, but what are the decisions you’re making right now that are going to carry through the whole show and especially this first season? You’re planning not just for one hour of entertainment. It’s multiple hours and a huge schedule to go through. So the decisions you’re making with this first director are going to ripple through to all of the other directors on future episodes. And these are fundamental decisions you’re making right now.

Craig: They are. And it’s really dangerous. You have the ability to mess things up before you even start and to mess them up permanently. So you have to be really careful and you have to think twice. There is a tendency, I think a natural human tendency, to want to just arrive to yes. Get to certainty as quickly as you can. But I find that it’s really important to listen to the nagging little voice at the back of your head going, “Well, wait a second though.” Maybe this is a problem for people who have stronger egos than I do because I think sometimes I hear stories about showrunners just like, “I’ve decided this,” and everyone is like, “But we’re the experts in this little area and we’re saying this.” “No, I’m saying…”

Anytime anyone, I don’t care who it is, it could be the guy delivering lunch, if that guy is like, “Hmm, that looks a little too red, don’t you think?” I’d be like, what, oh I mean, hold on. Does it? Let me consider that carefully because it might. Because if you don’t measure a thousand times to cut once you’re in trouble.

Example, hair. Very simple thing you’d think, hair. It’s not simple. That’s going to be the hair. So, we’re going to be shooting for quite some time. Once we figure out what Pedro Pascal’s hair looks like that’s the hair. Every day. Every day. If you blow it then every day you’re going to walk in in the morning, you’re going to look at him, he’s going to look at you, and you’re both going to go, “Great.” And he and I will both think the same thing, “Craig is an idiot.”

So, got to get it right.

John: Yeah. Now, let’s talk about what the start of prep really is because there’s this sort of murky period that I’ve found when a project is like we’re going to do this thing but it’s not quite clear when we’re going to actually shoot it, so the initial onramp into prep is really strange. And so talk to us about for something like this or for something like Chernobyl what were those first hires and when do you get sort of permission to actually make those first hires who are going to help you to put the rest of the team together?

Craig: Well, so sometimes we’ll call it pre-prep, which is kind of an amusing idea, but I mean, pre-pre-prep. So, the first thing that happens typically is in order to get a green light for your movie or your television show there needs to be a budget. And the only way to have any reasonably useful budget is to do some work. Typically that means figuring out roughly where you’re going to shoot and looking at some key locations and determining what you might need to build and not build.

To do that you have to start with this first key component and that is a producer. The producer in movies that I’m talking about is typically a unit production manager, sometimes they are elevated to executive producer or something like that. And in television they might be called producer or also executive producer. So for us, Rose Lam is our executive producer along with myself and Carolyn and Neil. And she was the first real key hire because she was the person who was going to start to work on schedule, like let me look at the scripts, let me look at this bible, let me use my experience to break it down, get a sense of how long this thing is going to be, come up with some basic numbers and some plans for where we should shoot.

And to do that you get a little bit of a float. They call it a float. You get floated some money from the studio. Not too much, but enough to get that done and done accurately. At which point then there’s a decision made about budget and all the rest. And then you begin hiring people. You need your casting director very early, because you’ve got to cast way ahead of time. You need to hire your production designer very early because what their vision is is going to impact how you are going to be spending your money. And you certainly need to make sure you have a director in place as well.

John: Yeah. And what can be confusing is based on different kinds of projects and media when you go from like, OK, we can put together a budget versus OK we are giving you a green light to start shooting can be a very different experience. For something like your show, maybe they said like OK we’re going to make this thing based on this budget, this script, and this director and other key talent involved. But other projects I’ve been through you’re going through quite a lot of preproduction and they have stop points sort of along the way. Like you can spend up to this point but they could decide like, no, we’re actually stopping this right now. We’re not moving forward. We’re not giving you the green light. And that can be one of those tricky things, too.

It’s not like full speed ahead, we’re making this thing, we’re starting this day. You’re continuing to like sort of hopefully build momentum, but you’re still waiting for key decisions from the powers that be.

Craig: Yeah. And for television that’s sort of what a pilot is. There’s a built in break point where everybody can agree to produce to one hour of television and no more. And then decide what to do from there. For us we were ordered to series, so that’s not an issue. We’re doing it.

Look, it’s risk and reward. Bet hedging versus commitment. They each have plusses and minuses. Pretty obvious what the plusses are of hedging your bet. The minuses are that when you don’t have a full commitment it can sometimes be harder to access and lock down great talent, not just in terms of actors, but in terms of directors, cinematographers, production designers, and all the craftspeople that create the product with you, create the show, the movie, the series.

And if you don’t actually have a full commitment there a lot of them are like or I could just go over here where there is a commitment and now I have a job. And I don’t have to worry about not having a job. So there are costs to that.

John: Yeah. A thing you find in sort of traditional television is you shoot a pilot and then all of your actors are placed on holds so that the studio can decide, OK, yes, we are going to make this into a series and therefore we can pull all of those actors and keep them on the show. And obviously there’s the choice to replace any of those actors you want to and reshoot that stuff which does happen.

It’s tough. And I think as more and more stuff has been written as mini rooms and we’re sort of shooting the whole thing at once that can be great, but it also puts a lot more showrunners in situations like you are where you have to plan for like – you may only get one crack at it. If you were shooting a pilot you could make some changes between the two things. Just like Game of Thrones made changes after that pilot that didn’t work.

Craig: Sure.

John: You’re not going to have that opportunity.

Craig: No. And we didn’t have it on Chernobyl either. And so part of that is making sure that you feel really, really confident in your team and in the scripts. But I think there are probably also on the other side of the pilot process some negatives to consider as well.

So positives are you can stop and you can retool and move ahead successfully like they did with Game of Thrones. The potential negative is everybody gets a chance to just sort of pick at it and water it down and smooth off the edges and make it stink. Nothing survives too much scrutiny. Nothing. From people who can comment without accountability.

So when I’m making something and I’m commenting on it in the editing room I have accountability for it. All of my comments are leading towards me coming out to the rest of the world and saying I stand by this. Other people it’s sort of like, well, if it’s one of the shows that a network puts out in the year, or Netflix, one of the 15 shows they put out every ten seconds, they’re not really accountable to it. So, it’s like they’re not getting blamed for it specifically. And so everybody can sort of focus too much and pick at it and then walk away. And it can just, you know, the soufflé can collapse.

So, plusses and minuses in all circumstances to these things. When there were only three networks and there was one season it made sense. Everybody had a pilot. Nobody could avoid the pilot situation because there was nowhere else to go, because those were the three networks, this is how they do it. We all do it at the same time. Not so anymore.

John: Yeah. But also the musical chairs problem of it was really tough because essentially there’s only a certain number of actors. There’s only a certain number of cinematographers, directors. You’re all fighting for very limited resources here.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So I got my third choice of an actor and I got this–

Craig: Yeah, it’s bad.

John: It’s bad. And so this is probably a better way to make things, but it is still really difficult.

Craig: It’s difficult. Yeah.

John: So, a question for you. As you were buried under work last week, how much of your daily firefighting problem-solving is really about money and budgets?

Craig: Very little. We certainly have budget challenges. There’s no such thing as a show without a budget challenge. It doesn’t matter what your budget is. My feeling is that by and large no matter what you do as an artist you will always have at best 90% of the money you need. That’s just the way it goes. Because, you know, your imagination always exceeds your grasp to some extent. And they have to draw the line somewhere. We do have a very healthy budget and we have a budget to make an excellent show, and so we shall do our best to do.

But, no, most of the issues that I deal with really are just the issues of 400 things need to be determined and here’s what someone just sent over as a possibility. And it’s not quite right, but it’s making us reconsider this or that. Someone says I need to sit with you for ten minutes and just ask you three questions. And that ten minutes turns into two hours because the questions are actually complicated. And then all of the other things that were supposed to happen after that have just been pushed down the line and then things spill over into the weekend.

And as you get closer to shooting this is very common.

John: Yeah. Now, how much more complicated is it shooting something that’s distant and remote? Like Calgary is not the end of the world but it’s not in a production hub. And obviously Chernobyl was not shot in a production hub. It does strike me as a very different experience because when I make a movie here in Los Angeles, we’re making Charlie’s Angels, we have all the resources of Los Angeles here. And we can pretty easily swap people in or out if we need to.

You are more isolated up there and is that a thing you have to think through in production right now?

Craig: No. It’s something that we consider early on. But one of the selling points of shooting here in Alberta is that there’s a pretty good layer of crew here in Alberta. And when we need to fill in we pull people in from Vancouver or Toronto where those are production hubs. Vancouver is more of a production hub at this point than Los Angeles is. So there’s actually quite a good depth and folks don’t mind relocating from Vancouver to Alberta for a while, or Calgary for a while, the way that our friend Derek lives in Chicago for a big chunk of the year because they do Chicago Fire there. So, that hasn’t been too bad.

And of course Calgary is a city of a million-plus people. So this experience has been much easier than the prep experience in Lithuania. There’s no language barrier. And there’s just more people to pull from. However, this production is way larger. So everything kind of scales together.

You get 90% of what you want all the time. That’s the way it goes. At best.

John: Let’s talk about you as a writer in this prep preproduction situation. Also it’s weird, as I was working on the outline here. We say prep and preproduction and prep is sort of a shortened version of preproduction, but it’s also preparation. It’s weird that they are describing the same things and they’re similar words but they’re not quite the same word.

Craig: Right.

John: As a writer what are you doing right now on that first script that’s shooting? How much are you still tweaking things? Is there a script coordinator who is helping get stuff put together? What is the writing that happens for you during this period?

Craig: The writing for the first three episodes and to some extent the first four episodes is kind of done. There are little tweaks. I kind of blew it. I forgot that we had changed, like literally a word from one thing to another, and I was like oh, D’oh. And that actually matters because the people doing some prosthetic stuff need to know where it’s going to go. So we issued – the green pages were literally I think one word changed.

We do have a script coordinator and so I work with her closely. I’m very good about maintaining revision levels and scene numbers and things like that. But with any production at this point you do need a script coordinator to be the central distribution point. And that all goes through Synchronize. Synchronize is the software that everybody uses. God, I hope it’s better than – it’s not owned by Final Draft is it? Because that would bum me out.

John: I don’t know.

Craig: I don’t think it is.

John: It’s probably Entertainment Partners or something else.

Craig: Yeah. Anyway, so it’s basically the software that does all the distribution of schedules, calendars, scripts, all those things to cast.

John: And are you distributing physical scripts? Or is it all online now? Basically are people seeing printed pages or are they only scenes on tablets?

Craig: I believe that they are able to print them. They arrive as watermarked PDFs so they print them for themselves for reference if they need to. But, no, this is not like the old days where when it was time to release new pages 12 Xerox machines begin cranking up to 800 kelvin as pages got shot out. We just don’t do that anymore. It’s wasteful and it’s slow and expensive and unnecessary.

But it is a weird situation because I am writing the other episodes. So, you know, there are episodes that are going to be shooting many, many months from now that I’m writing now while we’re prepping and then while we’re shooting. And that’s, you know, that’s a tingly feeling of anxiety.

John: And something we should make clear is that the preproduction phase stops at a certain thing. Once you start production like preproduction stops. But there’s still prep on each individual episode.

Craig: Right.

John: And that is the director. And are you marrying a director and DP together? Who travels together on an episode?

Craig: Yes. So each one of our episodes. Without getting into it, because I don’t think they’ve all been announced. But we have five directors across ten episodes. So we have the pairings all figured out in terms of DPs and such.

John: And does each director have his own first?

Craig: No.

John: So one AD is running the whole?

Craig: Well, no, I believe there’s going to be a second first AD that comes in. So, they alternate because what’s going to happen, of course, is the first AD does need to start prepping episodes with the director. So once it’s time for that our first AD who is working with our first director to kind of step back and start planning ahead then the new one comes in. So, yeah, we do have this kind of side-by-side first AD thing going on.

John: And so that episode prep is also crucial because you made general decisions about the look of the show, how stuff is basically going to work, overall camera styles, but this director with this DP and this AD is figuring out like, OK, we’re going to need a crane on this day. This is how many extras we need for this thing. So it’s really taking what you’ve written in the script and figuring out like, OK, let’s really break it down in how we’re going to do this and what is our plan for getting this episode shot in the number of days that we have. What is our schedule going to be? When do we go to nights? How do our weeks work? Those are crucial things.

Craig: We’re going to nights real fast.

John: Oh, Craig, you wrote a shot that probably mostly takes place at night.

Craig: No it doesn’t. Thank god it doesn’t mostly take place at night. But there’s a bunch of night stuff early on and, of course, we don’t shoot in order, so I’m not giving anything away about what happens when. But I’ve been pretty smart about not plunging us into too much night. But there’s night early on. And you know what? Better to do it early.

John: Yeah. Rip the Band-Aid off.

Craig: Rather than when you’re week – sorry, week – month seven and you’re like oh my god.

John: But you are in Calgary facing a unique challenge. There’s limited daylight.

Craig: Ah-ha.

John: As you get into the winter.

Craig: And this is an interesting challenge. Very limited night right now. So, a couple of weeks or so, or however, I haven’t looked at the schedule exactly to see exactly how many days, but the number of days we have that we’re shooting nights we have to be really careful about. They are very well orchestrated, prepared, and choreographed because right now in Calgary you get about 4.5 hours of proper dark.

John: Oh my god.

Craig: That’s what you get. So in production when you shoot a little bit of a day and a little bit of night it’s called a split. We will likely be kind of in a semi-split situation where we shoot a little bit of stuff that’s sort of day-ish and then we start prepping and we use that kind of twilight, that 19-hour long twilight that they have here to set up. And then once the sun is gone-gone, boom, pedal to the metal.

John: Yeah. I remember on Go, of course it has a lot of night shooting, and it mostly takes place over the course of one long night, and there would be times where you’re just trying to get this one last shot and the sun is coming up and you’re trying to hold up flags to make it a little bit darker. And you just curse the rising of the sun. And then to have to drive home after a full night of shooting with the sun coming up is just the worst experience.

Craig: Particularly if you’re driving east. It’s just blaring in your eyes.

John: Oh yeah. That was me. Me coming from Santa Monica Airport back to my house in Hollywood.

Craig: It’s depressing. The shooting schedules can definitely screw your head up. They certainly screw my head up. There is this awful feeling of chasing the light or chasing the dark, which is why I think some of the older, more well established directors from the ‘70s and ‘80s starting promoting this whole we’re going to shoot everything on a green screen stage and I’ll be MoCap because you don’t have to go outside, it’s always air-conditioned. There’s no light. There’s no dark. You’re wherever you want.

John: Yeah. Season two of your show is going to be like The Mandalorian. It’s going to be all virtual sets. Pedro will be back in his environment.

Craig: It will not. Look, I do – I’m not impressed – The Mandalorian, the volume. I love that they call it the volume. It’s a remarkable technology. It seems very well suited for something that does take place in a kind of fantastic other world. We’re a very naturalistic philosophy over here.

John: You’re a naturalistic zombie show.

Craig: Yeah. Not zombies. Not zombies.

John: Sorry, fungal creatures.

Craig: Thank you. Humans, just fungal-infected humans.

John: Yeah. Infected humans. All right. Let’s think about movies that are not in preproduction. They’re not even in development. They are just potential movies. It’s our segment How Would This Be a Movie. And as set up I’m seeing Zola this afternoon. I’m very excited. Because it’s the first of the movies that we’ve pitched, way back at the Austin Film Festival. I remember our great discussion about the Zola tweets, so I’m excited to see that movie. People love it.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Just this past week I got approached to adapt – to do one of my first How Would This Be a Movie. One of the properties we talked about on the show, producers came to me and offered me–

Craig: Did they know when they were offering it to you that–?

John: They did not. Because if they had known they would have seen like why I did not think it was a good idea for a movie.

Craig: They would have seen the big no flag being waved real early. You can’t say which one it is I assume?

John: Unfair for me to say which one it was. Because someone will get that job, and that will be great, because I love when writers get hired to adapt things. I just don’t think it’s a good idea for a movie. All right. We have three or four projects here to look at. We’re going to start with the big one which I think probably actually is a movie. We’re going to link to the New York Times story on this, but there’s actually a lot of other sources for it.

This was about these criminals who were using these secured devices, these encrypted devices, for phones and texting that they thought were legit, but of course the FBI was actually behind it. And so they bought these cell phones on the black market. They believed that they were super securely encrypted. It was like cell phones just for criminals.

Craig: Right. [laughs]

John: And of course the FBI was involved in this. And they were able to sort of really round up a whole network. On one day they had arrested 800 people in more than a dozen countries. They intercepted 20 million messages in 45 languages.

Craig: They seized tons of drugs. 250 firearms. 55 luxury vehicles. And $48 million in several currencies and crypto currencies.

John: And interestingly none of the people arrested were in the US. Because you actually can’t use basically what they were doing, like you can’t use in the US. But it was like Australia, and Asia, and all sorts of other places.

Craig: Yes. Europol was sort of a big part of it. So something like this has happened before. There was I think it was either the FBI, CIA maybe, had figured out – there was a company that was hosting servers for the dark web. I’m not sure what aspect of it. But they got them. They came to those people and were like we got you. We got you on X, Y, or Z, whatever they had done wrong. And the deal is we’re going to go easy on you if you just let us run this. And they were like you got it.

And so for months all these people who were using this secure server specifically to avoid the prying eyes of the government were literally sending stuff through a government server. And all of it was just being logged as mountains of evidence.

John: Yeah. And it was a very similar case here. So this is Operation Trojan Shield. Ugh.

Craig: Oh my god. Really?

John: That was the name of the operation.

Craig: Condom brand.

John: There was a service called Anom. And basically they busted the guy who was making these secure cell phones. And said like could you just keep making these secure cell phones but let us see everything that’s happening there. And he was like OK.

And so they sold these really expensive cell phones. I think it’s also so smart that they kept these phones really crazy expensive and sort of underpowered.

Craig: Exactly.

John: And so everyone felt like, oh, it’s got to be legit. It’s got to be real.

Craig: Genius.

John: And it’s a classic honeypot. You make somebody sort of feel like oh I’m getting something for free, or I’m getting something that no one else could have. And that’s how it works.

Craig: And they got them. So the question is how do you make this a movie beyond the simple mechanism of the kind of man in the middle hacking trick that they pulled here, because in and of itself once you get the point of that, well, then that’s that. So what do you do to kind of jazz this thing up to be a movie?

John: Well, I think there’s a couple good choices here. So I kept thinking back to the 2006 film The Lives of Others, the German film where–

Craig: Great movie.

John: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, I just love saying his name.

Craig: I know. It’s great.

John: Which is about eavesdropping in East Germany and a guy who is listening in on a family and sort of like becomes involved in their lives. So that’s a clear way in. But I also think we always talk about sort of ethical choices and characters being forced to make tough things. You’re going to hear about so many crimes and you have to make decisions of like when are you going to intercede or not intercede and sort of what is worth sort of blowing the whole thing up for or not.

And I think those tensions can be great. I’m assuming that the movie is more from the law enforcement side than from the other side, but maybe we’re splitting it sort of back and forth the way Sicario does. I think there’s lots of ways. What’s tough about the story as it is right now with the situation is like there’s so many characters you could pick, there’s so many ways in, and it’s a completely different movie based on where you start.

Craig: Well, and that’s why in the end when these companies purchase these stories, so whoever wrote this article, in this case I’m looking at the New York Times article. It was by Yan Zhuang, Elian Peltier, and Alan Feurer. So let’s say that Yan, Elian, and Alan sell the rights to this story as they’ve written it to Warner Bros. At that point Warner Bros what they have is a big question mark. And then they start talking to writers. And this is how it gets figured out.

Somebody is going to come in and throw one of those darts in the right path. For me, when I think of this, I do think of The Lives of Others, and I also think of Donnie Brasco. And the idea that you can create a relationship with somebody while this is happening. That part of your job is now you are monitoring the communications between two criminals and it’s quite clear to you at some point that one of them is just simply being used by the other.

Because you can see everybody’s communication. So what you’re watching is the normal flow of social activity where someone is being bullied or ostracized or lied to or manipulated. And you begin to feel for them. And I think that’s really interesting. So there’s all sorts of possibilities here.

But it would have to be whipped up quite a bit beyond just the concept. The concept alone isn’t going to get you more than 15 or 20 interesting minutes I think.

John: I agree. So, you and I are both thinking about this as a drama, but let’s think about this as a comedy or some other genre of film. Because there’s something kind of funny about this. The central conceit can be funny where these people think they’re being secure and they’re not being secure. And that’s relatable. We’ve all sort of messed up and done something that we thought was private and was actually public and it sort of got out. So there’s an opportunity to tell the same kinds of stories or the set the same kind of characters but play it in a funny way. And I think that’s another very interesting take to this is to approach it as a comedy, or even a romantic comedy.

Because what is it like if you can see inside what a person is really doing? Or you can see that this guy’s girlfriend is absolutely just a nightmare and you want to sort of intercede there. There’s something fun about having that information feels like a comedic premise.

Craig: Yeah. And in the ‘90s, I mean, this is how I got my career started. You would imagine a drama and then you would say, OK, do the drama except the person that would be the hero what if they’re just an idiot. Now go. Literally, don’t change anything else except that they’re stupid. And let’s have fun.

John: Steven Soderbergh, Matt Damon movie. I think it was The Informant! with an exclamation point feels – that’s a similar kind of premise there.

Craig: Yes.

John: You talked about sort of buying the New York Times article. I don’t think you buy this article. I don’t think there’s an enough there.

Craig: I don’t think anybody should buy any article. I don’t understand that whole business to be honest.

John: But I can imagine that there’s a longer article that really goes into the characters and gets some firsthand reporting that is unique and different that could be an article worth buying.

Craig: Then it’s just facts. They’re reported. Everything in the article as it is published is available for everyone to use. The reason you would buy the article is to have access to the iceberg under the water line amount of notes that perhaps the reporters had aggregated. And that can be interesting stuff.

John: That could be interesting, too. In this case you’re unlikely to get firsthand – none of the people involved in this story are going to talk to you. None of those people are going to be real characters that you can – real life people that you can buy life rights to. That’s not a thing here. So it’s not important.

Craig: Yup.

John: Cool. All right, next How Would This Be a Movie is Wanted: A Household Manager/Cook/Nanny. This is a thousand-word job listing that requests applications from somebody with a good degree, great executive functioning, very good Excel skills, and also river swimming. So I remember when this – so this was a viral post that went out. Basically this woman, a single mom, who was a CEO was trying to hire on someone to be a nanny, but the requirements for this person were just absurd. Basically crazy. And then I remember also reading Ruth Graham and Slate did a follow up where she actually talked to the woman who did the post. And it was much more reasonable and also interesting.

Because basically this woman kind of needed a wife. This woman needed to do sort of the other stuff and it became sort of an interesting question of feminism and gender roles. I thought there was an interesting thing underneath that as well.

Craig: Yeah. I read through that, too. Although I wonder sometimes if we look at these things and the first filter we’re going to consider is gender and the way sexism functions in a patriarchal society. And then the second filter we might want to consider is tech people versus not tech people, because it’s like they’re their own species of human.

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: When I listen to the tech people talking, I mean, so I was really interested in the woman sort of explaining through things, because I thought like OK this is where I’m going to actually see the truth under this and go I get it lady. But here’s the first thing. OK, so Ruth Graham asks this question: how did you set about writing this ad? And the woman said, “I had a great nanny for 5.5 years with our family. When the kids started school I placed her with a Google family that had baby boy twins. She’s now been with them for 5.5 years and they love her deeply. This is important because,” and now here’s why we go into Techville. “This is important because I’m one of the most loving, kind people around. And I build wonderful long-term relationships.” Who talks like that?

John: No one.

Craig: No one.

John: A tech person talks like that. Yeah.

Craig: A tech person is like and now here’s–

John: And now value.

Craig: Yes. Let me give you the PowerPoint of why you should invest into my human status. That was like whoa. And, look, also some of the stuff, I understand like your desire – it would be great if she was really good at mountain driving. I guess. But also she’s like my kids and I love to swim in rivers. We’re really into river swimming. You know, it’s OK if you found a wonderful person, a nurturing, caring person who could do all this other stuff, including mountain driving, but when she’s like these people aren’t physically fit enough I’m like well kind of also how dare you. So an amazing, wonderful, loving, caring person who your children would love and who would teach them things and take care of them and drive them places, do all these other things, you’re not going to include because she can’t river swim? How about just leave her there on the shore and then swim on back?

Anyway, I started getting annoyed when I was reading. Because just like, ugh, tech people. It’s tech people. Tech people.

John: And I think what she really wants is Maria von Trapp from the Sound of Music.

Craig: Maria von Trapp couldn’t swim the–

John: No, but those kids did river swim. Like we saw them swim in the river.

Craig: Yeah. And they also climbed a mountain, literally.

John: They did.

Craig: Every mountain.

John: Uh-huh. They did some mountain driving as they were getting out of there. So, yeah.

Craig: That’s true. That’s true.

John: So who are the characters in whatever story this is? I think it’s a comedy, but I think it’s a relationship comedy probably between these two women and what happens here and sort of what that dynamic is which I think is potentially really fascinating.

Craig: OK. I have an idea for a movie for this that I actually think is pretty good.

John: All right.

Craig: So don’t steal it everybody, but here’s my idea. My idea is you’ve got this kind of back-breaking tech humanoid. It doesn’t matter if it’s a man or a woman. Literally doesn’t matter. Who is a single parent and puts this crazy viral job listing out there that is essentially demanding a super human. There is a mess. Somebody is a mess, manny, nanny, doesn’t matter. And they’re like I need money. So they basically lie to get this job, but then are required by dint of the job, and also by starting to really care for those kids, to become the nanny that they were supposed to be. And the better they get at stuff the more it becomes apparent to everybody else around in the tech world that is meeting this manny/nanny that the manny/nanny is a super human because they have risen to this task. And that person becomes CEO.

Because if you can do all the things that this person is asking you don’t need to be a nanny. Guess what? You are a mega human. So anyway that was my idea for a movie.

John: I really do like that idea and I like the sense of – what you’re pitching is sort of a School of Rock to some degree. The person who takes the job just to kind of take the job because I happened to answer the phone and I sort of passed myself off as this thing I’m really not, and then I actually learned how to do it and I actually had skills that were above and beyond because I was actually myself.

Craig: Exactly.

John: Sort of underneath this.

Craig: And the same thing happens in the third act. By having that success, because you did this you then are in a position where you’re going to leave those kids and then the kids are like why and then you’re like, oh, I love you. And it’s nice. I mean, look, it’s formula and everything but I do think that you’ve got to lampoon the tech culture here. They are nuts. And by the way they’re nuts and they’re also running everything.

John: They are. Well, the other thing you’re pitching is essentially Mrs. Doubtfire.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Which is a person coming in under false pretenses to do this. So to the degree that I think you could go in tomorrow and say like it’s Mrs. Doubtfire for the 2020s. Yeah.

Craig: It’s like Mrs. Doubtfire becomes the perfect human being who becomes both an allergist and a river swimmer and a stunt car driver. And one of the things she was like “determine how to purchase travel via points or miles and comparisons.” And I’m like, oh, so they’re also a travel agent. They’re a booking agent.

John: But that is a spouse to a large degree, too. That’s what’s fascinating about this is that they really – she wants someone to watch her kids but also to help run her life. And that’s–

Craig: I mean, I don’t know how it goes over there with you and Mike, but for me and Melissa there are a whole lot of things on this list neither one of us does, including let me just start with river swimming. And mountain driving. Mountain driving?

John: Yeah, you’ve got to mountain drive.

Craig: Yeah, I don’t, yeah.

John: Chauffeur.

Craig: Megana, when you read this, just out of curiosity, what did you think about this?

Megana Rao: I felt so bad about myself.

Craig: [laughs] That’s terrible.

John: Now, Megana, you come from a tech background, so you worked at Google. So for all you know you know the Google family that took the previous nanny here.

Megana: Yeah, the Google baby boys. I mean, that part of it wasn’t surprising for me and I had a real visceral reaction to reading this. And I was like a lot of the things she’s talking about is adulting and the worst parts of being an adult.

Craig: Yeah.

Megana: And I was just thinking about like I think the reason that people have such a reaction to this is because the emotional labor required for these things is so taxing and tiresome. And thinking about doing a job of just looking at kids’ summer camps is so hard to like fathom. Because it’s horrible, but then it also made me think of all the work that you guys and all parents are doing but we just prefer to look at because we don’t pay for it.

Craig: Yeah. There is quite a bit of that. I believe that people need help and I believe if you can afford help then it can be a win-win for everybody. Some people are getting employment and people are getting help.

John: And she’s paying $35 to $40 an hour which is not bad.

Craig: No, no, it’s quite a lot. That said, the job that she’s describing is intense and there is a whiff of, well, when the revolution comes they’ll be the first against the wall, you know? It’s starting to get a little weird when you’re like having people pit themselves against each other to get your job to do this list of impossible things that honestly you will be OK if you don’t have somebody swimming in the river with your children. That’s not necessary.

Megana: Well, the weirdest thing to me also is when she talks about – she’s, you know, the most loving, wonderful person around.

Craig: Oh my god. What the fudge?

Megana: And how she loves her employees. It was just this weird thing of like outsourcing family and community but having – I don’t know. It was just so blurry around the boundaries and that made me feel really weird.

John: Yeah.

Craig: She did I think at some point describe her friends as – what was it?

Megana: Building alliances with other parents.

Craig: Building alliances. How dare you? Also, the nanny needed to be able to do sit-ups, lunges, squats, and pushups.

John: Yeah, physically fit.

Craig: What?

John: Yeah. I mean, like you do. Megana knows this. It’s part of the office culture here.

Megana: Yeah. Every day when I walk in.

Craig: John is like–

John: I blow the little whistle and then we do our lunges and our squats.

Craig: Megana, it’s Thursday and that’s squat day, so here we go. I, wow, experienced snow-driving.

John: Next How Would This Be a Movie. So this is a couple who breaks up after being handcuffed together for 122 days. This is Ukrainian lovers, Alexandr Kudlay and Viktoria–

Craig: Pustovitova.

John: Pustovitova. Have taken off their shackles and are moving on from one another. So this is a couple who agreed to be handcuffed together because they were having relationship troubles and they decided that the way to solve these would be to be the most cliché version of a ‘70s odd couple who have to sort of live together by being handcuffed together. So they could have divided their house in half and put a tape line down the middle, but instead they chose to be handcuffed to each other.

Craig: Right.

John: And as I looked through the photos related to this article I see them wearing different clothes including clothes with sleeves. And I don’t understand how they’re putting on these clothes with sleeves while they are handcuffed together.

Craig: This is so much bullshit. This is Instagram nonsense bullshit.

John: That’s why I kept it on this thing. This is just annoying Instagram couple decides to be annoying Instagram couple.

Craig: Screw you guys. Where they lost me completely was when it said that Pustovitova ultimately had to quit her job as a beautician because clients weren’t comfortable with her husband standing over them as she manicured their eyelashes. So, first of all, you can’t manicure an eyelash. You manicure fingers, not eyes. But you cannot do that job while handcuffed anyway. Geez Louise.

John: So Craig there is not a movie to be made about this particular handcuffed couple?

Craig: No. It’s nonsense and I would like to never hear of them again.

John: All right. Our final How Would This Be a Movie contender, this comes from a Washington Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax. It is her column. And here is the issue. Megana, would you read this question for us?

Megana: My husband’s sister “Beth” fancies herself a psychic of sorts who can communicate with the beyond. A few months ago, we were eating dinner when she began talking about a spirit with me. I honestly had no idea who she was talking about and told her that, because I had no deceased relatives or friends who fit her description. Beth became very upset, claiming that she was overwhelmed with what the spirit was trying to tell her. She was so upset she ran from the room to lie in a dark room and compose herself.

My in-laws asked me to be gentler with her, since this “gift” is a major part of her identity.

I see two paths. I can either lie to Beth and feed her belief that she has this “gift.” Or I can tell her she is dead wrong. Which makes me feel like I’m kicking a puppy. My husband and I would ideally like to handle Beth’s “gift” in a thoughtful way, but it’s hard to see what middle ground we have, especially when she puts you on the spot. How can I thoughtfully respond to Beth in a way that preserves her self-worth but also doesn’t give in to a delusion?

John: Now, Craig I think has a strong opinion on sort of the reality of Beth and what the sister should tell Beth. But I would urge him to think about as a movie or as characters in a movie is this a situation that can be fun and fraught? And how might you develop this as a movie?

Craig: Yeah. It’s a fun odd couple situation when you are marrying somebody and their sibling – you inherit these other people. And if you are very much a skeptic about things and that’s part of who you are, that’s part of your identity, no one ever seems to acknowledge that being a skeptic should be a major part of anyone else’s identity. And then you get stuck with somebody who believes this nonsense. It’s really frustrating.

It’s particularly frustrating if they keep being right and you start to feel like you’re being gas lit and what’s going on. Look, I refuse to be a part of any movie that actually says – other than Ghostbusters – that suggests that there is any of this stuff. But that seems like that’s what it would be, ish.

John: To me Beth feels like a minor supporting character, like you’re marrying into a wacky family.

Craig: She’s one of them.

John: It’s Meet the Parents, but she’s one of them.

Craig: Yeah.

John: That’s the natural choice for it. But if you want to elevate her up from a supporting character to the other sort of co-lead, that is potentially interesting. I mean, obviously Ghost is a great example of this situation where like this person has a “gift” that seems impossible. Whoopi Goldberg’s character has a gift that is impossible. Seems impossible. And yet it is important for the plot to move on. And there can be some good comedy there.

But I think it’s important to marry the skeptic with the true believer. That’s comedy.

Craig: Yeah. I think you’re right. But I also feel like I’ve seen this character before a little bit. You know, like the wacky and then no one has to take them seriously. Everybody agrees that they’re nuts. So it’s not really, I don’t…

John: But I think what’s potentially more fun is that everyone says like oh no but she’s right. Like if you come into a family where everybody is like, oh no, Beth has the gift and she sees these things. How are you supposed to deal with that? As the rational person. And so we’re coming in as the audience as the rational person. We’re relating to that character as our way in and then we have to see like, oh my god, and the frustration.

Craig: Every family I ever talk to I think I’m the weirdo. Because somebody there believes in god. And that to me is right up there with contacting the dead. I just don’t understand it.

John: Let’s do a recap of our four things we talked about today. So the first off is the criminals and their cell phones that were actually done by – there was a whole FBI sting behind that. Is that a movie? Is it a limited series? What do you think that is?

Craig: I don’t think it’s a limited series. That would be a very boring limited series. I think it’s a movie maybe if you really make it about relationships.

John: Yup. Nanny plus.

Craig: Yeah, it could absolutely be an interesting comedy that lampoons tech culture.

John: The handcuffed couple is not a movie. We’re striking it out. And I wanted to leave it on this list because I felt like these are people who perceive themselves as characters in a movie and they’re not. They have main character syndrome and it’s annoying and they need to just stop.

Craig: Yeah. The Defiant Ones is a great movie about two people handcuffed together or chained together. And it was all about the relationship between white people and black people during the Jim Crow era. That’s not this. This is just dumb. [laughs] This is just stupid.

John: The original Charlie’s Angels “Angels in Chains” episode is a classic and you’re not going to top that. So, just stop.

Craig: Can’t top it.

John: Can’t. And psychic sister-in-law is a maybe and I would say it’s possibly a movie but also I think that’s an interesting character in an ongoing TV comedy because it’s not a problem you’re going to solve. You’re not going to resolve this problem.

Craig: No. It feels like a wacky neighbor.

John: Yup. Let’s segue to something that Aline actually brought up. She texted to say why don’t you guys talk about why certain movies get made, so not just how would this get made but why certain movies get made. And my first instinct is that movies get put into development by development executives who are one type of person. And so they’re seeing story from a specific way. And they are interested in like oh the story, the characters, this writer is really great. And movies go into production because of marketing executives. Basically the decision of like what movie do we think we can actually make money on is often a very different team.

And so when I get approached with a hey would you want to adapt this thing for us, when I got approached with this hey do you want to take this How Would This Be a Movie one of my fundamental decisions was like I don’t think you’re actually going to make that movie. And so much of my job as a screenwriter is to really stock pick or thinking like what movies do I think you’re actually going to make versus you’re just going to hire me to write a script.

Craig: Yeah. It does seem to me that some movies just cannot be stopped.

John: Inevitability is I think a thing.

Craig: Inevitability. Generally speaking if there is some underlying property that some PowerPoint presentation proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that it can’t miss, they’re making it. Obviously it can miss. In fact, those probably miss more frequently and then the hit, it doesn’t matter. Everybody agrees together, holding hands in a boardroom this is correct. So this is how you do get pitched things where you go you can’t be serious.

And there’s nothing you can do about it. They’re making it. If there is a combination of a very hot star and a very hot director, they’re making it. Even when they shouldn’t. And that doesn’t have to be a very commercially obvious movie. That could be like a completely commercially not-obvious movie. And yet still but we got them. And then it’s like, OK, I guess you’re doing it then. You shouldn’t. But all right.

John: But you always have to think in terms of like what is the slot for this. And does the studio see this as their awards contender? Or do they see this as a big blockbuster movie that’s going to actually generate real movie? Because those are the two things that studios tend to make now.

With the rise of streamers there’s latitude to make other kinds of movies that are appealing to specific audiences which is great. But classically people were approaching this as like can I win awards with this or can I make a gazillion dollars off of this. And those are the things. And some of the movies we talked about today it’s not quite clear how that would work out. I mean, the nanny-plus, Aline could write that movie. It reminds me of sort of like I Don’t Know How She Does It or those books – there was an era of books that were adapted that were centering on women and women’s issues. Maybe you make those for streamers now, but you’re not making them very often for theatrical release.

Craig: No, I don’t think any of the movies that we contemplated existing today would be for a major studio. They just don’t do them.

John: Unless it was Smokehouse, the George Clooney company, doing it for Warners as a big awards kind of thing. That’s possible. Like Argo is an example of that kind of movie.

Craig: Yeah. There is still that niche, but a lot of times I think with those things they have arranged for other co-financiers that limit – when you talk about like, OK, we’re spending a bunch of money, what they’re spending a bunch of money on is, I don’t know, whatever Paw Patrol, live action Paw Patrol.

John: That’s what we want. Did you see the trailer for Clifford the Big Red Dog?

Craig: I did.

John: The trailer for Clifford the Big Red Dog was better than I expected and I think it will actually succeed in its target audience. And I want to wish them well.

Craig: I have no idea because I don’t know what it costs. If it costs a whole lot, I don’t know.

John: If it costs $100 million then I think that’s money not well spent. But I don’t think it costs $100 million.

Craig: That would be unfortunate. And somewhere someone is listening to this going it literally cost $99.5 million, you mother-f-ers.

Yes, listen, I root for all movies.

John: I root for all movies as well.

Craig: All movies.

John: All right. Let’s do our One Cool Things. Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

Craig: No.

John: No, you forgot.

Craig: I didn’t forget. You know, what episode is this? 507? There aren’t even 507 cool things in the world total.

John: There are so many cool things in the world.

Craig: I don’t think so. I think we’re into like moderately interesting things at this point.

John: My One Cool Thing is genuinely cool and I think our audience will like it.

Craig: I’ll be the judge of this.

John: Do you want to hear it?

Craig: Yeah.

John: So my One Cool Thing is an episode of Decoder Ring. It’s a podcast I listen to. I think it’s been a One Cool Thing several times before. Willa Paskin hosts it. It is terrific. It’s on Slate.

This episode was on the Tootsie shot. And the Tootsie shot – you know in Tootsie when she’s walking towards the camera, it’s a very long lens in a crowded New York street?

Craig: Yes.

John: You recognize that shot as an iconic image from Tootsie, but from a zillion other movies.

Craig: Sure.

John: It’s about the history of that shot, or that kind of shot, and how that shot became possible because of technological changes, but also sort of cultural changes. And the changes in cities overall. It’s just a really great analysis of both urban structure but also moviemaking and cinematography and what that shot means in terms of like we’re focusing on this one person among a sea of other people. That it’s generally a first act shot that you see.

Craig: Yes.

John: And establishing who this person is in a crowd of others. I just thought it was great. And it ties into 9 to 5 and lots of other things, too. So I would highly recommend people check out the Tootsie shot episode of Decoder Ring.

Craig: Pretty cool.

John: That’s pretty good.

Craig: Pretty cool.

John: And that’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Michael Karman. 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 I’m @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts and they’re lovely. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can also find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you find transcripts and sign up for the weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting where we talk about things that are interesting to writers.

You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where get all the back episodes and bonus segments including the one we’re about to record on your cheat sheet for time travel. Craig, thank you for coming back and for a fun episode.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

John: All right. So Craig this is the conceit here I want to get to. So let’s say you are traveling back through time and you may get stuck someplace. If you had one sheet of paper back and forth what kind of information would you want to have that you could share with the people of that time, that era, so that you could jumpstart them but also sort of like prove that you actually know things? What would you have on there that would make you seem so, so smart?

Craig: OK. And I don’t know what time I’m going to?

John: You don’t. You don’t know what it’s going to be.

Craig: Because what a bummer you jump in that thing and you end up just yesterday. You’re like, ugh.

John: I’ve got the Pythagorean Theorem for nothing.

Craig: God. Yeah.

John: And I want to stipulate that there’s prior art here. So Ryan Norse has a great book on how to invent everything. A previous One Cool Thing of mine was The Information by Lewis Dartnell. There’s The Thrifty Time Traveler’s Guide by Jonathan Stokes. So people have thought about this. But the sense of one sheet of paper is sort of my conceit for this.

Craig: I would probably emphasize medicine and in particular germ theory.

John: Yeah. Oh god.

Craig: And some simple antibiotic methods. But most importantly just basic germ theory. If I could back into certain periods and just prove to people that they should just wash their hands, and like specifically the doctor.

You know, when Lincoln was shot, so this is not that long ago. What was it, 1865?

John: Sounds right.

Craig: So not that long ago. That wasn’t thousands of years ago. The doctors who they took him across the street and they brought doctors in. He was clearly in grave straits and on his way to dying. There’s a bullet hole in his head and they just put their fingers in it to try and feel if they could find the bullet. That’s what they did.

They didn’t wash. There was no reason to wash because there’s nothing on your hand that could possibly cause more problems than a bullet. If I could do one thing it would be germ theory.

So notes on germ theory. Plans for how to heal infections. How to prevent viral transmission and bacterial transmission.

John: Those all sound great. I think there’s some basic formulas that would be important there. Because this idea of a cheat sheet, I don’t know if you ever had any classes where a physics test you were allowed to sort of like have one sheet of paper that can have–

Craig: They never let me have that.

John: Oh, I think it’s a godsend. Because it’s stupid not to because you could always look it up.

Craig: I know. But they were mean.

John: Yeah. So the basic formulas, so Pythagorean Theorem, Quadratic Formula, getting everybody on a base ten system is just so important and so crucial. The knowledge that the world is round, because experiments you could do even in ancient Egypt that show like oh the world is round, you can actually calculate the size of the earth. The sense that the earth is not the center of the universe. That the sun is the center of our solar system. That there are other planets. I think that’s important to understand. It’s not going to have as big of an impact necessarily as washing your hands will be, but I think will move things forward.

Getting people past – you know, if you look at Aristotle and sort of the classic philosophers they were trying to do this theory of mind, but also the physical universe, and they just did not have the tools to actually understand. So they kept inventing things and they systematize this logic but it was based on nothing. So bringing them the scientific method and sense of like this is the hypothesis, this is what I’m testing. This is the results. That feels crucial to me.

Craig: Yup.

John: Capitalism and just the sense of how money works and how we’re going to exchange stuff, how we’re going to exchange goods and services.

Craig: A lot of Bernie fans screaming at their iPods right now. How dare you!

John: If you understand capitalism then you can get to other sort of systems as well.

Craig: That’s how you get yourself off the hook, huh? All right.

John: That’s what it is. But who explained capitalism better than Marx? No one.

Craig: Yeah. I’m not really sure anybody did prior to that. It was just sort of this is our system. It’s a natural bartering system is what we do.

John: There was Adam Smith.

Craig: From the Invisible Hand.

John: Invisible Hand and all that stuff. Those feel like the crucial things to sort of get across. I mean, you don’t need to teach them atomic theory. There’s things that are just not going to be realistic because they have to build so much stuff along the way, but I want to get people started as quickly as we can. And hopefully head off some of the worst things like slavery and thinking about sort of like what does it fundamentally mean for each person to have inalienable rights that are possessed within.

Craig: Well, I mean, what do you think? Based on everything we know about science fiction when you go back and you help people then you hurl yourself back to the future, it’s going to be a nightmare scape. Because that’s just we can never help.

John: Time travel inevitably involves sort of like sleeping with your mother and it’s bad.

Craig: Oh, why would you? Why?

John: Back to the Future.

Craig: Got to drink heavily now at 11:47 in the morning. Oh man. I’m going to go back in time to a moment before you said that. That’s all I want to do.

John: Now if you can go back in time you could actually think of a One Cool Thing that you could have shared here.

Craig: Nah.

John: No, not going to do it.

Craig: Never.

John: Craig, thank you very much for a fun episode.

Craig: Thank you, John.

John: And listeners if you have suggestions for what you should put on that sheet do write to us because I think you’re going to probably have some really good ideas of what that sheet should be.

Craig: Better ones. Oh, you know what I would love? I would roll the dice and hope that I would go back to the time of Jesus. And show him the bible. And have him go, “You can’t be serious?” And I’m going to be like, no dude, this is real. And he’d be like, “You can’t? You cannot be serious.” And I’m like, no, no, no, this is seriously real.

John: Listeners if you tweet at me with your one page back-and-forth sheet cheat I will retweet that because I think that’s a great idea. Do it. Craig, good luck with your continued preproduction and when do you start shooting? Or is that public knowledge?

Craig: That is not public knowledge, but real, real soon.

John: Cool. Enjoy.

Craig: Thanks.

John: Bye.

Links:

• Zola Movie discussed in our HWTBAM segment on Episode 222.
• The Criminals Thought the Devices Were Secure. But the Seller Was the F.B.I.
• 1,000-Word Job Listing for a “Household Manager/Cook/Nanny and follow up An Interview With the Woman Who Wrote the Viral 1,000-Word Job Listing for a “Household Manager/Cook/Nanny from Ruth Graham on Slate.
• Couple breaks up after being handcuffed together for 123 days
• Must I really indulge my ‘psychic’ sister-in-law?
• Decoder Ring: The Tootsie Shot
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• John August on Twitter
• Liz Hannah on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Michael Karman (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@dev.johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.