Drew Marquardt

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: Hi ya’ll. My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 456 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the program we’ll be following up on a bunch of topics we’ve been discussing, include police on screen, assistant pay, short seasons, and restarting production. We’ll also be answering some listener questions assuming we have time because we’ve got a lot on the Workflowy here, Craig.

Craig: Let’s just mulch through this. Let’s go with expedience.

John: We will speed with heed. But no matter what happens in our bonus segment we will be talking about computers. I’m curious what Craig’s initial experience was with computers, what he’s using right now, and what he wishes to use in the future.

Craig: Yeah, sure. I love listening to a computer talk about computers. [laughs]

John: Ah, it’s good stuff.

Craig: Beep-boop-boop.

John: Boop-boop-boop-boop.

Craig: Beep-boop-boop-boop-boop.

John: Last week on this program we were talking mostly about police on screen, police on TV. And we covered a lot, but a thing we didn’t talk very much about was some of the shows that are doing an interesting or better job of depicting police on screen.

Craig: Yeah. Which is always good to call out people that are doing well.

John: Yeah. So I’ll link to an article by Bethonie Butler in the Washington Post where she singles out some shows that had good approaches to it. Some of them are not classically police shows. But she mentions Atlanta, Blackish, New Girl. Obviously people talk about The Wire, which wasn’t focused exclusively on police but sort of everyone around the community.

Craig, you did a whole podcast on Watchmen with Damon Lindelof. I thought that was a fascinating depiction of police and policing.

Craig: Yup. Very much so. I mean, it’s interesting. Every show that will touch on policing and the community and any issues regarding police brutality and specifically as it interfaces with the Black community is going to be scrutinized. And I think that’s fair. When you make – let’s call it, I think sometimes people misuse the word brave when it comes to culture. We’re not actually going in and facing down bullets or anything. We’re making shows and things. But when you are being let’s just call it creatively ambitious you’re going to open yourself up to scrutiny.

And it was interesting watching over the last couple of weeks as some people attacked Watchmen, which was curious to me because I thought they actually did quite a brilliant job. But then again that’s how things go. I mean, everybody kind of looks at things from different points of view. I thought that one of the things that was great about Watchmen, at least I thought, was that quite a number of the writers were people of color. So, you at least felt like you were getting this accurate representation of different viewpoints as opposed to just the standard Hollywood “and now white people explain everything” kind of point of view.

So, big fan of that show, and all shows, but you know, I think we should all be aware that as we tackle these issues that there’s going to be pushback all the time. And that’s healthy.

John: Yeah. And I also want to acknowledge that we probably aren’t talking about a lot of shows that really did try to some of these things and just never caught on. Like public defender shows or other things that were trying to take a very different approach and didn’t work because they got drowned out by police procedurals. And I’m sure there are a tremendous number of conversations happening in executive suites and writer’s rooms around town as these shows start up for another season about like can they change, will they change.

And it’s just really difficult based on how a one-hour procedural is set up to imagine what the better version of that show could be. Because as we talked about it’s a problem-solving show. And because it’s a problem-solving show you want to end the episode with a success. And you want things to happen, not not-happen. You don’t want to have interventions that mean that there is no gun fight.

Craig: Whereas of course in reality the problem doesn’t end. It is not solved. And all of these – anyone making a show, I think, especially if they’re in any kind of procedural format is going to also face a reasonable suspicion that they’re doing it cynically. No one wants to imagine that anyone is going to try and capitalize off of something. And yet, you know, Hollywood makes culture and it follows culture. So, it’s a tricky one.

You want to try and now make art that addresses the way we’re thinking about policing and how police function in our communities, but you don’t want to be seen as somebody that’s just doing it because it’s “the hot thing.” And I have to say I don’t have a lot of faith that that won’t happen. I think that is going to happen. And I think it will be interesting to watch people react.

John: In a strange way I feel like American culture in the last two weeks to a month as the discussion has focused on what do we actually really want the police to do, so this discussion of defund the police, or sort of how we’re going to change and reform how policing works is that I think Americans would like to see police actually do the kinds of things that they are sort of limited to doing on their on screen depictions. Which is to solve crimes. To stop murders. To protect people who are about to be killed by some outside force, and not do all of the other things which we sort of put on the police to be responsible for.

Craig: Well, you know, much like as is the case with the medical profession, what we see on television is not what the average day in a medical professional’s life is. And that’s because we wouldn’t want to watch that. It’s boring.

Reality and I would argue responsible, good, careful, thoughtful policing in a community should be boring. Meaning it’s not exciting to watch. It’s not titillating. You’re not eating popcorn. You’re not leaning forward. It’s supposed to have a different function. It’s not supposed to be dramatic. So when we make drama out of these things we are hashing it up a bit automatically. It’s an interesting – this is an interesting conversation that we are just starting to have which is how our culture interfaces with reality to make things either better or worse. Hollywood tends to over-emphasize or imagine how much impact it could have on the world in terms of good.

I think it under-emphasizes how much impact it can have in terms of bad. And I’m going to be watching this discussion carefully. This is an interesting one. And a necessary one.

John: Absolutely. So policing is only the first part of the criminal justice system. We got a letter in from a listener who works in the second half of the criminal justice system. Do you want to read what Lisa Steele wrote?

Craig: Yeah. Lisa writes, “I’m a special public defender for Massachusetts and Connecticut working in appeals. Yes, the public defender offices are busy. And, yes, most cases are resolved by plea, not trial. But if a client says “I didn’t do it” or “I want a trial” their attorney will do their damnedest to get them a fair trial. There are huge institutional roadblocks to overcome. But I’d be hard-pressed to see a public defender unhappy about taking a case to trial if there’s any hope of success. The ones with no hope, yes, we’ll try to persuade the client that trial is a bad idea.

“I’d love to see a dramatic series with an ethical public defender or a criminal defense attorney at the center. Better Call Saul is entertaining but does perpetuate the sleazy lawyer trope.”

So, what do you think about that, John?

John: Well, I think we have many listeners who could rise to this challenge. So it’s the question of what does the show centered around a public defender look like? And I know there have probably been shows every season developed along this line. Different pilots that have been shot. Some things that have gone to series and I have not seen them, so I apologize to listeners who said like, “I had that show.” But this does feel like a moment at which the right show, the smart show that did this could break out. And so it’s the way that Scandal broke out. The way that you have a show that this is your central character but there’s something else there so that it’s on a weekly basis. We’re not tuning in just for the public defender of it all, but for who these characters are.

Craig: Yeah. I have no doubt that Ms. Steele is correct about where she is working. One thing to be aware of is that our country does not have any kind of unified or therefore equitable justice code across the United States. Obviously that is true for federal statutes. But local, state-level, different laws. Different functions. Different ways of administering justice.

So for instance there’s a story in the third season of the Serial podcast about a public defender whose client is innocent. He knows she’s innocent. She knows she’s innocent. She wants to go to trial. And the DA is saying, “No.” And the DA offers a plea bargain and the public defender in one of those rare moments says, “No. She didn’t do it and we’re going to trial.” Just as Ms. Steele is describing here.

But in Cleveland, where this occurs, public defenders receive their assignments and therefore their salaries from the judges. So a case comes in, the public defender charges somebody, the judge assigns a public defender. And if you want to go to trial you’re going to have to answer to the judge who does not want to conduct a trial, because it’s too much work. So, what happens in that case? The public defender says, “I want a trial,” and one of the bailiffs comes to him and says, “The judge wants to see you.”

And the judge basically says, “What are you doing. Just, no.” [laughs] “Don’t do this.” And it’s not that you can’t, it’s more like quietly implied if you do maybe I just won’t be picking your name out of the hat anymore. And there goes your salary. There goes your livelihood.

Well, that’s insane.

John: Yeah.

Craig: That’s just a terrible system. So, we have problems. Something like that I think is just an easy one. Like we should get rid of that. But easier said than done as our entire nation is fragmented into 50 different codes. And then within those 50 codes lots of other different codes.

So, I think Lisa is right. And I also think that in other places what she’s saying is not exactly as clean as that.

John: Yeah. And you’ve listened to the Serial podcast which is based on True Stories, I can imagine though if this were put into a fictional context we would not necessarily believe it. Like I feel like it’s only television true story that would get me to take any action to say that that is outrageous and that has to change. If I just saw it happening in a TV show I don’t know if I would believe it in a way.

Craig: You need it to be based on facts, right.

John: Yeah. Dramatizing it is just not enough.

Craig: Dramatizing it is not enough. We just presume that drama is drama. And we presume that because the characters that we’re seeing are not real people. So, obviously nothing that happens to Jimmy on Better Call Saul is real because Jimmy is not real. It is a great show, though. I do love the show.

John: Cool. Now, Craig, I just want to remind you and remind our listeners that behind the scenes of all of this there’s still Coronavirus. There’s still a pandemic raging.

Craig: Oh boy is there ever. Yeah.

John: There is. So as we’re recoding this, middle of June, LA is reporting its highest number of cases ever. Deaths are up. And, yet, we’re opening up the town. We’re doing new stuff. So, it’s a challenging time.

So, personal news here. I got my first coronavirus test and antibody test this past week. This was the classic swab up the nose for the coronavirus and the antibody test is a finger prick. The antibody test, right there they can give you preliminary results, and then the afternoon, like a couple hours later, they give you the official results. So I did not have antibodies for coronavirus. I thought it unlikely but possible because I was in Korea for Big Fish right as the outbreak was happening. And my husband and daughter did get sick while we were there. So, that seemed possible. But all of us did not get coronavirus. So, we are like most Americans, did not get coronavirus.

Craig: Well, I mean, so good and bad news. You can still get it. Although, of course, people who have gotten it can also still get it. We’re not quite sure how long that immunity lasts. It appears that our country in its absolute vacuum of leadership has just said, “Meh, I guess people are just going to keep dying.” Because we are selfish. I don’t know how else to put it. We’re selfish. And we want what we want. We meaning the general public seems to just want to do what they want to do. And they’re selfish. And also they’re not thinking straight.

And people are going to die. So, the numbers are going to go back up. The numbers were going to go back up anyway in the fall. So this is already bad news. And there’s no question that the size of the protests and the lack of social distancing between protestors is going to exacerbate the problem. In no way am I saying that we shouldn’t have been protesting, but that’s just – you know what shouldn’t have happened was police murdering a guy. That would have been preferable.

So, it’s bad. And it’s going to get worse. No question.

John: So, when we first talked about this topic it was a bonus segment if you can remember that. Like way back in the day. That’s a bonus topic. We’ll talk about the coronavirus, this thing that could potentially happen.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And it’s funny going back to think through what my assumptions were then. So I wanted to record some of my assumptions right now just so six months from now I can listen back and say like, oh my god, I was so incredibly wrong. So, the assumptions going into this epidemic was that handwashing was super important. We all learned to wash our hands for 20 seconds. To maintain six-feet of social distancing. To be scrupulous about wiping down surfaces. And some people were doing like mail quarantines and all this stuff. And eventually the instruction came out like, oh, we said don’t worry about masks but, yeah, now do wear a mask. Masks are good.

I would say my assumptions right now, and this is again middle of June 2020, I think we’re going to find out that masks are actually incredibly important. And that we should have done those from the start and that that is probably more important than the other things I’ve put on my list in terms of keeping this thing from spreading. I think we’re figuring out that it’s more of a thing that is spreading through the air rather than you pick it up off of things.

Craig: Yeah.

John: But that’s my guess. That’s my guess right now.

Craig: I think that is – we can upgrade that from a guess to an educated guess. And I think in part we were told so much about handwashing and wiping down surfaces simply because there were no masks to give. So, I’m fairly certain that people like Dr. Fauci looked around and said, “OK, the number one thing we should do is the number one thing they’re doing in Asia already which is wear masks to prevent airborne transmission.” And then someone said to him, “We don’t have any. And the few that we do have we desperately need to conserve for medical professionals.” At which point we were told other things. Part of – and then we get frustrated. Why are we being told “yes mask, no mask, no mask, yes?” Because we screwed up.

Because we didn’t have this. We should have a national stockpile of personal protective equipment. Of course we should. We spend billions of dollars on a single jetfighter. And we don’t have masks to give people? God, we’re stupid right now.

So, I think you’re absolutely right. Now that masks are plentiful they will be crucial. If you wear a mask and other people wear a mask your chances of contracting COVID do reduce dramatically.

John: Yeah. And it just basically makes sense. The simplest description I’ve seen of this is the someone pissing description. So, if two people are standing next to each other and they’re naked and one of them starts urinating the other person will get sprayed by urine. If that person who is not pissing has pants on they’re less likely to get wet. But if the person who is pissing is wearing pants that urine is not going anywhere. And that’s really the simplest description of why you wear a mask. It stops it from getting out of your body so easily.

Craig: I would have used the example of someone – it’s like if someone were sneezing as opposed to somebody sneezing with a mask. [laughs]

John: Yeah, but I think pissing is more fun.

Craig: Listen, the fact that we started with two nude people–

John: Yeah, got to start with two nude people.

Craig: You start with two nude people and then one of them is just like, “Here we go. It’s happening.” I love it.

John: It’s going to happen. So, again, the backdrop for why we’re talking about this on this podcast is the entire production of film and TV has shut down because of coronavirus and now there’s – well, Craig, it’s all back.

Craig: [laughs]

John: The governor put out guidelines this past week.

Craig: Yes.

John: And I’ll just read you the guidelines. “Music, TV, and film production may resume in California recommended no sooner than June 12, 2020,” a couple days ago, “and subject to approval by county public health officers within jurisdictions of operations following the review of local epidemiological data, including cases per 100,000 population, rate of test positivity, and local preparedness to support a healthcare surge, vulnerable populations, contract tracing, and testing.” Wow, that was a long sentence. I can’t believe I got through it.

Craig: The government tends to not truncate their clauses.

John: No. “To reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission, productions, cast, crew and other industry workers should abide by safety protocols agreed by labor and management which may be further enhanced by county public health officers. Back office staff and management should adhere to office workspace guidelines published by the California Department of Public Health and the California Department of Industrial Relations to reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission.”

That just says not a whole hell of a lot. The interesting part here is you should work with safety protocols agreed to by labor and management, so let’s talk about labor and management and safety protocols and what we know.

Craig: Well, to start with the fact that the state government is saying you can resume film production doesn’t mean that it’s going to. And the biggest concern of course is with actors. Everyone on a set can be – people on a set can wear a hazmat suit if they want, except for the actors, who can’t even wear a facemask, or gloves, or keep any kind of social distancing. In fact, they may need to kiss each other.

This is a huge issue for them and they are going to drive this. There is a whitepaper – I’m still stuck on your peeing guys – so there’s a whitepaper from the AMPTP that was done in conjunction with every union except the Writers Guild here in town. And it’s about how to do this all safely. Of course, writers will also be required to be on set for televised work. It’s going to be driven almost entirely I think again by the actors. When the actors agree to do this it will be done. This also may start happening ad hoc. In other words the actors union is likely to say, if they haven’t already, “It’s up to the cast.” And then it’s about the cast.

Now, that’s tricky because this is people’s livelihood. This is their income. And when you start to say to people are you willing to trade your safety for your livelihood that puts them in a difficult spot. Especially when they aren’t what we think of – when we think of actors we think of George Clooney, or Meryl Streep. But in fact, you know, most working actors are making a living wage. Meaning they need the wage to live.

John: Yeah. When you’re number 13 on the call sheet you don’t have a lot of leverage there.

Craig: No. And so you may be willing to put yourself in danger. That’s difficult. And I sympathize with the position that SAG/AFTRA is in. Because on the one hand they don’t want their members to feel jammed into trading safety for employment. On the other hand if they ban it entirely they are also then curtailing the economic welfare of their own members in a way that may be just as detrimental.

This is a tough one. And I think probably one of those situations where there is not a perfect answer at all.

John: No. So let’s talk about the solutions that are being proposed and sort of what the general areas of discussion are. So we’ll link to the AMPTP paper. We’ll link to Lionsgate put out their guidelines. And it largely tracks with what our friends who are showrunners are discussing with their production entities about how to get back into production. So, it’s a lot of testing. It is a recognition that actors are masked until they can’t be masked and then you are keeping as few people on set as possible. You are maintaining social distance.

We’ve talked before on the podcast about French hours which is a limited timeframe. It also skips over lunch. There’s different ways to do that kind of limited timeframe. But that feels like a good idea to get rid of that break where everyone is congregating together. And also just get you off that set sooner.

Some of these things are just kind of frustratingly bullet pointy. The lines get things a little bit more of a template, a little bit more of a this is how we’re going to do it. But it’s really difficult. One of the things I found fascinating about the Lionsgate document was talking about what to do when you’re on location. And like if you’re going to a set that’s a practical location how do you know that that set itself is actually safe on a COVID level. It’s really complicated.

So the shows that can film on a soundstage that would normally be sitcoms but you just don’t bring in the audience, that feels much more controllable. It’s the things that do need to be out there in the world that are going to be challenging.

Craig: Yeah. And there are about six of those left? So most stuff is going to be done in a way that is challenging. And, by the way, even a sitcom set, all you need is one person to just start coughing and that’s it. And, again, all of this, no matter how much ink is spilled and no matter how many bullet points are dashed off and whitepapers are printed out, the virus doesn’t give a damn and will do what it does. And we are living with it now and like you and I said I think this is pretty safe to say this is going to get worse before it gets better. I do feel like we are in for some more trouble.

And until there is a reliable safe and effective vaccine this is kind of how it’s going to be.

John: Yeah. Before we close out this topic I do want to circle back to this idea of protests and sort of mass gathering. I, too, was really nervous when I saw a bunch of people together. What gave me some heartening was that when I saw these mass protests I saw a bunch of people in masks. And that made me feel better about that than a bunch of folks not wearing masks and sort of protesting against wearing masks in other parts of the country. So, including Orange County which is right next door.

Craig: Orange County, they are nuts.

John: So, it will be hard to suss out exactly to what degree protests were involved versus the general easing of restrictions. But individually I think we need to be really thoughtful about – like the description of a risk budget. How much risk is it appropriate for you to take given your circumstance and who is around you? And really figure out ways to mitigate that risk and not spend that risk budget when you don’t need to.

Craig: I don’t know if you saw this video. There’s an amazing video of a Karen in Orange County. I don’t know how else to say it. She’s a Karen. She gets up at some sort of city hall meeting where they were talking about imposing a requirement for masks in public spaces, which they should. And her argument against it was that god, so this is already great, god had given her the ability to remove carbon dioxide from her body by breathing out. And a mask would make her breathe the carbon dioxide back in.

And I thought it’s rare that someone could say something and every part of it is wrong. Every single part.

John: If she were to write it down the punctuation would be wrong. That’s just how wrong it is.

Craig: Everything. It’s just like, god? God? I mean…

John: All right, Craig, I think we deserve some good news. So let’s move onto our next bit of follow up. A few episodes back we asked our listeners, hey, if you were a previous Three Page Challenge entrant who we talked about your entry on the show we’re curious what’s up with you. So write in and give us an update. And so we had an update this week from Ashley Sanders. Let’s take a listen.

Ashley Sanders: Hi John. Hi Craig. I’ve just listened to Episode 449 of the podcast. I’m a few weeks behind because of lockdown. And you were asking about any follow up from people who had been on the Three Page Challenge. My TV pilot 419 was on the challenge about three years ago and you were both ludicrously nice about it.

After you discussed it on the show I got some [unintelligible] from TV companies over in the States. I’m in the UK. Sent it over and then panicked. I realized I didn’t know what I was doing and suddenly thought I might need someone to protect my interests. So it gave me the kick in the pants I needed to call an agency.

An agent read the script and [unintelligible] signed me. The most wonderful agent has been so proactive. My career has since – I couldn’t wish for a better agent. And I wouldn’t have made that phone call if it wasn’t for Scriptnotes and the Three Page Challenge. I’m now writing a couple of movies I wouldn’t be writing if I hadn’t made that call off the back of being on the challenge. 419 got optioned by a great UK indie super smart, developed it further, and ended up with an absolutely killer product.

Unfortunately we failed to find a home for it in the UK as the show is a little high concept. It’s currently joined with a US company and will hopefully get made.

So, really your challenge was responsible for giving me the shot in the arm to jumpstart my career. So, thank you. I can’t thank you guys enough. From me and everyone else out there like me please keep doing what you’re doing. It’s unbelievable.

John: Well hooray. Congratulations Ashely. We are looking forward to seeing this project and other projects. Listen, I am glad that your being on Scriptnotes gave you some exposure. I don’t want to claim any more credit than that. You clearly were a good writer. You were a good writer when we read you. Someone else would have discovered that you are a good writer as well.

It sounds like you’re doing the right things to keep moving forward. And even when you have setbacks in the UK figuring out a way to do that same project here is good. So, again, it sounds like this one thing you wrote is attracting some attention. But you’re also focused on what else you could write and how to get hired writing other things. That’s exactly what you should be doing.

Craig: Yeah. I feel like at best what we’re doing is maybe speeding along something that would have happened anyway. That’s the most credit I’m willing to give us. But we do love hearing this because, you know, we’re doing this pointlessly. [laughs] I mean, most of the time I must admit I’m just doing it pointlessly. But then again sometimes every now and again you’ll see like, oh yes, there is in fact a point that you are impacting people. And even if while we’re talking to – how many people listen to our show now?

John: Oh, like 50,000 a week.

Craig: 50,000 people a week. Even if five of those 50,000 people a week are going to end up being professional screenwriters, I’m glad that we’re talking to those five. Even more glad I hope that we’re bringing in some other people that may have not considered doing it and now are. So that’s always lovely to think.

So, I guess the point is that Ashley Sanders has proven that we guarantee success for you. [laughs]

John: Oh my, yes.

Craig: Statistics.

John: Yeah, statistics.

Craig: 100% of people that wrote us about this have gotten jobs.

John: Oh, good stuff. One core constituency of our listenership are assistants. Assistants in the film and television industry. And over the last year we’ve been talking a lot about assistants and particularly assistant pay in this town and how low it is. And how it needs to improve. And we made some progress on that. We actually got some major employers to raise their rates and actually start conversations about how to be paid better and really what people should be thinking about as their minimums. And then a pandemic hit. And so a lot has changed.

So, to explain a little bit about sort of how assistants work here and the different kinds of assistants, on set we talk about PAs. PAs generally have no union, but they’re often reporting to the AD which does have a union at the DGA. But in writer’s rooms and people who are just working for a writer like a showrunner we’re really talking about sort of classically two jobs. There’s the assistant who is taking notes in the room and a PA type who is running and getting the lunch order. And we talked a lot about the lunch order on the show and people not paying the PA back for lunch order orders and stuff. Those are classically two functions you would need to have happen.

One of the strange things about this pandemic is as all of the writer’s room stuff have become virtual those writer PAs who were getting the lunch order, there’s no lunch order anymore. Like that’s a whole big part of the job gone. But there’s still a lot of need for someone to be taking notes and sort of organizing things. And so that’s been a challenge. And a lot of the virtual rooms that I’m hearing from, they basically just got rid of one job entirely and now they just have the one person taking notes.

Craig: Yeah. Like many segments of the population assistants have been impacted significantly and very negatively by the shutdown. It does seem like when these things happen unfairly it’s the folks at the bottom of the earning pyramid who take the biggest hit.

I have heard and seen with my own two eyes honorable, decent, good people at the top of the pyramid who have gone out of their way and made personal sacrifices to ensure the health and welfare of the people at the bottom of that economic pyramid. I like seeing that. It does happen. I don’t want people to think that this is just a town where rich people mouth slogans and then give nobody a dime. That’s not what’s happening. People are being gracious. Sometimes. [laughs]

There are some people who are not. And it would be great if the multinational corporations with hundreds of billions of dollars in market value did it anyway. But they don’t.

John: Now, Craig, as I introduce the topic this is how long we’ve been in this state of emergency that I forgot that at the very start of the pandemic you and I helped raise like a half million dollars to pay support staff.

Craig: We did do that.

John: I completely forgot that was a thing we did. And so–

Craig: We did that.

John: Those checks went out and those people got paid a little bit more. They’ve been getting unemployment insurance in many cases which is fantastic, which is great. But now stuff is starting up again and it’s challenging for these assistants, many of whom are aspiring writers, to be employed properly. So, I had Megana reach out to her assistant boards and her contacts to sort of get some feedback about what’s actually happening. Do you want to start with this first one, anonymous, who wrote in?

Craig: Sure. Anonymous writes, “There’s been some chatter among assistants that even though the bulk of writer’s rooms plan on working remotely indefinitely, some are planning on meeting in person now that production is starting back. I’ve seen a few posts in which assistants are being put in a position where they must weigh the risk of going back to work, especially PAs, who will have to expose themselves while picking up lunch and groceries.

“I’ve also seen job postings looking for drivers and personal assistants. One of the posters even commented that their boss was ‘breaking away from social distancing’ as they start preproduction and are scouting locations. With studios and production companies impacted by the shutdown, they’re offering assistants even less pay while asking assistants to potentially risk their lives.”

Well, I certainly don’t like the less pay part. I mean, if you’re going to ask people to risk their lives you’ve got to at least give them what they were being paid before. Good lord.

John: Yeah. There’s so many elements at play here. So part of that is I think a thing that’s been happening since the pandemic began which is that we offload our individual risk onto someone else. It’s like someone else who is delivering our food to us is taking the risk for us. And that’s a whole complicated set of issues. And I think the change here is that these assistants who were staying home are now sort of being put into that role of being the person who goes out and gets the thing and brings it to a place and is absorbing some of that risk for the showrunner, for the other writers in that room.

But really you can generalize this second part of like, OK, if we are going to start getting together in person that is going to increase our risk overall. And that risk may be disproportionate for different people in that room because some people might be immunocompromised or have someone in their family who is immunocompromised. And it’s a bigger gamble for certain people than others and it’s really uncomfortable to say that in a room.

And just as we said 13th on the call sheet for actors, there’s going to naturally be kind of a hierarchy of writers in that room. And some people who would be confident speaking out if they were the co-EP wouldn’t speak out if they were the staff writer or story editor.

Craig: This has always been the situation, right? And we’re as an industry trying to improve things. Assistants and people who are entry level who are struggling to either get or keep these very small number of desirable jobs have always been put in these situations where they were exploited.

And there’s different kinds of exploitation. And as an industry we are trying to improve kinds of exploitation. I mean, the fact that everybody used to say the phrase “casting couch” like it was a goof and now we understand that just the words themselves are referring to a very serious crime is a sign of how we are improving, one would hope.

But then there’s stuff like this, which is new. This was not a problem. Hollywood in the ‘60s didn’t have a COVID problem where PAs were coughing and dying because idiots made them get lunch in ways that were unsafe. So, we have this new avenue of potential exploitation that we have to struggle with and we have to come to grips with. And, again, this is not going to be easily solved until there is a vaccine. It’s just not.

John: Now thinking through this, that assistant who is running out to get the lunch order every day, like they were assuming some risk because they were driving in LA traffic. There was some risk that was naturally there. It was lower than what we’re talking about with COVID-19, but there was some risk there. And I guess we really weren’t thinking about that risk that that assistant was taking.

I do feel like we’re getting closer to understanding what the risks are for going to a place and picking up a thing and leaving a place that is pretty secure the way that our food handling has seemed to have gotten. So, I’m concerned for that person who has to do it, but I’m more concerned about sort of the novel situations, or the situations where like well because Chris is already doing that thing and picking up the lunch order we can also send him to do this or to do that or to do this third thing and just increase his exposure and increase his risk. That’s troubling for me.

Craig: Yeah. And there’s a continued possibility of risk shifting, so if the PAs on a show say we’re not comfortable going to get these lunches then the show will say, great, we’ll just use Grub Hub. And so those people will now be getting lunches. Some humans will be getting the lunches. And, yeah. So it’s going to be trouble. There’s going to be trouble for a while. And I think the least that we could do, that we must do, is if we cannot solve the state of safety because the world is inherently unsafe, we have to at least compensate people fairly and decently, or we are compounding the problem. We have to. We can’t offer assistants less pay. That’s insane.

John: Yeah. So, Megana also added to our Workflowy a list of other questions and concerns that she was hearing from assistants as she was talking with them. So, I’ll just sort of read through these.

Is everyone getting tested prior to showing up to work?

Are people isolating outside of work?

Will assistants get hazard pay?

How will safety protocols be enforced?

How are we communicating about sick leave?

What are the daily systems in place to check how everyone is feeling on set or in the room?

Will someone be taking people’s temperatures?

If someone isn’t feeling well how should they communicate that? Are we still paying that person?

Are we requiring everyone to wear masks and gloves? What about people who are already choosing not to? How will this be enforced?

And, finally, many assistants don’t have insurance. Most of the people are not 871 script coordinators. So, are we paying them some sort of healthcare stipend because of the situation?

Craig: Well, in terms of that last one they already should be paying them that.

John: Yeah.

Craig: These are great questions. And much as we were referring earlier to the United States which has this uniform federal code and then four billion different state and county and municipal regulations, so too are our businesses fragmented among various networks, studios, and then inside of those, shows, and production companies, all of which are going to probably be approaching things in their own way. There is no simple answer to this. I mean, ideally you answer these questions moving the dial as far to the right as you can on the safety-ometer. Yes, everyone should.

I mean, I’m not sure about gloves because there’s an argument that gloves actually make things worse.

John: Yeah.

Craig: But masks – I mean, if it were me, if I were running a writer’s room, I would require masks. If we’re all sitting around the table talking at each other for hours, yes, I would require masks. Yes. I think taking temperatures in the morning, checking in with a thermometer is a great idea. Yes, if people got sick they should get sick pay. Yes, everyone working in your office should have health insurance. Those all seem like good policies to put in place.

John: Yeah. Also I feel like we’re in California. You can be outside. Try not to be in a room for a super long period of time with people if you can possibly do that.

Craig: Now everyone has skin cancer, so good job.

John: Tents. Tents. They’ll have tents.

Craig: Ah, tents, yes.

John: Finally, Charlie asks, “Are there any resources that can help people navigate working remotely? I think a lot of what’s happening is that writers don’t like the online boards. We all bought laptops so now one has a monitor that can see what’s actually happening in the room. So what software are rooms using and liking and can we share best tips and practices?”

This is a request out for if you’re listening to this right now and your room is working really well because of something you’ve discovered that’s working great, write in to us and let Megana know what you’re using and we’ll share this on the next episode or the episode after. Because different rooms are trying different things in terms of duplicating the experience of what would be on the whiteboard, what would be cards, how stuff is working. Some people are using Zoom. Some people are using other stuff. So next week or the week after we’ll do a segment where we talk about what writer’s rooms are using and liking because we’ve got to share this information.

Craig: Yup. No question.

John: Cool. So next up is equity and inclusion. Every year the Writers Guild publishes a report that shows who is working in town in terms of writers and the demographics of those writers who are working. And so we’ve talked about this I think every year of the podcast. The report came out this last week. It got overshadowed because of everything else happening in the world. But there was some interesting stuff in here. Craig, have you had a chance to take a look?

Craig: Yeah. This is what I have traditionally called the Bad News Report where we read it and go, yup, more bad news. But it’s not all bad news this time. There is clearly a positive trend going on. So, we’ll just sort of do the top line stuff here. The most encouraging statistics are along the axis of gender. So currently television writers for the 2019/2020 TV season, so reflecting what we just had, it broke down 44% women, 56% men. Is that parity? No. Women, however, are up 5%. And those numbers were not anywhere near 44% ten years ago. This is a really encouraging trend. I think we’re doing excellent work there. And I have no reason to think that that trend won’t continue. We should be able to get to gender parity in rooms.

Let’s talk about race. People of color at 35% and white at 65%. That’s also not disastrous given the actual racial demographics of the United States of America. It’s not perfect by any stretch. Good news though. Up, again, 5%.

And this is an area where I think we can actually do better than the demographics of the United States because we’ve done so much worse than the demographics of the United States. So, I think this is an area where we do need to aggressively not worry about the scale per se and matching. I think it would be nice to see that number actually also at 50%.

John: Absolutely. And we will link to this whole report. But if I’m talking about a page number it’s from this PDF which will be linked here. Page 11 talks about TV writers by level and that’s where you can see where there are still some glaring disparities, particularly in race in terms of as you move up the ranks from staff writer to showrunner the percentage of people of color in those different roles drops. Drops after like supervising producer. It starts to slip a lot.

Some of this is just the climbing the ladder issue. It’s a number of years and credits that sort of move you up that ladder. But as we’ve talked about on the show before sometimes the ladder in the pipeline is kind of broken. So there’s a real question of like with time would this get fixed? Or is there something more fundamental that needs to happen to make sure that writers of color can move all the way up to the top of showrunners?

Craig: I’m sure it’s a combination of both. So, on the one hand you would expect this that there’s going to be a lagging effect because as people enter the industry they enter at entry levels. And so over time in theory if the advancement scheme is fair then those numbers will improve. If it is not fair, those numbers will not improve. Or we’ll be lagging behind the process in the entry level stuff. So we’ve got to keep any eye on it. In general we know that the more people of color in positions of leadership the more likely it is that more people of color will then be promoted to positions of leadership.

We’ve always had a vicious cycle that’s been downwards, and now we’re hoping for sort of a positive spiral going upwards.

John: A virtuous cycle.

Craig: A virtuous cycle. Now, all of that applies to television. However, in the screenwriting business, so features AKA the Bad News Business. Not good. So, OK, plus side of things, 4% more women employed as screenwriters in 2019. 2% more people of color employed as screenwriters in 2019.

Bad part. 27% of screenwriters were women. Only 27%. And only 20% of hired screenwriters were people of color.

Now, some things to think about, aside from the fact that that’s horrendous. The job market in screenwriting, of course, continues to sort of be retract-y and regressive. And not as attractive honestly as the television business. So, one consideration is that when there is an unfair system people who are traditionally discriminated against are going to go to the avenues where they are being less discriminated against. So there is some sort of natural movement there.

It is only, therefore, more evidence that the way people are hired in the feature business is just not good. It’s just not good. And I don’t know why it has gone up slightly. I can’t get too excited about it because when you look at the numbers of employment, I mean, these percentages are a little bit of a lie. When we say 2% more people of color were hired as screenwriters in 2019 that 2% is applied against a very small number compared to the 5% increase of people of color in television, where the base is much bigger.

John: Yeah.

Craig: So, just in sheer numbers that 2% more people of color could mean four people. It’s just not great.

John: Now so one thing I do want to single out here, we have a perception that the feature business is falling and that few people are working in feature, but that’s actually not the case. There’s more writers employed in features this past year than the year before. There is actually an uptick because even as the studios have sort of compressed Netflix and Amazon and other people have come online. So there’s been more folks working in features than before.

But you look at sort of the work that you’re actually doing and our own experience we’ve talked about so much on this podcast is that it is structurally not very appealing to work in features. And if you are a young writer of color who is making a choice between like do I want to work on this TV show, or do I want to work on this feature given that I’m going to be doing so much free work on this feature. I’m going to be – I don’t know when I’m going to get paid for this feature.

Craig: It’s also certainly true that there are writers of color who want to work only in the feature business and who are struggling and one of the institutional issues you have with the screenwriting business is that it’s not room-based. It’s individual-based. And when it’s individual-based the compounding factor of experience dramatically multiplies.

John: Yes.

Craig: So you and I have written dozens and dozens of screenplay. We have been hired many, many times over the course of 20 years. So, when someone is looking for somebody to write a screenplay, at the very least they know that you and I have done it a whole lot. And the experience gap is enormous because there is no room. There is no entry-level position. There is no ladder. There’s nothing to climb.

They will continue – even as they increase the number of jobs available the pool of people that are experienced will dwindle. And so you have a lot of repeat business among a narrowing group of people and that will always, given the way that the businesses function, benefit white men. So, there has to essentially be an overt effort to get people experienced. And I was talking about this the other day here in the office. And it’s interesting you have to give people the right to stumble and fail. You’re not going to be able to get experienced writers of color in the feature business if you don’t give them the same right to stumble and fail that the feature business has always given white guys.

John: Yeah.

Craig: It just needs to happen. You just need to absorb it. Because you’ll hear people, “Oh well we tried, you know, we tried hiring but then this person didn’t do a great job because they’ve never done it before.” And I’m like, mm-hmm.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: Do it again. Do it again.

John: As we’ve talked about on the show the first thing I was hired to write I got through three official drafts on it. So the movie never happened, but I got to actually get paid for multiple drafts in ways that new writers never get these days. And so one-step deals and the lack of a guaranteed second step creates this impossible situation where that writer is never going to be able to deliver the thing that makes everyone happy, that everyone has a good experience with. They’re not going to get the experience of how to do multiple drafts and how to sort of work through a feature in development.

Craig: That’s such a good point. And that’s exactly why we need to get this clause through negotiations and the companies need to do this. Give writers earning under a certain small multiple of scale a guaranteed second step. You need to. It’s the only way you’re going to learn. You can’t learn writing one script and then rewriting that script for some dopey producer who has no clue. You work for the studio and the need the ability to be trained through experience. It’s the only job in Hollywood where most people who do it have never actually done the other half of it. The first half is writing a script. The second half is writing a script that gets turned into a movie. And working on the movie as it’s in production.

We need to get more people who are not just white men into those slots and the only way to do it is to increase the on-the-job training. Because there’s no room to follow.

John: I agree. All right. So that is our quick look at the equity and inclusion report. But there’s actually a lot more in here, so do follow through the link in the show notes to see sort of what’s there and where progress has been made, but where progress is sorely lacking.

We’re going to skip over our little bit here about short seasons. I will say that short seasons are related to the problem of experience and sort of developing experience in television. A writer I follow on Twitter was saying that like by the time he was running his own show he had worked on 100 episodes of TV. And no one can work on 100 episodes of TV easily these days with so many short seasons, or get the longevity of things. So, I feel like short seasons are a related factor to sort of the challenge of equity and inclusion in the TV business.

Craig: Yeah. And they’re not going anywhere. And they will become the new norm because also creatively speaking I would argue that creatively short seasons are why television is producing the best work it has ever produced. But, yeah, there are costs.

John: So one thing I do have some hope about is that as I see people who have big deals at streamers and other places, I’m thinking of the Berlantis and the Ryan Murphys, those writers do tend to hop from show to show, same with Shonda Rhimes. Those writers do tend to hop from show to show within that little ecosphere and I feel like even if these shows have short seasons I hope that those writers are getting an ongoing experience of making a bunch of stuff because that’s really what they need.

Craig: Yeah. I absolutely agree. And they do have an opportunity – I mean, Greg Berlanti is kind of his own network. So, Greg and Ryan and Shonda, these folks are continuations of this like what used to be the old school, like a Stephen J. Cannell where there was like a producer who had tons of shows. And so they’re still there. They still exist. And they become their own networks. And they are uniquely positioned to advance these causes and improve the diversity of the workplace. And I think that they do. It doesn’t hurt that Greg and Ryan and Shonda are all people that are in traditionally underrepresented categories in the business.

So, it’s good to see and you have to hope that it will continue that way.

John: Yeah. All right. Two last little bits of news. This Saturday I’m doing a local author event at Chevalier’s which is the bookstore in my neighborhood. It was originally supposed to be a couple weeks ago but then sort of the world happened and it was not an appropriate time for a happy discussion of kids’ books and local authors. So that is happening on Zoom this Saturday at 2pm. So, join us. So, Aline will be there. Derek Haas will be there. A bunch of local authors. Some of them are kids and middle grade authors. Some are grown up authors. We’re talking about our favorite books. We’re talking about summer reading lists and things we’d recommend people read.

There’s a link in the show notes. You can see my summer reading list, but also other authors about what they are recommending.

Finally, David Koepp, was a guest on Episode 418. We talked about his book a little bit on that episode, but I hadn’t really read it yet. I finished it this last week. It’s really, really good. I started reading it and worried it was going to be a pandemic book because there’s an outbreak of a thing, but it’s actually not. It’s a thriller. If you can imagine Jurassic Park but in an underground storage unit. It was really well done. So, check that out. And check out his movie, You Should Have Left, which is based on a book that I really liked, a German book I really liked. And that was supposed to come out theatrically. Now it’s coming out on video everywhere June 18. So check out his movie. The trailer looks terrific.

Craig: Fantastic. Love that David Koepp.

John: Craig, One Cool Thing time. What do you got?

Craig: Oh. This one is easy this week. My One Cool Thing is The Last of Us Part 2. It is a masterpiece. Obviously I’m a big fan of The Last of Us. I think that much is clear by now. I have had a chance to play The Last of Us Part 2. I’m in my second play through now. It’s a shattering, brilliant piece of art. And in the videogame business reviews are essential. Nobody really cares about television reviews. They sort of care about movie reviews. But I made a career of movies that critics didn’t like but people did.

So you can get away with that. It’s not a necessary aspect. But in the videogame business it’s huge. And specifically Metacritic. That’s what everybody looks at. Metacritic compiles, aggregates all the videogame reviews. Calculates them on a scale of zero to 100 and gives you an aggregate number. To get really good games I think you’re talking about the high 80s. Excellent games you hit a 90. The Last of Us clocks in at 96.

John: That’s great.

Craig: And it deserves it. It is a spectacular game. And it is a thought-provoking challenge to what we understand to be the function of heroism and villainy in narrative. I can’t say enough about it. I hope to god that Neil and I do a good enough job on the TV side of things to be able to tell that part of the story. Because it’s something else. I don’t think you’re a big PlayStation guy, but–

John: I’ll definitely get it. So I downloaded The Last of Us Part 1.

Craig: Oh great.

John: I guess it wasn’t Part 1 because they didn’t know there was going to be a Part 2. I downloaded that this past week and I haven’t started playing it yet, but I will. So I’m looking forward to checking it out.

Craig: Excellent.

John: Cool. My One Cool Thing is an episode of Decoder Ring. It’s a podcast hosted by Willa Paskin and written by Willa Paskin. And this episode I loved so much was about the Metrosexual and sort of the branding and a discovery and creation of this concept of the metrosexual. This man who cared about fashion and taste and seemed gay in a lot of ways but was not gay in other ways. And the birth of Details Magazine.

It was just a great time capsule of this little moment that happened. And the importance of how applying a word to it defines a space. And without the word metrosexual all that stuff would have been there but it wouldn’t have coalesced the way that it happened at its moment. So a terrific podcast, but especially this episode on metrosexual I thought was great.

Craig: Excellent.

John: Cool. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

Craig: Ka-boom.

John: It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Joey Hillenbrand. If you have an outro you can send us a link to it at ask@dev.johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts. And they’re great. So go to Cotton Bureau and look for them, or just there’s a link in the show notes for them.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you can also get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record. Also, you can gift memberships to Scriptnotes. And so a lot of people have been doing that this last week for whatever reason.

Craig: Nice.

John: So if you want to give a gift for that there is a link in the show notes for giving a gift of Scriptnotes to somebody if you’d like to give them something for a birthday or some other celebration.

Craig: Mm. Spectacular.

John: Nice. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

John: All right, Craig, let’s talk computers. What was the first personal computer that you used?

Craig: Excluding like goofing around on a friend’s Atari 400 with the membrane keyboard and the tape recorder storage, my father and I went into Manhattan in I want to say 1983 and we purchased a Franklin Ace 1000.

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: Which was a clone of the Apple 2. Franklin then was quickly sued. I believe the price was $1,400, which for my family was a lot. But, you know, it was just something that my dad really wanted. But I was the only one that used it. And I used it every day. I have one, by the way, in my office.

John: Oh that’s great.

Craig: Yeah. I went online years ago on eBay and was like I’m going to get myself a Franklin Ace 1000. It won’t turn on or anything. I’m just going to stick it in a corner. And I bought it for $1. Yeah.

John: $1,400 to $1. My first computer was an Atari 800. So no the membrane keyboard, but the one that actually had a keyboard-keyboard. And what younger listeners probably don’t understand is that those computers actually hooked up to TVs. And so you’d wire it into your TV. Rather than having a separate monitor they hooked up to the TV. And the picture wasn’t great. None of it was great.

We originally didn’t even have the tape drive to save stuff on. So basically we would type up programs from the magazine and watch them run. Or play the game and then we’d turn off the computer we would have to retype the whole program. That’s how it all worked for us. Fast forward to a couple different Ataris along the way. That’s what I did my first early writing on.

Then my first Macintosh which was in high school using it for my school newspaper. And that was just a revelation. It was the first computer that just truly adored using on a daily basis.

Craig: Oh yeah.

John: When did you get your first Mac?

Craig: Let’s see. I think I got my first Mac actually for college. So, I was using – I can’t quite remember what version of Apple I was using at home with like a daisy wheel printer to clackety-clack out the term papers and things. But when I went to college, so that was 1988, I got a Mac SE20.

John: I had the same computer.

Craig: Pretty standard.

John: And did you have a hard drive or two floppies?

Craig: Oh god, no, no, no. Floppies. No hard drive.

John: I sprang for the hard drive.

Craig: Actually, I take it back. That’s what the 20 was. The 20 was a hard drive. I think it was a 20 megabyte hard drive.

John: Yeah. That’s what it was.

Craig: Which would now hold one file of – it would a PDF.

John: It would not hold this episode of Scriptnotes.

Craig: Good lord, no.

John: No. What’s crazy is I remember I ended up buying that at a University of Colorado bookstore, or the computer shop at the bookstore, and my had come with a check for me to buy it, like a cashier’s check or something. And it was like $3,000. It was so expensive to buy it and yet it was worth every penny of it. Because just the amount of writing and stuff that I got done on that computer was remarkable.

Craig: Hugely necessary. Do you remember when – because when I bought it I believed I got a little bit of extra memory? They were running a deal for students. To get the memory in there they had to use a special tool to crack the case open. They had a special Mac case-cracker. Like a Slim Jim for a car. And then they would pop the whole thing off. It was quite a process to do any of that stuff. Now, of course, you can’t actually do any of that at all. When you buy a laptop it’s sealed.

John: Yeah. Things tend to be sealed now. So, what got me thinking about early computers is I put in an order for a new Macintosh because my iMac that I’m recording on right now is like four years old, maybe five years old. It’s pre-Paris that I had this computer. And it’s a little bit old. As we’re playing Dungeons & Dragons on this there have been times where it’s sort of spun out a bit. Like, OK, I think it’s time for this computer to move on.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So I put in an order for a new iMac and then it became clear that, oh, you know what there’s actually going to be a whole new iMac coming because they’re switching to a new processor so I canceled that order and now I’m waiting to see what the next Macintosh will be. And I’m kind of excited about it. What I find so fascinating is that the Apple hardware and Apple chips and the iPhones and iPads they really are more powerful than many of the Macintoshes we’ve become accustomed to. So I’m curious what’s going to happen once I can get this into my computer.

Craig: I mean, if you have an iMac that’s four years old whether you get an iMac today or whatever the next gen is that they release in a couple of months it will be – OK, this one is 1,000 times better and this one is 1,500 times better. The difference is going to be vast. I don’t have an iMac. I have a MacBook Pro. So I run everything on that. And it is pretty astonishing what it can do and how fast it can handle things. I mean, we used to have concerns about like speed and memory. When was the last time, well, I mean, you have an old iMac, so maybe you do. But I never think about speed or memory ever.

John: And honestly I don’t think about it that often. It was a rare case where like the Dungeons & Dragons stuff was overloading the system here. And truthfully, listen, my company makes Highland and Highland runs incredibly smoothly on my computer. There’s very little that I’m encountering with my iMac that makes me feel like, oh, this thing is too slow. It’s a dinosaur. Partly because I have an SSD in it. So, that’s making everything feel a lot faster.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Weirdly a thing I have noticed though is that the front-facing camera in it is pretty terrible. And so it’s a small thing, but well it was a small thing until the pandemic and now that I’m using this a lot for video camera stuff it’s not good.

Craig: I mean, most front-facing cameras suck. But, yeah, the older ones really suck. That is an area where when my son was born in 2001, you know, I was like I better go get a camera. Got to take pictures of my kid. So I went and got myself like a Casio 3 megapixel. That’s what we would do. And had a little digital card inside of it. And over time they have essentially made that camera but ten times better and the size of my thumbnail. It’s incredible. Absolutely incredibly the way that that technology has evolved. So, yeah, the four-year difference on camera will be pretty remarkable.

John: Yeah, I saw on Twitter this week a 1 terabyte SD card and that’s like the little mini SD card, but it’s one terabyte. The amount that we can cram into these small spaces.

Craig: Oh yeah. Awesome.

John: So, lastly, the other thing I’ve been working on a lot is the new version of Highland, internally we have a version of Highland for the iPad. And it’s been fascinating to look at making this app that I use every day and making it work on an iPad just because you really recognize how differently you work on devices based on whether it’s an iPad or like a MacBook.

And so even like I got the iPad that has the new laptop-y kind of style keyboard. It folds together. It’s really a terrific–

Craig: It’s cool. I like it.

John: It’s a really good system. I think it’s great. But it’s still not the same as a MacBook. And there’s things just do work differently and your expectations about files and not having menus, it does such a brilliant job with the cursor. It’s just remarkable how clever they figured out how to make the cursor work. And yet still figuring out where to put certain things that would normally be in menus has been a real challenge design wise.

Craig: Yeah. I am reliant on the finder. I like finder.

John: Yeah. I do, too. Because we grew up in the finder.

Craig: Yeah. We grew up with finder. I mean, there’s files on the iPad, but that’s really just like your cloud storage. If they could make finder that would be nice.

John: Yeah. That’s what we want. We want a finder.

Craig: Yeah man.

John: We solved it all. Craig, thanks.

Craig: Thanks John. See you next week.

John: Bye.

 

Links:

• Chevalier’s Local Author Event, Saturday June 20th at 2pm
• Police officers are often glorified on TV shows. Here’s what it looks like when they aren’t. by Bethonie Butler
• WGA Inclusion and Equity
• Shorter and Fewer Seasons, Is TV Sabotaging Itself?
• The Metrosexual episode of Decoder Ring by Willa Paskin
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Joey Hillenbrand (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.

The original post for this website can be found here.

 

John August: Hey, this is John. Today’s episode contains some strong language. It’s also reflecting kind of how we’re feeling at the start of June 2020, which is a little bit raw and painful and uncomfortable. So, I just wanted you to know that before you started listening. Thanks.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 455 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we are going to take a look at how police and policing are portrayed onscreen and writer’s responsibilities in doing so. We’ll also answer listener questions about freaking about in meetings and whether to write books or movies.

And in our bonus segment for Premium members we’ll discuss the possibility that Craig does not exist.

Craig: Oh god. I hope that’s true.

John: That would be wonderful.

Craig: Oh god.

John: Before we get to any of that we do need to acknowledge this moment that we’re in. So, we postponed this last week’s episode a day to sort of give some space. But if you’re listening to this years later we should explain what this moment is. The last two weeks we’ve had protests over the killing of George Floyd. The issue of police violence against Black Americans is at the top of the list. We’ve had looting. We’ve had curfews. We’ve had the National Guard. We’ve had more police violence. And this is all against the backdrop of a pandemic which still has no cure. It’s been a lot.

Craig: Yeah. And this moment that we’re in, it’s one of those moments where we just noticed that we’re in it. That’s all that’s happened is that we’ve noticed the moment that we’ve always been in. And we means all of us, but specifically people of color in this country. I guess we hit a point where we just – everyone. Everyone. And that’s been part of the kind of nice thing that’s come out of this is that everybody is standing up and saying, “Nope, no more. No more.”

John: Yeah. So a lot of our listeners are in LA. So some of what we’re going to say in the next few minutes is probably like “well, obviously, I have eyes and I have ears.” But we also have a lot of international listeners who wouldn’t be familiar with what is actually happening right here in Los Angeles. And you and I might be the only people they know who live in America or live in Los Angeles. So, I thought we might give some recap of what it feels like to be here right now, just a sense of you’re in this place.

For me the last two weeks has been kind of the situation where I thought I was in one genre of movie and suddenly I find myself in another genre of movie and I can’t kind of figure out where I’m at. Like I felt I was in a pandemic movie and now I’m in a dystopian movie, or a different kind of dystopian movie. An authoritarian kind of dystopian movie. A protest-y kind of movie. And I’ve been trying to get my bearings. And I keep cycling through these feelings of confusion, of grief, anger, fear, moments of hope, despair, and then it just sort of circles back around.

And as we’re recording this it’s a cloudy afternoon. I feel less despair than maybe I did six hours ago. But you just don’t know what’s going to happen next.

Craig: Yeah. I just feel like this country just hit a saturation point. We have taken it on the chin from ourselves and from our terrible federal government and from local law enforcement and the scientific response – the politicized scientific response and the way that our scientists have been shackled. The entire last five months has been awful. And all of it was built on top of something that has just systemically been awful. And we just hit it. We just hit the point where we just said, nope, that’s it.

And if people are wondering why the death of George Floyd was what did it, as opposed to the death of Breonna Taylor or anybody else that was murdered by the police, I don’t know. Other than to say that there’s just sometimes it’s time. And it just hit the time.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Boom. And I’m glad. I’m glad. And I hope it keeps going. And I’ve never felt like this before. That’s part of the happy circumstance of my easy life. But I feel like it now. And I’m just – I’m angry. I’ve got to be – like I’m angry every day right now.

John: Yeah.

Craig: That’s where I’m at.

John: Adam Lisagor, friend and writer, made a point that the feeling that fascism is happening, it’s the awareness that to the Black community in America they sort of always were living in a fascist state. There always was a fear of things. So we’ll get into this in our discussion of policing. But the other change of feeling was that after the 2016 election we did that little special episode where we talked about like not that everything is going to be OK but this will end. And I would say that a thing I’ve felt over the last two weeks is that notion that right after the election people could tell me, “Oh, you’re overreacting. You’re being crazy.” And now someone can’t say like, “Oh, you’re being crazy.”

Because when you see video, when you see these things happening in front of you, when you hear helicopters overhead and you see military vehicles moving down the streets, OK, you’re not being crazy. You’re actually seeing not just figurative institutions like the rule of law and justice eroding, but you’re seeing the things that you know in your daily life being destroyed. Literally restaurants I would eat at don’t exist anymore. That Starbucks where I met Melissa McCarthy, oh, that’s on fire right now.

And so to see those things be literally destroyed in front of you like you’re in a Roland Emmerich movie just makes it more present. Makes it more immediate. And you can’t – it’s just harder to deny what’s actually happening in front of you.

Craig: The stuff that’s been haunting me is weirdly watching the police abusing old white men. And here’s why. Because I see this – there’s a video out of Utah and video out of Buffalo which is just awful to watch. And the police just push these two different elderly men backwards and they fall. And one of them starts bleeding and is in serious trouble. And you watch that and you think, OK, if that’s how they’re treating old white men then how do you think they’re treating everybody else? Going all the way down their list. And I presume at the bottom of their list of who should be treated well are young Black men. And this is how they’re treating old white men. And I’m watching this and I’m just thinking this doesn’t happen randomly.

Because the police chief and will come out each time and say, “Well, we are shocked. That is not who we are.” It is who they are. It’s who they are. That doesn’t happen just randomly over and over and over in every city. There is a culture that has permeated law enforcement. It’s evident.

I mean, I watch LAPD beating people with sticks who were just peacefully protesting. They may be obnoxious, by the way. Protestors may be obnoxious. They may say things. They may get in your face. Too bad. You’re not allowed to hit them with sticks for that. Because, see, we’re in this place now where only certain people get to have the protections of being Americans. Like, I don’t know, white supremacists who show up in government buildings with semiautomatic guns.

John: Protesting that we need to open up the economy because of COVID-19. Yes. All that.

Craig: Right. Because they want to be able to go to Wing Stop. That’s OK. But somebody walking down the street saying, “You’re murdering people that look like me for no reason,” they have to get hit with sticks. The whole thing is outrageous. The entire thing. When you look at the entire thing it sucks. Our country right now sucks.

And I’ve said this before. I’m a Yankee fan. Through and through. That’s my team. I love the Yankees. In the 1980s the Yankees sucked and I would get so angry at how bad they sucked. I would yell at the screen “you suck” because I was upset. Because I wanted them to be good. Because I loved them. I can’t not love them. And I can’t not love this country. But I am so angry right now and it sucks so bad right now. Oh, god. We suck.

As a team our country right now is the worst. And its manager is the worst ever. And a lot of the people in charge of the organization are the worst ever. And people are dying. Because we suck. Those are the stakes. We’re not losing games. We’re losing lives. We suck right now.

And I am angry. Again, I’m sure this is evident to everybody listening to this, but I’m disgusted and I’m angry and I’m proud of our kids, you know, like my daughter who gets out there and makes signs and marches. Because I do feel like their generation understands so much more and so much better than ours does. So there’s a little bit of hope. But it doesn’t matter if they get hit with sticks. Then it doesn’t matter. So the whole fucking thing has to change. All of it. It has to change. And, I mean, if we cannot figure this out fast, as in like November, I don’t know. Then, I don’t know. Maybe it’s not the team that it used to be. Maybe I’ve got to find a different team to root for. Because it is dispiriting and breaks my heart.

Did you see this video of George Floyd’s daughter? Did you see that?

John: I have not seen the George Floyd daughter video.

Craig: Fucking heartbreaking. Because she says that her daddy changed the world. And I’m like, you know, that’s not what a little girl should be saying is that her daddy changed the world because he got murdered. Anyway.

John: So, as I watch – I never watch live TV, but I needed to watch live TV because I live near the mayor’s house and there are helicopters over my house as protestors are marching on this house. And to watch it in real time and not knowing like, OK, this is totally a peaceful protest. Will this stay a peaceful protest? What is going to happen next? And to find myself being both an audience member and a potential actor in this situation where like I don’t know whether this thing I’m seeing on TV is going to spill over the fences and become a situation in my life.

Or to watch live TV and to see Trump do that crazy press conference and then the chaotic walk to that church. And to be watching and like, wait, am I watching a Zapruder film happening in real time? At every moment it felt so dangerous. And you could tell like, OK, this is some sort of horrible anti moon landing. You could tell that some big moment was happening in live TV.

Craig: Anti moon landing. That’s exactly right. It’s a moment where we can all share and vomit.

John: Yes. So as I’ve been watching myself watching this thing I always come back to the sense of you are a protagonist in your own life and that one of the challenges is to both observe and recognize that in the drama of your life you are the central character and you are the hero in this moment. And you’re having to make tough choices the way that heroes in these stories have to make those tough choices.

And so the choices of like, OK, do I go out and protest knowing that there is an incurable virus out there that would put me at risk. It would put my family at risk. Do I let my daughter go out to these things not knowing whether this is a thing that could end up with police and batons and tear gas? These are the tough choices that protagonists in stories have to make.

Craig: Yeah. And we do the best we can. Because we’re not heroes in a movie. Heroes in movies get to walk away from explosions. We don’t. Heroes in movies can be beaten in the face hundreds of times. Watch any Rocky film, he would have been literally dead after three or four of those straight punches to the face. But that doesn’t happen in movies. In movies you can get shot and you just keep going. You just wrap a thing around your arm. That’s not how it works at all.

You have to make these choices. I’m happy to say that people are being brave, which is exactly what we need. It’s funny. It’s also exactly the thing that the worst of us keep insisting the best of us are. The worst of us keep saying that everybody else is this scared, easily triggered snowflake. No. No. No, quite the opposite. These people are out there facing down batons. They are not afraid.

And, yeah, look, did I like the idea of my wife and daughter in a crowd of people on the one hand? No. So, you know, you make sure – my wife is incredibly responsible. We’re wearing masks and you be really careful and you try and keep yourself socially distanced as you can. But, then I am not going to – I’m not going to deprive, especially my daughter who is very emotional about this. And I’m not going to deprive her of this. So I have to make that choice. And I hope it works out, you know? But I have to be brave, too.

Just, I am proud of the people. I am.

John: Yeah. A moment I’m proud of is that I saw white Americans actively seek out information about what Black Americans are facing on a daily basis and try to understand it. And try to actually not only to listen to it but to speak up and act out in protection of Americans who did not have the same experience. That gave me some hope. And I don’t want to make it sound like it was all storm clouds and dystopia for the last two weeks because that wasn’t my experience either. It was a lot. And I think we have to just acknowledge that it’s a lot. And that in not knowing what happens next that uncertainty is also draining.

Craig: This is an experience that you and I, I don’t think, have ever really had. This kind of America. We were not alive for the late ‘60s where this was going on quite a bit. And I guess it’s our turn.

There was a war, I think it was after World Wars, during the Hoover administration. This may sound familiar. A stingy Republican administration was stinting on benefits for veterans of WWI. And veterans of WWI marched on the government. And there was like a little war. And the government basically shot a bunch of its own veterans. This is kind of who we are.

If we have a moment now to change it somehow for good that would be great. I don’t know if we can. But we can’t not do it. We can’t not change things profoundly. When I look at not just in ’92 everybody could point at Daryl Gates and say your traditional here in the LAPD is no good. And you could say that from time to time about individual police departments. I’m watching police departments in Portland and Minnesota and Los Angeles and New York and Buffalo and in Utah and in Kansas. And it’s all of them. We have a cultural disaster.

John: Well, then let’s talk about that. Because there are many other podcasts and many smarter people who can talk about systemic changes that need to happen to improve policing and police and we will link to some of those resources because I think that’s another good thing that’s come out of here is some people actually have very specific plans for this is what we want to do. But let’s talk about that cultural expectation about policing because that’s a thing you and I can speak to because I feel like so much of my experience as a white American with police has been the police that I’ve seen on screens. It has been – because I have never been arrested.

Craig: Same.

John: I can count on one hand the number of interactions I’ve had with a member of law enforcement. There’s nothing more privileged than that to have to deal with with this. Either as a suspect or someone who has been a victim of crime. I just have not had to deal with police. And so my experience of police comes from watching police on television. I think that’s a truism for many white Americans is that we think of police as those people who solve crimes on television. So let’s talk about how police are portrayed right now and think through what are some possibilities for how we change how they’re portrayed on screens so that we get to some better understanding and better approaches to policing onscreen.

Craig: Sure. I’ve never written any kind of police stuff, but I’ve certainly watched it. I have a friend, Ken White, who goes by the name Popehat on Twitter. He is a former federal prosecutor turned defense attorney and he has his own podcasts and he appears on news programs from time to time as I guess a pundit. And for as long as I’ve known Ken, which is, god, about 17 years, he has always been a very staunch proponent of the notion that law enforcement is over authorized and law enforcement essentially has its thumb on the scales of justice in ways most of us do not appreciate or understand.

And it’s easy to sort of, you know, in times of what we think of as peace because we are privileged to be in situations where we’re not on the frontline of this, we think, oh come on, they’re doing a good job, they’re out there. And, look, it’s just like on the shows. And I suspect that if Ken White were to create a police show it would not be like that at all.

John: No. When I hosted this panel on criminal justice a few months ago, which feels like a lifetime ago, we were largely talking about from arrest to incarceration. But so much of what police do is well before that. It’s the policing. It’s the being out there in the world. It is solving the crimes. And so I wanted to talk through some of what we see police do on TV and then we can talk about sort of how that doesn’t match up to reality.

So, cops on TV, they are problem solvers. The problem is a crime and they solve the crime within 60 minutes. And now obviously I’m talking about sort of the police procedural show and we’ll talk about sort of the exceptions to those shows. But like in most of especially the CBS kind of crime shows, but also the NBC crime shows, there’s a problem, the problem is introduced at the start of the episode. And then by the end of the episode there’s a solution to the problem. And the solution is putting a bad person behind bars. Or killing the bad person.

The cops on TV, they are heroes but they’re not necessarily protagonists in the sense that they don’t change. They don’t experience ups and downs and huge growth over things. They start the episode super competent and they end the episode super competent and they did the job and they solved the problem. There’s not a sense that they are undergoing a metamorphosis over the course of the show.

Craig: Right. They specifically can’t because they have to be back next week to solve another problem. So, there is a presumption there just built in structurally to the police procedural that the police officer is doing a good job. Now, there are some shows like The Shield where part of it is about a police officer being corrupt. But for the most part in the procedural they’re often given a glossy paint of problems. Maybe they’re an alcoholic. Maybe they are divorced. Maybe they’re cheating on their spouse. Maybe they did something in their past. It’s very common that when we meet police in movies or television they have done something wrong in the past. And they are in the midst of atoning for it while they usually violate any number of reasonable police regulations to bring the bad person to justice.

This is very common. In reality the bad things that police do are being done all the time by police. And at this point I can hear somebody saying, “Not all police.” Correct. Not all police. Just like not all men. Just like – yes, yes, yes, we know.

John: But we’re talking about the overall system. And also we’re specifically talking about the police that we see on TV which is what we’re talking about right now. So, to this point of like the police we see on TV they can use or ignore the system as merits and there’s no consequences for ignoring the system. So I think back to one of my favorite shows of youth was Hunter which was a cop detective show with Fred Dryer. And he’s a maverick. Hand in your badge. Here’s your badge back. You solved the case.

Basically as long they got the results it didn’t matter if they broke the rules. And that is a thing we see in these systems again and again is that they have all the resources and they have the whole team but if they need to move away from the team and they need to go on their own as a lone wolf well that’s what they should do.

Craig: Right. So the frustration that these shows create dramatically in us is a cop is handcuffed. I know who the bad guy is. I know how to catch this person. But you and your stupid hippie liberal regulations are preventing me from delivering justice vigilante style. So, you suck. You, the police chief, the politicians, the DA, anybody that – god help you if you’re a defense lawyer. You’re all scum. And I need to be out there doing the job that needs doing.

John: Yep. Now, in doing that job they are fundamentally conservative in the sense that they are protecting institutions. They are protecting the status quo. And so anything that is a disruption to the status quo is something that needs to be knocked down within the course of those 60 minutes. And so it doesn’t matter whether the disruption was a murder or a plot. Whatever happens they’re going to bring us back to normal at the end of 60 minutes because that’s what you do in an ongoing series. It’s like there has to be a big thing that happens but by the end you need to be able to recycle back to where you started the whole show.

Craig: Yeah. So, you fix the world. That’s what you’re doing. As a cop in a procedural you are fixing the world. Now, in the actual world as it turns out it appears that police are one of the things that are breaking the world. Now, if you are someone whose child has been smashed in the head by a police baton or shot in their own apartment because they were in their own apartment, and you watch one of these shows it must seem like it’s beaming in from another planet.

John: Because that’s not been your experience with the police. That’s not who police are. Like what is that? I mean, come one, police are there to protect and serve. That’s what it says and that’s what we’ve seen on TV again and again is that that’s what they should be doing, right?

And so then you see these aberrations and like well that gets back to the “oh it’s one bad apple.” And Seth Meyers this last week made the point, “Listen, if the cops were bad apples like people die, then you’d say, no, you have a bad orchard. You have an orchard problem, not an apple problem.”

Craig: Uh-huh. Yeah, Chris Rock has a great bit from years ago because, see, it’s not like this is news, right? Where he said, “Uh, yeah, OK, well police officer is one of those jobs where you actually can’t afford to have a bad apple. Like pilots. You can’t – American Airlines can’t say after a crash, ‘Well, you know, that pilot was one bad apple.’” [laughs] We cannot have any bad apples walking around with the ability to shoot somebody in the head, or smash them in the face with a stick, or push them on the ground and put their knee on their neck, or take their life and liberty away. We can’t.

They can’t have bad apples.

John: And that’s one of the ways in which I would say reality does mirror the TV perversely is that the stakes are incredibly high. The stakes of these dramas are always like, oh my god, it’s going to get away. The bad guy is going to escape. In real life it’s the worry that like the ability to inflict deadly harm on somebody at any given moment, so the stakes are profound at a moment because of how we have armed our police.

Craig: Yeah, no, that’s exactly right.

John: Now, in these shows the world is a fundamentally dangerous place. And I think this is a thing that we don’t talk enough about is sort of the Jessica Fletcher problem is that in Murder She Wrote all these people are dying in her tiny, small town. What is up with her small town?

Craig: She’s obviously a murderer.

John: She’s obviously the murderer. But if you watch crime shows you believe like, oh, it must be very common for these kind of crimes to happen. And they’re not. The kinds of crimes you see on TV are not the kinds of things that a police officer is dealing with on a daily basis. And so it gives this really warped perception of how dangerous the world is versus what you’re seeing onscreen. And statistically we can show over the last 30 years the US has gotten just so much safer in terms of like the odds that a violent crime are going to happen to you, unless it is a violent crime happening on a person of color by a member of law enforcement.

Craig: Well, yeah. Because those aren’t crimes. See? They’re not listed as crimes. They obviously are crimes. But probably the number of assaults, physical assaults, that police inflict upon people is incredibly significant. And you can sense this kind of thin-skinned entitlement when I watch these videos of we deserve your respect, you can’t talk back to us, you can’t sass us. No. Actually, I’m sorry, but for all these people that profess to be defenders of the constitution and who declare that the 2nd Amendment and the right to own 12 guns is necessary to protect ourselves from a tyrannical government, how do you not then see that that’s exactly what the problem is right there? There.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: I should be able to express my mind in front of a police officer at any point, including saying, “I don’t like what you’re doing. I detest it.” And, no, they can’t get all grouchy with me about that. Sorry. Because you’re not allowed to be a bad apple when you’re a police officer or a pilot. If I walk on a plane and I say to a pilot, “You know what? I don’t love the way you’ve been flying,” is he allowed to beat me up? I’m stuck on the plane with him. He’s stuck on the plane with me. No bad apples.

John: But, I mean, really we have to acknowledge though that in any place where there’s a position of authority, even like an airline pilot, your objection to the way he’s performing his job does depend on your race. And so you raising the same objection in a situation is all going to be influenced by their perception of you and your race. And so-

Craig: Yup.

John: You, Craig Mazin, could raise objections to a pilot or police officer or a city official and have a different outcome than a black person would.

Craig: Yes.

John: And that’s a thing which is so uncomfortable to admit. And I do feel like we’ve made some chipping away progress over the last two weeks to get more people to recognize this and how pervasive the difference is there.

Craig: Why is it that it’s hard to admit? What is that? I mean, I don’t feel am I responsible for racism and white privilege? No. So, why should I feel this need to deny that it exists?

John: Because you don’t want to admit that you’ve benefitted from it.

Craig: OK. But we have.

John: Oh, we absolutely have. I’m saying–

Craig: I know you know that. And I know I know that. But I’m just saying who doesn’t know this? Who is looking around and not getting it at this point? At this point.

John: I think we also want to believe in the American ideal that everyone can raise up through the ranks and it doesn’t matter where you started. It has no [unintelligible]. Yes.

Craig: It’s childish. This is what children do. When children are afraid of something they shut their eyes and they say it’s not there. It’s just denial. That’s it. Just straight up denial because to acknowledge it somehow is frightening to you. If you are invested in the notion that this is the greatest country on earth and the American dream is alive and well, and everyone here is treated equally and all the opportunities are the same, well, I’m not going to tell you to open your eyes. You already know that that’s bullshit.

You know it. In your heart. Now, it may be uncomfortable for people who are not doing well in this system to also admit that. It is hard at one time to say I’m struggling, I don’t have enough money, I don’t have enough work, I can’t afford healthcare, my children are sick. And also I’m white and I benefit from a system. And I can appreciate that to an extent. But then also this is part of empathy. You have to start putting yourself in other people’s shoes. You have to.

John: Yeah. I mean, it’s a fundamental ability to shift this is my own experience, this is your experience, to the degree I can look at it from your perspective I can understand we have different outcomes because of where we started, because of how society is treating us. It does not help that we have a president who has just a noticeable vacuum where empathy should be. A spectacular gap there.

Craig: Does not know what it is.

John: So two other points about TV cops. There’s a well-documented CSI effect which is that prosecutors and defenders when they bring evidence into trials they’ll say that juries expect that there’s technologies there and sort of precision that just does not exist in the real world. Because they’ve seen things on CSI to make them believe like, oh, you should easily be able to do these things. Well that’s fiction. And they don’t understand what the reality is.

A general case you can make for we have this idea of competence and professionalism from what we see in TV police procedurals that is not reality. And I think for people who don’t have interactions with police outside of what they see on TV they would believe that the police function the way they see on TV and that they are competent and professional at every moment. And that’s dangerous.

Craig: It is. Actual police work is, well, it’s work. And most law enforcement, most police work, and then on the other side of it the prosecution and defense of people is far more bureaucratic paperwork-y than people want to admit. And also the stakes of the police drama necessarily put forth that there’s a risk that justice will not be done. That someone is going to get off the hook. This is the always the problem. If we don’t have this evidence they’re going to get off.

No one gets off. How about that? How about in this country first of all almost no one goes to trial at all.

John: Yeah. It’s all plead out.

Craig: It’s all plead out. The whole deal is we make a deal and it’s plead out and you’re going to suffer. And if you want to go to court just know that everything is stacked against you. Your temerity to demand a trial is going to stack it against you. Everyone is pissed off that there’s a trial. The judge is pissed off. The prosecutors are pissed off. The public defender is pissed off. Everyone is pissed off. They don’t want to do it. They just want to bargain you down to something that everyone can agree on. The one factor that is always true in most things is that you are Guilty with a G. And that’s how it works.

So the stakes are not that high. You will say, OK, well you know what this is what we’ve got. Well, you know, you don’t have everything. True. You know what? I’m not going to spend an hour in police show time trying to find that thing. Let me just pop two years off this recommendation. What do you think? How about instead of 15 we go to 12. And the defense guy will say, “Eh, I could do 9.” You’re like, 11? “Great.” Done. That’s how years of human beings lives are decided.

That’s not conjecture. If you listen to the third season of the Serial podcast, which is brilliant, you’ll hear it. You will literally hear the discussion. And it is chilling to listen to. That’s the reality. So they’re creating sort of false stakes on a lot of these shows. And, by the way, I don’t know how you continue on as one of these shows without changing at this point. I don’t get it. I think you have to, right? How do you continue?

John: I want to get that. Because I do think we’re going to have to have a reckoning with the kinds of shows we’re making and how we sort of do that. So the last point I want to make about police shows right now is – and I don’t have data to back this up, so this is just conjecture – but my perception is that the people who are arrested or prevented from doing terrible things on these shows generally aren’t people of color. And you’d say like, well that’s good, because you’re not portraying those people negatively. But I think then you also risk that you’re actually not painting an accurate picture of what is really happening here and sort of who is being affected by the system.

So if it’s always just white blond guy who is the villain here, well OK, you may be demonizing blond white guys to some degree but you’re not actually showing who is being impacted by the criminal justice system.

Craig: Right. And it is incredibly purposeful. I mean, when we were making the superhero parody movie, way back when, David Zucker and I watched as many superhero movies as we could. This was back in 2008. So we hadn’t quite gotten into the big Marvel cycle. But there were plenty of Spider Mans and Batmans to watch.

And the character of white mugger – I think we called him White Mugger #3, was our favorite. So the white mugger is usually a 40-year-old, clearly a stunt guy. He likes to wear that knit wool hat. You know, that ridiculous mugger hat.

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: And he’s unshaven. And he’s angry. And he’s like, “Gimme the purse.” And he’s got the gun. And we would just laugh at this because the whole point of white mugger was like, um, we’re uncomfortable showing the nature of how these things work, right? We’re uncomfortable showing the nature of poverty and we’re uncomfortable showing the nature of who the police are actually involved in. And, by the way, if superheroes were real who they would be beating up. So, we’re going to create this fantasy world and pretend that race doesn’t even exist. Isn’t that nice. There’s no race. Guys, we don’t have to address this problem because in our movie all the muggers are white.

Well, that’s bullshit. Right? It’s bullshit. Criminals are of all colors, but more importantly the interaction between people that commit crimes and the people who are there to enforce the law is completely screwed up. It’s screwed up. And here’s why. Let’s say you’re a mugger. And you come up to somebody and you threaten them and you want – you are a criminal. You are committing a crime. You do deserve to go to jail.

What we cannot do as a society is empower any individual person to beat the shit out of that guy on the spot, break bones, right, and possibly kill. Because sometimes you think someone is a mugger and they’re not. In fact, a lot of times it would appear the people that we think committed a crime are matching a description of somebody that merely vaguely looks like them. As in Black.

So even the superhero fantasy of punishing the mugger is nonsense. And so on police shows, yes, you see that stuff and it’s their way of just sidestepping the whole thing and not showing ever what is often common. A white guy with a stick hitting a black guy. That’s what’s common.

John: That is what’s common. So, we’re going to link to two other pieces that came out this last week. Kathryn Van Arendonk for Vulture and Sam Adams for Slate. And they talk through some of the issues of police on TV and there are of course counter examples. There’s The Shield. The Wire. Bosch. Justified. Fargo. True Detective.

A counter example from my own childhood I thought about yesterday was The Dukes of Hazzard. When you think back to The Dukes of Hazard, like Boss Hogg is the mayor. He’s the villain. The police officers are corrupt and incompetent. There’s Rosco P. Coltrane. There’s Amos who is sort of good-natured but still has to work for the police. That was sort of what my first impression of the police was, was weirdly this kind of strange southern fantasia of these good-old boys and the terrible sheriff who is trying to do them in. There’s a connection between that and Smoky and the Bandit in the sense of like, you know, literally a bandit or a Robin Hood kind of character who is up against this law enforcement.

But that was really the exception. So, let’s close out the segment by talking about what we think might–

Craig: Let me just point out that those heroes were always white. So, like, at the same time in the ‘70s you had like the one fantasy is white guys fighting back against corrupt police. My other favorite one was there’s a James Garner movie called Tank where he literally rides a tank, a military tank, to avoid a corrupt police officer. That’s what white people can do.

And at the same time Dirty Harry is just shooting Black people. Just shooting them because thank god he’s taking care of justice.

John: Yup. That’s justice.

Craig: Yeah. Those two paranoid fantasies right there can explain the two kinds of demonstrations in our country. It’s Dukes of Hazzard when the Ku Klux Klan dudes show up in a government building with long guns and it’s Dirty Harry when people of color are in the street protesting against innocent men and women being murdered.

John: Weirdly true. So you’re either Dirty Harry or you’re the Duke boys.

Craig: Yeah.

John: That’s what it is.

Craig: Depending on what color you are.

John: So let’s think through the future of police on TV. And let’s not be naïve. It’s not going to magically change. But I do wonder where we can get to in the next five-year period. Some of these shows I feel like as they restart production you’re going to have to – weirdly even in a bigger way than the pandemic impact and how we’re going to portray people interacting with each other on screen, just acknowledging that this moment has happened feels like it’s going to be fascinating.

I think there’s a real question of like should these shows continue to exist? Can these shows be changed in a way that’s meaningful? Or is it inherently the problem of the formula of a 60-minute crime procedural doesn’t really lend itself to anything other than this kind of thing?

Craig: Yup. I believe the latter. I think that we know that medical shows are essentially medical fantasies. Because when you actually do have someone in your family or if you yourself are seriously ill or injured you understand that the process is not at all like an hour of medical procedure television. But we’re OK with that because we’re too busy being healed or being cured or praying for – if you pray – for your family member who is sick.

But we don’t have the luxury of – if we are being hit with a stick or being shot in our own apartment, it’s not like we have the luxury of pretending that cop shows don’t cause trouble. They do. The reductive nature of the police procedural is either going to falsely glamorize or reductively criticize the problems with law enforcement in this country.

I don’t know how to fix it.

John: Yeah. This is not saying that we cannot do other things that are about police, but the sense of a weekly show that is about – I mean, procedure, they’re called procedurals because there’s a procedure. There’s a process that it goes through every week. It feels unlikely that we’re going to get to a place.

And I’ve seen some well-intentioned shows that try to take different approaches to them and they were not successful either critically or commercially. Someone may crack that code, but I don’t think it’s going to be by tweaking some of the ingredients within the basic nature of a police procedural. That’s why I think it’s important to have representation of various voices inside the writer’s room. But I don’t think it’s going to be a writer’s room problem to solve these existing shows. I think you have to make different shows that can work differently.

Craig: Yeah. This is going to have to be thought of in a different way.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Because – and what we don’t ever do with procedurals is show the long dragon’s tail of suffering. You have a police procedural where someone gets a little too crazy and beats someone up. And all the white cops get to be virtuous and say that cop is bad. Let’s get rid of him. And then they do. But what you don’t see for every single episode following that one for years is the person who is beaten up going through some sort of physical rehabilitation and living with brain trauma.

You don’t see that. That’s gone. In fact, you don’t remember their name.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Because they don’t matter. Because the entire thing is from a perspective of the police. And at this point I’m sorry I am only concerned with the perspective of citizens who are being policed. Because we’ve had enough of the police’s perspective. And I’ve had enough of being manipulated by the police perspective when I’m – when we are told that the old man in Buffalo fell. He tripped and fell. And then we see the video. And then they go, “Oh yeah, oof, those cops. Mm.” Well I think everybody all at once said at the same time, “Now if there hadn’t been a video…”

John: Oh yeah. That’s been the lesson of really the last few years, but especially this recent period. There’s video. You cannot tell me this didn’t happen because I’m seeing this.

Craig: Because I’m seeing this. And now you entertain the horror of knowing that prior to 1990 there was no video ever of anyone.

John: Yeah.

Craig: So that is centuries of police doing whatever the hell they wanted to.

John: In case we’ve not said this clearly enough in this podcast, it’s not that this is a new phenomenon. We’re acknowledging that this is not new. It’s that the arrival of video has surfaced an ancient evil which a huge chunk of the population already knew about, but a huge chunk of the population could look away from because we didn’t have it there on video to see.

Craig: Yeah. There’s just a – it’s exaggerated, it’s not that bad, I don’t have that problem. When I’m stopped by the police they’re incredibly cool to me. What’s the problem? Mm-hmm.

John: So, Craig, you and I did not solve the issues of police violence against–

Craig: Shocking.

John: Against Black Americans. Hopefully we had a helpful discussion for other writers thinking about what we are portraying police like on screens and the choices that decision-makers are going to be faced with as they decide what portrayals they want to put on screens.

Craig: And when they’re making those decisions. Don’t find yourself in a room full of white people all trying to figure out what the right thing to do is. If you are in the room with all white people trying to figure out how to make your show different, or better, or more responsibly you’ve already fucked up. You need to have people of color in the room. We need to employ writers of color for not just window dressing purposes, or to signal how wonderful we are, but for the actual stated reason behind the whole diversity thing. Which is that individual different perspectives matter and influence things in a positive way.

John: One addendum I want to put on that is the notion that it cannot fall on the responsibility of the one or two or four Black writers in the room to have to speak up and stand in the way of horrible choices and inconsiderate things being described. Like, they cannot take that burden all on themselves. And we cannot ask them to do only that. That’s why one of the things I’ve been somewhat hopeful about the last two weeks is I feel like people have actually been reading up and trying to understand a bit themselves what that is so it doesn’t fall entirely on the Black people in the room to explain why something is wrong.

Craig: Yeah. And that’s a particular problem when a staff has one person of color. And then everybody sort of turns to that person and says, “Well you’re here really as an ambassador from person of color stand. And so tell us what it’s like on your planet.” That’s not correct.

John: Particularly if that one Black person in the room is the lowest level staff writer, or is the PA. I mean, to ask that person to step up and do all that work when they don’t have any authority is crazy. So, we have to just acknowledge relative power in that room as well.

Craig: 100%. And most of these potential disasters can be averted if you simply look at it from their point of view, as best you can. And ask how would this seem to me if I were in their shoes? And do that as much as you can, all the time, with all the people that work with and for you. Just try.

John: Which shouldn’t be that hard considering we are writers and our whole job is to be able to understand–

Craig: Thank you.

John: What things look like from other people’s perspective.

Craig: But you know, and now I’m going to be critical of writers for a moment, that – for as long as I’ve been doing this I have been shocked over and over, which is surprising, because really I should stop being shocked, that writers whose job is to empathize and imagine themselves in other people’s shoes, writers who are supposed to be enlightened oftentimes are blinded by their own thin-skinned insecurity and ego. It blows my mind how frequently the blinders go on because they have their own set of shame issues and neediness and fragility.

John: I absolutely have those myself. I see them and I recognize them and I despise them when I see them in myself. But they are there. Another thing I see in myself that I see in other writers, too, is laziness. Is that it is a lot of work to have to be doing that and to be thinking that way. And it’s just easier not to do it. And so laziness is another contributing factor there.

Craig: Well let us affirm ourselves to working harder and let us affirm ourselves to doing what we need to do to kind of improve ourselves whether it is through therapy for our own issues, or just listening better. And see if we can’t make things better for human beings at least in our small circle. Because we can’t fix the world. We can’t. But if we fix little pockets. If we make little pockets better over and over and over, just like that, things get better.

John: We’ll hope. Let’s try to make the world better in two small ways with these two questions we’re going to answer.

Craig: Segue Man.

John: Jason asks, “Have either of you ever lost control of your emotions in a meeting or on a call—“

Craig: No!

John: “With professional collaborators and needed to apologize or restore the climate back to a safe place to collaborate again? If so would you mind sharing how you did this? Is this common in creative collaborations? And how to best handle it when people find themselves in a situation where emotions get the best of them.”

Oh yes I have. Oh yes I have. I’ve lost it.

Craig: Oh. Oh? Go on.

John: In one case I was brought in for notes and I thought it was going to be one notes meeting and it ended up being just like a pile-on on me. And I was like I cannot handle this. This is not at all. No. This is not it. And I left.

And was it the right choice to leave? Probably, because I would have said even worse things had I stayed. And then in the follow up phone calls I could explain like this is what my expectation was. This is what the actual thing was. This is not cool. And I think I ended up basically getting out of that project.

In other cases, I described this on the Charlie’s Angels movies. There’s a thing we describe as like fighting the monster in that on any given day someone was going to be the monster and everyone had to sort of come together to fight the monster. And some days I was the monster. And it was the recognition that it was a tense situation and we were going to do it. And there would be some yelling. And afterwards we would talk it through and be fine because it kind of had to be fine because somebody else was the monster at that point.

So, I feel like anger and frustration in the pursuit of creative goals isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s when you stop treating people with respect that you have to really ask why are you letting your emotions get to that place.

Craig: Yeah. I have gotten emotional. I tend to not vent it outward, but to keep in inward. Although there was a moment, it was during Chernobyl. It was during post-production of Chernobyl. And it doesn’t matter what the specific thing was. I experienced the work of something and it upset me. It upset me. Because it was not at all what I wanted and I could feel myself being flooded with waves of negative emotions. And so I stood up. I said, “I’m going to get some air.” And then I walked like three miles. And I was aware that even that in its own way is kind of hostile to just stand up and walk out and then disappear and not answer your phone. But it was kind of what I needed to do to avoid something I didn’t want to do.

I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. I didn’t want to make people feel bad. And I also understood what ever little part of rationality was left that wasn’t going to solve the problem. So the problem was going to be solved by kind of careful explanation of where what I wanted had not occurred and where I what I didn’t want had occurred. And by the time I was done walking and came back I had calmed down sufficiently to be rational. And to kind of help relay what I wanted.

It happens. But I try as best as I can to not – I’m not a big yeller. You know. I have been in situations where, I mean, the Weinsteins made me absolutely crazy. Crazy. I mean truly nuts. It’s quite likely that in the past I – especially when I was younger I probably did raise my voice. It just doesn’t get you where you want to go. But it’s been a long time for me. It’s mostly for me when that happens I do – my mode is to walk away, calmly. Walk away and then return when I’m OK.

This is an emotional job. And one of the reasons why is something that you and I have gotten into with our how to give notes thing. The thing we made we identify with. It is entwined with us. And so when someone is doing something that we perceive as injurious to it it’s like they are being injurious to us.

John: Yeah.

Craig: So it is always – I was on a notes call for something a few weeks ago and I said you know what just, sorry, holding up my hand. We’ve been at it for a while. I think I’m at the moment where I’m not quite absorbing things efficiently anymore. Why don’t we take a break? And we’ll pick this up again tomorrow or a day later. And everybody was like, OK, yeah. Great. Because I didn’t say it after five minutes. And if you can do that that’s always preferable.

John: Agreed. All right, Randy asks, “As someone who is interested in becoming both a novelist and a screenwriter which craft should I pursue first? And how do I effectively manage my time to learn both of them?”

So, I’ve written books and I’ve written movies. I’ve written many more movies than I’ve written books. Craig, you’ve done some prose writing as well. If I were to give advice to Randy about which thing to pursue first, I would always come back to kind of what do you want to exist in the world. What is the thing you wish you could see your name on most? Is it a movie? Is it a book? If it is a movie then you should be writing a screenplay. If it is a book you should definitely be writing a book. There are more books printed every year than there are movies made. So your odds of getting that creative work out there in the world to some degree are much higher with a book, because you can always self-publish in ways you can’t self-make a movie.

But it really comes down to sort of what you wish had your name on it in the world most to me.

Craig: Yeah. I’m not sure how to answer this. I feel like as writers or an artist of any kind the work that you’re going to attempt to want to do is the work where you feel love back. There’s a relationship between the artist and the audience. If people say, “Look, I love reading your prose, I just don’t care as much about the screenplay stuff,” then maybe follow that. And if people are excited when they read your screenplays but the novels feel a bit jejune then maybe stick with the screenplays.

What is the world telling you that they want? And maybe then, you know, that’ll kind of help you figure out what to do.

John: Yeah. There are definitely a class of screenwriters who would never, ever write a novel. And who fundamentally see themselves as people who can see movies well and they’ll put up with the having to write it part of it so that they can make that movie happen. That’s kind of valid. Novels are all you’ve got is the words and you’ve got to be able to hold someone’s attention over hundreds of pages with just those words. And it’s a lot longer of a slog than screenplays tend to be. But nothing is stopping you from doing both.

I will say that the sunk cost of a novel is a lot. And so definitely be – if you’re new to writing prose start on some smaller things rather than tackling a whole novel at once and just see how the form fits your brain and your fingers. Because it doesn’t fit everyone.

Craig: Yup. That’s absolutely true. But sort of an unanswerable question. Feel your way and see how it goes.

John: All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing feels like it should be a Craig One Cool Thing. It is a game. It’s on Steam. It’s also on Switch. It’s called Baba is You.

Craig: Huh?

John: So Baba is You is one of those kind of puzzle games where you’re pushing blocks around in order to achieve the goal of the game which is generally to hit the flag at the end of it. And what is so ingenious about Baba is You is that the rules for that level of the game are also blocks. And so you can move the blocks around in order to change the rules of the game. So no longer do you need to hit the flag to win. You can change it so you now need to hit the rock. Or you can become the rock. Or you can become the walls. It’s very clever in how it does it.

It’s also really tough. I’ve been embarrassed how often I’ve needed to look up solutions to certain puzzles. But I really did enjoy it quite a lot.

Craig: OK.

John: For you, Craig, or anybody else who is looking for a puzzle kind of game, Baba is You would be my recommendation.

Craig: That sounds great. I do love a game as you know. My One Cool Thing is, and this is merely one of many options that people have. If you’re trying to support change in our country, especially in regard to law enforcement and policing, and you’re not quite sure where to go there’s a billion people who – there’s not a billion people. There are a number of nonprofit organizations that are working to fix things. The one that I was really impressed by the work they’ve done and so I did make a donation myself is called Campaign Zero.

And Campaign Zero is interesting because their entire focus is on reforming the way the police function and interact with communities. And they have 10 kind of points that they’re working on. All of which seem, well, very reasonable.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And very needed.

John: It’s hard to say like, oh, that’s a radical idea. No, that’s not a radical idea.

Craig: Yeah. Pretty much all of them.

John: And it looks like their activism is really about convincing local governments to insist upon these changes. And so there’s national stuff that can be done, but it’s also pushing on local levels will affect people’s experience on the ground.

Craig: Yeah. And one thing that strikes me about the campaign that they’re running, and real fast I’ll rattle off their 10 areas of focus. End broken windows. Policing. Community oversight. Limit the use of force. Independently investigate and prosecute when there is police malfeasance. Community representation. Body cams filming the police. Training. End for-profit policing. Demilitarization. And fair police union contracts.

So, if I were a police officer who believed in the rule of law and fair policing and the equal treatment of all Americans regardless of race, color, creed, I would want all of these things. I would be in favor of all of these things. And I know that there are police like that. I know that. I think it’s important to say that there are good apples as we say. It’s just that again, like pilots, can’t afford any bad ones.

So, if I were a good apple and a good police officer of which there are a number I would be desperate for all 10 of these things. And I would be desperate for a different kind of relationship with the community I police. And I hope that this is something that carries through. And this isn’t nonsense liberal fantasy. And weirdly the people who decry government tyranny and the tree of liberty must be watered with blood and don’t tread on me, they should be in favor of this, too.

John: Yeah.

Craig: You’d think that they’d be able to make that connection there. So hopefully people find some way. And if you don’t have the means, and this is a brutally difficult economic environment, so if you don’t have the means it’s totally understandable. And maybe there’s a way to volunteer a little bit of time if you have. But if you do have the means I think this is at least one reasonable way to donate. But, of course, feel free to research. There are a number of others.

John: Cool. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: Indeed.

John: Our outro this week is by Jason Azziz. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@dev.johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts. They are great. They’re on Cotton Bureau.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts. You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments, including the one we’re about to record really where we’re looking at whether Craig actually exists or is just a figment in all of our imagination.

Craig: Oh god. Rooting for figment.

John: Thanks Craig.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

John: Craig, so this occurred to me that the last time I saw you in person, that we saw each other in person, was February 28, 2020.

Craig: Yes.

John: It was at a fundraiser for Mark Kelly who is running for senator in Arizona. And you and I were in a room. We shook hands. There were other screenwriter friends there as well. And at that moment it was like – maybe we didn’t shake hands – it was at the moment where like, wait, are we supposed to be in a room together? Are we supposed to shake hands? What’s going on? Is this safe? It was very early in the pandemic.

And then I have not seen you since.

Craig: Right.

John: And I started to wonder, I’ve seen you on video, but we have the ability to sort of fake video. Right now you and I are talking on Skype. You could be an elaborate computer simulation. Naturally you’d assume that I am the computer simulation, but you could be the computer simulation. Like someone could take all of the transcripts of Scriptnotes like I’ve done and put them into a computer system and generate with Markov chains things that sound like Craig Mazin there. So how do I know that you really still exist?

Craig: Right. We don’t. Neither of us exist. So, neither of us are real. This is a simulation. But, you know, inside of the simulation it feels real. And reality is only subjectively defined because it’s experience. We experience reality. So it’s from our point of view. This is why empathy is so interesting. You are attempting to experience somebody else’s simulation.

So, the important thing to make clear is I’m not real and also I wasn’t real that night either.

John: Mm.

Craig: When you saw me there–

John: Pass the joint back. Now has your unreality changed though in this situation? Because it feels like, you know, when I see a person in front of me in a physical space they feel more real, and yet all of my interactions these days are basically on these Zoom rooms.

I was struck by a friend was talking about this writer’s room that she’s in. it’s been entirely a virtual room. And six weeks into this room one of the writers stood up and said, “Oh, I have to stretch. I’m really, really tall.” And everyone in the room was like, wait, you’re tall? That’s a thing, it was weird for them that this person that they’ve known virtually for six weeks. Wait, you’re like freakishly tall? It was a thing that would have been the first thing they noticed about them in real life, but not because of this virtual situation.

Craig: Well, what I would say to you is you are overestimating the value of your own eyeballs. If you are in a room and you look in a mirror and you see me in the mirror I’m right behind you. You see yourself and me in the mirror. That seems pretty real. But that is no different than seeing me on a Zoom. Your eyeballs are just seeing light that is being passed along. So instead of light going right into your tiny little organic cameras it’s just taking a little detour and then getting into your organic cameras.

And so I’m not arguing that Zooms are just as real as real life. I’m arguing that real life is just as not real as Zooms.

John: Yeah. So, where this goes to is the idea of sort of where we’re headed in the next few years where there’s going to be an increasing number of people who we interact with who we will never meet. And so traditionally if I was hired to write a film I would at some point sit down with the producers and with the head of the studio and we’d have this thing. Basically just a reality check that everyone exists and we’re actually going to do this thing. There would be some face-to-face meeting. And those are going to be less common. I think even after there’s a vaccine and things get back to a little bit more normal I feel like people are going to become more comfortable hiring people they’ve never met to do things.

I’ve hired somebody for my company who I’ve never met in person who is now working for us every day. So, that’s a strange thing I think this pandemic has brought us to.

Craig: Well, let’s say that, I think it’s reasonable to expect that we will have technology soon enough – we kind of do – where instead of just vanilla Zoom we can create a situation where the room that we normally, like a shared room, a conference room is scanned in perfectly down to the tiniest pixel, retina level.

John: A holodeck-ish kind of thing.

Craig: Yeah. So we can look around in 360. We have our little headsets on. Our oculi. And we can look around the room. And then eventually our avatars are res’d up to the point where they are essentially as detailed as our actual selves. At that point what’s the difference? I mean, at that point haven’t we created a simulation of reality that we’re in?

John: But thinking back to even the episode of Mythic Quest that you were in where you’re talking with the other quality assurance testers and there’s the passing of chips back and forth. There are physical things in the real world that we are all sharing the same physical reality that is different.

I mean, this episode we were talking about the importance of going out and protesting and marching. Nothing is more real and physical and sort of being in your body than going out and protesting. And protesting feels like a thing that is important to do with your body versus online.

Craig: But would it blow your mind if someone said to you you have actually already – it’s just that you’ve been living your entire life in a very elaborate, really res’d up Zoom.

John: A brain in a jar.

Craig: Yeah. And that’s the Matrix. And the truth is I do believe the people who say it’s incredibly unlikely that we’re not. It doesn’t make any of this less real. That’s sort of the point. I mean, pain is pain. Joy is joy. You touch something, you’re not really – when you touch something or when you taste something you’re not–

John: It’s fields of stuff interacting, yes.

Craig: It’s your brain telling you that you’ve touched something. It’s your brain telling you that you felt something or you tasted something. None of it is real. It’s not real, but it matters.

John: So that sense of it’s not real but it matters does get us back to the notion of empathy and the sense of even in the unknowability of things one’s choices have consequences. This is not nihilism. This is not the denial of an outside reality, at least in a moral sense.

Craig: Right. What we’re saying that what we think of “real” is a vastly overestimated concept because experiences are real whether or not the thing is real. I mean, you and I literally for a living create fake experiences that have real emotional impact. So the experience of watching a movie or a show or a musical creates real feelings.

If we can’t see the value of that then, you know. So, that’s why I’m all in favor of it. You know, to conclude, I do not exist.

John: Never has.

Craig: But I am important and I matter.

John: Aw. That’s nice to think. Thanks Craig.

Craig: Thank you, John.

Links:

• Black Lives Matter
• Campaign Zero
• Baba is You
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Jason Azziz (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.