Drew Marquardt

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 391 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the program we welcome back Aline Brosh McKenna to talk about what she learned producing four seasons of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. We’ll also talk about Emma Thompson, agency-affiliated producers, and more.

But most importantly welcome back, Aline.

Craig: Yay.

Aline Brosh McKenna: Yay. Let’s do the happy dance. We’re dancing. We’re up. We’re dancing. We’re flipping.

John: I just saw a happy dance, because Aline on her laptop showed me a musical number that no one else in the world has scene, well except for everyone at CBS and everyone on her show. But I got to see a musical number from one of these upcoming episodes.

Aline: Yeah. Exciting.

John: It was a happy, upbeat number.

Aline: It was a beat, yes, indeed.

John: Yes. How are you feeling? Are you feeling happy and upbeat?

Aline: You know, we just literally – I’m coming from my last post. We delivered the episode to the network. We’ll probably have a few things. They don’t tend to have a ton. But we’ll probably have a few things to hammer out. And I’ve been struggling to like, you know, one of the things as a writer is learned to try and write not from my head but from my body. And it took me a long time because I was such a head/grades/homework person. And so now I’m trying to experience these things without like chewing them over in my brain too much and just sort of like feeling it in my body.

And I’ve slept a ton since we wrapped. The last bit of it was just chugging through Count of Monte Cristo like drawing Xs through days because it had gotten so physically taxing towards the end of shooting. Because what happens is we finish writing the season and then the next day we start prepping the finale, which I direct. And so the amount of focus that you have to have as a director, even though it’s a different kind of focus from writing, but switching from the kind of brain focus of writing into the physical discipline of directing–

John: The stamina.

Aline: Yeah. There’s a lot of physical elements to directing and just sort of keeping your energy up. And then you’re responsible for everybody else’s energy. And so that kind of buoyed me through that. And then we wrapped about three weeks ago and I’ve been – you know, we’ve still been in post. And it’s funny, this year – so our post facilities are on the same lot where we shoot. And every year it’s a very peaceful little time, a little during that hiatus. But this year we were wrapping – literally wrapping the lot. And so any sadness I had not processed really welled up because literally they were running the sets through a wood chipper and carting things off.

Craig: [laughs] Oh my god, that’s awesome.

Aline: Yeah. And so you’d see parts of our experience were literally being dumped in the garbage.

Craig: Wow.

Aline: And there was a day where we started sort of madly scavenging things because we wanted to save them and give them to people and there was no systematic way of doing that, because we’d been so focused on making the thing. I mean, our script coordinator, he posted a thing about, you know, in the last four seasons it’s 2,900 pages. You know, the amount of output is just staggering and I have to say 90% of what I was experiencing towards the end was like excitement about finishing my homework.

And I think I’m still in there, but I think it hasn’t – you know, the thing you take for granted as a screenwriter, which I like I’m just going to get up and go get one of those croissants with cream in it, and like try that before I start writing. When you’re doing a show you just – you know, one of the first things I did after we wrapped was I went to Rite Aid. And I walked through Rite Aid and I went like do I want this lip balm, or this lip balm. And it felt very human.

So, I’m entering the human realm again.

Craig: Yeah. You’re reentering.

John: You went through a whole campaign. Like a political campaign where your person got elected, which is fantastic, but now the next thing happens. Or college graduation.

Aline: Yeah. It’s an intense – it’s just that it’s a cycle of four years. And I think as screenwriters you’re accustomed to, you know, many years of development and then the shooting period is maybe an intense – with prep and everything – four or five months or something. But to have had, you know, on and off for five years been working on pretty much the one thing, I don’t think I’ve quite processed it.

John: Today let’s do some of that processing live on the air.

Aline: OK, great. I haven’t seen my therapist yet, so let’s do it.

Craig: I’ve got a beard. I’ve got the processing group beard, so I should be fine.

John: Should be good. Before we get to that let’s talk some stuff in the news. So, it was about a week and a half ago now Emma Thompson sent a letter to the folks at Skydance Animation. They had recently hired former Pixar chief John Lasseter to run their animation division. And Emma Thompson said basically I’m out. She was supposed to be doing this movie called Luck and she said, nope, not going to do it. And it’s because you hired John Lasseter.

There’s one paragraph in here which I thought was really sort of telling. She writes, “Much has been said about giving John Lasseter a ‘second chance.’ But he is presumably being paid millions of dollars to receive that second chance. How much money are the employees at Skydance being paid to GIVE him that second chance? If John Lasseter started his own company, then every employee would have been given the opportunity to choose whether or not to give him a second chance. But any Skydance employees who don’t want to give him a second chance have to stay and be uncomfortable or lose their jobs.” Which is really a great way of framing it to me that I don’t think I’ve seen in sort of any of this discussion of the #MeToo movement. It’s that he has a chance to sort of come into a company, but they don’t have a chance to sort of necessarily leave.

It’s that sense of like you have a choice of where you work but only to a limited degree. What was your first take on this letter as you read it, Aline?

Aline: Well, you know, what really strikes me is that we just as a society we have a completely different way of communicating in every way. There was a time when she could have written that letter and we never would have heard about it unless she had decided to give it to a newspaper or publish it in the trades or something. And what’s really struck me is in addition to the sort of social movement it’s inextricable from the social media that has allowed people to put their voice out there directly. And so all of the conversations that we’re having about what as a society we believe to be the norms and how people are supposed to respond to things are just not anymore mitigated by layers and layers and layers of slow-moving newspapers and magazines. Everything happens very instantly.

It just really struck me that, you know, somebody says something, she gives her opinion, you know, she speaks her truth, she says what’s important to her. It’s immediately disseminated to all of these people and we’re having conversations that we’ve never had before. And it’s really interesting that the voices are being heard as there’s these different means of communication. And that’s what I have been struck by is that, you know, anybody who has something that they want to say there’s just such an immediacy to these conversations in the culture right now.

John: Well it doesn’t seem like there’s a distinction between a private letter and a public letter.

Aline: No.

John: This was written with the understanding that it probably would be out there in the world.

Aline: Yeah. I mean, the analogous somewhat similar thing was, you know, our show is at CBS and there were a couple of things, you know, the Les Moonves investigation started. And then there were a couple moments where articles came out that were really disturbing. And I felt comfortable saying to the folks at CBS like this is – we’re uncomfortable. They knew the people who worked for them were uncomfortable. And I don’t know that in my career I ever would have felt comfortable saying to the corporation that I worked for like oh this is uncomfortable.

And, you know, we have all seen – we’ve talked about this on the show before – but we’ve all seen bad behavior, people that we knew were behaving badly. I did a movie at the Weinstein Company. But I never thought, I mean, truth be told I didn’t see the Harvey stuff that came out, but you know even though I did see Harvey be abusive I never felt like I’m going to call anybody there and say, “Hey, this guy is a raging rageaholic, treats people horribly.” You just kind of went, shrug.

And now when that Les thing came out I felt comfortable saying to the folks that I work with at CBS, you know, as women doing a feminist show this feels uncomfortable and they understood. I mean, the people that we were talking to understood. But I just – the whole conversation has changed dramatically everywhere, not just in our business, to this point where people feel really, really, really comfortable speaking out publicly.

Craig: Yeah, well, it’s like the great tradition of the open letter. You could write, I mean, look, she put this in the Los Angeles Times, so that’s kind of old school, but the difference is where you would write an open letter to blah-blah-blah and have it printed in something like the Los Angeles Times, the people who would know about it would be the people who read the Los Angeles Times. And if they wanted to share it with somebody they would have to show them their copy of the Los Angeles Times.

Aline: Or like clip it. Remember when you used to get clips from your parents?

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Yeah. Exactly. Send you in the mail, like, look you were in the paper. So no question that social media amplifies voices. But I want to give Emma Thompson a certain kind of – maybe it’s a credit that other people wouldn’t give her – but we’re a show about writers. It was beautifully written. She’s such a good writer.

Aline: She really is.

Craig: People forget that Emma Thompson is such a good writer. Really, really great. Maybe – I don’t know, I hope people don’t forget how good she is at writing.

So it was gorgeously written and I personally appreciated that a lot of what she was talking about didn’t shy away from the topic of money. I think that we sometimes get a little squeamish about money. Sometimes people look at something like this and say, “You’re diminishing the principled argument by talking about the notion that people should be paid.” And the fact of the matter is that’s what people who don’t want to pay you want you to think.

Right? Because quietly John Lasseter is getting paid. And her point is, you know what, the people who are here they’re not getting some sort of John Lasseter hazard pay. Nor are they having a chance to say, “Listen, I don’t want to work with John Lasseter, so I’m going to leave, but you should still keep paying me because I didn’t hire this guy.”

Aline: Do you think it would have been different if John Lasseter had started his own company and therefore every employee there would have had a choice?

Craig: Of course.

Aline: As to whether – it would have been different.

Craig: Of course.

John: It would have been different.

Craig: No question.

Craig: That’s the point that Emma Thompson makes in the letter is that like if he had started his own – I think she even says in other places in the letter that she believes that a person can turn a new leaf and you can give people chances, but it has to be on the terms where you’re voluntarily going towards them rather than them being hired on as your boss.

And, you know, I remember during this last presidential campaign someone asked like, well, Trump how would you feel if Ivanka was being sexually harassed. And like, “Well, I’m sure she’d leave. I’m sure she’d quit.” That as being a solution to the problem of sexual harassment is absurd.

Aline: Privilege.

John: And is incredibly privileged.

Craig: Well, there you go. I think that Emma Thompson is an example of somebody that has that privilege and is using it on behalf of people who don’t. This is very admirable. And because of course she’s wealthy. She doesn’t need to do this job. She can walk without suffering these tremendous consequences.

And also you can’t quietly blacklist Emma Thompson. But if you are dealing with – and remember, animation is not union. So, there’s already a kind of inherent potential for abuse. And I would argue that that potential is realized frequently if not all the time. So you have people who can absolutely be put in situations where simply by speaking out and saying I don’t want to do this their reputation can be quietly tarnished to the point where it’s hard for them to get work somewhere else.

So she’s using her privilege here in a wonderful way. And she did it kind of super smartly I thought. I don’t know, I just thought this was a really well done – it was a well-written and also well-argued point.

Aline: I wanted to ask you guys a question. I’ve noticed that the letters of protest and the letters of accusation and the letters of pain that people have written have been gorgeously written. And all of the apologies have been terrible.

John: Yeah.

Aline: Terrible. I mean, we have yet to see – I’m still waiting for an apology that is an apology.

John: Well, we talked about the Dan Harmon one which wasn’t written but was a spoken apology and that was–

Craig: That wasn’t bad.

John: The distinction between is it was an apology that was actually accepted and it had an intention and it was accepted as an apology and people could sort of move on past it. And I agree with you though. I think the folks who are putting their thoughts together about what happened and why it was wrong do so very articulately and the folks trying to defend themselves, maybe because there is no great defense for it, do not come up with really coherent explanations. Because they try to explain it away rather than trying to take it in and understand it and address it. And that’s the frustration.

Craig: It’s hard to apologize. Because the best apology is the one that is personal. It is face to face with the person you’ve heart. These kind of ritualized public apologies are already very difficult to pull off because they feel so calculated. They are calculated. And so–

Aline: Just none of them have followed any of the principles of apology.

Craig: Correct. [laughs] Because I think that partly they are doing it reluctantly. You get the sense that they’re being dragged in there to say in front of the principal I’m sorry that I wrote on the desk with the Sharpie. They just, you can tell. And then some of them just aren’t apologetic in any way, shape, or form. Bill Cosby and Harvey, yeah, unrepentant.

John: Yeah. The last point I will say we talked about Emma Thompson has the privilege to be able to turn down this job. I do wonder how many writers and artists and actors are being approached to do stuff at this company and are passing and they can’t say why they’re passing, but they’re finding excuses to not do it. Because this is a thing we see in TV and movies all the time where like you get that pass, like oh they’re busy, they’re finding another excuse for why they’re not doing it. But I do wonder if ultimately Skydance Animation is very much hurt by Lasseter’s being there because talent may silently choose not to go there, even if they’re not writing the letter that Emma Thompson is they may be making their own choice like I don’t want to be associated with it.

Aline: Well there’s a meta conversation happening in the entire culture now. There’s sort of this thread of conversation about events that are happening but also about pieces of culture, you know, television shows and movies and books are all surrounded by this little buzzing orb of conversation about them as well. And so it’s interesting when you see the reaction to certain movies like Green Book where people feel like the context was insufficient.

It’s hard for things to exist on their own, for business deals to exist on their own. Everything is now again webbed together because of the instantaneity of our culture.

John: Yeah. So let’s segue here. You made it through four seasons of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend without – I can’t think of any sort of major horrific things happening.

Craig: Give her time. Give her time. There’s still some time left.

John: There was a scary thing that happened quite early on about where the show was going to end up, but at any moment you could have had some – an actor or some crew member or some writer do something that attracted negative attention and have a whole spotlight on it, but you managed to dodge that. So congratulations. I don’t want to jinx it because your final episodes are still left to air, but congratulations.

But before we get into your exit interview where we talk about what you did and what you learned, I thought we’d go back to 2014 when you came on the show. This is December 2014, Episode 175. It was the 12 Days of Scriptnotes. And you came on along with Rachel and you described this new show you were going to do. And so let’s take a listen to what you said about the show well before it aired.

[flashback]

John: So you did what we’re all told we should be doing is you actually went off and you made a TV show.

Aline: Yes. Well, that was not intentional at all. And I think we’ve maybe talked about this before. I had done TV at the beginning of my career and I was not looking to go back at all. And every once and awhile somebody would ask me, but this idea of just going in to TV to do TV, which a lot of features do, feature writers do. They just kind of wander over there because it’s there and people say it’s groovy, I wasn’t interested in.

And then in my procrastination I was on Jezebel and I saw a — yup, which I know you guys are all on.

Craig: Totally. Yeah.

Aline: And I clicked on the animated video of a satiric take on Disney princesses with this amazing singer. And I went to see who had done this thing and you obviously can’t see who — I didn’t realize that the person who wrote it was also singing. And then I got bumped to her other videos and it was written and sung by Rachel Bloom. So, I went to — she has a YouTube Channel.

Craig: If only she were here!

Aline: And I went to Rachel’s YouTube Channel and I watched all the videos and I got really excited. And I called my best friend, who is my actual best friend, not my showbiz best friend, but my actual best friend Kate who works in showbiz, who works for a television studio and I said you’re going to love this, I know you’re going to love these. This girl is amazing. You should meet with her. So, we had a meeting with her and she’s, in the videos Rachel is very like sexy and super-hot.

Craig: But in reality —

John: Yeah, there was a conjunction coming that was not going to be your friend.

Aline: I was expecting, well, I was expecting like someone from the planet Glamazon, like I was expecting a very actressy thing to show up. And she showed up and in my mind she was wearing cargo pants, which she does not own, so she claims she wasn’t wearing them. But she was wearing sort of like jeans and a t-shirt.

Craig: Is that bad?

Aline: And she was wearing like what Craig wears.

Craig: Well, that sounds pretty great.

Aline: [laughs] So, she came in and I could see right away that she was like a writer girl, you know, and she’s also an amazing actor, and singer, and all of these things. But in her heart of hearts she’s really a writer girl.

[flashback ends]

John: 2014. So, now, Aline, we’re now in 2019. If you could travel back five years and give yourself some advice to the woman who was sitting there planning this show what could you tell her? What were the things that would have helped if you had known?

Aline: Well, it’s interesting. I remember that I thought the show was dead because we had given it to Showtime. We had our first notes call and, you know, the three of us have been in the business a long time. I knew two sentences into it that we were screwed and she did not because she thought they just had some notes and we would fix it. And I just knew they weren’t going to pick it up.

And so I remember thinking when we were on the show I got to make sure as many people as possible know who Rachel Bloom is. And the thing I was happy about was that we had made a $4.5 million audition tape for Rachel. And so I knew that even if it never got picked up that people would see her and see how extraordinary she is.

You know, there are a lot of things that I wish I had known, but I couldn’t have known them before I did them. And before I experienced them. And so neither of us had run a show before. And, you know, the smartest thing that we did was surround ourselves with people who could help us and give us advice and listen to them. And in our writers’ room we had two other executive producers when we started. One was Erin Ehrlich and the other one is Michael Hitchcock.

And they had both done a lot of television and they just were so helpful to me in particular about running a room and doing all the other stuff and how that could all be done. And frankly also they just put their bodies on the line. Any moment from season one that I wasn’t on set, and I couldn’t be on set for most of it because I was running the room, Erin and Michael alternated every single episode. So, producers go on set, but the rest of our writing-producing staff was sort of inexperienced. And so in subsequent seasons they would cover their episodes on their own. And now they’re all like super experienced and they’re all sailing off into the world. But Michael and Erin covered every bit of the first season on set for me.

John: So just imagining the advice you’re giving to your younger self, it’s to hire really carefully. And so you were looking for the people you want to be around all the time who actually know what they’re doing.

Aline: Well, this is where being judgmental came in handy.

John: Oh god, yes.

Aline: Yeah. Snap judgments. I mean, we had the same writing staff all four years pretty much. And I think that I did a good job of choosing people because I was an older lady who really trusted my gut about people. I think when you’re younger you think, well, I’m not sure I feel – it’s the same thing of head and body. You know, sometimes when you’re younger you just feel, I don’t know if I feel comfortable with this person but my head is looking at their resume and they’re saying…

And so I had learned to sort of like trust my gut on people. And I learned a lot about the process. It’s interesting. You know, I went into doing that show, a lot of it was that I wanted to protect Rachel. Like physically protect and protect her work. And, you know, protect her schedule. And for whatever reason that was something outside of myself that was like a non-selfish act that really drove me the whole time. And I would say towards the end Rachel would be like, “I’m OK.” You know, she had learned to sort of do some of those things for herself and figure out her comfort level. But there was something about that maternal role that I played that really drove myself in.

I’m trying to think of something really important that I learned.

John: It’s natural instinct to be maternal, to be paternal, and yet you don’t want to undermine somebody. You want to make sure that people actually have the ability to make their own decisions at all times. And that’s a think I’ve seen with the two of you being really good about. And so even over the time that I’ve known you I would say that I see you more in a sisterly/colleague way and less of a mom/daughter.

Aline: Yeah. It’s changed. So here in the thing I would say that I learned how to do the most is I really learned how to listen. Because Rachel and I are not partners. I mean, we have a certain percentage of the time where we are like eerily in agreement. But then we have I would say maybe more than most partners, because we both came from being like single authors, we disagree because we come from such different backgrounds.

And I really learned to shut up and listen. And Rachel after a while would say to me, “How open is your mind?” And that’s a helpful thing to say to me because, you know, I would just like – and just today she wanted to change something, my first reaction was like, no, I’m not going to like that. And I just took a breath and she did it with the editor and I watched it and I liked it. And I’ve learned to – you know, you build such a carapace of such a thorny exoskeleton as a screenwriter and television is just so collaborative. I mean, movies are, too, but television you can’t possibly do it all yourself. And so I really learned to listen much better.

Really learned to like – and part of listening is shutting up.

Craig: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That’s exactly right. It is a practice that will punish you if you are in a situation where you must listen to somebody that you don’t respect. Somebody that’s frustrating. I’ve been in that situation many, many times. But it is a situation that will reward you endlessly if you trust that person. It all comes down to trust.

So, what happens is someone says something and if you trust them instead of freaking out and going oh my god let me just catastrophize, because if I am subject to doing what you just said I’m going to basically want to drive my car off of the cliff.

Aline: Right.

Craig: But if you trust that person then you can just relax. You can listen. You can hear them out. And you know what? Sometimes they’re wrong, too, and they’ll trust you.

Aline: Oh yeah.

Craig: But you don’t have that panic. The panic is the worst.

Aline: Yeah. And we did learn to be better, but also to say, “Hey, this person is really passionate about this, so I’m going to listen extra hard.”

There were a few practical things that I can pass on. I stopped watching cuts before I went to bed. Because I would watch cuts and I would get really upset about something not being right. And there was – it was 11 o’clock at night and there was no one there for me to say do we have this coverage, do we have that, but do we have a two-shot, do you have an over here?

And so I stopped watching them at night and then I stopped watching them at home the first time. So the first time I always watched it with the writer of the episode and the editor. And the writer of the episode had been there on set. And that way I could say, oh, OK, this isn’t working. Do you have this? Do you have that? And they could tell me in real time whether they had it or not so that I could make the plan.

Because I would watch cuts at night and then I would sleep unbelievably – and it would always be a jagged dream that partly had the episode. You know, a lot of what you have to learn how to do is turn your brain off. It’s like being a parent. You can’t run a show if you’re depleted and miserable. You can’t parent if you’re depleted and miserable. And sometimes there’s just things that are not going to happen and are not going to be perfect. You know, my husband always says, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” You know, there’s just moments where you’d have to say that’s good enough, I’m turning this off, I’m turning this in. You know, this is fine.

And other places where you’re going to strive for excellence and for me it was always the writing was where I tried to – and the editing, frankly – are the ones where I tried to maximize the amount of shots we got at something. So let’s rewrite it again. Let’s do another room. Let’s take a few people.

And then the other thing I learned is I had a staff of 10 people the first season and we all held hands and walked around together the entire time for 18 episodes. We were all limbs entwined sitting around a table the whole time. And it took me a long time to figure out how to split my room, so that some people were outlining and some people were in the room with me. And then I developed a system of doing room rewrites with only three to five people. And Erin really encouraged me to do that. That was very helpful.

Another tip I will give. If you are in charge of starting a new pilot, a new television show, a new movie that you’re directing or producing or whatever, make t-shirts. I’m a big believer in this. We did a pilot. We had a very short prep time, very short shooting time. And everybody when they got there got a t-shirt because you’re trying to build school spirit very quickly. And at the end of the season everyone was exhausted this season and I bought t-shirts for everyone that had, “I’m not sad, you’re sad,” and some quotes from the songs for a finale t-shirt. Now, I’m saying a lot of people did not care, but for some people it’s just that little extra bit – any school spirit you can find. Bringing donuts to the office. Finding extra fun things to do so that when people are there they are still – we all got into show business because we wanted to have a fun job and not what we thought of as a boring job. And so it’s good when you can to preserve that feeling of – and it also sort of plays against my slight natural taciturn-ness.

John: So, I think we talked about this on the show before that I did a TV show right after Go, and so this is ‘99/2000. And I had a genuine nervous breakdown. The world just melted down around me and I got fired after three episodes as I got off the plane. And I was just so relieved. And so hearing you talk through this stuff it’s both triggering but it also helps me recognize how I really couldn’t have known how to do that. Like I didn’t have – I didn’t have any training, but I didn’t have any life experience about how to deal with other people and sort of what the expectations where.

So, I didn’t surround myself with people I trusted. I didn’t listen to my gut on those situations about who I was hiring, where we were doing this, logistically how it was going to be possible. And I couldn’t do what you’re doing in terms of prioritizing which of the jobs are going to be my jobs and which of the jobs are better left to somebody else. And so I was trying to cover set while also writing and also being in the editing room and thinking about music.

Aline: People do that. Someone was telling me about somebody who like there are frequently people who are on set all day and then have their writers’ room start really late or go to editing at 8pm. And you have to make as many decisions as you can, not because – this is the thing that I think is not quite visible to people is that having one person approving things is not there because that person is so amazing. It’s because it’s the military and you need to just ask one person. And it’s like you can’t, you know, costumes can’t be in a situation where they have to ask five people because you’ll slow down the process and speed costs money, and money is opportunity to do cool things.

And so I’m very decisive so that was good for me in terms of like costumes, props, sets, locations. That’s pretty easy for me to make decisions. And I learned when to loop Rachel in, like if it was important for her to look at a costume. But a lot of the times it’s like someone’s jeans and leather jacket. It was fine.
I’m a systems-oriented person. My dad is an engineer. And so the other thing I would say is like when you go into any new process just rigorously applying trial and error. Like this worked for this episode, this didn’t. This thing worked, this didn’t. I was not accustomed to being the locust of power. I did not understand what was happening half the time. So, I did not understand that people were nice to me who were not being nice to other people. I’d never experienced that before.

Craig: Isn’t that weird? That’s a weird one, yeah.

Aline: I did not know that was happening.

Craig: It happens.

Aline: Yeah. So it happened a few times my experience with someone was completely different than other people’s experience with someone. So I learned that you kind of half to poke around and ask and sort of check in about other people’s experience of things. And also because you want your writers to tell you when they don’t like something. You want people to come to you when they have an issue. But I’m not still totally used to the thing of people sort of moving around you in a way where you’re disrupting molecules because of your authority. I think for me anyway, I can’t speak to everyone, one of the things I tried to do was take down those barriers as much as I could so that people, actors, department heads, people felt comfortable saying to me, “I need help here, or I have an issue here,” because as a screenwriter you know you have smart things to say and maybe no one has asked you. And I know that all these people have tremendous expertise.

The flip side of that is sometimes you just don’t have time. And sometimes you’re just taking the hill and so you’re going – black pants Thursday, you know, five o’clock, no to this actor, yes to – you don’t have time always to check in with people. But as much as possible I tried to amplify the voices and try to listen to people as much as I could. And that took like EQ to figure out.

And also everyone who works on the show knows that I loved it when someone took something over. You know, like when one of the producers on the episode – like what’s the timeline of this? Be like ask the producer. I was always looking for things that other people could supervise.

John: Could figure out for you.

Aline: Yeah.

John: Well, so, but this is your first time also supervising a whole group of writers. So I want to talk about the writing itself. Craig when he went off to do Chernobyl he just wrote the whole thing himself. And it would have been impossible for you to have written the whole thing yourself, or for you and Rachel to do the whole thing together. Even when it was the smaller Showtime order you would have had to bring in a staff.

So, how hard was it to have control over those first drafts – I know you were always like the last typewriter. Everything went underneath your fingers. How do you give that up? And how do you also coach a writer who is not getting something or not getting some aspect of the voice of the show?

Aline: Well, you know, a lot of showrunners I talked to said that they really struggle with getting drafts in that they could use. And I always put myself in the shoes of the writers. We were all learning the voice of the show. We were all learning what the stories were going to be like. We were all learning how our act breaks were going to go. So, I didn’t expect people to be like nailing it perfectly. I expected those drafts to make a contribution in terms of testing the story that had been broken in the room. And I encouraged the writers to check in with me if they felt that something fundamentally wasn’t working.

I expected to get some good character moments and jokes and lines out of the drafts. But I always knew that the drafts were going to come into the room at some point. So, I was always in a gratitude space about whatever was handed to me. And we all got better at writing episodes over time as we identified the voice of the show and the pace of the storytelling. We all got better. And so it got better over time.

I mean, I felt and feel so privileged. If I talk about this long enough I will cry. I feel so privileged to have worked with this group of people. This is an exceptionally smart, brilliant, helpful, loving group of people. And when we would hire assistants I would always say you’re not going to be able to figure out who the nicest person in this group is, because everyone is so nice. They just were lovely to the office staff. They were so helpful and supportive of me.

And also just so brilliant and hilarious. And to me, to have a draft and put it up, whether I had started it, or Rachel had started it, or Rachel and I had started it together, or someone else had written it, to put pages up and then have between five and 10 people weigh in and be brilliant and give notes and shout out jokes, I mean, what a privilege. And they’re an exceptional group. I mean, we two people have their own shows already that graduated from our show. One person is on Mrs. Maisel. And then one of our writers went to The Simpsons because Selman asked me if I had anybody. That part of it was just an enormous privilege. That was my sanctuary, that room.

And then another thing I did that might be helpful for showrunners is that, so my screen was always up at all times because we were writing. And then I also did all my approvals while they were there. Because if I waited all day to approve costumes and props and all that stuff every department would be crazy. So I would just throw up the emails and say, “Look at this prop, look at this costume.” So they all did it with me and that’s one of the reasons we have so many showrunners coming off our show.

I made sure that everybody on their episode was in every meeting, every production meeting, concept meeting, on set. And then while we were writing I would say this production, what do you guys think? What do you guys think? We’d put up the casting videos. You know, I’m very opinionated so sometimes I ignored them and sometimes people would get annoyed, but I think everyone appreciated the access.

John: Everyone saw what the job of showrunner was. And so they could imagine themselves doing that job.

Aline: Yes. So even our staff writer now has her own show. And she, you know, saw those decisions being made on the fly every day. That also means they saw every email and text message that came up in four years, so they managed to only see one sexy email from my husband.

Craig: I’ve seen way more sexy emails from your husband than that.

Aline: Yeah right. My desktop is messy and one of our writers, Jack, it drove him nuts because my system for saving things was to throw them in the trash.

Craig: Oh my god! No!

Aline: Yeah. So I basically any time I was done with a draft or whatever I would throw it in the trash. And then if I needed it I would search and sometimes it would be in the trash.

Craig: Can you just please quickly take John’s pulse. Is he OK? [laughs]

Aline: You should talk to Jack. It made him insane. And also on my text files I would start to text someone but not finish the text, which means that on the left side–

Craig: They’ve got the bloop-bloop-bloop.

Aline: Well, they would be half open and nothing on there. And he would be like you just have to delete those. I can’t look at it. Because I’m organized but not fastidious. So every single writer in that room looked at my screen, my computer screen, for five years. And, you know, it is like being a parent. I’m not perfect. I hope I did a good job. I love them tremendously. See, I told you I was going to cry. I think I did as much as I could right. I’m sure I did some stuff wrong. But everybody there knew how much I valued them. And, you know, I just feel extraordinarily privileged.

And then at the end – so I made, it was four years, so I made everybody letterman jackets for senior year. And it has the name of our whole staff, which is again the same people the whole time, and their names. And then a little saying of whatever they said the most in the room. And so, of course, Rachel said, “How open is your mind?” And one of our writers, who is a vegetarian, would often order in the thing that she got, she hated, and so her patch said, “This is just a pile of lettuce.” Because when you order a salad and you’re a vegetarian and they take all the stuff off it, you just end up with a pile of lettuce.

Craig: [laughs] It’s a pile of lettuce.

Aline: So, going back to – I started writing, I’m doing a movie for Netflix, so I started writing a screenplay on my own. It’s exhilarating and I’m loving it, and I’m making a big mess and no one is asking me any questions. And I’ve already written the first scene, and I wrote the last scene. And then I wrote a set piece in the middle. I’m doing it in whatever order I want to do and no one is asking me any questions. You know, but I miss them. So I feel liberated. It’s so much like parenting. You hope that you do a good job. You know you’re not perfect. And then, you know, then they leave home and you’re left on your own. But then you can pick your own Netflix shows.

John: Yeah.

Aline: Do you know what I’m saying?

John: That’s nice. Aline, as you know I’ve seen every episode of your show. I just love it. And it’s been a delight to do Q&As with you and other stuff along the way. But I think I’m especially happy that you got to do it on your own terms. That you got the four seasons. You got to sort of enter where you wanted to, exit where you wanted to, and sort of do the whole thing. That you’re not at this moment thinking like, “Oh, what if they pick us up for another season?” You got closure. And so often in TV there isn’t closure, at least not classically in TV. There’s no closure. The chance to land the plane. And I’m so excited that you got that.

Aline: Well, now that we’re saying that, this is an opportunity for me to publicly – a shout out to CBS and CW. You know, writer things – we spend so much time shitting on executives, but Kate Adler, Amanda Palley, Amy Reisenbach, David Staff, Michael Roberts, Tracy Blackwell, Mark Pedowitz. I could go on and on. But those were the ones who dealt with the scripts. But I could go on and on. We had extraordinary support. The PR teams. The casting. The ethos of everyone making the show was like this is one that we get to do for fun. This is one we get to do the right way.

And you know what? It was so lowly rated that we just did not have those pressures that you have when you have a successful show. Like nobody was asking us to hump anything weird because they just – there’s nobody watching it anyway. It’s such a niche thing. Netflix is made for niche things. We go to Netflix a week after we stop airing. So in some ways that’s how people consume the show. And I got to say I can’t stress enough that the executives gave us total freedom and Mark Pedowitz said to us when we went there, “Never pull yourself back. If we need to pull you back we’ll do it. But never pull yourselves back.”

John: That’s great. All right, changing topics, so two weeks ago we had Chris Keyser on the show and we talked through the agency agreement. So we’re in the middle of trying to figure out this agency agreement. And we talked through the difference between packaging, attaching elements to things, and the problem of packaging fees.

But a thing we didn’t get into very much is the rise of these agencies as producers. And so there are two big production companies that are affiliated with agencies. So there’s Wiip which is affiliated CAA, and Endeavor Content which is associated with WME. And a question that’s been coming up a lot this week is like, “Wait, do you want those things to go away?” And to me, no. I want those things to stay. I want more buyers.

It’s the thing we talked a lot about on the show is that as studios keep consolidating down smaller and smaller there’s fewer buyers for things. When you and I started in the industry there were 10 places you could go with a spec script and it’s just gotten narrower and narrower and narrower. So, we want to have all those places that are buyers but we need to figure out a way to sort of get those places to not be conflicted with their agencies.

Have you faced any pressure to go to one of those places, Aline?

Aline: You know, I just don’t – I have not interacted with this a ton. And I’ve not been approached, but that’s partly because I’ve also been in a convent.

John: Yeah. You’ve been locked away for four years. Craig, do you get approached to do anything at Wiip?

Craig: No. And I – I’m not sure that we do need them, I mean, just to push back a little bit. There are more buyers now than I recall before. I mean, there’s still the traditional studio producers, talking about television but also for movies, but we also have Hulu, we also have Amazon, we also have Apple, we also have Netflix. Netflix on its own is buying more content than I think everybody else combined. So, I don’t know if we do need them.

And my question ultimately about Wiip and what’s it called, Endeavor Content, is I guess what I would say is – I know the answer, really, it’s rhetorical, but why? The only reason they’re doing this, literally, is money. Now I know that sounds absurdly naïve for me to say. Of course it’s money. But, you know, you can do a lot of different things to make money. If you really want to make, I think we’ve said this on the show before, get into hedge funds. You’ll make way more money way more reliably. What is the purpose? If the purpose of an agency is to gather people who love advocating for artists and getting them employment and putting things together to see these things happen and making deals, all the stuff that I can imagine would attract somebody to the agency business, why do they also need to do this? It just feels like pointless greed. Like they looked at a number and said, “You know, we could make money. And there’s a lot of money coming in from overseas. Let’s just take some of it and we’ll just make things. And we’ll put this flimsy little paper screen between ourselves and this so that, you know, we can essentially say the agency doesn’t control the production company and the production company doesn’t control he agency.”

But as we said when we were discussing this topic with Chris, what possible thing could these companies have to offer investors other than we also represent a lot of clients you might want?

John: Yeah. So, I’ll play devil’s advocate here. I think you could argue that they know their clients. They know the deals that their clients could get other places and they’re able to get them better deals than they would get other places. And so that’s a true thing I’ve heard from some writers who have made projects at these places is that they’ve gotten a better backend definition than they would get other places because they can, because they can offer them that.

There’s always the question of like, you know, would any other bunch of money-chasing talent offer those better back ends just to get the talent to do stuff there? I mean, the same way that Amazon and Netflix are offering better money for writers in some cases than other places are. I wonder and I worry that you have these two companies doing that and any other money that wants to chase after that talent they knock on CAA’s door saying, “Hey, I want to hire this client.” It’s like, well, yeah, or we could do this with you. We could do this with you through Endeavor Content. It gets back to the problem of, yeah, in that gate-keeping function they’re also kind of funneling everything to their own projects. It’s like they have a first look deal with all their clients.

Craig: Right. I mean, you couldn’t come up with a more classic conflict of interest than this. I mean, they could teach this in business school. It is the definition of a conflict of interest. That’s the part that I just find so shocking. I mean, you can call it Wiip if you want, but what it is is CAA. At least Endeavor they stuck their name in there. They didn’t even bother.

It’s just a classic conflict of interest. And, by the way, what shows does Wiip produce? I don’t even know.

John: I don’t know either. I’m sure it’s a good list.

Craig: Do we need them?

Aline: I just think we should not stop until every single person in the world has a production company, music festival, podcast. Where everybody has some side hustle. We’re like the side hustle generation.

John: I think right now in 2019 maybe we’re all content creators. But until we’re all our own networks and all our own studios – maybe that’s our real goal. So, maybe Aline next you shouldn’t think like what’s the next TV show you’re going to do. Because you’re thinking of like what is the TV company that you’re going to found.

Aline: Well, what I think is hilarious, you know, the Fyre Fest thing which those movies have been so riveting, and then there’s the Theranos thing which frankly I can’t get enough of. There’s this sense now in the culture that like you don’t have to do a thing, you just have to super seem like you’re doing a thing.

John: Oh yeah, for sure.

Aline: And people seem to like perform their tasks and their lives and their parenting and their dog-owning and their relationships more than they have them. And some of the things now with the podcasts and everybody has a production company and everyone is streaming and everyone is like – I wonder if it will all go back to people having sort of an artisanal where like all they do is making the one product. But I feel like we’re all being called upon in our lives to be presenting this like 360 fully realized, which is how people can start fake companies based on nothing and keep them going for an incredibly long time because it goes back to what we were talking about before which is like I don’t know how you could – you know, before it would be like people who print business cards that queued to nothing. Well now you can do full social media onslaughts and have, you know, entire – the Theranos lady got money from every single man with a million dollars she got a million dollars from based on turtlenecks, blonde hair, deep voice, and like–

Craig: The deep voice is my favorite.

Aline: It’s the best.

Craig: The fake deep voice. I love that.

Aline: It’s the best. And then also like just a good patter. And I think that everybody wants to be in everything.

John: Yeah. I mean–

Craig: Sociopaths gonna sociopath.

John: I mean, both Fyre Festival and Theranos they feel like amazing pieces of performance art. And so if you take them as that rather than businesses that hurt people, as performance art bravo. Give them some awards. Where are their awards?

I often feel like Ryan Reynolds deserves some sort of special Oscar for marketing or ability to promote himself, promote the products. You look at how he promoted the Deadpool movies, they were masterful. And Deadpool was as much the marketing of Deadpool as the movie itself. I loved the movies, but his ability to engage as that character was spectacular.

You found Rachel off of her YouTube videos. So just to think about she had a sense.

Aline: Oh yeah. And, look, a lot of it is for the good. A lot of this unmitigated content, like I just bought a book and optioned a book and the way I got to the author was I followed her on Twitter, she followed me back, I message her. And then we went through official channels. But now more and more I reach out to people directly the way I did with Rachel and then move on to the red phase. But you’ve had that personal connection. And that’s why I think that – it’s like anything. Much of it is for the good. Some of it is just complete hell scape. Humans are humans. And if you read Sapiens it explains a lot.

John: With your book thing I wanted to – a writer I was talking to this last week, she was saying that she was optioning a book. And so she told her agent, oh, I read this book that’s really great. It’s kind of out of print in the US, but it’s a British author. And the agent said, “Oh, no, no, no, let us deal with that and we’ll rep the rights for you and we’ll put it together as a package with you and the book and the rights and so you won’t have to spend any money.” And I asked her like well how much would the option have really been? My guess is the option was either a dollar or a thousand dollars. It wasn’t a big book.

And so now this agency has a package with her and this book and all this stuff and it’s like I don’t think that helped you. I don’t think that really gave her any extra hands. Because when you say you’re buying this book, you’re forming a relationship with this author and then ultimately you’ll set it up together. But you’re not giving your agency the power to do all this stuff.

Aline: Yeah. I mean, I’ve driven a lot of my own business historically. I mean, my TV agent now is like extremely helpful. And I’ve had very, very helpful agents along the way. And I was with someone for 17 years. And agents are great and they offer a lot of value and they open a lot of doors. But ultimately we’re all chasing our own stuff.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Yeah. All right. It’s come time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a streaming show, because all things are streaming shows these things. It’s a Very English Scandal.

Aline: Oh, I loved it.

John: On Amazon Prime. It’s just great. And so it happened months and months ago, but I missed it. But now I can see it. So it’s Ben Whishaw, Hugh Grant. They’re both fantastic. Russell T. Davis wrote it. Directed by Stephen Frears. And what someone was pointing out today as I talked about it is that it’s only the three episodes – it’s just three episodes – is like 180 minutes. It’s actually shorter than many movies. And so as we’re talking about what sort of like what is a TV series, what is a movie, I got to kind of say you can really look at it as a movie that comes in three parts.

Aline: I think Frears is 78.

John: That old? Wow. That’s great.

Aline: I think. 77 or something. He’s amazing. He’s one of my favorites. In terms of directors who have style, that it’s both gorgeous and signature and invisible, he’s really one of my favorites. He did The Queen. I love Frears.

John: So I went into it expecting The Queen. I went into it expecting a serious drama, so I had no idea how funny it was going to be. And it was great.

Aline: Yeah.

John: Craig, what do you got?

Craig: I’ve got a game. You know I’m endlessly looking for something to fill the space that used to be filled by The Room, The Room 2, The Room 3, The Room 4. So there’s this other game called Birdcage. It’s very simple. It’s Room-like though in that you are presented with a little puzzle that’s very tactile, move levers, solve some puzzles, flip a switch. But each stage is basically a bird is in this elaborate trapped birdcage and you have to go around the birdcage and solve the puzzles and flip the things and eventually open up the birdcage and the bird gets out.

So, Birdcage 2 is out. God, I don’t know, I assume it’s like three bucks or something like that. It’s not expensive. Totally worth your while. Easy to play. It’s in levels so it’s a super casual game for your phone or iPad. Loved it.

John: Loved it. Cool. Aline?

Aline: I have a tip. You know how when you get a dog you get obsessed with other dogs that look like your dog?

John: Totally.

Aline: Right? And like it’s all you want to do is look at pictures of dogs that look like your dog. So we got a Jack Wawa, which is like not a dog that we had any interest in.

John: Like a Jack Russell/Chihuahua—

Aline: It’s a Jack Russell/Chihuahua mix.

John: It’s a great dog.

Aline: And it really was happenstance that I went to a shelter actually with Rachel and then I dove into this pit with her and I came up with a little tiny, which Will didn’t want and was not a kind of dog I’d ever been interested in. So then of course now I’m obsessed with Jack-Wawas.

So if you go on Instagram any breed that you’re into that’s your particular mix, #Jackwawa really is one of the most soothing things that I do on Instagram is to follow other dogs that look like Jimmy. Quite enjoyable. My whole family does it. Rachel follows it, whatever her dog thing is which I think is Border Terrier. And it’s just a delight.

And then we have all these other dogs that we look at and we’re like how much does this one look like Jimmy. This one is like Jimmy but is just completely white. This one is like Jimmy but less furry. This is just hours of enjoyment.

John: I’m so happy you have a dog.

Aline: That has been my other One Cool Thing of my whole – I mean, it’s crazy that – like I’m going to explain to you what’s good about having a dog. Like I just realized what’s good about having a dog.

Craig: We know.

John: Dogs are good. We all have dogs.

Craig: The greatest.

John: Some wrap up stuff from me. If you are not sick of hearing my voice, I just recorded 23 videos about Highland and sort of how to do different things in Highland2. So they’re little tutorial things. So if you’re curious about how to do stuff in Highland2 there will be a link in the show notes pointing you towards those things.

Also I’m trying to hire another coder. So we have Nima Yousefi who is our main coder, but we’re hiring somebody in sort of – not an intern. It’s like a full on paid job, but it would be a great job for somebody who is in college, just out of college, who does some iOS coding. There’s a job description we’ll put in the show notes. But we need somebody to do some work on an iOS app for us, and that might be a listener.

Aline: Black turtleneck, low voice.

John: 100%. That’s how you recruit them. I’m not looking for VC money. I’m just looking for a person who can code.

Craig: But definitely lower your voice.

John: Lower your voice.

Craig: Lower your voice.

John: And that’s our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Victor Krause and I picked it because it kind of reminds me of the 90210 theme.

Craig: Aw.

Aline: Aw.

John: Yeah. So Luke Perry died this past week. I never met him. Did anybody meet him?

Craig: No.

Aline: No. He was married to someone I know and by all accounts is a lovely person.

John: By all accounts was just lovely. And so I feel so bad for them, for the family.

Craig: It’s so tragic.

John: For everyone on Riverdale who has to figure out how to deal with that. But anyway, sorry for that. But it’s a delightful theme by Victor Krause. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@dev.johnaugust.com. That’s also the place you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Aline is @–

Aline: I think it’s @abmckenna. [sic] (correct @alinebmckenna)

John: Well there will be a link in the show notes. You can find us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there leave us a comment. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts.

You can find the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net, or you can go to store.johnaugust.com and download individual packs of things. You can listen to the 19,000 times that Aline has been on the show, but in particular The 12 Days of Scriptnotes one, Episode 175, where we first talk about it.

You can hear Rachel Bloom’s first song on the show, which is the Scriptnotes theme to When Will I Be Famous. And the answer was–

Aline: Pretty soon.

John: Pretty soon, Rachel.

Craig: Shortly thereafter.

John: Aline, it is always a delight to have you on the program.

Aline: Thank you. You know what? I get a lot of props for this. People always stop me. They really continue to dig this podcast. And it’s the thing I always recommend when people ask me what they should be doing.

John: Scriptnotes.

Aline: Yep.

Craig: This podcast is like, we’re turning into like the Meet the Press of writing podcasts. It’s been on for 40 years.

Aline: Yes. It’s an esteemed institution, especially because it’s been around forever.

Craig: God.

Aline: Well, John is on the cutting edge of this stuff.

John: But, I mean, the fact that your entire show–

Aline: When is your music festival, John?

John: It’s got to be soon. But your entire show fits within the Scriptnotes show.

Aline: That’s right.

John: It’s nested within Scriptnotes.

Aline: That’s right.

Craig: Crazy.

Aline: That’s right.

John: All right. Bye.

Aline: Bye.

Craig: Bye guys.

Links:

• Emma Thompson’s open letter to Skydance.
• Episode 175 Transcript
• A Very English Scandal
• Birdcage 2
• Instagram #jackwawa
• New Highland 2 videos and tutorials
• We’re hiring a coder! If you’re interested please send an email to assistant@dev.johnaugust.com
• You can now order Arlo Finch in the Lake of the Moon
• Submit entries for The Scriptnotes Pitch Session here.
• T-shirts are available here! We’ve got new designs, including Colored Revisions, Karateka, and Highland2.
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• Aline Brosh McKennaon Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Find past episodes
• Scriptnotes Digital Seasons are also now available!
• Outro by Victor Krause (send us yours!)

Email us at ask@dev.johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 390 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the program we welcome back former Scriptnotes producer Megan McDonnell. Welcome back, Megan.

Megan McDonnell: Thank you.

Craig: As you can see, she was such a valuable employee for her strong voice.

John: Well today you’re not producing because you are in fact our guest. We want to talk to you all about how you got staffed on your very first show. Then it’s a new round of the Three Page Challenge where we take a look at the pages sent in by our listeners and discuss what’s working and what could use some work.

But first off, Megan, how does it feel to be back here doing – you did so many Three Page Challenges. You probably read – how many Three Page Challenges do you think you’ve read over the years?

Megan: Hundreds.

John: Hundreds. Yeah.

Craig: Wow.

Megan: Not a thousand.

John: Not a thousand. But hundreds.

Megan: Hundreds. Certainly.

John: So you were the culling mechanism to find the very best of them. Now Megana Rao has that job, so she got to go through a whole bunch of them yesterday to try to find the three that we’re going to do today.

Megan: Yeah, I mean, it was so fun to read through all the Three Page Challenges. It’s the making the decision of like, OK, which ones are John and Craig going to like and that was the hard part.

John: I used to be a reader at TriStar and at another company before that and in some cases reading things that don’t work is really helpful because it gives you a sense of like, OK, I’m never going to do that because I just see that never works. Do you think reading all the Three Page Challenges helped you as a writer or hurt you as a writer?

Megan: It definitely didn’t hurt me as a writer, I hope. I think it’s extremely helpful to see what people are doing, not only to see like what works so well and what’s so good, but also just what the trends are out there and like what I see a lot. OK, that’s a thing that’s probably being seen a lot, so avoid that thing.

John: Avoid that thing. Megan is going to be back after we do some quick follow up.

Craig: Great.

John: Last week we had Chris Keyser on the show to talk about agency negotiations and the problems of conflict of interest, all that stuff is still happening. But on Wednesday we got word of a major payout in another conflict of interest situation. Craig, do you want to talk us through this.

Craig: Oh boy, what a mess this thing is. And this is not something that hasn’t happened before. This is kind of a pretty dramatic outcome though in terms of how it unfolded. So this is about the show Bones. This is a show that was airing on Fox. And it aired more than 10 years. And basically what it came down to was the people that were the profit participants in the show Bones essentially said that Fox had kind of self-dealt. I guess what do you say like–

John: Undervalued?

Craig: Underestimated? Undervalued. Perfect word. They had undervalued the value of Bones when it was kind of self-dealing the reruns to itself and the programming to itself. So, what happens is you’re making a show. Very typical way this would work is in the old days a studio, let’s say Paramount, would make a television show like Star Trek. So they produced that show. They then sell that show, meaning they license it, to a network. I think Star Trek was on – oh boy, I’m not going to say it because they’ll get angry at me, the Star Trek people. They license it to a network. The network pays them a fee. And then over time if the show does well then it goes into syndication and all that rerun money kicks back to Paramount, the studio that made the show. But they weren’t airing it.

What happens if you have Fox Television creating a show and then licensing it to Fox Network? Ah-ha. Now you have all sorts of opportunity for skullduggery because Fox doesn’t necessarily want to have to pay out profit participation to the people that are participating in the profits. And so the lower they say – the worse the show is doing, the better it is for them, because they’re actually keeping all the money. They’re just reporting on paper it’s just not doing that well.

But it is. So, the people that felt cheated by this took Fox to arbitration and they didn’t just lose this arbitration, they lost in the most spectacular manner. The arbiter essentially awarded them $180 million, most of which was him saying Fox is a bunch of liars. They have a culture of lying. This is egregious. So, first you’re getting essentially what you were asking for as kind of the money that they had ripped you off essentially. They were saying look they ripped us off about $52 million. He said great. Here’s your $52 million and here’s another $128 million in punitive damages because of the egregious manner in which they approached their accounting.

This is not a new story. This is Hollywood everywhere all the time. And I wonder if something like this will actually change the business or if this is just going to be another one of those, well, every now and then we have to pay $170 million but we’ll make more if we keep lying.

John: Yeah. So, it’s important to note that this is going to go up for appeal so we don’t know what the final decision is going to be. But what I found so interesting about this story is that we’ve had this situation before where for reruns they were undervaluing the thing, so X-Files the reruns were about that situation, syndication, that situation. But here it was the initial broadcast of the show. So the show aired – it was made by Fox. It showed up on Fox Broadcasting. Also Hulu and Fox’s foreign affiliates. And they were pricing it below market value is the argument that they should have been charging more for the show in all those situations. And they’d actually gone to the executive producers and the stars insisting that they not challenge the license fee issues over this time.

Craig: Right.

John: It’s really fascinating because you don’t – it’s one thing to say like, oh, it’s creative accounting. But it felt like there was actual deliberate manipulation and talk about we’re not going to pick up the show for the next two seasons because the show is not successful and it really was quite successful.

Craig: Exactly. They’re saying, look, you have to go along with this and take these reduced things because otherwise we’re not going to bring the show back. Meanwhile they had already made a deal with the showrunner to continue making the show. They were lying flat out. You can’t threaten to cancel a show when you’ve just made a deal with somebody else to keep making the show.

And then there’s the Peter Liguori thing. Did you read about this?

John: You know, I got a little bit lost in all the weeds of it, because I read – we’ll put a link to the actual decision, but there’s so many different articles. Tell me about the Peter Liguori of it all.

Craig: So Peter Liguori was the president of entertainment at Fox Broadcasting Company which is the network. And he was the president until 2009. So, 2009 he leaves Fox and he happened to be around when a lot of these initial things were happening. He was apparently meant to testify in these proceedings. And seven months before he is brought in to testify Fox makes a new deal with him, an outstandingly good deal with him to produce shows at FX.

And this did not pass muster with the arbiter. It says, “Liguori’s deal came with fixed episodic fees and contingent compensation far exceeding that of top executive producers in Hollywood despite the fact that the executive Peter Liguori had ‘virtually no experience whatsoever as a producer.’” That feels like a buyout, right? That’s essentially what the arbiter is implying here is that Fox basically paid off Peter Liguori to not testify against them.

Now, that’s obviously what this guy is saying. I’m just reading along with it. But the arbitrator, Peter Lichtman, apparently is a very well-respected arbitrator. They’re going to try and I guess appeal this in court. Good luck, I think? I don’t think that’s going to work.

So this is a fascinating one. I’m interested to see if it sticks. If I had to bet I would bet it would stick.

John: Yeah. I think some version of this will stick. But I think it’s also worth looking at it in the larger context of conflicts of interest. And so this is Fox for Fox, but as we talked about last week we have these agencies that are also becoming producers and that’s going to be really awkward. You can imagine a ton of these lawsuits over like, oh, did you really find the best deal for this project or did you just take the best deal that you could make internally?

Craig: Right.

John: So it’s a real challenge.

Craig: Yep.

John: And follow up is over. Megan McDonnell, you’ve been the Scriptnotes producer for a year and a half, 14 months?

Megan: A year and some change.

John: Year and some change. You were also the producer of Launch, the podcast we did about the book. But you’re only a name at the end of the show, so people don’t really know you. I guess they could have seen you at the live show, or in Austin. But talk us through your background. Did you always want to be a screenwriter? How did you come to this?

Megan: I’ve always loved to write and it kind of never occurred to me that I could be a screenwriter until I went to grad school. So I went into grad school thinking oh I’ll be a producer, I’ll be a network executive, and then once I was there and doing internships and taking writing classes I was like, oh gosh, I’ve really got to give this a try. And I’m so glad I did because now I’m writing.

John: So where did you grow up?

Megan: I grew up in Long Beach, California, so a Southern California person.

John: All right. And school here? School in Boston, right?

Megan: I did undergrad at Harvard, studying English and Chinese.

Craig: As one does.

John: As one does. And then did you know you were going to move to Los Angeles directly afterwards?

Megan: Yeah. Because I knew I wanted to be in the industry.

John: Great. So you end up going to the Stark program at USC.

Megan: Yeah.

John: But did you have a job or an internship before Stark?

Megan: So I went straight from college, but while I was in college I had some internships over the summers.

John: So talk us through the Peter Stark program. For people who don’t know it’s a two-year graduate producing program. Why pick that rather than a screenwriting program?

Megan: Because at that point also I was like oh I’ll be a producer. This is my track. But also, I mean, all the programs at USC are wonderful, but also I think that for what I want to be doing ultimately anyway I’m very thankful that I went with the Stark program because it does teach you skills that you’ll need as a showrunner in addition to just being able to write and all of that.

John: So Craig is usually down on film programs overall, film school overall.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Sell Craig on film school. What were the things you took out of film school that you think you wouldn’t have gotten if you hadn’t gone through them?

Megan: A huge part of it, of course, is the friends you make there. Being able to make a short film, like using your friends as crew, and actually making stuff I think it’s helpful to go to film school. And I do think it’s like a big decision that isn’t for everyone.

But I feel very grateful that I went. One for all the people I met. Two for all the internships I had and the friends I was able to make through that. But also you just learn a lot. And it’s certainly stuff that you can pick up while you’re working, while you’re at an agency or any of that, but just like learning how things fit together in a very straightforward way I think is extremely helpful. And it’s stuff that comes up while you’re an assistant even where you just have answers to things. And it helps add value to what you’re doing.

John: Yeah. I will say a good film program, and Stark I think is a very structured film program, it gives you a sense of the entire process. And so a screenwriting program can teach you this is how screenplays work, let’s write our screenplays, but doesn’t give you a sense of how movies are made and sort of from the idea to release date to home video. That sense of it is useful and you can learn that in an academic setting.

Craig: I mean, listen, no question that there’s advantages certainly to a program like this. So we’ve spoken about how if you are going to film school in a graduate program, or an undergraduate program at NYU or at USC, I get it. I do. I can see just the value of the people you meet alone probably – I mean, I have to weigh it against what it costs. Like for instance, my friends, you know, I got my friends to work on my movie. I’m like you could have also paid a crew of people and that would have been half the year’s tuition maybe for one year of film school.

But I get that part. I do. I wish that there were fewer programs. I don’t know how else to put it. I honestly wish there was some kind of cap on how many programs there can be because sometimes we’ll get emails from people saying, “Listen, my professor of screenwriting at East Tuscaloosa Bible College says that,” and we’re like do they need a screenwriting program there? I don’t know if they warrant one. Do you know what I mean? Just fewer. I’m all for fewer programs.

John: Now, Megan, an interesting thing which is different than any previous assistant is that in addition to school you also were participating in writer’s groups. And so you had regular writing sessions with other folks. So talk us through that. How did you find those people and what did you actually do in your writer’s groups?

Megan: I think the biggest thing for me getting stuff written has been writer’s groups. It’s such a game changer. And I was lucky, the first writer group I really participated in was organized through my alumni program for undergrad. And so they put us with a group and it was a semester-long thing where at the beginning you have an idea, at the end you have a script. And just the value of deadlines is huge. But in addition to that just being around people that have smart ideas about your script and bring different things to the table and can help you out.

And just like you learn things from people when you get to meet with them every week and talk about writing.

John: So that continued after school. I know that you would have every week, every two weeks – how often were you meeting up with these writer’s groups?

Megan: I’m in two writer’s groups. One is weekly, the other is every other week.

John: And what are the expectations of what you’re going to do in a weekly group?

Megan: For the weekly one, we would just create assignments that we would have to turn by the next week with room to read them. But it would be like, OK, figure out your log line and then your structure, or have a beat sheet by the next week, or write ten pages. And then by the end, stacked in such a way that by the end you had a canvas script that you’re proud of. And then for the other one it’s just like whatever anyone is working on bring it in and we’ll see.

Craig: How many people were in these writing groups?

Megan: Six or seven.

Craig: OK, that’s not too big. Sometimes I think if it gets – if there’s a group rather large it always seems to turn into some weird political mess, you know, because writers not always great in groups.

John: So you said the advantages are deadlines. I guess there’s a sense of like social pressure. If you don’t do this thing everyone is going to notice that you didn’t do this thing. And you won’t just feel bad personally, you’ll feel like you’re letting them down. Is that it?

Megan: Social pressure, yes, definitely that. But also just the energy of being around people that are excited about it, about what you’re writing but also about what they’re writing. I think that energy especially when you’re an assistant during the day and you are kind of creatively burned out by the evening then to be around people that are very excited to be doing this, I think is a helpful thing.

John: Well let’s talk about your day jobs. So, during Stark, it’s a two-year program, but the second year all your classes are at night so you could in theory have a normal job. When did you have internships? When did you start working full-time for a place?

Megan: So, during Stark I think I always had full-time internships. Not full-time internships, but I’d stack internships in such a way that I was using all my time, which actually I’m really grateful for that system just because working all day and then heading straight to class and getting home at 11, now that’s just what I have as a baseline. OK, the workday is that many hours long and I think it’s helpful as far as then being trained to do the assistant job and then at night do the writing part of it.

John: So when you say stacked internships, so you might have two, or three, or four internships over the course of a week? So on Mondays you’re this, Tuesdays you’re that?

Megan: Yeah. Usually two at a time.

John: Two at a time. Great. And talk about internships. Classically it was making copies, but no one makes copies anymore. So what does an intern do these days?

Megan: It’s a lot of script reading, which of course is very helpful for a writer. And also just understanding like mandates, what people are looking for, what belongs on kind of what network. But for me it was always development internships or programming internships.

John: Great. So you’re reading scripts. Are you writing up coverage? What do they have you do?

Megan: Yeah. Writing up coverage.

John: Were you paid for these internships or were they credit?

Megan: 50/50 I think.

John: All right. And were you paid enough that they were actually survivable, or was it just sort of token pay?

Megan: Whenever I did get a paid internship it felt like holy moly, like this is so exciting.

John: One of the classic knocks against internships is you have to be able to afford to take an internship.

Megan: I think it’s a huge problem. Yeah.

Craig: The whole system stinks. We were talking about this on Twitter, I think Aline McKenna mentioned that the standard – and I was talking to Bo Shim who is my new assistant, and she came out of CAA. And she said early on they just say, “OK, are you OK with the industry standard of,” and I think it was $13.50 an hour or something like that. That’s just unconscionable. I really – in the middle of our argument with the agencies about package fees and all the rest of it, you know, I’d also like to start arguing with them about what they pay assistants. That’s stupid. And it’s mean. It’s cruel. It’s a bit like that old system – which is still in place – where medical students fresh off getting their MD are sent to hospitals to work 19-hour shifts. It’s dumb. It’s hazing.

John: It’s dumb and it’s dangerous.

Craig: Yes. It’s literally down to hazing. Except in this case it’s hazing plus cheapness. It’s really gross.

John: But also it creates a system where the only people who can afford to work for that little money are the people who can sort of afford to not have a job. And so people who actually really need to pay rent, good luck.

Craig: Yeah. And not only have these things not kept up with inflation, but housing costs have far outstripped that. So, it’s a mess. And I’m angry thinking about–It’s upsetting to me. And so you know let’s put that on our list of things to yell at the agencies about.

John: [laughs] All right. We’ve got a long list here.

Megan: Yeah. It’s also across the board, too, right? Agency assistants certainly don’t get paid a lot, but also assistants on shows and PAs and stuff also don’t get paid a lot.

Craig: Right.

John: When was your first real job-job that wasn’t an internship? What was that?

Megan: It came from an internship where over a summer I had a job at Fox in comedy, the network, current and development–

John: We should clarify that for folks. So current means the shows that are on the air right now. Development is shows they’re trying to figure out how to get on the air, or they’re going to make pilots and they’re going to figure out which ones go. That handoff is always really weird. So you start in development and then if your show keeps going then you’re handed off to current. Is there more prestige in current or development?

Megan: So I don’t know because I felt very lucky to be at Fox Network because it was the same person, like when you start with a project in development you get to keep it through current. So, the executives did both, which I think is relatively rare. Most places it’s split up. But I think it’s also just very different skillsets, too.

Craig: That was my first internship, too, was current programming at Fox. And I remember that – you know, they had I don’t know three, four, five current programming executives, so they would assign everybody a few shows. And their job was to go to the table readings and to give network notes and so on and so forth. And the least seasoned of them, he was a fairly new hire, I think this was his first executive job, he was given The Simpsons. And I asked my boss who was the head of current programming, I was like just out of curiosity why would you give that guy The Simpsons? And he goes, “Because it’s The Simpsons. We don’t need him to do a good job.”

John: It’ll be fine.

Craig: It’s gonna be fine. They don’t give a damn what we say anyway. The sort of prestige portion of current programming is when you’re kind of put in charge of a rescue mission I think.

John: Yeah. Now, Megan, this is a question I never thought to ask you but when did you start listening to Scriptnotes?

Megan: I think I started listening during Stark. I don’t have a sense of what episode I came in on or anything, but as soon as I started listening I backfilled.

Craig: I really wanted you to say, “Oh, I’ve never listened to Scriptnotes.”

John: I’ve never listened to your show. Even though as I produced it—

Megan: I just assume they’re fine and I publish them.

Craig: Yeah. The wave form has come through, so I’m good. Yeah.

John: How did you find out about this job and what was the process there?

Megan: I found out about this job – a friend of mine, thank you friend, forwarded the blurb about the job and was like, “Hey, is this the kind of thing you’re interested in?” Because they knew I wanted to transition to a writing thing. And I was like yes I am. And so then I was lucky enough to be able to go through the process.

John: You sent through the email, the resume, we talked and you did a little assignment. And then you were hired into the job. What does a writer’s assistant do? What did you end up doing when you were doing this job in addition to producing Scriptnotes? Like what are the things that you think a good writer’s assistant is doing for a feature writer mostly?

Megan: I think it’s so, so different job to job because you’re so self-sufficient, so I feel like the standard part of a writer’s assistant job was much less for this. For me besides doing Scriptnotes the majority of the time was just on tech support for Highland2.

John: Absolutely.

Megan: Which was delightful.

John: Yeah. We are a software company as well, so there’s a lot of tech support that you stepped up and helped us out with that. But you were also writing a lot. And so what were you writing before you came here and what were you writing during here? What were you thinking your career was going to be about? Were you trying to do TV? Were you trying to do features?

You had directed a short that was great, which we linked to very early on in your run as a producer. But what was your plan getting here?

Megan: First of all I was just so thrilled to have this job because I mean obviously the best writer’s assistant job you can have. But as far as next steps/game plans, I had just started talking with my manager who is wonderful, Scott Stoops. Mostly I’m focusing on TV, so I had written a couple of TV scripts, a couple anthology specs which is kind of cheating. And then while I was here I was working on a feature, a couple more pilots. But I think the sample I’m using now is one that I actually gave to you–

John: Yeah, I read your pilot.

Megan: Right at the beginning.

John: Back then. And so I wasn’t hiring you as a writer, but I just wanted to see like does this person have the ability to put words together in a meaningful way. Does this person get it at all? So that was the goal behind that.

You very quickly skipped over this like “oh, and a manager.” So talk to us about how you came across this manager. Because it was a transition where it wasn’t quite clear whether you were represented by him or if it was a friendship. So talk about how you met this person and how it develops.

Megan: Yeah. I mean, I was so lucky, again, for this one through one of my writer’s groups we would organize every semester like a practice pitch thing where you would practice pitching in like a very fast way your idea to people in the industry. And so my manager Scott was among the people that would come in and listen to our pitches and give us notes on them. And I pitched him my project and he’s like, “Wow that sounds really interesting. Is it written?” And I was like yes it is and it’s printed out and here you go. And I gave it to him and he read it that night. And called me at work at the office. I told him who I worked for at the time. Called me at her number the next morning and was like, “Hey, just want to say I read your script and I loved it. Would you want to work together?”

We really hit it off. At that time I had kind of been talking to a couple people. There’s a strange thing where–

John: Was it about the chemistry or did you just trust him? Was it you felt that he was the right person or you weren’t even quite sure at that moment?

Megan: Well, no, I really got great vibes from him. And I had been talking to someone else, so I didn’t know when things become official and like that kind of thing.

John: Let’s pause here because Craig–

Craig: Are we dating? Are we exclusive?

Megan: I wanted to say that but I was nervous.

Craig: Are we boyfriend/girlfriend, or are we just friends-friends? Or like where are we?

John: You and I had this conversation about him because it wasn’t quite clear for a little while there. But, Craig, I want to sort of wind back here because a lot of what Megan is describing feels really familiar. And so it’s that sense of like, oh, I must be really lucky, and she’s not noticing how much hard work she did.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Like how many things she wrote.

Craig: Shall I punish her for this? I mean, you’re not lucky. You are no luckier or less lucky than anyone. I think that certainly the way life functions there’s going to be circumstances and things, but I think in general we – you know, once you get past the luck of where you’re born and what kind of family environment you’re born into, when you get to Hollywood there’s just not enough luck. There’s literally not enough luck possible to make you have a career.

So, and by the way, I would also say there’s not enough bad luck possible to keep somebody brilliant down. It’s not going to happen. If you are talented and you are hardworking and you are a person of conscience, an honorable person with a work ethic, then you’re going to make it. Chance favors the prepared mind, and so on and so forth.

So it’s not luck. In fact, if anything I could argue that you are unlucky that somebody that was talented enough as you were to get hired and be put on a show as you are now – it should have happened sooner. You are unlucky. [laughs] So I’m glad that even as unlucky as you were you were able to finally get a job. See, that’s how I do it.

John: That’s how you do it. I would say that I’ve actually seen a lot of people in exactly your chair sort of moving up through. And what I recognized was there was a time at which you would have some phone calls where you’d have to step outside to take the phone call about a thing, or you’d say like is it OK if I take this meeting. So, your manager is setting up these meetings and you’re going to just general meetings and see who you hit it off with. And I saw that happening and I saw it happening more frequently and more frequently.

And so I would say to Craig I think she has about three months left before–

Craig: Yep. He would.

John: Before she’s out the door.

Craig: Before she gets really lucky. [laughs]

John: So you have a manager. At one point do you have an agent?

Megan: Now I’m getting confused with my timeline because it just feels like, you know, god I’ve been working ever so long now. But I think there gets to be a point where it’s getting close to like time to get staffed, time to do this, and that’s when I started meeting with agents. And also my agents are wonderful at Verve. But, yeah, the kind of thing where it’s like, OK, if we’re going to put you up for staffing jobs it’s helpful to have someone else to follow up and to find opportunities and covering agents and stuff like that.

Craig: Covering agents for those of you at home are the agents who are assigned a studio or place of purchasing. So they’re like, OK, I cover Warner Bros. I get a call from Warner Bros saying we have an open writing assignment for so and so.

John: Yeah. Or on a specific project. But how did you get to Verve? So this is your manager sending your script to people at Verve saying like I represent this young woman, she’s fantastic, you should read her? Is that the process?

Megan: Yes. It was for me.

John: Great. And so then you go in and you talk to the agents there. You see if you hit it off. But when you say you’re being put up for shows is it just the agency sending it in or is it also your manager who is talking to folks? Is everybody sort of working together to do it?

Megan: I think, yeah, everyone is working together. They’re always in communication. My agents will submit me to some shows. The show that I’m working on now I think initially my manager was the one to kind of initiate it, which I’m very excited about.

John: So there was a moment about two months ago where I came back after a meeting and you stayed back late and like I could tell you were really, really excited. And so what was your excitement over?

Megan: This is when I was called – it was after work on like a Friday evening and I was packing up to go. But I had a call with my team planned and it was like, oh, you have a staffing offer. And I was like oh my gosh. What it was was Scott being like, “Hey Megan, you know, on this thing, you know, they really liked you. I’ve got some bad news.” And I’m like, OK, yes, of course, like I never expected to get this job. Of course. And he’s like, “The bad news is you’re going to have to quit working for John because you got staffed.” And I was like oh my gosh.

John: So talk to us about the show that you ultimately ended up signing onto?

Megan: So the show that I’m staffing on now is a Marvel show for Disney Plus about Scarlet Witch and Vision.

Craig: Ooh, cool.

Megan: And it is just my dream job. It has been – it’s too good to be true, where like I’m loving every minute of it but also like very anxious that it’s too good to be true.

John: Yeah. So we should have said earlier on that the stuff that you’ve been writing has classically been science fiction or sort of like Twilight Zone anthology-ish. It’s very much in that sort of mode. And so this felt like, wow, that’s a great show for her to be staffed on.

Megan: Yeah. It feels like a really good fit. And everyone is so nice to each other. It’s going to be good. I can’t wait for everyone to see it.

Craig: You know, I’m telling you these kids growing up now in an age where people must be nice. And I feel like they’ve weeded out the real psychos. I hope they have. You know, back in our day Megan it was just psychos. You’d open your door and it was fields of waving psychos everywhere you looked. Ugh. Now you guys, I love it. I’m happy. I’m glad that it’s that way. It should be that way.

John: Yeah. I’m really glad it’s that way. Talk us through that first day being in a writers’ room, because that’s got to be just a completely different experience for a writer who has always been working by herself. So what is it like?

Megan: Besides just totally magical, I had met with some friends in advance who had been staffed on shows before to be like, OK, give me all the tips, what should I do, what should I not do. And so I thought I was like, OK, I’m going in and I know vaguely how much to talk and how much to not talk. And I felt all set. And as soon I get into the room I realize oh my gosh, like I don’t know what seat to pick.

I was one of the first ones there, of course, because I was new and nervous. And I was like this is definitely a thing. Like when I was in China I learned much too late that the seats where you sit at a dinner table is like meaningful. And that was very embarrassing to me then. So now here I am in this room being like I just have no idea. So I picked a seat and everyone was nice and it ended up being fine.

Craig: Again, I wanted you to be fired on the spot, just like, “Oh, you have to go now. You can’t come back. You picked the wrong seat. You picked the wrong seat.”

John: You picked the wrong seat. Are you still sitting in that seat today?

Megan: Yes I am.

Craig: That’s how it works.

John: And so right now you are in the room, you are breaking story, you are figuring out all that stuff. So you’re not writing on a script yet? It’s all secret because it’s Marvel.

Megan: Yeah. Everything is very secret. That’s one thing we learn the first day.

John: There’s a red dot moving across the wall. I don’t want it to land in the middle of your chest. Well, anyway, Megan, we are so, so happy that you are on a show and a show that you’re very excited to be on. We were so sad to lose you, but fortunately we found Megana who is great.

Megan: Yeah.

John: And so this is so confusing to everybody. Megan’s replacement is named Megana. And she is fantastic and she’s a friend of yours from before this.

Megan: Yeah.

John: So she’s been great. So she’s been on the job for a couple weeks. And you’ve trained her how to do all the Scriptnotes-y things.

Megan: Yep.

John: Let’s move on to our Three Page Challenge. You’ve done a bunch of Three Page Challenges. We have three this week. Our first Three Page Challenge comes from Christopher Cramer. For folks who have never listened to a Three Page Challenge before, here’s the deal. So we put out a call to our listeners saying we will read the first three pages of your script, your screenplay, your teleplay, whatever you want to send us that’s script-like and give you our honest feedback. And so Megana looks through them all and picks things that are going to be interesting for us to talk about. So they’re not necessarily the best things she’s read, but the things that had the most interesting stuff for us to talk about.

So three very brave people, actually four because it’s a writing team for one of these, have sent through their stuff and we are talking about them. These people have volunteered for this, so just reminder to everybody – everyone wanted us to do this. They went in full knowing that we were going to do this.

If you want to read along with us you can follow the links that are in the show notes. We have PDFs that you can download for these things.

All right, our first script is called Three Weeks Gone by Christopher Cramer. It’s morning on a ranch in Wyoming. Jim Young, the owner of the ranch, checks the progress of the farmhands repairing a fence. Through their conversation we learn that Jim’s nephew Mason has been having a hard time adjusting to the farm and that he damaged the back hoe recently.

Mason hasn’t come to help yet but was seen going into the barn. The conversation is interrupted by the sound of a gunshot, presumably Mason scaring off Coyotes. Then Jim goes inside to see his wife Laura. He grabs a bite and asks what Mason was shooting at. Jim leaves to check on his nephew. After a standoff with a coyote outside of the barn, Jim enters the barn to find his nephew dead. And that is where we’re at at the bottom of these three pages.

Megan, we’ll start with you. What was your first impression reading through these pages? What did you get out of this?

Megan: I think it does set up a story. Like you understand kind of what we’re doing here. You understand the relationships I think really well right from the beginning. Something I noticed before, through reading through hundreds of them, it used to be that sexual violence was the thing that was in so many of the scripts. And then more recently for all the scripts I’ve been reading suicide is now like in so many of the scripts. And that’s not to say that it’s not used perfectly well here. But something to look out for as you’re writing.

John: So this one ends, the reveal with the body at the end. And it may be because we’re asking for three pages that there’s the pressure to get to a big showcase moment at the bottom of three pages. Rarely is it just sort of trickling out at the end of three pages. But it sort of a big moment. Craig, what was your first take on this?

Craig: My first take was that I was bored to death. And, look, here’s the thing. Christopher, it’s not that your pieces of story are boring, they’re not. But the way you’ve laid it out you’ve forced me to wait for something that clearly is bad. There’s no surprise here. The second there’s a gunshot that goes off I’m waiting for somebody to be dead.

Everyone is acting like, oh, he must have been shooting a coyote. No he’s not. I know that the – because really here’s the thing, Christopher, do you really think that any of us are sitting there going, hmm, yeah, it’s probably a coyote. No. We know it’s a show or movie, so we know he’s dead. We know. Or someone is dead, right? So you’re just making me wait for this thing that I know is there.

So I was bored. And also I thought, and this is a theme I’m going to bring up in all three of these, I could have written all of this in a half a page as far as I’m concerned. You’re not using this precious space very well. There’s a lot of just yapping. There’s yapping about posts. There’s yapping about where’s my nephew. There’s yapping about him being in the barn. Then he gave me a heart attack. What was he shooting at? I don’t know what he was shooting at. How was he? Yeah, he didn’t eat much. It goes on and on.

And as far as I’m concerned you have a bunch of guys that are working on a post. They’re hitting the post with a hammer. Ping. Ping. Ping. Someone goes where’s Mason? Don’t know. Ping. Ping. Bang. They all look over. Somebody starts running. I’m watching that. Do you know what I mean? It’s just dragging this out. There’s not enough drama to warrant these three pages.

I mean, I have a lot of other small things that I want to mention, but that’s sort of my tough love beginning for you here.

John: Yeah. From the moment we hear the gun shot I sort of know that Mason is dead, and so I’m just waiting for everyone else to catch up with me, which is a really bad place to be on page two.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So there’s more here that I did kind of like and I want to highlight some stuff that I thought was possible here, it was possible to sort of enjoy here. So the overall setting of the world is not bad. We’re on a ranch. I like that there’s people working on the fence. I like that there’s a lot more fence to be building. I liked the moment on page – it’s really page two here. His page numbering is off. But Jim says, “Take it easy on him. Your first three weeks here weren’t nothing to write home about either. He’s a good kid.” That’s a pretty good way of giving me a sense of who Mason is.

Now if I had seen some of that and I’d seen Mason walking around, or I’d seen Mason walking with a gun that is scaring off coyotes I would have been fine. In a weird way if you’d set up Mason with a gun before all this had happened, or we just see him walking by in a shot that would have been fine. I wouldn’t have assumed that he’s dead. But because we’re talking about this character and then we’re hearing a gunshot we’re naturally going to assume that Mason shot himself.

Craig: That’s what a gunshot means. It means Mason shot himself. There’s a bunch of things that stylistically I think it’s important to take a look at because this is somewhere in the – it’s Wyoming, right? So we’re dealing with ranchers, cow hands, and so on and so forth. Everyone kind of talks a little bit like a robot for a while. And then they start talking not like a robot. First of all “Its” possessive does not have an apostrophe. Please proofread your work.

Jim says, “How is it coming along?” That’s really weird and stilted. How is it coming along? Not how’s it coming along. Things like that are a bit odd. And there’s a bunch of them actually in the action description as well. It is summertime. Even in action description if it’s not dialogue, if it’s taking place on a ranch in Wyoming there should be a slight familiarity there. The contractions are going to help you.

There’s a long conversation with a ranch hand and his name is Ranch Hand. No.

John: No.

Craig: No.

John: We’re going to hit that on another script today, too.

Craig: Exactly. I think also it’s important if you – Jim says, “How’s it coming along?” I’ve already done the contraction for you there, Christopher. And Ranch Hand says, “Oh, you know, one post at a time.” OK, a mild ranch joke I guess. But then the next thing you say is, “Jim cracks a smile. ‘There is no other way to approach such work.” Is this like a computer is explaining the joke to us? It’s very odd.

John: Yeah. So here’s a way to do that kind of joke. So, first off Jim is capitalized there for no good reason. But you could say Jim cracks a smile and then in italics go, “How else you gonna do it?” That sense of like you can give the unspoken line that he would be saying if he was going to say the line. But as it is right there it doesn’t help.

But then the idea of he reacts to that and then we reveal how much more of the fence there is to build, that’s fine. That’s great. To the degree it’s a misdirection about what is going to be happening next that can work.

Craig: Yes, I agree. Although it seemed like then everyone ignored the reveal. In other words if you’re going to make a reveal it usually comes at the end of something, not at the middle. So this is the moment where suddenly the scene has to stop so that we can do a reveal, and then it picks back up again. That’s not how it’s going to work. I mean, camera-wise if you think this, look, you know us we’re a big defender that writers can use the camera, but if you’re using the camera you got to use it right. So we pull out to see the expanse of the field and just how far along the fence isn’t. It is going to be a long day. Great.

Then the next thing. Ranch hand, “Haven’t seen your nephew yet this morning.” Well he’s a mile away from you now because I’ve pulled back. Like what’s happening? So that comes in the beginning or it comes at the end. But I don’t think you can put it in the middle here.

John: Megan, talk to me about geography in here. Did you get lost at all sort of where things were? Like the barn was close – he’d driven up in the truck but he said he’s already seen him go into the barn. And then we also have people walking through doors. Is this a thing that you notice a lot in these Three Page Challenges? I just felt like our confusion of geography is a thing that hits for me.

Megan: Yeah. On this one it didn’t bug me. I think I got more attentive to that after the Austin Film Festival Three Page Challenge where you guys talked a lot about geography and now I really look for it. In this one I saw it all pretty close together. But–

John: So let’s say that this is somebody in one of your writer’s groups who delivers these pages. What is the feedback you give to Christopher who is a friend or at least a colleague? What would you tell him to focus on?

Megan: There are just some things that he stylistically – he does a lot of things that are in all caps that I wonder like why is this in caps and why is this in caps. So hot day, restless huff, long day. And I can totally – it works really well, like sound of a gunshot. Yes, I definitely cannot miss that.

Craig: Sure.

Megan: But for some other things it just like if there’s too much capitalized or bolded then I don’t know what I should really be paying attention to.

John: For sure. So like on page three there’s a coyote is uppercase and bolded. Sure. Great. We’re seeing that it’s a big thing. But if we hit a bunch of those before then we don’t know what to pay attention to.

Let’s talk about the cut to-s on the second page. You didn’t need them. And so you can have cut to-s in your script. You can leave them out. But they didn’t feel like they were providing anything new. Because it was a kind of continuous action and you could get rid of those cut to-s and nothing would have changed.

Craig: Right.

John: I’m a big fan of using cut to when you really need to signal to the reader this is a big shift. We’re really going to a new place and time. Otherwise drop them out, because just doing the scene header is going to give you the sense that you’re cutting to a thing.

Craig: Yeah. Cut to-s are really there to just say look there’s an interesting cut happening, not a cut. Similarly at the end, smash to black, that’s not a thing. I don’t know how you smash to black. You can cut to black. But there’s no smashing.

John: No. Can’t smash it. And then the blood on page three, there was just a long time on the blood. All the bottom half of the third page could have been done in two lines.

Craig: Yeah. It’s movies and television, so we have seen blood 14 billion times by the time we’re 12. So, when you want to show blood I think the last thing you want to do is all caps and bold and underlined – a pool of dark red liquid. It’s blood. I mean, it’s not that, do you know what I mean? Just say he notices something on the ground. He cocks his – I would cut it. Just literally cut the next three lines and just say, “He cocks his head to the side and then looks towards the barn. It’s seeping out from under the large door.” I would say it. Let people – we’re good at this sort of thing. We want to play. We want to be invested. We want to get to fill in a few little blanks. So why hit us over the head with something as mundane as blood?

John: Yeah. Agreed. All right, last thoughts for Christopher. I would say the idea of the world is good but I don’t quite know what movie I’m going to be following on page four. Like if I’m reading page four I don’t know what movie I’m in. And so I don’t know if this is going to be a crime thing. If it’s going to be a family dealing with the death of their son, or their nephew. I just don’t know kind of what movie it would be on page four and that’s kind of a problem.

I have a sense of the world but I don’t have a sense of like where this could go next. Fair?

Craig: Fair for me. I mean, I don’t know where it’s going. I assume it’s a ranch drama. But it’s too – it’s flabby. These are flabby pages I think.

John: Craig, do you want to take Am I a Man Yet?

Craig: Sure. Am I a Man Yet by David Koutsouridis.

A day before his 21st birthday David confesses to his budget psychologist Xavier that he is not only a virgin but that he has never been kissed. Xavier suggests David take out Xavier’s younger sister tomorrow night. Xavier says she has definitely broken up with her boyfriend. We then cut to David’s birthday dinner with his overbearing mother who gifts him a framed portrait of himself as a cherubic angel. David storms upstairs where he discovers the phone number of Xavier’s sister and decides to call her. He shows up for the date where Xavier’s sister, Renee, initially assumes that he is her waiter.

So, John and Megan, what did you think of I am a Man Yet by David Koutsouridas?

John: This was a good example to me where pages don’t have to be perfect to be enjoyable. And that you can see that person has the ability to do this thing called writing even if not everything is really working right. What was your first take, Megan?

Megan: Yeah. I think it has some very funny moments. I think a thing that I got frustrated by was there would be a very funny joke and then the next character would explain the joke which wasn’t necessary because we got the joke.

John: Yeah. It’s very joke-joke-jokey. And that can be great. But I had a challenge on page one where I didn’t believe the psychologist for most of page one. And then when we got to the bottom of page one, “A framed certificate print-out on the wall. It’s been poorly made in Word.” Oh, I kind of get now more what this cheap psychologist is, but I didn’t – because I didn’t get that earlier on I couldn’t read his dialogue with any sense that it could possibly be real.

Craig: Yeah. I had the same reaction. Actually I would say also to get rid of the Word thing because I don’t know – he’s a therapist and so you can’t do it. It’s illegal to just print something out. So that’s kind of a tone violating thing where the world doesn’t even make sense.

So tone on page one, page two, page three of broad comedies is incredibly important. It’s also where everyone I think early on at least washes up on the shore and their boat smashes apart because it’s tricky. So in this case, actually there’s a really funny bit here and what I would do is just eliminate some other things. I mean, he’s saying, “I’m a 20-year-old kiss virgin.” And Xavier goes, “What?” I would just keep him like a psychiatrist. “A kiss virgin.” “Well, yeah, it means that I have never been kissed. Also I’m a full virgin.” And then the psychiatrist, or psychologist, could do this line which is really funny? “Well, if you haven’t been kissed, I’d hope so. I’d hate to think you hadn’t kissed someone but you fully penetrated them. How do you even initiate something like that?” That’s funny in the context of a guy who is not doing other wacky stuff.

John: Yeah. Just that run of dialogue if you took out all of Xavier’s lines between that and let David keep talking, a character who keeps talking can be a lot funnier. So this might be a situation where you do some beats or something just to break up that thread so it’s not so dense to read. But I believe one character talking through all of this. And all those jokes play better if Xavier hasn’t spoken.

Craig: 100%. There’s a little bit of a – again, we giveth and we taketh. We are empowering all of you to use the camera, but then we are demanding that you do not make the camera do things cameras can’t do. For instance we are close on baby face David. We pull back to reveal an oddball psychologist, Xavier. That’s not possible. Because unless Xavier is not facing David, if you pull back you’re going to see the back of his head. You know what I mean? That’s not a thing you can do.

You can’t just use pull back as this like reveal. If you want to reveal, reveal.

John: Say reveal. You’re allowed to capitalize reveal. That works.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Yeah.

John: In many ways I questioned the nature of like his being so babyish. On page three we also get into his bedroom which is “Bed-sheet with dinosaurs, plush toys serving as throw pillows. He grabs them, throws them into a garbage bin.” I didn’t quite believe that character because if the character is at the start of this thing frustrated that he’s never even kissed a girl and he’s 21 years old, but he just got frustrated today? Like why has he not sort of fixed his bed before this? Why does he still have dinosaur sheets?

Megan: Yeah. Someone who is frustrated with being read as a younger person would try – would overcorrect for that.

Craig: I feel like based on his name that he’s Greek and so he’s writing hopefully something that’s familiar to him with the character of Nancy, his mother. But we have seen this mother many, many times. We’ve seen her actually as a Greek mother. We’ve seen her as a Jewish mother. We’ve seen her as a Chinese mother. We’ve seen her as an Italian mother. This is the most clichéd of clichéd moms.

And I was a little confused because it began with David cheerily sits at the kitchen table. So he’s happy. And then she hands him this thing and he just doesn’t like the gift. At which point I’m like what’s your vibe, dude? If you’re super happy to be having your 21st birthday alone with your mom you can’t really flip out when she gives you a present that is consistent with that. Do you know what I mean? Like if you’re glum, if you’re depressed, if this whole thing is just like a total death of joy moment and then she makes it worse by handing you this gift I understand. But I’m like you, I’m confused. How aware is he that he’s like a child? Has he just become aware? That was a little tricky.

That said, I do agree with your initial point which is that these do feel like there’s promise there with polish and time and thought. There’s an intelligence behind this. There is some legitimately funny things that are happening. And so it just needs the usual thing that I would say to everybody that is starting to write comedy: logic, logic, logic, tone.

John: Absolutely. So the logic I would really stress is that you can have this scene with David and Nancy, with the mom and David. I don’t think it can be the first time that we’re meeting them because it doesn’t give me enough information to process how these people could possibly fit together. So I need a different thing that even if you’re not telling me everything I can believe it can fit into this universe and this world. Because I didn’t buy this first time you’re really starting at a deficit when it comes to later things.

But what Craig has pointed, like I see moments of really promising writing here. Page three, so he’s stormed off. Then David suddenly reenters, maintaining his anger, as he quickly finishes the last bit of his cake. He storms off again. That little tag on things, we’ve seen that kind of thing before but it worked in this scene and it felt like the right thing. It told us something about David and his impetuousness. And if I had a scene that set up how codependent he is with his mother or sort of like what their relationship is it could have even landed better.

Craig: Agreed.

John: One last typo, page one, first word that isn’t INT is psychologist but it’s misspelled.

Craig: I mean, guys–

John: Got to proofread.

Craig: I mean, honestly. They have machines that do it for you now.

John: Yeah. It would be underlined with a little squiggly. So just look for the squigglies here.

Craig: Remarkable.

John: Our third Three Page Challenge is Chow by Carrie Wong and Herman Ming. Helen and Michael Chow, a Chinese-American couple in their 50s, shop for custom cut tablecloths at Home Depot. Helen questions Michael’s claim that the cheaper tablecloth has the same quality as the more expensive tablecloth. He convinces her that they’re the same and they check out.

A Home Depot employee tells them not to buy the cheaper tablecloth and that they are in fact not the same quality. The employee had bought the tablecloth herself and it quickly ripped.

We then cut to their 20-year-old son’s bedroom where their son Jimmy lies sleeping. And that’s as much as we know at the bottom of page three.

I’m going to start with a question specifically for Megan McDonnell. What typeface is used in these three pages?

Megan: I’m going to say Courier Prime.

John: It is in fact Courier Prime. You can tell by the lower case Ys.

Craig: Kissing up.

John: She doesn’t have to anymore. She doesn’t work here.

Megan: Right.

John: But this is a product I make.

Craig: Oh no, she’s not. Carrie and Herman are kissing up.

John: Oh yes.

Megan: And it worked.

John: It worked. It worked. They got picked. Just yesterday I was explaining to Megana how to tell which is Courier Prime and which one is not. So, yeah, now she knows.

Craig: Now she knows.

Megan: It’s so beautiful. If you guys haven’t seen it, read these pages.

John: Beyond the beautiful font what was your first impression, Megan McDonnell?

Megan: I really liked the dynamics in this. I really liked the characters. I think the way that they’re kind of looks are juxtaposed is really nice. I do think that the employee takes up such a huge percentage of the talking that maybe isn’t necessary, maybe slows the pace down a little bit.

John: The employee is just set up as “A moment later, a Home Depot EMPLOYEE (early 20s) approaches them.” But we don’t get a gender on the employee and later on it kind of becomes important because apparently she says, “When me and my boyfriend moved in together, he, like, bought the same…” And so not having any more information about that employee made it tough because that employee speaking probably has the most lines in these three pages and is just employee.

Craig: Yes. Employee. [laughs] This was another one where I thought I could have probably done this in one page. It just goes on. And I don’t know why. There’s nothing interesting happening here. The value is that the wife, Helen, is suspicious that Michael is pushing her towards a cheaper option. And it turns out he is. This is not high stakes, nor is it particularly interesting, nor is it something I haven’t seen before a billion times. This is almost the province of commercials. You know, dumb husband. And I’m fine with dumb husband, but three pages of it?

And the employee is just rambling. So sometimes we’ll call this shaggy dog. It’s rambling, rambling, rambling. The story that she’s telling is nowhere near interesting enough to warrant all this time. This story would have to go to some amazingly f-ed up placed where literally Helen and Michael are just staring with dropped jaws to justify the amount of time for which it goes on. This is the beginning of your movie. And what you’re telling me is that this movie is going to be sort of mumblecore like low-stakes chitchat. And I don’t like that.

And I think honestly that Carrie and Herman have done themselves a disservice because I think they’re good writers actually. The writing itself in and around these things is executed nicely. It’s just it has not been compressed. It has not been shaped. There’s not a lot of interesting things going on. People just arrive slowly. There’s no interesting ins and outs. There are two zoom outs which we’ll get into in a second. But this was sort of my trouble with this, like the first pages we went through, it felt like a prodigal use of what is incredibly precious real estate.

John: Some things I admired about these pages. We always talk about hair and makeup and really describing your characters. And so you look at the descriptions of Michael Chow and Helen Chow, they’re really good, and I can picture them in my head. And to skip out on that for the employee is sort of one of the big problems here. But to me this kind of felt like you have this writing team who has an idea for these two characters and just sort of gets them talking, or puts them in a situation and watches what they do. And this would be great practice for how to use these characters or practice for how these characters interact. But I don’t think it’s a great first scene in a movie.

Craig: Right.

John: It’s not setting them up on a big adventure. I’m more of a fan of the mumblecore, like stuff happens and people just talking and it’s loose, and that can work really well. But the things that work best it feels really loose but it’s actually getting to a point.

Craig: Exactly. I mean, when it’s done well people say, well, it’s mumblecore, but when it’s done well that’s just kind of the affect of the performance. But what’s happening is fascinating. So you have two people mumbling-coring at each other while somebody is watching and doing something else. The frames are interesting. The storytelling is good.

You know, you’re not going to get the movie made if it’s just boring talk. And this kind of is in the boring talk zone.

Small thing, in three – I think three different places, yes, bowl-shaped, gold-rimmed, mild-mannered, these things take hyphens. If you don’t put the hyphen in it’s just weird to read.

John: Yeah. You want to do this. Did both of you watch Master of None? Did you see the series Master of None?

Craig: Not completely but a number of episodes.

John: There’s an episode that I’m pretty sure Alan Yang directed where it’s this deaf couple in a store trying to buy something and it’s basically just them trying to have – the whole segment was just them trying to have this negotiation about what they’re going to buy. And it reminded me of this. But it’s the shaped version of this where you see their entire relationship is sort of summarized by their decision of what they’re going to buy here.

And I kind of feel like our writing team here could get there with the husband and wife because there’s something really interesting there that’s underneath this, but the employee is just dominating the whole thing. To see sort of what the manipulations are that they play with each other could be great.

Craig: Yeah. It just doesn’t – there’s no twists, there’s no turns. You know, there are versions of this where it seems like a normal thing and she’s like, oh yeah, no, because it rips. And then Helen just starts crying because this is the straw that broke the camel’s back and then the employee is like, “Oh, but it’s not the worth tablecloth.”

There’s all sorts of things you can do to justify these things, but you can’t do none of them. That’s the one that you’re not allowed to do.

Megan: I’m also curious about the way that this is opened, which is, “DARKNESS, A SERIES OF THIN GREY STREAKS, We SLOWLY ZOOM OUT to reveal…The bowl shaped hair of MICHAEL CHOW.” And I think it’s really interesting, an interesting visual, and I’m wondering are we supposed to be very curious about what it is. Are we going to come back to this? Because it is a pretty bold decision to start your film on something we don’t know what it is right away.

John: It reminds me of the start of Roma where you just see these squares and there’s water and eventually there’s mopping and eventually you sort of get to a thing. It can totally work. And maybe that really is the tone of what this is going for. Maybe we think it’s a mumblecore comedy but maybe it really is Roma and we’re supposed to be appreciating all this stuff around it.

If that is the case I think we would need to see our universe a little bit more and get a better sense that we are living in this space with these people and that we’re doing the slow pans through things, we’re really following them all the way up to the counter. And maybe it’s Roma. Maybe we’re missing that.

Craig: I don’t think it is. And if it is, this is not the way to start it.

John: The employee is written as a comedy.

Craig: The employee is written as a comedy. Let’s talk briefly about the difference between zoom and pull out or push in or those moves. So, typically in modern movies we don’t use zooms ever. A zoom is when the lens is doing the moving, not the camera itself. So as you’re zoomed in you’re looking at a small thing and as you zoom out the image essentially is like zooming out like on Google Maps, right. Whereas when you’re moving the camera itself, pushing in or pulling out, that’s more of a sense of you get parallax and motion and all the rest of it. And generally speaking zooms are bit ‘70s and a bit cheesy. They can occasionally be cool.

But in this case I’m guessing we don’t want to zoom out here, because if we did it would just be like one of those weird science movies where it’s like, look, you know, a tiny bug, and now the city, and the planet, and the galaxy. I don’t know.

Look, if you know the difference between zoom, and dollying in and dollying out, then cool, I apologize. But it’s important for people to know that there is a difference. I also – I have a question about at the end of this we arrive at the son. I assume this is their son because he’s got the same last name. Chinese-American, and then in parenthesis ABC, which I had to look up. It means American-born Chinese. The deal with this one is ECU, so now we’re extreme close-up on a yellow earplug. We slowly zoom out, again, so it’s the same gag. Is this on purpose? To reveal – and then the undersized ear of Jimmy Chow. I have no idea what that means.

What’s an undersized ear? I mean, like deformed?

John: Yeah. We don’t’ know if it means that he’s just a person with small ears or if there’s something really weird that’s going to actually be a factor. I agree. Undersized draws your attention without rewarding you for drawing your attention to that.

Craig: Perfect way of describing that. Yes.

John: Let’s talk about the ABC, American-born Chinese. I knew that term but you didn’t know that term. I think a safer bet for this script going out the first time is in that parentheses you say American-born Chinese, ABC, or ABC, American-born Chinese. And then once you’ve defined it you can use ABC after anyone else’s description if it’s helpful to you. Because in the nature of this project there could be lots of Chinese people with Chinese last names and it might be important to distinguish who was born in China versus who is born in the US.

Craig: Correct. Correct. Yeah.

John: Cool. All right. So those are our three samples, so our three Three Page Challenges. Thank you to all of our writers who sent them in. And to everyone who didn’t get picked, you’re still in the queue so we may get back to them.

Now, there was a question that came up on Twitter today asking, “Hey, last time you said that you wanted to have a bunch of female entries to the Three Page Challenge,” because historically those numbers have been low. Megan, you actually counted at one point and it wasn’t great. It certainly wasn’t 50/50. And so we want everyone to send in their three pages, but we’d really love to pick more women for these because the percentages are not fantastic.

If you have three pages you want us to take a look at you go to johnaugust.com/threepage. And there’s a button there. You click the button saying it’s OK for us to talk about your thing. You attach your script and it goes into a queue and we will take a look at everything that gets sent in.

Craig: Neat.

John: Neat. It’s come time for our One Cool Things. Megan, have you ever done a One Cool Thing on the show?

Megan: No.

John: You get to start. What’s your One Cool Thing?

Megan: This is thrilling. My One Cool Thing, I saw my friend Hunter’s setup. I love a second monitor when I’m working and his setup had the second monitor but it was like portrait, oriented portrait, which I had never seen before. This might be very obvious to everyone else. But I’ve got to say I set it up myself and Highland2 looks beautiful on a vertically-oriented monitor.

John: Nice! I love that you’re still selling our software.

Craig: Always be promoting.

Megan: Everywhere I go. People, yeah.

John: All right. So you write in Highland2, but you’re saying it works well done vertically.

Megan: Yeah. And you just can see so much more of your script and I think it’s really helpful for me.

John: Great. Fantastic. Craig, what’s your One Cool Thing?

Craig: My One Cool Thing is this tiny, little, dorky novelty item, but I saw it in my producer Jacqueline Lesco’s car. And I was like, ooh, what do you got there. And she showed it to me. It’s a charger. It’s a phone charger. That’s it. It’s a phone charger except – this is so dumb – but it lights up. So it’s got like these LED swirlies going around the cable and when you plug it in it lights up. And you’re like, OK, cool. But then when it’s charging the lights move.

John: Oh my god. [laughs]

Craig: It delights the child in me. It really does. It’s like you’re watching electricity flowing into your phone. It’s just delightful. I just stare at it. It’s hypnotizing.

John: Megan and I are going to watch the little video that shows what it looks like as it’s doing and, yeah, it does. It sort of snakes around.

Craig: Yeah. Look at that.

John: It’s like Vegas in your car.

Craig: Yeah. Vegas in your car. It’s the El-Aurora Lightning, it’s a USB cable. 360 Degree Light Up Visible Flowing, Glowing LED iPhone charger cable. I suspect that Amy August would love this.

John: OK, so are you using this in your car or in your house?

Craig: In my house.

John: All right. I guess it would be distracting in your car possibly. You could line your windshield with it and so everyone would know that you’re charging your phone and that you have this thing.

Craig: I know.

John: Now, Craig, I’m noticing that it has 286 customer reviews but they’re three stars. That’s not a very high – but it doesn’t matter?

Craig: Well, you know, some people can’t be pleased. I mean, you just like – you know, they just – apparently for a lot of people it didn’t work. But you know what?

John: You know what? It set your house on fire. But it looks so cool.

Craig: Yeah. Somebody in their review, “Anchorman: 60% of the time it works every time.” [laughs]

John: Ah-ha. Good stuff. My One Cool Thing is a thing that probably everyone has talked to you about already. It is Russian Doll, the show on Netflix. I thought it was just fantastic. Megan you said you watched it all in one sitting?

Megan: Loved it. Yeah. One sitting.

John: Loved it. Oh my god, nothing could be a more Megan-y kind of show because it’s a puzzle box show. It’s like a cross between Lost and Girls. I don’t know, but it’s just so great. Craig, did you watch it?

Craig: I have it queued up. I’m going to watch it this weekend because I’m doing a little traveling this weekend. And I’m very excited for it. And I do think, you know, Natasha Lyonne should come on the show. I can’t believe we haven’t had her. How have we not had her on yet?

John: Well we crossed paths with her because remember when we did our Slate Culture Gabfest crossover she was the guest after us. But we’ve never had her on the show.

Craig: She was so cool. I remember when we were walking off the stage from that, because we went on and then she came on, and when we were walking off the stage she is like walking on the stage and she just gives me the fist bump. It’s just like what a cool person. Just look boop, my turn.

John: Boop.

Craig: Yeah, we should have her on. It’s actually fascinating watching the evolution and kind of progression of Natasha Lyonne over time because she’s been doing this since she was a kid. And I’m always fascinated by those people because I feel like I’ve kind of been weirdly growing up with them myself. It’s like knowing Jason Bateman is a fascinating thing because he doesn’t know it but I first met him when we were both 10. Do you know what I mean? And just like watching this thing happen is really cool.

And she’s just doing some really, really interesting work right now. Everybody loves the show. I know I’m going to love it, too. I can just tell. So I’m very excited.

John: Yeah. So it was created by her, Amy Poehler, and Leslye Headland, a great director who directed a lot of it, but Natasha Lyonne directed it as well. It’s just really well done. It’s one of those rare cases where everyone was hyping it up a lot and then you watch and it’s like, oh yeah, it’s really good. It didn’t actually diminish from everyone’s hyping it up. So, now that I’ve set the bar way too high–

Craig: No, no. I will.

John: Enjoy Russian Doll.

Craig: I’ll love it.

John: You’ll love it. Cool. That is our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by James Launch and Jim Bond. It’s called The Stuart Special in honor of our original producer, Stuart Friedel. Our producers have done pretty well. Godwin Jabangwe set up a show at Netflix.

Megan: So exciting.

Craig: I know. How about that?

John: If you have an outro of your own you can send us a link to ask@dev.johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions, but for short questions on Twitter I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Megan, are you doing Twitter?

Megan: No.

John: No, Megan is not on Twitter. Don’t try to tweet at her. But you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there leave us a comment.

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

You can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net. Craig, just today I realized only 10 more episodes and we hit the big 400.

Craig: I know!

John: 400.

Craig: It’s almost too much.

Megan: Is it going to be a live show?

Craig: Oh, it should be. Well…

John: Actually I’m thinking ahead and it could end up being a live show.

Craig: It could be. Because we’ve got a little something planned. And I will give you a little teaser, not to give away too much, but I recently recorded something that is associated with Chernobyl and I did it with somebody who is a prominent radio person. And the people who were producing it were, you know, I think they were concerned somehow that, I don’t know, that we needed help or something. And I was like, look, he’s a pretty big radio guy. And then I realized – and I’ve done almost 400 podcasts. I think I’m also pretty good at this by now. I get it. I know what I’m doing. I know what I’m doing.

John: You do. Craig, it’s always lovely talking to you, but especially nice to talk to Megan McDonnell again. We miss you but we’re so happy that you’re doing so well. And continued success on everything.

Craig: Welcome back and good luck.

Megan: Thank you so much for having me on.

Craig: It was a pleasure.

John: All right.

Craig: Bye.

John: Bye.

Links:

• The Bones Decision
• The Peter Stark Program
• Three Pages by Christopher Cramer
• Three Pages by David Koutsouridis
• Three Pages by Carrie Wong and Herman Ming
• Megan’s Desk Setup
• Light Up Phone Charger
• Russian doll starring Natasha Lyonne
• Submit to the Three Page Challenge here
• Submit to the Pitch Session here
• T-shirts are available here! We’ve got new designs, including Colored Revisions, Karateka, and Highland2.
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Find past episodes
• Scriptnotes Digital Seasons are also now available!
• Outro The Stuart Special by James Llonch & Jim Bond (send us yours!)

Email us at ask@dev.johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.