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 256 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, Aaron Sorkin wants your money, Aristotle has a few thoughts about character development, and we’ll talk about what makes a movie original.

But most importantly, Craig is back. Welcome back, Craig.

Craig: I’m back. I’m back. You thought that you could Craig-xit from me.

John: We could never Craig-xit you.

Craig: You can’t Craig-xit.

John: So, last week you had an ear infection. Is that correct?

Craig: Yeah. So I was intending to show up at your place and interview Billy Ray with you, who is a buddy, and my ear was hurting for a day, and then you know when it suddenly crosses the line — it crossed the line from annoying to ow, ow, my ear.

John: To like Chekhov in Wrath of Khan?

Craig: Yeah. Like the bug coming out of the ear thing. I didn’t have a bug in my ear, but I did have an infection. And for those people at home who are wondering what my relationship with you is really like, I sent you a picture of the diagnosis like a doctor’s note so that you would believe me.

John: [laughs] I did get that while we were recording, and I noted it that, okay, it’s for real. I’m not sure Billy Ray believes that you had it, but it’s fine. We had a fun time talking with Billy Ray, who is very smart, who talks even more quickly than I did. It was the first time in my history of listening to this podcast where I actually had to bump the speed down to like a normal person speed, just so I could understand what he was saying.

Craig: Yeah. He’s a very fast talker. Fast thinker. Fast talker. I’m sorry that I wasn’t there for it, mostly because I would have given him a lot of crap. Because that’s what I do.

John: I especially love when guests come on the show and clearly have never listened to the show once in their life. I find that extra charming. I was trying to do my best Craig for when he got — he sort of like laid into us about the WGA stuff and about our basically convincing people not to vote for one of the proposals.

Craig: Right.

John: And I was trying to stick up for your point of view there, which is largely my point of view, but you just felt it more strongly. So, I tried to feel it strongly for you.

Craig: You know what? That’s the saddest thing of all. Because I don’t like missing time with friends. I don’t like missing interviews. I get a little FOMO from that. But I really don’t like missing a good fight. That bothers me. And you know I would have taken it right to — because you know, when I argue with Billy, it’s fantastic. It’s so much fun.

John: One of the things Billy Ray would never had heard before on the podcast is the How Would This be a Movie. And one of our favorite episodes of How Would This be a Movie we talked about the Hatton Garden job, which is basically the robbery, all the old British people robbing this vault, and it was terrific.

And we predicted that there would be several movies going into development and they are going into development. In fact, one has started shooting.

Craig: Wow.

John: So, director Ronnie Thompson, who co-wrote the script with Dean Lines and Ray Bogdanovich, it’s already in production. Matthew Goode is starring. Julie Richardson is in it. I presume those are not playing the actual robbers, because those are older people. Unless it’s Matthew Goode with a lot of prosthetics makeup, which sounds terrible.

But there are two other versions in development. One of them is based on a Vanity Fair article. One is based on a New York Times article.

Craig: Amazing.

John: So, we’re going to have a bunch of old people robbing banks.

Craig: No we’re not. We’re going to have one. [laughs]

John: Yeah, we’ll probably have one.

Craig: We’re going to have one. It’s funny how sometimes you read these things and you’re like — it’s not rocket science to see which ones… — The only thing that surprises me I guess a little bit is that enough people were not only able to see that it was deserving of being a movie, but also felt that they could make money with a movie like this. Because increasingly, you know, getting those kinds of movies made is a tricky proposition. It’s essentially a small movie about a small thing. It’s going to ultimately be a character piece.

It’s not like these guys were involved in a hostage crisis or anything like that. They were robbing a bank. So it’s like a very small Ocean’s 11.

John: What’s also interesting is we talk about the situations where there are two movies in parallel development and they both happened and it was a nightmare because they were sort of butting heads against each other. But more often what happens is one of them gets out of the gate first and that becomes the movie. And the other movie just doesn’t exist. And so it’s interesting that we even know that these other two things are in development and it’s entirely possible that down the road those other things will get made.

It’s entirely possible this first one could be great, but it could be terrible. It could be one of those things like you’ve never even heard of, where it gets sold off at AFM and never really got released. So, we’ll see.

Craig: Yeah, it’s normal, I think, for large competing movies to coexist, because there’s just so much momentum behind them and people think, well, you have your movie about a meteor with your movie star, and I have my movie about a meteor with my movie star. So, let’s go ahead. Let’s slug it out. Same thing with our volcano movies. Same thing with our animated ants movies.

But for a little thing like this, I think getting to the marketplace first is crucial, which by the way I think you’re seeing — think about this, right — we did our episode on that, what, a few months ago?

John: It was back in Episode 234 we talked about that, The Script Graveyard.

Craig: Okay, so, we talked about this back in Episode 234.

John: So January 26.

Craig: Right. That’s essentially a half a year ago. Six months ago we talk about this. That’s when everybody else is reading it at the same time. They go and they buy the rights to this thing. That takes a few weeks. And then they say, okay, we have to be first to the market. For them to be shooting six months from that day — I’m saying they went and got the rights that day. Prep takes, you know, two months minimum. Three would be good, right?

John: You also have to write a script —

Craig: Ah-ha. So this is what concerns me sometimes when people are racing to market. And I’ve been involved in these situations. The screenplay process becomes terribly compressed, very, very stressed. So the normal things that happen to screenplays that are stressful, like the creation of it, the revision of it, and then the collision that occurs when a director and a cast collides with the screenplay and there needs to be some kind of reconciliation between all these new elements, those things now get compressed really tightly and it’s very difficult to do well, nearly impossible.

So, I always get nervous when I see this race to the market. I root for all movies, so hopefully it works out with this one.

John: I root for them as well. I would say that the logistics of this movie are probably not especially difficult. We sort of like know what the basic sets are we’re going to need, so it doesn’t require that much sort of prep work in that sense. You feel like if this were a pilot you could just go off and prep it and shoot it.

There’s a bonus episode in the premium feed where I talk to Simon Kinberg about the most recent X-Men movie. And he talks about how they had the four writers who were working on story that came up with a treatment. And they actually had to prep off of that treatment. It was before Simon had written the script. Because they knew they were going to be such giant set pieces that they had to start the pre-vis and everything else on those basically just off of the treatment.

And that’s the way it works on some of these big movies. And in some cases it’s working on these tiny movies I bet, too. I bet they had some document that said this is what we’re going to try to do, but then they had to start getting cast and everything else probably before they had a finished script.

Craig: Well, right. And on a big movie, the nice thing is you know you have a little bit of a cushion because while you have the long tail of post-production because of all the visual effects, you will theoretically have the ability to go and pick up a scene where if you need a few people talking in a room, or maybe even something slightly larger. There may be a week or two to do. The money will be there because there’s an enormous investment worth protecting.

On a little movie, sometimes you don’t have any of those things at all. And especially if the whole point is to race to the marketplace, everything — even post-production — gets compressed down. So, tricky, tricky, tricky business to be in.

Let’s see how it goes with them.

John: Let’s see how it goes. Your last bit there reminded me of we never talked about reshoots and sort of the Star Wars — we were never sort of on the air when all that news came up that they were doing some reshoots for the Star Wars movie. I find it so maddening when the film press starts talking about reshoots as if it’s a sign of trouble. Reshoots are incredibly natural in the film industry. They are usually a sign that you have something that you are very excited about, but you see opportunities and you want to improve those opportunities. It just makes me crazy when reshoots are perceived as being a sign that everything has gone wrong.

Craig: I couldn’t agree more. Generally speaking, whenever I see the film press writing anything, I get frustrated because their ignorance is vast and seemingly without a bottom.

John: And you’re also Craig Mazin. You were born to be angry at the film press.

Craig: Correct. I was born to be angry anyway, and particularly them anyway. I’m their natural enemy. I am their — what’s the — Honey Badger? I’m their Honey Badger.

But it’s a bit like saying, “I saw somebody walk into CVS. Clearly they’re fatally ill.”

John: Yup.

Craig: What? Maybe they just had a little bit of a scratch that they needed a Band-Aid for and they’re going to be so much better now.

John: Maybe they wanted a Vitamin Water.

Craig: Maybe they wanted a Vitamin Water. A useless, overpriced Vitamin Water. It’s just stupid. Reshoots happen for any number of reasons. By the way, to be fair, sometimes it’s because the movie is a mess, right??

John: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Craig: Here’s the incredible thing: so what? So the movie is a mess, and then they did reshoots, which many times fix the mess. You and I both know of movies, which we’re not going to say —

John: You and I both know of a certain TV series, the biggest TV series in the world —

Craig: Okay, there’s one.

John: Which was a mess.

Craig: A total mess, right? And those guys, Dan and Dave, have been really forthcoming about it. Their pilot for Game of Thrones was a disaster. And then they reshot not some, but almost all of it. The point of it is reshoots don’t mean that something is all wrong.

The problem is they’re always looking for this — they’re looking for gossip. And really what’s underneath all of the “ooh, reshoots” is a general sense of Schadenfreude. Oh good, people are failing. He-he-he.

Ugh. Gross. Gross.

John: Well, you can hear more about our discussion on reshoots and Game of Thrones and everything else on the brand new black USB drives we have now. So, we have the 250-episode Scriptnotes USB drives. They are in stock. I mentioned it last week, but they are now actually up in the store, so you can get them. And Craig and I recorded a special little introduction that’s only on the USB drives. And so if you are a person who is a completist, then this is a completist thing you could get.

Craig: And do the USB drives cost $90 each?

John: They cost $25 each.

Craig: Huh? That’s interesting, because I thought $90 was — all right. $25 seems incredibly reasonable.

John: I think it’s incredibly reasonable. So it’s $0.10 an episode. Not even $0.10 when you think about it because of all those bonus episodes on there, plus all the transcripts.

Craig: I mean, good lord.

John: Good lord. So they’re there. So, you could find them in the links to the show notes to the podcast you’re listening to, or just go to johnaugust.com, or store.johnaugust.com. There’s places to find them.

All right, let’s get to today’s business, and it is business because just like I was trying to sell you on a USB drive, Aaron Sorkin is trying to sell you on a series of screenwriting lectures. It’s a masterclass. Actually the site is called Masterclass. And this service, which I’d never heard about before, they have sort of like the biggest names in different fields teaching these classes. So, Christina Aguilera will teach you singing. Kevin Spacey will teach you acting. Usher will teach you the art of performance.

Craig: [laughs]

John: Annie Leibovitz will teach you photography. So, they are —

Craig: You’re missing one here. Serena Williams teaches you how to play tennis. [laughs]

John: Yeah. She’s probably really good at it.

Craig: Well, I’ve noticed that she’s very good at playing tennis.

John: I’ve watched her play, and I’ve got to admit it, she’s pretty good. Aaron Sorkin will teach you screenwriting. And so everyone on Twitter sent me the link to this and said, “What do you think?”

Craig: Yeah.

John: So I’ll ask you, Craig, what you think.

Craig: Well, first of all, I think it’s nice that he’s only charging $25 like the price of our USB drives.

John: No, no, no, it’s $90, Craig.

Craig: Oh what? Oh my goodness.

John: So let me tell you exactly what you’re getting. Over the course of 25 video lessons, spanning five hours, Sorkin shares his rules of storytelling, dialogue, and character development. He critiques student submissions. He works with real world examples from the decades he spent writing movies and TV, and TV shows, and plays. So, that was from the press release.

Craig: Well, I happen to be a big fan of Aaron Sorkin’s. I think that he is a terrific screenwriter. And I suspect that if you are somebody who is talented and on your way to becoming a screenwriter, and you’re serious about your craft, that this $90 may actually be money well worth spent.

Of course, on the other side you do have to be aware that one of the things that makes Aaron Sorkin a terrific screenwriter is how specific he is. He is one of the few screenwriters I know whose style is self-defined.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: You know, Tarantino and Sorkin are very, you know, oh, that’s Sorkin dialogue. We know it when we hear it.

John: Absolutely. So, it makes it very strange when anyone else tries to do it. It feels like you’re ripping him off.

I sort of come out where you come out, too, where it’s just like I got little heebie-jeebies at the start, and then I watched it and it’s like, oh, they look really well-produced. I mean, I’ve hosted panels with him. He’s very, very smart. And generous. And odd. So, if you’re looking to spend $90 on learning more about screenwriting, it seems like kind of a reasonable way to go.

I’ll really be curious, because I bet a bunch of our listeners will end up signing up for it and will sit through it. And they can tell us whether they thought it was worth it or not.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, of all the things that we talk about all the time, you know my whole thing — don’t pay for screenwriting. And this is actually I think worth a shot because, first of all, it’s capped at $90. There’s no come on to keep spending. And I also think there’s a nice side effect. And that is that all of these jackanapes and charlatans who are peddling their so-called guru genius for $500 or $1,000, or $100 an hour are all now going to have to face this question: why should I pay you that when Aaron Sorkin charged $90 for 25 lessons spanning — how many hours?

John: Five hours.

Craig: Five hours. $18 an hour for Aaron Sorkin. Why am I paying you a $100 an hour, because you wrote an episode of Cagney & Lacey once? Yeah. So I like that part of it.

I’m puzzled by this whole thing.

John: I’m puzzled by it, too. So, clearly they think that there’s a good business model here, because they have giant names doing it. So, I don’t know what his cut is. I kind of don’t know why he said yes, but I’m not telling people to say no, because I think it’s actually — I’m kind of curious.

Craig: Well, it’s one of the things where of all the things they’ve listed where I think, oh, people actually might get something out of this. He’s going to have some, I think, I’m just predicting, he’s going to have some really useful universal insights.

You know, you and I are trying to do that all the time on this show. I would imagine that he’ll have some of those for sure. It’s not simply going to be five hours of him describing how he wrote A Few Good Men.

Now, some of these other people — Christina Aguilera can’t teach you how to sing. That’s ridiculous. [laughs] And neither can Serena Williams teach you how to play tennis well.

They can teach you how somebody at their incredibly high level does things, but I actually think screenwriting is a little more teachable than some of those other things.

John: Well, let’s see how he does it. So, let’s listen to a clip. Here’s a little short clip from the promo video for it.

Aaron Sorkin: Dialogue is pretty much where the art comes in. Taking some words that someone has just said, holding them in your hand, and then punching them in the face with it. I left The West Wing after season four. I have not seen an episode from seasons five, six, and seven. Together we are going to break the teaser and first act of Episode 501 of The West Wing.

You don’t have an idea until you can use the words “but, except, and then.” I just want to hear your bad ideas. Very bad. Love it. Very bad. By the way, it wasn’t that bad.

Female Voice: It’s a White House conspiracy.

John: So, you see at the end there he’s sitting around a table with these students who are all made up and everyone looks just as good and glamorous in it. So, it’s not quite reality. They’re going to break a new season of The West Wing, so some fan service there.

I guess.

Craig: Yeah, I mean, I guess is right. And so, look, the thing is you and I — we have an interesting perspective on this, because we do this every week for an hour. We’ve done now 256 hours, plus some, and we’ve charged — well, technically we do charge $2 a month, right?

John: Yeah, for the premium feed.

Craig: For the premium feed, which isn’t — and so, you know, it’s not quite as expensive. But, you know, of course, he’s Aaron Sorkin. And so that’s really impressive and great. I hope that he gives money to the — if he’s getting money from this personally, I hope he donates it to the Writers Guild Foundation. Wouldn’t that be nice?

John: That would be nice if he did that.

Craig: We do that.

John: We do that.

Craig: Aaron Sorkin, I call upon you to donate your proceeds to the Writers Guild Foundation.

John: But I think it’s also fine if you don’t. So, Aaron Sorkin has been generous and he does participate in WGF events. He was there at the last giant panel I did with all of the nominees. So, I like him for that. I don’t begrudge him any money he’s making off of this.

I just kind of wonder whether there could be enough money to be made off of this to make it worth his while. If it’s worth Serena Williams’ while, then I’m guessing there must be money there.

Craig: I feel like — this is a big Silicon Valley thing, right? Like maybe these are people’s friends. Like highfalutin Silicon Valley people who are like, hey come on, you know. I’m a billionaire. You’re cool. Let’s do something together.

John: Or maybe their seed money, so part of the VC money was to pay these people a lot of money up front with a percentage. Maybe that’s what it is?

Craig: Oh, interesting. Okay. Well, listen, I don’t begrudge anyone making a buck. Well, I do, obviously, all the time. I don’t begrudge Aaron Sorkin making a dollar. And I do think you could do way worse. $90 seems very reasonable. I hope that people do find value from it. If I were to bet on anybody, I’d bet on him.

John: Yeah. I’d bet on him, too. You know who else was a very smart thinker about drama was this guy Aristotle. So he’s super old. I mean, kind of old school, but actually very clever. And one of the funny things is you can kind of rediscover these clever people in random places. And so this last week I was reading this blog post about coyotes and cliffs, and this word was used, and I didn’t really know the word. So, I had to look up how to even say it, and then you actually looked up the YouTube video on how to pronounce it so we wouldn’t be like idiots as we try to pronounce it.

So, it’s this Aristotelian term called Anagnorisis. It comes from Aristotle’s Poetics. And it’s that moment when a hero realizes the true nature of things. It’s that moment where like the blinders come off and the hero sees that the world that he or see perceived is not actually the world as it truly is.

And, we think about — he was describing it mostly in terms of tragedies, but I think in movie usage it’s more often used in thrillers. So you think about The Sixth Sense, the twist in The Sixth Sense. Or Gone Girl, which has the mid-act, sort of midway reversal. But it’s also a thing that becomes incredibly useful in comedies. So, I said the coyote going over the cliff, it’s that moment where the coyote has run off the cliff, and he’s floating in mid-air, and he turns to the camera and realizes, “Oh, I’m going to fall.”

It’s that moment. And it’s such a weirdly wonderful moment. So I thought we’d spend a few minutes talking about how that exists both internally, but how it exists in fiction, and sort of how we can use it.

Craig: Well, you’re right, that it comes in big moments, and it comes in little moments. The obvious ones are the ones where there’s an on-rush of information about the world, specific facts about the world around them.

So every whodunit has a moment of Anagnorisis where the detective hero has all of these facts, none of them seem to add up, and then somebody does some little dinkety thing and they go, “Ah…,” the big gasp, “Oh my god, I know who did it now.” And we all have to wait, right? We’ve watched them.

So, that’s a clear example. But then there are these little moments like at the end of The Graduate, when you have these two people sitting on this bus and they believe they have culminated this wonderful romance. And then you can see, suddenly they realize, ooh, wait. That’s a very small kind, but it is crucial for the audience to see in characters.

It’s crucial that we see them suddenly realizing these big truths that they did not have before. In reality, where a narrative does not rule, here’s how a typical — for instance, let’s go back to the whodunit. Here’s how a typical whodunit goes: a detective arrives at a scene, here are some facts, here are some suspects. They start to put together a reasonable presumption about who did it, but there are a couple of other possibilities. And then they begin to slowly grind their way towards what is growing increasingly obvious to be the right answer. They just have to support it. And so they do, like a mathematical proof, and then that’s that.

That cannot be how it goes in drama.

John: No, it can’t. So, what you’re describing is a lot of times TV procedurals will essentially do that, where like they’re stacking the blocks together. There’s some revelation or something, but it’s not a character revelation. It’s nothing that’s personal to the character. And I think that’s what we’re trying to go for here, is a fundamental sort of gasp in the character. Oh no, the thing I presumed.

So, this thing I just turned into the studio this afternoon has Anagnorisis in it, where the hero at about the second act break has trusted this one other character throughout, and then realizes, oh crap, you’re the villain. And what the villain does in sort of like the moment of the villain unveiling himself for who he truly is has to really land. It has to land not just on a plot level, like oh, all these make so much more sense now. But you have to see the betrayal. You have to see what it feels like to be in the shoes of the hero as this revelation is coming to pass.

Craig: Mm-hmm.

John: So often when I hear pitches form new screenwriters, they’ll go, “Blah, blah, blah,” they pitch the first act, second act, and then they’re like, “And then the hero comes to realize that something, something, something.” And whenever I hear “come to realize” I’m like, oh no, no, no, that’s not good.

Craig: I agree.

John: It’s amazing and wonderful if a character has a realization, but that realization can’t just be like I’ve been living my life for the wrong things. Realizations have to be like this is a thing that fundamentally changes how I’m going to relate to this world that I’m in. Fundamentally changes how I relate to the other characters that have been set up in this story.

It can’t just be like, “I need to be a better dad.” No, that’s not real.

Craig: I completely agree. And this is one of the keys to writing layered work, right, work that doesn’t feel like it’s all operating on one level. So, Anagnorisis occurs after a character does something. It shouldn’t really occur before they do something, because if they’re just sitting alone in their room and they go, “Ooh,” and then they do something it’s like, “I’m doing it because of that thing I figured out.” This all now feels like it’s inevitable. Like I’m just following along. And what anybody would do having realized what I realized.

But there’s something wonderful about a character doing something. Very typically, for instance, we’ll see a character finally achieving this goal. Vengeance is a classic one, right? I have finally achieved my revenge. And then Anagnorisis. Oh no. Right?

Or perhaps I did not understand what I was doing or this other person was doing until now when it is too late.

John: Yep. You see that — classically the tragedy aspect of like I spent my entire life seeking revenge on this person, and it turns out this person was my only true friend. Or it turns out the person I’ve been seeking for revenge is myself. There’s that sense of like I have wasted all this time, or I’ve killed the only one true thing that I love. Or that in my pursuit of vengeance, I have destroyed my life around me.

Craig: Yeah. You’ll also see this when characters are witnessing other characters performing an act of sacrifice. So much more, well, let’s talk about the bad version. Here is the version that is ana- Anagnorisis. Or Norisis. I don’t know what would work right. But not Anagnorisis.

Someone says, “You’re never going to make it unless I stand here and sacrifice my life so you can escape.”

“What? I don’t want you to do that?”

“Well, I’m going to.”

“All right. Well, thank you.”

Ugh. Right? But when someone says, “Okay, yes, I’m going to go with you. It’s going to be okay.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

And you run and you jump and then you realize the other person hasn’t jumped, they’re staying back to fight for you and die for you. And then you have Anagnorisis not only about what that person is doing for you, but in a deeper way, how they feel about you, how you feel about them, the depth of their connection, why they’re doing this. All that stuff comes wooshing over this character. And that’s when we have these human connections.

Ultimately, these are the things that make us want to keep watching anything, or keep reading a book for that matter. It’s not the details of the richly textured world. It’s, in fact, these universal things that we experience all the time in our own lives.

John: Yeah, it’s not the plot. It’s the reaction to the plot. It’s what we see in the characters. Let’s talk about the audience’s relationship to that moment of realization of the character’s relationship to it. Because one of the things you find is that sometimes you want the audience to be a little bit ahead of your character so that they can anticipate it. It’s sort of the classically when you show the audience there’s a bomb under the table and the two characters are sitting at the table that it’s incredibly suspenseful, because you know there’s a bomb and the character’s don’t know there’s a bomb. So, sometimes you want to let the audience be just a little bit ahead of your characters.

But if the audience is too far ahead of your characters, if the audience has already like made this journey, they start to kind of hate your heroes. They kind of start to think your heroes are idiots because like how can you not see that that’s the bad guy? How can you not see what’s going on here?

So, as a writer, your challenge is to hopefully land both the audience and your hero at this moment of realization at the right time, which is often simultaneously, or at least closely coupled.

Craig: It’s about putting in and taking out bits of information, like a little test. Because you’re right, there’s this balance. The audience needs to have enough clues so that after the fact, like any good detective, they could say, “I could have figured that out.” Or, maybe sometimes it’s not so much of a strain. It’s simply there are enough clues where clearly I knew what was going to happen, but it wasn’t rubbed in my face, and it certainly wasn’t rubbed in the character’s face who is about to experience that Anagnorisis. So, that’s okay.

For instance, we all know, here is a Game of Thrones example.

John: Great.

Craig: We all know that Tyrion is going to be using wildfire to destroy this fleet of ships coming in from Stannis Baratheon. And then Stannis Baratheon’s fleet shows up and Sir Davos is there on board the ship and he’s coming around. And they realize that there’s only ship waiting for them. Well, that’s strange. And we’re all thinking — yeah, it’s got to be full of wildfire. And it is.

We don’t know quite how. That’s the interesting part. We’re like, well, they’ve got all this wildfire. I don’t see any wildfire on the top of the ship, so where is it? And then as he comes around they reveal that the stuff is pouring out of holes in the bottom of the ship and actually spreading out on the water, floating on the water. And then Sir Davos has that moment that we live for when we’re watching these things, which is Anagnorisis, the oh my god, get back! And then, boom.

Right? So, it’s about taking pieces in and out. And if you put one extra piece in, it’s suddenly boring. And if you take too many out, it’s suddenly confusing. And you don’t have the richness of that moment of “oh no.”

John: Yeah. I find the moments where this lands most is there’s kind of a melting dread that happens where like you can sort of see like it’s as if you’re kind of poisoned and you realize, like oh god, how I’m going to — and you can see the wheels turning in the characters’ heads like, “How do we even react to this?” They’re trying to basically recognize the situation that they’re in and plan accordingly.

It’s very fun to sort of put characters back on their heels and not be able to take the natural actions that they should be taking.

Craig: Correct. And this is something where I think sometimes some directors underestimate the value of this. Because it is often — not always — but often concentrated on a face. There is not much of a spectacle to Anagnorisis. It’s very small. And usually it doesn’t have much in the way of speech-making. It’s someone’s face. And it’s pure acting. And it’s pure reaction. And it requires a little bit of time. Some directors I think really appreciate it and understand what it means to sit and dwell with it. And too also when directing scene, direct toward it.

But some do not. And when your movie short changes those moments of Anagnorisis, the strange thing is even if the circumstances are the same, just as shocking, just as surprising, just as twisty, we won’t feel it. Because we only experience it through the eyes of the hero on screen. We wouldn’t care so much that Bruce Willis’s character has been dead the whole time in The Sixth Sense if you didn’t have that long drawn out moment of Anagnorisis.

Same thing with watching Chazz Palminteri realize, oh my god, that Verbal Kint is Keyser Soze. Long, drawn-out face. Eyes. Gasping. Over and over. We need it.

John: Yeah. You absolutely need it. And it’s so easy to lose it. But I would also say, even before you have a director on board, one of the things I’ve noticed over a bunch of different scripts is when you’re in a protected development on something, people are reading that same draft again, and again, and again. And they sort of forget, the same way they forget like why jokes are funny. They forget like what those moments feel like when they land.

And so I find they keep asking you add back information earlier on to like set that thing up.

Craig: I know.

John: And so you have to just be so hard about like parceling that information carefully so that some things can actually be a surprise, just so, you know, there’s this desire to have everything make so much sense the minute it hits. And like, no, I need the character to be doing the work to be putting it together at that time. And the audience should be doing that work, too. So like if I set that up so clearly, then it wouldn’t be a surprise whatsoever.

Craig: Yeah. I find, for whatever reason, that a lot of studio executives prize clarity over drama and revelation. And they have no problem actually un-dramatizing something. Sucking the drama out of it so that ten people at a screening won’t go, “I was confused.” That seems to petrify them more than anything else. Maybe because people can articulate, “I was confused.” But it’s very hard to articulate, “I identify with somebody as they experience Anagnorisis.” Right?

So, it is an ongoing battle. And it is one of those things at times that makes screenwriters feel very lonely. It is a lonely feeling when you know something because it is part and parcel of who you are and what you do, and everybody around you is saying, “Well who cares about that?” Everybody in the theater. Don’t you know why we’re there?

But it’s a struggle. By the way, I wanted to mention there’s this other kind of Anagnorisis that’s fairly rare. But when it happens I love it. And it’s the Anagnorisis of the audience. So this is where the characters in the movie know everything. We don’t. They’re not surprised by information. We are.

John: Absolutely. No Way Out.

Craig: Yeah. No Way Out. Exactly. No Way Out, we’re shocked because — but they’re not shocked. They know. They know who is Yuri is, right? And I always remember this moment in The Ring where we realize — we in the audience realize — wait, that’s that kid’s dad. The kid knew that that was his dad. The dad knew that was his kid. The mom knows that that was her ex. Everybody knows everything. We just didn’t know. And I love that.

John: Good stuff.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Before we get off this completely, I’m going to try to find a link to Mike Pesca talks about sort of magical dad transformation comedies. And it’s such a weirdly specific sub-genre that I’d never considered.

Craig: The Santa Claus.

John: The Santa Claus. Liar Liar. A Thousand Words. Like a bunch of Eddie Murphy movies. Which is basically like I’m a terrible father who works too much, but because of a magical thing that happens, now I’m going to learn the true value of family. I’m going to try to find — if I can’t find another link to it, I’ll link to the actual podcast. But he talks about how it’s such a weirdly specific genre of movies that is designed probably so that dads can take their kids to go see that movie and then feel better about themselves. It’s a bizarre thing that we’ve made. And I don’t know we keep making them. I guess they make money.

Craig: Well, it’s a way to feature — let’s say you have funny men, who are in their 30s or 40s. It’s a way for them to be funny, but then maybe also appeal to like a kid audience. And then the question is, well, what do we do with that character? And as poorly as we treat female characters, we treat dads, I think, perhaps the worst of all because they’re so stupid. They’re the dumbest people in the world.

This is the dad character. This is it. I work too hard. I’m ignoring my wife and my family. Period. The end. And actually, no, there’s one other thing about this dad. I just needed somebody to point it out to me. And now I’m going to change my life forever. Oh, please. I always like to say all those movies about overworked, working too hard dads are made by dads that are working too hard, not seeing their children. It’s such a — god, I hate those. I hate them. Hate ’em.

John: And so the other thing I’ll bring up, and I’m sure our listeners can find a counter example. So, write in with a counter example of the female equivalent of that. Because I can’t think of one where the woman works too hard and through magical means she gets to learn the value of family. It’s just presumed that of course a woman knows the value of family.

Craig: Right. Exactly. That’s a thing. Nobody — you just couldn’t get away with it, like putting a woman on screen being that profoundly stupid and emotionally stunted. Nobody would believe it. For good reason by the way. [laughs] Because I get it. Men are dumber and more emotionally stunted than women. We know this. But, god, to be that profoundly dopey.

And, of course, this is why — so then the question is how do you — you can see how these things happen, right? All right, so hey, screenwriter, here’s a problem for you: we need to illustrate in a simple way that this father is neglectful of his kid. How would you do that? I just need one scene that proves that he’s putting work ahead of family. What should we do?

John: So maybe he could like not show up at his son’s violin rehearsal?

Craig: Sold! Sold! So it’s a school play, it’s a rehearsal. It’s a this, it’s a that. And here’s the thing — this is why I was — argh, umbrage now. Here’s why it’s so lame: because it would be cool — I would actually like a movie where a dad is like, “Oh, I got to get home to see my kid’s play.” And then someone is like, “Okay. But if you want to stay and keep working on this, you might get a raise.”

“Huh, all right. I’m going to stay.”

That’s never how it is. Because I’d be like that guy is awesome. What a bastard. No, it’s always like this: “I have to get to my — I love my kid so much. I have to get there. Oh no, there’s a crisis. I’m stuck. I can’t do anything about it. I forgot.”

Ugh, god. Blech.

John: Blech. Here’s the thing is like they have to be terrible by their own choices for them to be able to learn something at the end. Because otherwise, if it’s just like their mean boss is making them work, then it’s just Scrooge, and it’s not his story at all.

Craig: Well, that’s what it is. They’re basically cowards who can’t stand up to a mean boss. And inevitably they finally do.

By the way, let’s also be realistic. If you don’t show up to your kid’s play in fourth grade, that’s not what’s going to end up putting them in therapy. You know, it’s recoverable. Don’t beat them. How about that?

John: Yeah. And so then we set these incredibly unrealistic expectations about what fathers are supposed to be able to do and the kids talk smack about their parents. Oh, it just drives me crazy. Maybe it’s because I have a tween now who has started talking like the characters on Disney Channel shows. And so she talks this way that she kind of thinks that kids are supposed to talk, but she’s really talking the way a 45-year-old man wrote for these tweens to talk on a Disney Channel show. And it’s just so maddening. And so, ah.

Craig: Well, you know, it’s going to get worse and worse.

John: Oh, of course.

Craig: I don’t know what to tell you about that.

John: Yeah. It’s going to be good. Let’s go on to our final topic which is originality and the sense of why some movies feel original and some movies don’t. Craig, take us there.

Craig: Well, this is something that I was talking about with Lindsay Doran and we were talking about a moment in the script that we’re working on together. And she was very happy with it. And she said, “You know what I like about this? Only our movie could do this.” And I thought what a great test. Because we talk about being original all of the time, but what does that really mean exactly? Because while we talk about being original, we also say things like, “Well, there’s only seven stories. And every story has been told. And it’s just versions.” And that’s all kind of true.

And everyone who is learning how to be a screenwriter, what do they learn? There are certain archetypes. There are this many kinds of heroes. And the heroes journey. And it’s all based on mythology. All kind of true.

So then the question is what do we mean when we say something is original. And in a strange way I think she’s kind of hit on it. It’s not that it has to be original compared to everything else around there. It’s that it has to original within itself. That the movie is providing a combination of character and circumstance that allows that movie to do something no other movie could do. Not for lack of trying, but because it wouldn’t make sense in that movie. It only makes sense in this one. I thought that was a good idea.

John: I think it’s a very good idea. And it’s going to invoke one of our other favorite words which is specificity. It’s like it’s ideas that are so specific to this movie that they could not be plugged into any other movie. And so it’s the joke that only could exist with these characters in this situation and couldn’t be dialed into another movie.

It’s the characters and situations that can only happen here. One of these we have marked here is people being unplugged in The Matrix and then falling down dead. Exactly. That’s a very specifically kind of Matrix-y idea. And while other science fiction films could do things that are kind of like it, the specific way that feels is only The Matrix. And that’s great.

Craig: Yeah. Precisely. And sometimes it’s as simple as a line that only your characters can do. You know, so the movie that I’m working on with her is about sheep. And these sheep are detectives trying to solve a crime. And they repeatedly do things that only our movie could do, because we’re the only movie that has sheep detectives.

It’s not like we’ve — detective stories are not original. Talking animal movies aren’t original. There have been movies with sheep. But this combination is original. And therefore you have to ask yourself, “What can only we do?” If we can only do that, we should do that. That’s a good light guiding us to where we’re going to go.

You and I see when we get Three Page Challenges, sometimes we’ll say things like, “I’ve seen this a million times before.” And I think underneath that really is — any movie could do this. So, why do I need this one, right? I’ve seen many movies where people are caught on vaguely haunted spaceships. But what can only your movie do?

And it’s a good way to think about your work. For those of you playing the home game, as you go through and ask yourself, there must be a combination of things that is unique to your screenplay. I believe that, otherwise why would you have bothered to write it. If that combination is not unique, you’re already in a lot of trouble. But if it is unique, ask yourself have I exploited that which is unique to this? Because if I have not, I should.

John: Yep. And when we’re saying like you have to find this moment that is unique and original, it should ideally be the kind of moment that you would actually hopefully would put in the trailer. It doesn’t have to go in the trailer, but it has to be the kind of moment that so shows the DNA of your movie and why this movie, which will obviously fall into some genre, can both reflect the genre but also stand apart from the genre. That it’s doing its own thing.

And, you know, you say like no other movie could do it. Well, no other movie would even sort of try to do this specific weird thing that you are trying to do. And when you see bad trailers, it’s often because you can feel like well that’s just another retread of the same idea again and again.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, we know that we’ve seen pirate movies. And we’ve seen zombie movies. And we’ve seen movies with ghosts, right? And I remember when I saw the trailer for the first Pirates of the Caribbean, how impressed I was when these pirates moved into moonlight and suddenly were revealed to be skeletons. And that’s something only that movie could do, because that was their interesting rule which they made sense of, and then exploited the hell out of.

And talk about Anagnorisis, when Barbossa says, “You don’t believe in ghost stories, you better start. You’re in one,” and he steps into the moonlight, into a beam of moonlight and his face is revealed. And her shock at seeing what the world is. That’s — see only that movie could do that.

John: Exactly.

Craig: Wonderful, right? And they’re sometimes the littlest things. The strangest. Look, one of our little lambs in our movie is just obsessed with tomatoes. It’s a sheep. This lamb loves tomatoes. And she’s been sent to kind of listen in to a conversation between two people. And first of all, here’s something only our movie could do. Only our movie can have somebody sneakily eavesdropping on a conversation, except the other two people couldn’t care less that they were there because they’re a lamb, right?

So the people don’t understand that lambs are eavesdropping. So that’s pointless eavesdropping, but they’re eavesdropping anyway. And she’s watching them and they’re eating lunch. And one of them is eating tomato salad. And our lamb just focuses in on the tomatoes, and everything else is gone. And it’s just tomatoes. Only our movie could do that. What other movie could do that? None.

And that’s why we’re here is to do stuff — and then people go, “Well how did you think of that?” Because that’s why we’re doing the story is to do things that only this intersection of elements could create.

John: Yep. The success of Zootopia is largely based on those kind of moments where it’s just like, oh, it’s because you have these specific characters in this situation and these crazy rules for your world that these kinds of situations can happen. And that’s delightful.

Craig: Yeah. Animated movies in particular, this is their stock and trade. They are obsessed with the idea of what can only our movie do. What can you do if everybody in the movie is a talking car? What can you do if everybody in the movie is a fish? What can you do if everybody in the movie is a video game character? And then they ask themselves — you can see them saying, “Well…”

John: Starting with this premise, what are the best outcomes from it? And if the outcomes aren’t great outcomes, then maybe ditch that idea and start a different idea.

Craig: Because it can be applied to any other movie. So, how is it great that we’re applying it to ours? The Lego Movie, so first of all, what’s the worst thing that can happen to Lego people? Being stuck in place and not being able to be interchangeable because that’s the nature of Legos. Okay, great. So then what should the ultimate nuclear bomb in the Lego world be? Crazy Glue.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Great. Right? Only the Lego Movie could have Crazy Glue as the ultimate weapon of doom. Ergo, it’s a good idea.

John: It’s a very good idea. God, I love the Lego Movie. I need to see it again. I haven’t seen it since it came out.

Craig: Well, it’s just chock full of things that only that movie could do.

John: Cool. Let’s answer one question. Stuart from York, England writes — oh Stuart, I’m so sorry for you.

Craig: Yeah. Let’s just take a moment here.

John: We’re recording this on Friday. So it’s just all come down. And I’ve been kind of really depressed all day.

Craig: Well, for good reason. Will everyone survive? Yes. Will the world be okay? Yes. However, what’s disturbing about Brexit is that it is irrational. It’s profoundly irrational. And by the way, I think it’s not like the EU doesn’t deserve a ton of criticism. They do. It’s not a great organization actually. In fact, one could argue that it’s terribly flawed from its inception.

But, the problem is the alternative is worse. Sometimes you have to make the best of a bad situation, which is I think what the EU was. But leaving it is profoundly irrational and it was kind of surprising to see that much irrationality. And in a weird way, John, in November, the United States will suddenly have to be the grown-ups and like the good ones. What a weird role reversal, right?

John: It is a very strange role reversal. You know, this morning I retweeted a couple of I thought smart observations about it. And then I got some weird Twitter blowback about. You’re no stranger to weird Twitter blowback, Craig Mazin.

Craig: It’s all I get.

John: It’s all you get. And so I’ve been judiciously using my mute function. So, I have a perception of who really wanted Brexit to happen. And there’s the extreme types, but I think there’s also the people who genuinely perceive that England was better off when it was a separate country, or Great Britain was better off as a separate country. And that they were longing for a golden time. They were longing for a time where things were better.

And when I see movements like this happen, there always tends to be sort of this myth of like a golden age when everything was better, and if we could just get back to that place. The realization that — the Anagnorisis that you have — is that you never get to that better place. You can never get back to that old better place. You can only try to get to a new better place. And every attempt to go backwards is fraught with peril.

And so as I retweeted a few of these things, including this one young woman interviewing saying like, “Yeah, I voted to leave, but now that I wake up this morning, I really regret that.”

Craig: [laughs] Yeah. I saw her.

John: I’m like, oh, that’s Anagnorisis there.

Craig: By the way, that’s so British, because an American would never say that. Ever.

John: Exactly.

Craig: Americans will never, ever admit — not only did she admit that regretted it, but she admitted it so freely. Like, “Oh, you know, if I could do it again, I think I would vote to remain.” Just so casual. So like, la-da-da, oh well.

John: La-di-da. You know, people also describe it as being like I wish I could revert to a save. It’s like go back to that last draft. That made a lot more sense.

Craig: I know.

John: Or like save progress in a game. Like, I’m going to try to something really foolish, so I’m going to save first and then see — go back to a state there.

Craig: Right. Exactly. Oh my god, that’s so the video game analogy of like, “Oh, I’ll just do a save point here. It’s my fallback. Yeah, because I’m about to go Russian somewhere that I probably shouldn’t. But maybe it’ll work.”

You know, you’re right. This dream of what once was, part of the problem also is it wasn’t that. You know, in the United States people sometimes — a lot of people — fetishize the 1950s.

John: Yeah. Exactly. Oh, let’s go back to that. Because they were awesome, Craig. Everything was perfect in the ’50s. If you were a white person, who was straight, and a male, it was fantastic.

Craig: Well, here’s the crazy part. Even if you were a white, straight male, it still wasn’t that great, because there’s like — here’s a list of things that kind of sucked about being anyone in the 1950s.

John: Polio.

Craig: Yeah, thank you. Much less being black, or gay, or a woman, or any of the things. We just imagine these times because we look at Norman Rockwell paintings and it’s just easy to imagine that that was the way it was. It was not at all that way. And, of course, there were a lot of men who were dying in Korea in the 1950s and early ’60s, I believe.

A lot of things going wrong. But John Oliver, I think, had the best — he had the best and most well-rounded and understandable view on it as a British man.

John: Yeah. And of course it didn’t air in the UK because Sky pulled it for political content.

Craig: Amazing. So, it basically came down to him saying we have to stay. I hate the EU. All British people hate the EU. We hate all the other countries in the EU. We should hate them. They’re ridiculous. We have to stay. And that is a very difficult selling point.

John: It is. I think the lesson I’m trying to take with me going forward, just because obviously we’re going to hit our own situation in the very near future, is to always be mindful that there is going to be a sizable portion of any society that wants to return, that wants to get back to a place. And you have to be able to tell them the story that makes them feel good about the place we’re headed to, and not just tells them that they’re stupid for wanting to get back to that place.

Craig: Yeah. And again, you know, we have — our situation is a little better. We have the Electoral College.

John: Thank god.

Craig: Which definitely is a buffer against large waves of people located in one area. And also, of course, our situation is not permanent. Theirs unfortunately is irreversible.

John: We’re recording this on Friday. What is interesting is the damage that’s been done can’t be undone. There’s no reverting to a previous state. But, how they actually implement it and sort of what happens next is still very fluid.

And so I would hope that in its fluidity it gets to a place that is less terrible for everyone.

Craig: Well, on the darker side of things, I suspect it’s going to be a brutal, vicious slog over the next two years. Political careers are going to be dashed to pieces. And Scotland will probably vote to leave the United Kingdom.

John: I also hope that more politicians aren’t going down in the streets.

Craig: And my god, I mean, good lord, right? So, a real mess over there, but Stuart — Stuart is from York, and he deserves an answer, whether he voted to leave or remain. Shall I read his question?

John: Read his question.

Craig: Stuart asks, “Would putting the main character’s names in bold be something that would help the reader focus on the central characters or the characters that the writers deem important enough to bold, or is it something that could risk marginalizing the other characters?” Interesting.

John: I have a simple answer to this which is don’t boldface your character’s names. So, I would say there’s nothing horribly wrong with boldfacing your character’s names, except that part of the reason why we uppercase character’s names is so that people can find them, and so that people sort of know the first time they appear. I just don’t think you’re going to find a lot of utility in boldfacing those names.

Craig: I agree, particularly considering that their names are going to be repeated constantly, every time they say a word their name will be there in the middle of the page. This is not a problem worth solving.

John: I agree. What I will say is at the point you go to table reads and stuff like that, people will highlight their dialogue. That’s awesome, but that’s really a very different thing. So for that first read, it’s going to be too much. Imagine if you were reading through a book and Harry Potter’s name was boldfaced every time it showed up. That would get old really fast. And that’s kind of what you’re doing in a screenplay.

Craig: Yeah. Particularly because we’re trained, or at least, Stuart, the people that are reading your scripts are trained one way or another to view bold as emphasis, not a general textual emphasis, but dramatic emphasis.

John: What I would also say about character names is you are right to be focusing on like who are the most important characters in your story. And what you’ll find is as you’re writing sentences, you will craft sentences so that they are highlighted in the sentence. And so if multiple characters need to be in that sentence, you will put your hero first in that sentence. You will find ways to make sure that we are keeping it very clear who they need to follow, who they don’t need to follow. You are probably refraining from giving character names to unimportant people so that they are not elevated importance beyond their natural stature.

So, don’t say that the security guard’s name is Anderson if he’s really just a security guard.

Craig: Correct.

John: All right, it’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a post by Steve Yedlin that Rian Johnson had put a link to this last week. It is on color science for filmmakers. And so what Yedlin does, he is a cinematographer. And he is talking about sort of a lot of our assumptions on image capture formats on film versus video, on Arri versus other ways of ingesting light and forming an image.

And the whole thing is worth reading. It gets really into the weeds on some stuff, but through that you can find his sort of key points which is that so much of our assumptions about like what’s the best thing for shooting movies on, what’s the best camera to use for shooting movies on, is so often based on what the default settings of things are versus what is this thing capable of doing.

And the choices about what formats you’re going to use, what cameras, what equipment, what looks you’re going for, those things should be figured out before you start shooting your first frame. You need to do your work to figure out what you want your film to look like, and then pick the appropriate technology. And also pick the appropriate colorist. And actually set some of those looks ahead of time so you know what you’re aiming for.

It’s the movies that are trying to do it all on the set, or do everything in post, that are less ideal than they should be.

Craig: It must be very, very frustrating, I think, just as we were talking about how it’s frustrating for writers to be the only person in the room who is defending Anagnorisis. It must be very frustrating to be somebody like Steve Yedlin, who is an incredibly talented cinematographer, and also just a clearly well-educated person, to have discussions with people saying things that are just flat out stupid and wrong.

John: Yeah. Camera X is too something, or like this thing, the blues are too bright in this. It’s like that’s probably not true and you’re really ignoring the purpose of what a colorist does.

Craig: Yeah. Sometimes when musicians get into these little twerpy fights over, “Well, you know, if your drums are made of maple, they’re going to sound warmer than birch. Birch is too…” And somebody inevitably will come in and just destroy the whole argument by saying, “I’m pretty sure that if you put a great drummer down, if you put John Bonham on that kit it would be just fine.”

You know, he would know what to do. It’s like people get so twerpy about stuff, and I like that underneath all of Steve’s facts and science is this general argument understand your tools and then use the tool for your purpose. You’ll be fine.

John: Exactly. He’s really arguing do the work. Like do the work of actually figuring out what it is you want rather than just like looking at a bunch of checklists, or reading a bunch of articles about things and saying, “Oh, well this is going to be the ideal camera for us.” Do the work.

Craig: Precisely. And you mentioned that he’s shooting Rian’s Star Wars movie, right?

John: So I think he has some good credits to his name.

Craig: Yeah. So my One Cool Thing is a game that I played the other night with a group that Megan Amram has now coined the term Illuminerdy, or we are the Illuminerdy, among others, myself and Megan, and David Kwong the magician, and Chris Miller of aforementioned Lego Movie, and Aline Brosh McKenna, and Shannon Woodward, and blah, blah, blah. Doesn’t matter who is in the Illuminerdy. In fact, I shouldn’t tell you all the people in the Illuminerdy, because we got to keep some secrets here.

John: Yeah, but if we see throwing little signals and signs in your Instagram photos, that’s how we can tell.

Craig: Then you’ll know, and we are controlling the world. So, anyway, David Kwong brings a card game, sort of a logic word card game. Similar to the kinds that you’ve been kind of fiddling with over there at Quote-Unquote. And it’s called Codenames. And we’ll throw a link up in the show notes to a description of it. Wonderful little game. Incredibly simple. So simple I could describe it to you right now.

There is a bunch of words that are laid out in a five by five grid. So, five words by five words, all spread out. And there are two people giving clues to their teams. And the two people that are giving clues are looking at a little tiny map on their side that shows that some of those words are the words I want my team to guess. They’re the red words. Or the person to the right of me who is giving the clues to their team, they’re trying to do the blue words.

There is one word that is an instant loser word. And your job is to get your team to guess the words on the grid before the other team guesses those words. And the way you do it is you give them a word that’s a prompt and you tell them how many words you think that word should lead to. So, for instance, in this game that I played on my grid I saw that I had the word bank and I saw I had the word dwarf.

And so I said Gringotts.

John: Perfect.

Craig: Two words. Now, granted, they’re goblins, not dwarves. But, still, that’s the idea. Now, the trick of it is whatever word you come up with, it can’t lead them to one of the other team’s words, because if it does then obviously that helps them. So, the idea is to try and come up with these linking words, a single linking word that might hit even three things at once.

Very fun. Very easy to play. It takes four seconds to learn. Good for families, too, I would imagine. Good game.

John: Good game. So I nearly played that game about two weeks ago. I was over at Elan Lee’s house. Elan Lee created Exploding Kittens, along with The Oatmeal. And so he occasionally gets people together to play games. We nearly played that, but instead we played a Fake Artist Goes to New York, which Will Smith had brought. And not that Will Smith, the other Will Smith. And it was also terrific. So, I’m going to link to A Fake Artist Goes to New York as well which is a great, fun party game that we should play next time.

Craig: Awesome.

John: You will find links in the show notes to these things, and a lot of the other articles we talked about today at johnaugust.com. Just search for this episode of the podcast. Our premium feed is at Scriptnotes.net. You can also get the Scriptnotes app which is on iTunes or the Android store. You can find it at multiple places.

If you are on iTunes for any reason, please leave us a review. That helps other people find Scriptnotes, which is great.

As always, we are produced by Stuart Friedel. We are edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: Yep.

John: And our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro for us you can write into ask@dev.johnaugust.com and send us a link. If you have questions, that’s also the address to use.

On Twitter, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. And we will see you next week.

Craig: See ya.

Links:

• Scriptnotes, 255: New and Old Hollywood, with guest Billy Ray
• ‘Hatton Garden Job’ Beats Other Pics About Famed UK Heist To Production on Deadline, and our discussion in episode 234
• Our bonus episode with Simon Kinberg
• Scriptnotes, 235: The one with Jason Bateman and the Game of Thrones guys
• 250-episode Scriptnotes USB drives are now available for purchase from the John August Store
• The Verge on Aaron Sorkin’s screenwriting MasterClass
• Our bonus episode featuring Aaron Sorkin
• Anagnorisis, and how to pronounce it
• John Oliver on Brexit, before the vote
• Steve Yedlin On Color Science
• Codenames on Board Game Geek, and A Fake Artist Goes to New York
• Outro by Rajesh Naroth (send us yours!)

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. And this is Episode 255 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig is out sick today. But lucky for us we already had a guest lined up. This is a screenwriter who knows much more about the industry than me or than Craig. His name is Billy Ray. He is the screenwriter of movies ranging from Hunger Games to Flightplan to Captain Philips and the writer-director of Shattered Glass, Breach, and last year’s Secret in Their Eyes. He was the head of the most recent WGA negotiating committee. And while I was in the room with him for that he was writing the pilot for The Last Tycoon, a new Amazon series you can watch right now.

Billy Ray: That’s right.

John: Billy Ray, welcome to the show.

Billy: I’m really happy to be here. I think it is important that you guys are doing this.

John: Well, thank you.

Billy: Sure.

John: So talk to me first about why you would do this show? Let’s just start with this because I read a very limited list of your credits. You have a zillion credits. [laughs] They go all way back to like Color of Night was your first credit.

Billy: I can’t talk about Color of Night.

John: Oh, you’re not allowed to? Actually. Well, like, well —

Billy: [laughs] Well, let’s start with Color of Night. Okay.

John: That was 1994. I was still in film school back then.

Billy: Color of Night was a great devirginizing experience for me. And when I say great I do not mean happy. [laughs] I mean, profound.

John: Yeah.

Billy: It was a spec that I sold that was then sort of taken out from under me and rewritten so that by the time that it got made there was not a line of mine in it. And I went to my agent and I said, “I got to take my name off this. This is not my script anymore.” And he said, “You’d never had a produced credit. So, you know, leave your name on and you’re going to be on the side of every bus that drives passed you when this movie comes out,” which was true. As that movie was coming out, it was heavily promoted. And then the movie came out. And I was crushed in those reviews like first page above the fold, the calendar section, I was called out and it was not my script. When that happens you can’t understand the feeling of that until it’s happened to you. But you kind of want to move to Finland, you know, for about two weeks. It’s just crippling. I’ve still never seen the movie and will never see the movie.

John: I have one of those movies. Yeah.

Billy: What I can tell you is there must be a Color of Night channel out there somewhere because the green envelopes do show up now and then. And on that level I’m grateful that it happened but on every other level it was a complete disaster.

John: So Color of Night comes out, that’s 1994. And credits thereafter —

Billy: So the interview is now going to be about Color of Night.

John: No, no, no. So you have a zillion credits and mostly as a screenwriter and then more recently as a bunch of features. And every time I would see you I said — you should direct more things and I was really trying to remind you that you are really are a good director.

Billy: Thank you.

John: The first thing I saw was Shattered Glass which was I was trying to do a rival version of that movie at the same time you —

Billy: Is that right?

John: Yeah. So I loved that story. And so I was trying to get The Fabulist which is his account of that whole situation.

Billy: Right.

John: But I loved that. I loved Breach.

Billy: Do you want to hear something amazing?

John: Tell me.

Billy: I got an email, I do not know, six or seven months ago from a judge, retired judge who lives in Pasadena and once a month he does these screenings in a library somewhere out in Pasadena. And he invites people and he has Q&A’s afterwards. And turns out he was a big Shattered Glass fan and he asked me if I would do a Q&A with Shattered Glass and I said, “Look, I’m in the middle of shooting this pilot, The Last Tycoon. Can we do it after?” So he said, “Fine.” So we scheduled it for some moment in July. So last week he wrote to me saying, “Are we are still on for July 6th for the screening of Shattered Glasses?” I said yes. He said, “Happily, I have reached out to Stephen Glass to see if he wants to do the Q&A with you and he said yes.”

John: Oh my lord.

Billy: Yes. So on July 6th I’ll be doing a Q&A with Stephen Glass about the movie Shattered Glass.

John: Fantastic. For people who do not know what this actually is. My quick summary of it is Stephen Glass is a journalist who was basically faking a lot of his sources and got caught for it and your movie very brilliant just follows it all unraveling and just sort of the melting dread that sort of happens upon him.

Billy: Well, brilliant is a very big word for that movie, but it was a really good story and we definitely got out of its way.

John: All right. So you have done that movie and you are basically a person who can write almost any feature that sort of comes up around.

Billy: I’m sure that is not true.

John: Well, you are a very busy feature screenwriter so why would you do this TV show? And I was correct, right, that I was in the room with you for the negotiating committee —

Billy: Yes.

John: Like we are in there for all these hours, I would see you type-type-typing away and that was on this pilot.

Billy: That’s right.

John: So how did this come to be?

Billy: Well, actually it happened all because of my wife. There were these two women who knew each other, one was my mother-in-law and the other was her dear friend Lynn. And Lynn had a friend named Josh Maurer who is a producer who said I have the rights to The Last Tycoon by Fitzgerald. And my wife heard about this through her mother and put me together with Josh. At that point I really had no interest in doing TV. It was Fitzgerald. And embarrassingly enough, I had never read the book.

John: I never read the book. So I saw your pilot last night and I had a framework for sort of where it fit, but I didn’t really know. So for people who don’t know, it is a Fitzgerald — is it a completed novel or was it — ?

Billy: Fitzgerald died while he was writing the book.

John: So the story takes place in Hollywood.

Billy: Hollywood in 1936 and it’s the story of Monroe Stahr who was Fitzgerald’s take on Irving Thalberg, who was an employer of Fitzgerald when Fitzgerald was at MGM. Stahr is the boy wonder who runs the studio that is owned by a man named Pat Brady who is played by Kelsey Grammer. And Pat Brady, for me, although I think he was based loosely on Mayer when Fitzgerald was writing, I based him more on Harry Cohn who is more a little bit of a gruff vulgarian kind of guy.

But Brady has this daughter named Cecilia who is 19, who is in love with Monroe Stahr. That power triangle is sort of the dynamic that Fitzgerald was writing about. I fell in love with it. I just thought it was the greatest thing ever. Although it feels presumptuous to say you’re going to finish something that F. Scott Fitzgerald started, I didn’t really ever feel that way about it. I thought we were going to be telling pieces of the Hollywood 1936 story that Fitzgerald actually could not have told. For example the influence of Nazi Germany on what movies were made in Hollywood 1936. And we were going to talk about what it was like to have all of this happening in the middle of the Depression which Fitzgerald really didn’t want to touch on.

So, the juxtaposition of the glamour of Hollywood, the fantasy of Hollywood versus the reality of the influence of Hitler creeping across the Atlantic Ocean and the Depression. That was just irresistible to me. So I went in to meet on it. The rights were owned by Sony TV and I thought I’m very much an unknown commodity in television. So if we’re going to pitch this, I should really know what the hell I’m talking about. So I went on spec and wrote the bible for the show, which laid out five seasons of the show. And I was just doing it so that I’d be prepared when we went in to that first pitch, you know, there’s a line in the pilot where Monroe Stahr says, “I’m not talented enough to be unprepared.” You know, Monroe got that line from me. That’s how I feel.

But what I noticed was when I went into my office to work on the bible, I’d go in there at 8:00 in the morning and I would look up, it would be 6:00 in the afternoon, I wouldn’t know where the day had done. I mean, it was just bliss. Because I love screenwriting and screenwriting has been very, very good to me, but there is something about the forced economy of a hundred and ten pages versus “oh, I have five years” to arc this character. Let’s see where this guy can go. Let see what would happen with this relationship. It was just so much fun to be in there throwing all that around. By the time I was done, the bible was, I don’t know, 120 pages.

John: Lord.

Billy: And when it came time to go pitch, I was ready. And we pitched it at six places. And although I would not —

John: So let me talk through, so this is a Sony property, so Sony TV would be the studio behind it.

Billy: They are the studio.

John: So we’ve had previous guests who sort of described how things fit together. Jonathan Groff was talking about how Sony TV is in a sort of unique place because they sell to everybody else but they don’t have their own network, so you need to find some place to be the network to air this.

Billy: That’s right, which gets tricky when it comes time for the studio and the network to make a deal if they don’t have a template deal in place which I found out to my chagrin. But anyway we pitched it at six places and although I would not recommend this, the pitch was an hour. It was literally me talking for an hour. That was after I was set up by my partner who’s going to run the show, Chris Keyser, who did a brilliant job in those rooms.

John: Chris Keyser, former President of WGA.

Billy: Former President of the Guild and very dear friend and brilliant writer and probably the best note-giver in the history of writing. He sort of set the table for me in all those meetings and interjected in exactly the right kind of way, but it was basically me talking. And we actually got yesses in five out of those six rooms, which was pretty thrilling. And we started to develop it with HBO but then we found out that HBO and Sony had a very hard time making a deal which took, I don’t know, four or five months to resolve.

And while that was happening, I just wrote the pilot because I just didn’t have time to wait. The development at HBO was really tricky because they were always intending to make Vinyl and I don’t think they were ever serious about making another show set in a period that was about show business. So we were always kind of fighting an uphill fight and the people we were fighting against Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger, so we were going to lose that one. By the time the script was done, it was very clear HBO wasn’t going to make it and we got very lucky Amazon wanted to.

It was the favorite book of Roy Price when he was in college. He was very hands-on in the development, pushed the script in I think a very, very smart direction because he kept wanting the romance of the novel, which I think I had resisted when I was writing at HBO, I was trying to write darker version of the story. So I don’t know how many drafts I’ve done but it’s upwards of 40 by the time we actually went to go shoot.

John: So you went off and directed the pilot. Was that shot here in town?

Billy: All LA.

John: All LA.

Billy: At Paramount.

John: That’s great. I felt like I recognized some familiar backlot which is actually completely appropriate in this case because it’s a backlot sort of drama.

Billy: It’s our set.

John: It’s our set. It is strange to be making a show about Hollywood for Amazon which is sort of the new force in Hollywood. There’s a delicious sort of irony in the fact that you’re trying to talk about this old studio system and meanwhile you’re at this sort of tipping point where it’s not really quite clear what’s going to happen next with both features and with television as these new models come in.

Billy: Well, it’s getting clearer.

John: Yeah.

Billy: And not in a good way.

John: Right, yeah. [Laughs]

Billy: At least to me.

John: We’ve talked about this on the show before, like the good things about it is there are more buyers and when there are more buyers —

Billy: Yes.

John: There’s more stuff getting made. And that’s fantastic —

Billy: That’s fantastic.

John: For everyone.

Billy: That’s fantastic.

John: It’s really challenging to get certain kinds of features made, the kinds of features that your characters are trying to make in your show —

Billy: That’s right.

John: Would never get made.

Billy: No way.

John: No way.

Billy: You know, go try to sell Kramer vs. Kramer today, which was a big hit.

John: Yeah.

Billy: You just can’t do it. I think that television has provided such incredible opportunities, particularly for writers, because the storytelling there is so interesting. For me, as I was writing this pilot, I had a very clear target in my head. I revere Sopranos, Breaking Bad, The Wire, Mad Men, and as a matter of fact as I was writing the pilot I had a rule for myself which was if I had written a line that I didn’t think was good enough to be in a Mad Men episode I had to come up with another line.

And I was trying to apply that kind of rigor to every single choice we were making in the script. Trying to tell the story as visually as possible, trying to do all those things that Mad Men and those other shows do just so automatically. That’s the great news is that television now has those kinds of “tent poles” out there, I use that word semi-ironically. The bad news is that partially because of that features have completely surrendered that ground to television, and I think that’s really a dangerous thing.

I don’t know if there are executives that listen to this, but I believe that 15 years from now, 20 years from now I think there’s going to be some sort of semi-Nuremberg kind of trial where all the executives of today are going to be standing on a docket and someone like you is going to be saying, “Where were you when the art of movies just went down the sewer? When this uniquely American art form was completely sacrificed? What were you doing about that?” And I don’t think any of them will have an answer. And that’s a sad thing.

John: Well, they were trying to make the movie that needed to fit into that slot at this time. Like, it’s very easy to see sort of like a bunch of very rational decisions made step by step by step by step can take you to a place where you’re not making the kinds of movies you should have been making this whole time through. And so, most of these executives who I think are listening, they do have a sense of like once per year we get to make something that is the Oscary kind of movie and you had an opportunity to make that kind of movie.

Billy: Right.

John: Captain Phillips is exactly the kind of movie that each studio makes one of those per year.

Billy: Right.

John: And hopes it is good enough and gets the Oscars and gets the acclaim it needs to get. But not more than one. I mean —

Billy: Right.

John: Yeah.

Billy: I know, except here is the problem. You’ve got a generation of film watchers out there who still think Hollywood can come up with that kind of stuff. They’re eventually going to stop going to the movies and they’re going to be replaced by new generation of filmgoers who have no expectations of that kind for Hollywood. They’re just there to see superhero movies. They’re just there to see IP turned into movies.

And that generation has now seen the planet threatened in every movie they go to and they’ve seen every CGI image that could possibly be generated. And the problem with movies that are generated inside a computer is that when any image is possible, no image is that impressive anymore. And I think we are raising the bar for what it’s going to take to dazzle people to such a degree that eventually you’re just going to have a movie that’s just an hour and 20 minutes of explosions, because I don’t know what else you can do if it’s not going to be about character, story, and theme.

John: Yeah.

Billy: Which as I said, I think we’re surrendering to television.

John: So this last fall I went and saw an early cut of your movie Secret in Their Eyes, which you made for STX. And I remember seeing the initial credit as it showed up like what the hell is STX? I was like, oh, it’s a new studio, it’s like a new place that’s doing a movie. And I loved seeing your cut and I was so happy that your movie got made and it got out there in the world and it didn’t sort of set the world on fire.

Billy: Nope.

John: So what was it like sort of going, I mean, it’s so much time and so much energy to get a movie made and to get a movie cut. You put everything you have into it and what did it feel like for it not to land?

Billy: I’m glad we’re talking about this, because I know that there are a lot of writers listening and I wanted to make sure that when we sat down today that we spent at least a little bit of time talking about failure, because you have to learn from it and you have to survive it. You have to grow from it.

That experience for me was a total humiliation. I remember about three or four days before that movie came out when I started to see what those reviews were going to be and the tracking, what that was looking like.

John: So the tracking being, it’s the advance look at sort of where they think your movie is going to open in terms of Box Office.

Billy: Right.

John: They basically do surveys to figure out within a range what they think you’re going to open at.

Billy: And our tracking numbers had always been okay. Then if you remember Paris happened a week before we opened and all of a sudden our tracking numbers just went off the cliff.

John: Yeah.

Billy: Which has nothing to do with the reviews by the way but it didn’t help. I sat my kids down and I said, “Okay, your dad is about to get punched in the face in public and I’m not happy about it. But if I am going to enjoy the ride that is Captain Phillips or The Hunger Games, I have to expose myself to this. You cannot have one without the risk of the other. So we’re going to survive it and we’re going to learn from it and we’re going to move on.”

I stopped reading reviews. I stopped reading the Calendar and have not read the Calendar since because I just didn’t want to see some mention in there that was kind of snarky or mean. I didn’t watch any screeners for the entire Christmas season. I just couldn’t watch anyone else’s movie because I thought I want everything else to suck right now.

John: Yeah. I know what that feels like.

Billy: I’m in such a bad place. I’m rooting for everything else to be terrible and that’s not a fun way to watch a movie.

John: No.

Billy: And nobody wants to be around a person who’s watching a movie that way. It changed me in a lot of, I think, profound ways which is not to say that I’m profound, but I’m saying the experience was. I used to really enjoy the bad reviews that other people got. Secret in Their Eyes knocked the fun out of that experience out of me forever.

I now know what that feels like. It was hubris on my part. I thought coming off of Shattered Glass and Breach and Captain Phillips, I was sort of the critics’ boy and I just didn’t think they would do that to me and that’s ridiculous, that’s hubris, which I then became aware of really quickly and paid a penance for. It’s not an experience that I would wish on anybody. I was enormously lucky. That movie came out on November 20th. I was already in prep on Tycoon. So, I had a bad weekend. But that Monday, November 23rd, I was back at work. I was prepping Tycoon which was this incredibly joyous piece of material, I mean, it was Hollywood 1936 and it was F. Scott Fitzgerald and everybody was so happy to be there.

Everyone on the crew who loves movies and loves what movie can be, they were so excited by every single prop, every single costume, every single hairstyle. And I just went back to work. There’s nothing else you can do.

John: It is a different thing with my movie The Nines, you know, it came and it went but it came and it went in very much a Sundance kind of way. Like most of those movies, there’s not an expectation it’s going to set the world on fire, so like I had all the buildup and then it’s like — and then it’s done. And it’s like, you know, it never expands. It never goes beyond the place. It’s like, all right, that happens. That’s the kind of way it is.

And then I’ve had movies that I was the writer that tanked. In some cases like I knew a long time ago that it was going to tank and it wasn’t sort of — they weren’t my babies. But it is very different when it’s all of your energy is on that thing. It’s like being a TV showrunner and having your show get yanked off the air, you know, in its first week.

Billy: Yeah. Part of it is when you’re a director, you’re a leader and you are there to inspire people and get them to follow you over that hill and if you do it well everybody buys in and they follow you over the hill. And on Secret, it’s very tough for me to assess it creatively. When I say it was a humiliation, I don’t mean that I’m embarrassed by the movie. I mean, I’m embarrassed by the reviews. And I’m embarrassed by the box office, and right now I’m sorry I made it, right now I certainly wish I had not made it. But, making a movie is a little bit like raising a kid, you know, it takes you 20 years to find out if you did a good job or not.

I can look back on Shattered Glass which was a movie that got released in 2003 and I’ve had enough time away from that movie now. I can assess it. I know how I feel about that movie. I know how I feel about Breach. I won’t know how I really feel about Secret in Their Eyes until 2036. So we’ll have to redo this then and it’s possible that in 2036 I’ll say, “Critics were right. I shouldn’t have made that movie. It was dumb to remake such a beloved Argentine movie or the choices that I made in remaking it were stupid.” But it’s very possible that I’ll say, “I think they were wrong. I think they were unfair.” Again, I just won’t know until enough time has passed.

John: So what is the lesson you can take from this? Does it make it harder for you to get another movie to direct done? Or did it change the kind of movie that you would try to do next to direct? Has it impacted your screenwriting life at all? My hunch is that people will perceive that as this movie directed by Billy Ray didn’t work but we know Billy Ray can write all these other movies because he’s always written all these other movies. So I wonder if it impacts both sides of your career.

Billy: I don’t think it had any impact at all on my screenwriting career, none. And I didn’t test whether not it had an impact on my directing career because I didn’t try to direct another feature right after that. Again, I fell right into Tycoon. I can’t tell you how lucky I was to have that to dive into. I just didn’t have time to sit around and think about it, you know. The thing about athletes is if they fail, they have another game the next day.

John: Absolutely.

Billy: And they get a chance to sort of rewrite themselves and there are stories about, you know, relief pitchers who were supposed to be closers who give up a gigantic homerun that ends a season in the playoffs or the World Series and they don’t have a game to play the next day and sometimes they wind up shooting themselves because it’s just too long to think about the period of failure. It happened very famously to a guy named Donnie Moore who pitched for the California Angels in ’86. But anyway, I had Last Tycoon to dive into which was a chance to direct again and it was a chance to do something very, very different. So, we’ll see.

John: We’ll see. And so with Last Tycoon as an Amazon pilot, it is now up there for people to look at, so there will be a link in the show notes so people can click through and watch it?

Billy: Yes.

John: And after watching it they can tell Amazon how great it was and that they should order it series. That’s essentially the stage you’re at right now, right?

Billy: Let’s hope they feel that way. The other thing about Secret is I do not look at reviews anymore.

John: Yeah.

Billy: So, I’m told we’re doing great.

John: [laughs]

Billy: We launched this morning at 6:00. I’m told everything is going great and lots of five-star reviews are happening but I will not look.

John august: Yeah, don’t look.

Billy: I will not look, because I’m the wrong personality type for this. I’ve learned that about myself. Chris Keyser who is going to run the show with me happens to be in Europe right now and he called me this morning to say that we had just launched. And he called me to say that on Amazon UK, we’ve gotten 17 customer reviews and sixteen of them are five stars.

John: Well, that’s great.

Billy: And I said, “Who was that seventeenth review?”

John: Yeah.

Billy: That is where my head goes.

John: Yeah, of course.

Billy: So, I’m the wrong guy to be looking at reviews.

John: Cool. Let’s go back to feature land —

Billy: Yeah.

John: And I want to look at a video that Vanity Fair put out that says, “How much does everyone working on a $200 million movie earn?” So we’ll have a link in the show notes to it, it is about a four-minute video, but really we’re only curious about above the line basically.

Billy: [laughs]

John: Because we’re writers [laughs]

Billy: It does not mean bellow the line is not important, it just means it’s not what we’re talking about today.

John: Indeed. And we don’t necessarily know — have a great insight into like sort of how much those below the line people make, but we do know how much the above the line people make. So —

Billy: Yeah.

John: The video which you’ll see a link to in the show notes, it takes a theoretical $200 million movie and the guy that put it together basically went through a bunch of different budgets and sort of averaged out what he saw between these budgets. What did you think?

Billy: See, it looks about right.

John: Great. So, this is what they are listing for these different amounts. So, the director of this $200 million movie, $4 million paid. That seem right?

Billy: Yeah, that seems right, but obviously plus some back-end participation.

John: And so if it was a newer director it might not be that high —

Billy: Right.

John: And a super-experienced director might be higher than that.

Billy: Absolutely.

John: But $4million felt right. The thing that gave me a little bit of pause is that this video listed executive producers before producers which to me suggested that this person wasn’t as familiar with the order of credits. Executive producers would have been listed after producer.

Billy: Okay.

John: Yeah.

Billy: Fair enough.

John: These executive producers, a million basically each. Feel about right?

Billy: Yeah, sounds right on a $200 million movie.

John: So, let’s think about who those people would be on $200 million dollar movie. So they are — they could be someone at the director’s company, the person who runs the company with the director.

Billy: Yeah. Although I would bet that person is probably a producer, not an executive producer.

John: Yeah, that’s probably true. Could be the author of the book?

Billy: Could be the author of the book, could be someone who controlled the rights to the book.

John: For sure. Then there were three producers listed, each at a million dollars. So, producers’ slot, that could have been the director’s producing partner —

Billy: Easily.

John: It could have been the former studio executive who —

Billy: [Laughs]

John: Who got booted out of the studio.

Billy: Absolutely.

John: And then the writers. Let us talk about the writers.

Billy: By the way, one of those producers could actually be the person who really produced the movie. In other words, like a line producer —

Billy: Absolutely.

Billy: Who was of such value, that they actually got a producer credit.

John: Yeah, and that’s a wonderful thing.

Billy: Although sometimes line producers wind up getting executive producer credit.

John: Yeah, while we’re at the producer level, we would see, after some of them, a PGA which means Producers Guild of America.

Billy: Right.

John: And so, it’s not the guild in the same way that the Writers Guild is a guild —

Billy: No.

John: But it is a group of producers who look at each movie and say, like, “Who really did the job of producing?”

Billy: That is right.

John: And they determine who gets that actual thing.

Billy: That’s right.

John: Writers, so there are three writers listed in this $200 million movie. The first one at $3.2 million, the second at $900,000. The third one at $250,000.

Billy: Right.

John: So this one doesn’t list those writers with any ands or ampersands. We don’t know if there’s any teams.

Billy: Okay.

John: If there were three writers listed, there would have likely have been a team. They could have all been ands I guess together.

Billy: Okay, I could give you a scenario for that one.

John: All right.

Billy: The scenario for that one is that the second writer, the one who is making $900,000.

John: Yeah.

Billy: Okay. The second writer, let’s just say that that second writer was the first writer aboard and did a ton of work on it and got paid well. And then they decided that writer just had no more in the tank.

John: Yeah.

Billy: Then the third writer, the one who made $250,000, was some hot shot like straight out of Sundance or NYU and everyone said, “Oh my god, this guy has got the greatest take. Or this girl has got the greatest take on how to fix this particular script.”

John: Yeah.

Billy: So they came in, one draft, and then everyone said, “Okay, this is a total disaster.” So, 250, but some of it stayed in.

John: Yeah.

Billy: Then they brought in —

John: The closer.

Billy: A big hit —

John: They brought in Billy Ray.

Billy: Let’s not say anyone in particular, but they brought in somebody because there are a number of people out there who could do this kind of work and that person and the director completely fell in love.

And so it started off as a weekly, which is how the number got high fast, and then it became an all services contract because the director said, “I am not going off and making this movie without this person next to me.” And so all of a sudden it became that gigantic number.

John: The other scenario, I mean, 3.2 felt really high but the other scenario I was thinking of, if this was a big-name sort of first writer who got like a million — a million against a million and then there was also some backend stuff that it would be very hard for those other two writers to exist in that situation.

Billy: That is why I think it goes the other way.

John: I think you are probably right. So, coming in as a weekly is one of those situations where the movie had a whole bunch of troubles. It just kept going on forever and they just basically kept paying that writer’s weekly.

Billy: Here is a thing about that. It has happened to me a couple of times. There is one moment in the history of any movie where the writer has any juice, I mean any, and it’s that moment. They’ve done ten drafts with three or four writers. They are millions into the development of the script. They know they want to make the movie and they don’t have a daft they can shoot.

John: Yeah.

Billy: And they are all panicking. Everyone is afraid they’re going to get fired. Everyone is kind of losing their marbles for a second there and for one moment the writer walks in and is the grown up in the room and very calmly says, “Okay, I’ve looked at the material. Here is what’s not working. Here is what I think we need to fix. Here is how I plan to address it.” And in that moment you have the power.

John: Yeah, totally.

Billy: Everyone is saying, “Oh my god, somebody is going to save us.” Now, by the way, the next day you’re still just the writer, but at least in that meeting you have some juice and it’s a great feeling.

John: It is a great feeling. A couple of a times in my career I have been that person who came in and have done that. John Lee Hancock famously does that. And it is a great moment when you sort of can see like, “I know how to do this, I know how to keep everybody calm.”

Billy Rey: Right

John: And honestly if the director believes in you but also like one of the actors believes in you, if like Will Smith believes in you —

Billy: You’re gold.

John: And does not want you to leave, you’re there.

Billy Rey: You are gold. Now, the thing about doing a weekly and I haven’t done that many of them, by the end of a weekly, and I do not mean to compare writing to digging coal, it’s not. It’s not as hard as working in a coal mine, but in relative terms, you are so fried by the end of that process you begin to feel like a really well-paid typist.

John: Completely.

Billy: Because at the very end you’re sitting in a room with eight people, they all have 12 drafts in front of them, and I go back to the days when these were on paper, right, not just on computers. And by the end they know they have you for one more day and they’re saying, “Can you give us this scene from this draft and this scene from that draft and this scene from this draft.” And you are sort of taking dictation.

And you come away from, at least I do, you come away from a weekly convinced you have no talent. And I never need a rest. I never ever, ever need to stop working. After a weekly I need about two days where I am just kind of a zombie. I don’t think it is a bad fit for what it is I’m capable of doing. I just do not like doing it.

John: Yeah, especially because sometimes you’re a weekly, but you go to wherever the production is, and so therefore you are like trying to do this in a hotel room while all of this other stuff is crazy and you’re on strange hours and —

Billy: That I would not do because I don’t like to be away from my family. There are certain people who are great away from their family. I’m not one of them. There is no weekly that could pull me away from Los Angeles. I just wouldn’t do it.

John: The other thing I want to talk about with this list of credits is the writers, like, they’re listing these three writers here but maybe not necessary those were the people who got credited. So, if this person is looking at the budget, there’s honestly a lot of writing that may not be reflected on the credits. And so like —

Billy: Absolutely.

John: A bunch of money is spent in development.

Billy: Of course.

John: So, it is kind of impossible that, like, this total aggregate number might be accurate but, like, the actual writers who were credited didn’t get paid as much as that.

Billy: Oh, no question.

John: Lead actor $12 million, second actor 4.5, third actor 1.5.

Billy: There aren’t that many lead actors who can get that number.

John: Twelve million went away, sort of, it’s —

Billy: What that number was, it’s something that Peter Chernin once said to me, when I was about to — the first time that I was co-chairing the negotiating committee for the Writers Guild. To get ready to go into those negotiations, I felt like I didn’t know enough and so I wanted to go do the work that a journalist would do to sort of learn how these negotiations work.

So, aside from talking to everyone at the Writers Guild to prepare myself, I started talking to people who were in the AMPTP and one of them was Chernin who, you know, was a very major force in the strike in 2007 to 2008 but now it was 2011.

John: Yeah. And now he’s a producer.

Billy: He’s a producer. He’s no longer in a studio head, so I wrote to him and I said, “Can I come interview you?”

So we sat down and I wanted to hear what that negotiation was like, with that strike was like from the other side of the table. I thought that would be valuable information for me. And he was forthcoming and great. But one of the things that he said to me was what a seismic change the business had undergone since the DVD market have flat-lined. He said the margins for the movie business were so good when DVDs were selling like they were selling before that market matured and he said, “However, we didn’t handle that profit well. What we did with that profit was we gave it in $20 million chunks to actors.”

John: Yeah.

Billy: And once that market dried up, those $20-million paydays just went away.

John: Yeah. All right. The last credit here that seemed high for me that maybe you would know this better. Second unit director is listed at $1 million. That felt high, but maybe I guess some of these movies that a second unit director really is making that much money.

Billy: I’ve never seen it.

John: Yeah.

Billy: What I can tell you is if you have a director who insists on a specific second unit director, it’s possible.

John: Okay. That’s fair. So a $200 million movie that came out this last week is Warcraft which was an incredibly expensive adaptation of the very successful video game. It did not perform well in the US whatsoever but it performed incredibly well in China. So a bunch of stories this last week about how this movie wasn’t even sort of made for America in a certain sense. It didn’t need to do well in America because it was going to do so well in China. We sort of weren’t even paying attention to like how much it was essentially a Chinese movie with American actors in it.

Billy: This is kind of a stunning statistic.

John: Yeah.

Billy: So I may have to say it twice. Every single day 15 new movie screens go up in China.

John: Yeah.

Billy: Every day. Think about that.

John: Yeah, so, I mean —

Billy: That is what you call an exploding marketplace. Capitalism is a voracious animal and it doesn’t stop and reflect. It just keeps moving forward and devouring things and it goes where the profit is. And the profit right now is in China.

John: Yeah.

Billy: So, of course, a capitalist animal is going to start moving in that direction and all the studios have. You know, there’s a storyline in Last Tycoon and I don’t mean to bring this back in a promotional way. But in The Last Tycoon there is a storyline about how Monroe Stahr and Pat Brady run the studio and they can’t make a movie that might offend Germany.

John: Yes.

Billy: Because Germany is such an important —

John: It was the number two market in the world.

Billy: Number two foreign market in the world. And that happens to be true by the way. Hitler had passed this thing called the Article 15 which forbade the exhibition of any American by a studio that had offended Germany with some other movie.

Anyway, if you take out the word Germany and put in the word China, it’s the exact same conversation that’s happening today. And I know a number of writers who have written movies that may have a line or two that seemed like a poke at China. And those lines come out of the movies.

John: Yeah.

Billy: I was for just a brief period of time working on something on Warner Brothers where they said to me, “Your bad guy is Chinese. You just got to make them Russian.” I said, “Why?” They said, “We don’t want to offend China?”

John: Yeah.

Billy: And I guess they do not care about offending Russia. That’s not good for storytelling, but it is where storytelling is going right now. And what you’ll see as a result of that is more action, right, because action doesn’t really need to be translated. And I think with a lot less nuance. And it will become tougher. It will require much more courage to make movies that are something other than that.

John: Absolutely. People often say like, “Oh, well, it’s common for movies to make more overseas than they do in the US.”

Billy: It didn’t used to be.

John: Yeah. But, I mean, over the last ten years that needle has crossed over and so like Star Wars: Force Awakens, huge in the US, but it made 54% of its money overseas. What is unique is this is the first time where 90% of this, of Warcraft’s money, is coming from overseas and so much of it is coming from China. It is also a case where Legendary, the studio behind it, is now owned by a Chinese company. It is owned by the Chinese company that owns the movie theaters.

Billy: Right.

John: And so, uniquely you have a closed market. There are only certain movies that can get released in China theatrically. But if you own the movie theaters, there is a very good chance you are going to be able to release that movie theatrically. So, in some ways, it goes back to the really old sort of studio system —

Billy: That’s right.

John: Where they used to own their own theaters and where a Paramount Theater that was owned by Paramount. And they could make the money the whole way through. They were vertically integrated in ways that are not allowed to be integrated theatrically anymore.

Billy: That is right. And they all did it except Colombia. Harry Cohn decided he didn’t want to own theaters.

John: Again Sony, they never own both parts.

Billy: [laughs] It’s in their DNA.

John: Yeah.

Billy: But there was a reason that the United States government stepped in and said, “No. You can’t own the theaters and own the product,” just like it used to be in television that you couldn’t own the network and produce for the network if you were the same entity. It is not good for the product. It’s not good for competition. I have surprisingly little say over what people do in China.

John: [laughs]

Billy: They just never call and ask if I think it’s a good idea for the same company that owns the theaters to be the company that’s producing the movies. So I imagine that’ll keep going.

John: So let’s talk about TV again because this sense that you cannot be the studio and be the network has basically all gone away.

Billy: Gone away. That was Fin-syn.

John: Yeah, it’s Fin-syn. It’s done. So your show is made for Sony but it’s being distributed through Amazon. Classically, the story they always told us about TV is that you have to make a hundred episodes of TV a shows or else it’s lost.

Billy: That’s over.

John: Yeah, yeah. It was deficit financing up until you made a hundred. So that was the magic number at which syndication kicked in and then shows became profitable.

Billy: Right.

John: So you just be very thankful that we’re putting your show on the air at all because we’re losing money until we get to that magic hundred number.

Billy: That is right. Now because all of these AMPTP companies, remember we’re talking about six companies that essentially control 95% of the media that’s produced and distributed in the United States, or the world. Because those are all publicly-held companies, the people who run those companies have to stand in front of stockholders. And they have to explain how much money they’re making. It’s a matter of law. So when the owner of a network stands up and says that a show like Under the Dome was in profit before it shot a frame a film, that’s on the record.

John: Yeah.

Billy: That’s not something that people can walk away from. The model has changed now based on foreign sales, based on all sorts of revenue streams that exist that need to bundle a hundred episodes and then go into distribution heaven. There’s just no such thing anymore, it’s not required. There are so many more ways to squeeze money out of a show now. That’s another reason why TV is a great business.

You know, you look at the impact of DVRs and you think, “Okay. I don’t know anyone who watches commercials anymore unless it’s a football game. How are networks still making money? How are they still in business? Why are they still at the upfronts dropping billions of dollars?” And yet they do. It works great. And the reason is because, again, capitalism being this constantly moving animal, the networks and the studios have found a way to exploit foreign markets and exploit by the way all the different platforms on which things can be screened. And so it’s just a great business, a greater business than ever. I mean, those six companies are going to generate $49 billion in profit this year.

John: Yeah.

Billy: Which is extraordinary and which we will be reminding them off when we sit down to negotiate with them very shortly.

John: Yeah. It does strike me as strange that whenever we sort of go into a negotiation stance with the studios, it’s always like, “Oh, there’s so much turmoil, it’s like it’s so difficult for us to make money.”

Billy: Right.

John: And then, you know, years where we’re not doing that, they’re happy to report all their profits to —

Billy: Right. No, it’s the same story, look.

John: But what has changed is that it has become much more clear. We had Aline on recently and I was trying to tell her that like she gets all nervous about Crazy Ex-girlfriend which is a fantastic show and one some level like feeling bad that it’s not a bigger hit. And I keep trying to remind her like they’re still making money. Like don’t —

Billy: Oh, they’re doing great.

John: Yeah, they’re absolutely fine.

Billy: Look it is such a shell game. It’s extraordinary. When people are running a show, they have so much pressure put on them because a studio will say, “Okay, you have X amount to make this show,” and of that X amount here is your portion that goes to the writer’s room. And so the showrunner looks at that number and says, “Oh, my God, like this is just not enough to put enough people around this table.” So, I have to do something really stupid like paper teaming. I have to take these two people and tell them, “I know you’ve never met but you’re now going to be a team and you’re going to get paid as one person.” There’s a lot of that going on.

John: Yeah, it forces writers into this situation of making like questionable choices that hurt other writers.

Billy: That’s right. And within the context of that given show, that showrunner is actually doing the best job they can with the resources that have provided to them. However, what they’re not getting, the shell game part they’re not getting is that the studio for which they’re doing this is making billions of dollars and it’s a portfolio business. You have to sort of step back and look at the whole canvass. And if it’s Fox or if it’s any of those other studios, they have plenty of money and, of course, they could put more money into the writer’s budget of that given show and still be doing great.

But what they have decided is that the reason that they’re making $49 billion is because they have found all these revenue streams but they have kept constant downward pressure on cost. And for them, why would they change that formula if they don’t have to change that formula. It’s part of our job as a negotiating committee to acquaint them with the facts of what that actually means and to make them re-examine and then change that formula because it’s just fair that they do and I think necessary.

John: You raised that idea earlier about putting up a big sign on the WGA that’s like a big moving billboard.

Billy: Oh, the scrolling thing. Where did you hear that idea?

John: I think you told me at some dinner we had.

Billy: This is my fantasy.

John: All right, so tell me about the fantasy.

Billy: Okay, what the American Cancer Society did on this one building in West LA, they just have this rolling tote board that tells you the number of smoking deaths as it grows over the course of the year. I’d like to that with AMPTP profits. I think outside of the Writers Guild there should be an electronic rolling tote board that’s just keeps churning millions into billions of dollars so that is —

John: Not just revenues but actual profits. That’s the thing.

Billy: Yeah, profits, as the year progresses we’d be getting closer to that $49 billion number. And then no one would have to ask why it is we have to renegotiate our deal. We never talked about the Writers Guild vote.

John: Well, let’s talk about the Writers Guild vote.

Billy: Oh, my god. Okay. All right. So, this vote that came up and I know that you and Craig and Michael Oates Palmer were allied on this one.

John: So, this is the decision about the amendments to —

Billy: Right.

John: Whether the term should go up to, was it four years or three years?

Billy: Three.

John: So, from two years to three years. The WGA board had all agreed to do that but it went to a vote of the —

Billy: Right. What was critical was not that we were extending it or attempting to extend it from two years to three years. What was critical is that we were trying to tie it to negotiations so that there would never be a year where the board was coming up for elections and we were negotiating a contract at the same time. That was the idea.

John: Yeah.

Billy: And as someone who has now co-chaired that committee twice, I can tell you, it’s not a good thing that we’re in the middle of negotiations and trying to put together a negotiating committee and people are busy grandstanding which is what you have to do when you run for office. That’s why the board voted 15 to 1 to support this.

And I went out of my way not to do a lot of campaigning about it. I just thought I’ll let the chips fall where they may. And I kept hearing about the rabble rousing going on between you and Mazin and Michael Oates Palmer, who was the one on the board who voted against it. And I decided, no, I’m just going to keep my powder dry and not fire on this one. And as it turns out, I think 64% of the guild voted yes, we needed two-thirds. I forget the exact number but I think we were eight votes shy. I have a very hard time forgiving myself because I know I could have convinced eight people. I know it.

John: Yeah.

Billy: Or I could have come on this show and we could have a very healthy back and forth about it and I should have. I should have. That was laziness on my part and I think as a guild, I think we’ll pay a price for it. I don’t think it’ll be horrible. There’s not going to be blood.

John: Billy, I mean, Craig could do a better job defending this than me, but I do agree with him. We’ve never had, it’s always been two years and it hasn’t killed us to this point.

Billy: Right.

John: And I think the danger, and the danger which we have raised on the podcast, was extending to three years, it feels really great when you have really wonderful people like you and we kept singling you out as like the person we want.

Billy: Oh, thank you.

John: And so, I mean, you should listen to the episode. We single you out as the person we want to have to make sure is always there and is there for three years. There are certain people who get on that board —

Billy: Did you name them?

John: Craig named a few.

Billy: Did he really? Oh my god. [laughs]

John: I’m not sure if it made it to the edit, but he really did name a few.

Billy: Oh, my god, I got to talk to him off-camera.

John: So, there are people who you don’t want to be there for three years and you want to make sure you can, when you see things going wrong, you can get those idiots off the board. And so the only reason, I will tell you, that I understand that trying to not link stuff up, but the only reason we did that was because of the stupid people on the board for three years versus two years and we’ve all been through situations where people have taken control of the board and it’s not been a good happy outcome, so those were our reasons.

Billy: Well, I hear you. Here is how I would challenge that.

John: Yeah.

Billy: I’ve now served on the Writers Guild board for, I guess I’m in my 7th year. I’ll be termed out a year and a half from now.

John: Yeah.

Billy: I also serve on the Board of Governors of the Academy. And I just want to paint a picture for you about how different those two experiences are, okay? Everybody who’s on the Writers Guild board is there because they care about writers, they care about writing, and they know how hard it is to make living as a writer. In no way are they there for self-aggrandizement. It really is altruism. They really do want to dig in and do a great job for writers. And I’ve never met anyone on the board who had any agenda other than that.

It’s very different on the Academy Board of Governors where there are a number of people on that board who don’t feel relevant but they’re relevance is completely tied to their being a governor. And they maybe haven’t worked in 20 years but they’re still a governor. That’s a very different board. It functions in a very different way and not as well. So, a long winded way of saying, there is no one on that board that you really need to get rid of inside of three years. And even if there were, nobody outside that board would know because I can tell you having served with a bunch of different people on that board, the handful of people on that board that might annoy me personally, I would never say so publicly. There would never be any indication publicly that anyone out in the membership would know about and therefore have to or want to act upon and no one on that board has ever done any damage, ever. It’s just not the kind of board that would allow for that, it’s too democratic in nature.

John: No, no, no, there have been situations where slates of people have come on board and those slates can be incredibly dangerous and having those —

Billy: Totally agree.

John: And having those dangerous slates on there for three years versus two years is a real concern of mine. And my concern isn’t about the actual people who are there right now, it is envisioning scenarios in which a bunch of idiots do get on there and it becomes very hard to get them off. And that’s really the scenario that I’m envisioning for this.

I would say I don’t think the Academy being quite as applicable because the worst that happens when you have a bunch bad people on the Academy board is that like they make some stupid choices about sort of like hosting the Oscars or sort of the new museum, but they’re not like shutting down the film industry for an ill-conceived labor action. And it’s peoples’ livelihood and so I think peoples’ livelihood is a very different situation than the important but not as, you know, day-to-day crucial like what is films’ legacy in America.

Billy: I hear you. I would say that what you guys were worried about was a bit of a nuclear scenario; having a bad slate that is entrenched in power for three years that you can’t get rid of. And I can understand why that would sound pretty daunting. I’d say the likelihood of that is very, very low when compared with the 100% likelihood that you’re going to have elections that happen during a negotiation period which hurts our negotiations.

John: Yeah, but I honestly, I understand your perspective on that but I will say, as the person watching you lead the negotiating committee, I feel like the job of the negotiating committee and the reason why you have all these other big-main people who are on the negotiating committee who are not part of the board is that it insulates the change of the leadership within the board. Because the negotiating committee is the people who are actually sitting across the table from the AMPTP and those are the big-name writers who they want to make sure are actually delivering their TV episodes next week. So, I think the negotiating committee is what insulates the difference between, you know, this board versus the next board that gets elected.

Billy: Somewhere out there are eight writers who agree with you.

John: All right. Apparently so. So, we use this platform for this.

It has come time for us to do what we do every week which is a One Cool Thing in which we recommend something. My One Cool Thing is actually something Aline Brosh McKenna brought up on an earlier episode, she described the character being too much of a Mary Sue and I didn’t know what a Mary Sue was. So what do you think a Mary Sue is? Do you have a prototype in your head of what that is?

Billy: I do.

John: Okay. Tell me what you think is a Mary Sue?

Billy: But it’s a very ’50s prototype.

John: Okay. Tell me what you think it is.

Billy: I would think that if it’s a pejorative, if a character is too much of a Mary Sue then they’re not adventurous, they’re probably very predictable in their behavior and they think small.

John: That’s not what she was meaning. It’s not sort of the trope, and so, on TV tropes I fell down a deep hole in TV tropes and I read up about Mary Sue, and so Mary Sue actually comes from Star Trek fan-fiction and so the prototype is the character who, I’ll read one of the definitions, she’s amazingly intelligent, outrageously beautiful, adored by all around her, and absolutely detested by most reading her adventures. She’s Mary Sue, the most reviled character type in media fan-fiction. And what’s fascinating is like so it’s the kind of character who seems to represent the author’s intent, basically like the author injecting him or herself into the narrative and is a character who should sort of be secondary but is sort of taking over all of the focus. It is a pejorative but it’s also sort of sexist and it’s a weirdly —

Billy: It checks a lot of boxes.

John: It checks a lot of wonderful boxes but it’s a trope in the same way that Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a trope like you have to watch for like are you doing, you know Manic Pixie Dream Girl, right? Oh, wow, and so Manic Pixie Dream Girl is Zooey Deschanel in 500 Days of Summer. She’s like quirky and fantastic but like just impossible to exist in real life.

Billy: Yes, I have a problem with that.

John: Yes, and so the Mary Sue is an equivalent kind of case of like the unknowingly two perfect character that could not exist in natural real life.

Billy: Yeah. In the ’80s, the equivalent of that would be the Sylvester Stallone character in Cliffhanger.

John: Absolutely, one hundred percent.

Billy: Okay. Who wants to feel guilty about something that he did so that he can brood during the movie but the movie doesn’t really have the balls to have him do anything wrong. So even though someone dies in that opening sequence in such a way that Sylvester Stallone could kind of say I feel bad about it, the movie actually made it very clear it wasn’t his fault at all.

John: One hundred percent.

Billy: That’s an ’80s trope. That’s the equivalent of that.

John: That sounds really good.

Billy: Yes.

John: What’s your One Cool Thing?

Billy: Oh, my god. Well, this week, I would have to say my One Cool Thing is the fantasy that I might be able to spend the next five years of my life telling the story of The Last Tycoon.

John: Ah-ha!

Billy: I know that sounds like a shameless plug. I don’t mean it that way, I really do feel that way. You know, it’s a story that means something to me, it’s not just about the contrast between the fantasy of Hollywood and the reality of Hollywood. It’s about why we need that fantasy. Why does it have that hold on us that it does? You know, every character in that show, they are chasing a dream of one kind or another and it has an absolute vice-like hold on them. What is that thing and why is it so powerful? And why is it by the way powerful out there in the public as well. That’s a story I feel I’ve had a career that has prepared me to tell.

John: That’s fantastic.

Billy: And the idea of getting the privilege of doing that, that would be something very special.

John: That would be very cool. You must listen to You Must Remember This, the Karina Longworth podcast.

Billy: Everyone tells me I have to listen to it.

John: So, you would love this podcast because it is exactly in your alley. In some ways, you know, it is so much your thing that it might become like weirdly overwhelmingly sort of too much. It’s like, you know, I’m sure like professional football players like don’t like want to go, you know, play football on Xbox but it is remarkably sort of what your show is and Craig Mazin actually plays Louis B. Mayer in the podcast.

Billy: You’re kidding me.

John: Karina has him do the voice of Louis B. Mayer.

Billy: Oh, my god.

John: Yeah. I have two tiny bits of follow up before we wrap up.

Billy: Yeah.

John: First off, the Scriptnotes 250-episode USB drives which is all 250 first episodes of the show plus all the bonus episodes, those are finally now available, so you can find those at johnaugust.com.

Billy: Oh great.

John: We’ll give you one of those.

Billy: Thank you.

John: Yeah, you can catch up all the back episodes you missed.

Billy: Thank you.

John: And also last week Craig’s One Cool Thing was about Sunspring which was this short film written by a computer. Basically it was this computing-learning program that like took a bunch sci-films and boiled them down and sort of like generated original plot and dialogue based on that. It was very cool, you should check it out, but I’d also say that —

Billy: It’s the scariest thing I’ve ever heard in my life, but okay.

John: Yeah, we’ll send you a link to that so you can see what that turned out to be. I will say that, if you are a person who’s researching sort of language processing or sort computer learning and you would like a big codex of people talking, we actually have all the transcripts for Scriptnotes very conveniently, we’ve had to sort of put them all together in one archive. So you have me and Craig talking and it’s all in text. So, if you are a researcher, a legit researcher who actually does this not just like, “I’d like all the text,” email us and we can send you a link to that because it could be very interesting that you can build a Craig-bot and John-bot and they can have a conversation.

Billy: But I would say in particular to miss the actual inflection of Mazin’s voice, I think you’d be losing half of the richness.

John: Oh, I agree.

Billy: Of his words.

John: Absolutely, like you don’t even listen to the show so you don’t know his sexy Craig character which is so horrifying. No computer will ever duplicate that.

Billy: [laughs] One thing about Craig Mazin that I want to share with you. When I really got to know him, it was because I went on the WGA screen credits committee which he was co-chairing with Robert King.

John: Yes, those are two strong personalities.

Billy: Okay, so I go into my first meeting of this committee and, you know, I don’t know how many committees I’m on in the Guild, it’s too many. But this is one. And it had to be something I cared a lot about because we’ve all been through arbitrations and I thought we could help make the process better. And in fact, we did. But in that first meeting, Robert King resigned from the committee, which it turns out he does every meeting. I didn’t know that. But there was so much fighting and screaming and craziness going back and forth and some of it was happening via Skype because there were people on the committee who were in New York at that time.

So the meeting ended and I went up to Mazin and I said, “How the hell do I get off this committee?” And he said in a pine box.

John: [laughs]

Billy: [laughs] That’s Craig.

John: Very good. As always, our show is produced Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. This is where Craig would usually do his “hey, eh” about these things two guys.

Billy: [laughs]

John: If you have a question for me or for Craig, I am on Twitter @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Billy Ray, are you on Twitter?

Billy: I am now.

John: What’s your Twitter handle?

Billy: Sony made me get a Twitter handle.

John: Fantastic.

Billy: So I have to tweet.

John: Right.

Billy: It’s @wmr_ray.

John: All right. There’ll be a link to all of these Twitter handles including Billy’s, but you should tweet him after you watch his show on Amazon and tell him how much you enjoyed it.

Billy: Please do.

John: Our outro this week is by Fantastic Negrito. It’s from his new album Last Days of Oakland. It’s a song called The Worst, because it’s about money and power which is fantastic. Malcolm Spellman, a frequent guest on our show, is one of the people who is helping to push Fantastic Negrito out into the world. He is doing a heroes’ job. It is our job to help you know about the music of Fantastic Negrito. And we’ll be back next week and Craig will be healthy and here. Billy Ray, thank you so much for being on the show.

Billy: Oh, my god, this was really a pleasure. Can I do it again?

John: Sure.

Billy: Great.

John: Bye.

Links:

• Billy Ray on Wikipedia, IMDb and Twitter
• The Last Tycoon pilot is available now on Amazon Prime Video
• F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon
• Shattered Glass on Wikipedia
• Secret in Their Eyes and STX Entertainment on Wikipedia
• The Producers Guild of America
• How Much Everyone Working On a $200 Million Movie Earns from Vanity Fair
• Wired on how World of Warcraft changed blockbusters forever
• Fin-syn on Wikipedia
• Under the Dome and TV’s New Ad-less Ways to Make Cash from Vulture
• Scriptnotes, 246, in which John and Craig discuss WGA Amendment 1
• TV Tropes on Mary Sues, and “Too Good To Be True”: 150 Years Of Mary Sue by Pat Pflieger
• You Must Remember This podcast
• 250-episode Scriptnotes USB drives are now available for purchase from the John August Store
• Email us if you want to build John and Craig bots
• Outro by Fantastic Negrito (send us yours!)