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: This is Episode 651 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we’ll do a live edit of a chapter for the forthcoming Scriptnotes book and answer a bunch of listener questions that have stacked up. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, card games. We’ve talked a lot on the show about word games and role-playing games, but I have no idea how Craig feels about poker and the like.

Craig: Woohoo.

John: Woohoo. But now, Craig, we can finally reveal what you’ve been up to, because people have been writing in to say, “Where the hell is Craig? It’s been four weeks since Craig has been on the show.”

Craig: Where is Craig?

John: Where is Craig? I think we can say this. We can’t say everything now, but we can say you were cast on this next season of Survivor, and so you’ve been off on an island in Fiji. I obviously can’t tell how you did, but wow, Craig, I’m so impressed.

Craig: Got voted off first. Did I just ruin the show? There is nothing less likely than me being on Survivor. Maybe Love Island. That might be slightly less likely.

John: I bring this up because Jon Lovett, who’s the host of Lovett or Leave It, a show that you were on, he went on Survivor, and that was crazy.

Craig: Wait, he did the whole thing?

John: He did the whole thing. He disappeared off the face of podcasting. It was like, where the hell’s Jon Lovett? Matt Rogers, who had filled in for you one time before, was filling in for him. Everybody was filling in for him.

Craig: Wow.

John: They revealed, oh, he’s on Survivor.

Craig: Wow. I had no idea. My new neighbor, because I live near you now, and my across-the-street neighbor is Jon Favreau, not the actor director, but the podcaster, Pod Save America guy. He didn’t mention this. Was it a secret?

John: It wasn’t a secret that he was on it. It was a secret that he was going on it. But once it was revealed that he was, basically, once he showed up in a promo for the new season on the Survivor season finale, everyone was like, “Oh my god, that’s Jon Lovett.” And so then the cat was out of the bag.

Craig: Just to be clear, he wasn’t on the run of the season? He just appeared once?

John: No, he’s going to be on an upcoming season of Survivor. He was gone for four weeks to be on Survivor, just like you were gone for four weeks. Apparently, that’s the official canon explanation of what Craig’s been up to.

Craig: We’re getting there.

John: You’ve been busy making a TV show. You’re making a different TV show.

Craig: Making a different TV show.

John: Honestly, just the same way that people get voted off of Survivor, not every cast member is going to survive your season of The Last of Us. That’s no spoilers. I suspect that’s going to happen, because it’s a show where bad things do happen to people.

Craig: If anybody watched the first season, they know that death is in the air. People are going to die. Of course people are going to die. We killed almost everyone in Season 1. We really did.

John: Absolutely. If you want to think the time jump, yes, that really did kill almost everybody.

Craig: That killed really almost everybody. Then of the remaining people, anyone that we featured, whose name we gave you, there’s a decent chance they’d die.

John: The clock starts ticking the minute they have a name. Craig, since you’ve been gone for a minute, I want to catch you up on what’s happened on the podcast since you’ve been gone, because I know you don’t listen to the show.

Craig: True.

John: Last week, Mike Schur came back on.

Craig: Great.

John: Mike Schur was fantastic, so good.

Craig: Terrific.

John: We talked a bit about locking pages and color revisions and that stuff, because he just finished a show for Netflix. We did all that. It never really occurred to him that he could just say no. But I want to keep this ball rolling in terms of just saying no, because you brought up before, maybe your next season you just won’t do those things anymore.

Craig: I won’t. Interestingly, one of our first ADs, Paul Domick, listens to the show. He listened. He knows everything. He knows.

John: He tells you what happened [crosstalk 00:03:45].

Craig: He tells me the things I said, which I forget. He said, “You want to unlock pages?” I’m like, “Yeah.” We had a conversation. Basically, the upshot was yeah, there’s really no reason to keep pages locked anymore, and there are a ton of reasons to keep them not locked. As long as the scene numbers stay locked, there is no reason.

I’m not sure there is a reason even to assign colors to revisions at this point. Revision 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Just do levels. This way, you don’t have to come around to double color or something. You just go, “Oh, we’re at Revision Level 28.”

John: I think we can accept that locking pages and color revisions were a very clever solution for the issues that were a problem 30 years ago. They’re not the solution we need right now.

Craig: Brilliant solution, actually. I remember thinking, “Oh, this is so smart. Instead of having to print everything, we just take these two.” Yeah, we’re done with that. It’s over.

John: What I would propose is, if you are a showrunner who is thinking about stopping locked pages and stopping color revisions, write in to us and let us know what you’re thinking and what your concerns are, or if you are a person who is responsible for production, so in feature films, the line producer, the first AD who is hearing this and excited or terrified, write in to let us know. What are we not thinking about? I want to make sure this momentum keeps building so other people feel like maybe we can stop this silly thing that we’re doing.

Craig: We are stopping. I’m stopping. I’m just saying, it’s going to happen. I didn’t even realize that until this moment while we were talking that revisions in everything else are enumerated. Revisions for cuts, for visual effects shots, “Oh, we’re on V219.” Scripts should just simply be Draft 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and so on. Why would we not?

John: You know what else is enumerated, Craig?

Craig: What?

John: The literal slate that claps in front of a take.

Craig: That is enumerated. There’s time code on it. There are scene numbers on it. Everything has numbers. It is true that we assign letters sometimes.

John: We use some letters. It’s true.

Craig: But nobody else does colors. Nobody, period, the end. It was only because of different colored pages. That it. It’s over. We’re killing it. This is now what I do. Killing that.

John: Part of our conversation about this idea of moving past locked pages and color revisions was really about this notion, like, there needs to be a central source of truth, like, what is it the hell that we’re shooting?

John in Chicago wrote in with his experience working locations in Chicago. “In locations, we are responsible for informing production, the location, the public, and the police and the government of our parameters. One can easily see how a lack of centralized information puts us in a precarious position. The amount of time I spent hounding departments for exact information is incalculable. But more nefarious is the general disorganization, such as, no one told us that we were using simulated gunfire at 1:00 a.m. in the most dangerous neighborhood in America. People who actively use disorganization to avoid us knowing what we are doing, thus putting the crew and public in real danger, while knowing it is me, not them, who is responsible for the repercussions. In an industry so competitive, one major instance like this can make all the difference. My advice to producers with an assistant is to have them take minutes at all meetings, pack them up into single documents sorted by filming day, and distribute daily to departments.”

Craig: I’m a little puzzled by this, I gotta say. John in Chicago is suggesting this as if this isn’t the standard operating procedure for everything and always has been. We have production meetings. In movies there’s a big production meeting, but there are tons of meetings for prep. The ADs will go through the script scene by scene with all the departments. Everyone will ask their questions. Everything like, for instance, gunfire and things like that are printed on the call sheet, especially when we’re dealing with firearms, blanks, cold guns, hot weapons, etc, all of this is documented at length across multiple, multiple meetings. I’m not sure what production John is working on, but yikes.

John: This feels like a yikes to me. My guess is it’s not one of the Chicago shows, not one of the ongoing series, because they would have a whole protocol for this. My guess is that it’s some indie feature or something else that was shooting there and did not have its act together. I want to be sympathetic to John in Chicago. This was a bad situation. It puts you at risk, can put other people at risk. It should’ve never happened. That said, I feel like an ongoing production would recognize this and address it. This is the kind of thing, it would absolutely be on the call sheet.

Craig: Yeah. There would’ve been a meeting where the locations department would’ve been present, along with special effects, along with props. Props typically handles weapons. It would be understood that there would be gunfire. Locations would be aware. They would take their own notes. It is not up to the producer’s assistant to document things for the locations department.

I do not know what’s going on here, other than to say I don’t want anyone listening to this to think, oh, that’s how it goes, just people running around going, “Wait, we’re shooting stuff tonight?” No, that is not how that works.

John: That’s not how it works. Also, while you were gone, Simon Rich came on the show.

Craig: Brilliant.

John: Simon Rich, delightful, so funny. We talked about his new book that’s coming out or actually will be out by now. We talked about really the differences between a story/sketch and a movie or a novel, because a person who’s writing short stories, he has to have a premise and development and a conclusion. The amount of energy going into it is just a very different thing. It’s a very different structure behind the comedic premise. It was a really good conversation.

Craig: He’s a brilliant writer, super funny. I’m sorry I missed him.

John: Aline was here, which is a “this kind of scene,” where we did farewell scenes, which was nice. It was also just looking at the whole range of farewell scenes and whether characters know it’s the farewell at the start of the scene. So often, one character knows it’s the farewell and the other character’s learning about it in the course of it. Characters are also aware that they’re in a farewell scene moment and that there are expectations built upon movies that they’ve seen themselves that they know they’re in. It’s a meta situation whenever you have a farewell.

Craig: No question. That’s an interesting discussion. I’m sorry I missed that one.

John: Also, we finally launched AlphaBirds. This is a game you played a bazillion years ago.

Craig: Oh my goodness. In Austin, with you, I believe.

John: Absolutely. Back then, it might’ve still been called Sparrow, but it’s now called AlphaBirds. We got the full trademark on it. If people want to play it, you can buy a copy at alphabirdsgame.com. We’re also on Amazon. We’re finally out there in the world, which feels really good. The final version of it is in a nice little box. It has little wooden tokens that you move on your cards. It turned out really well. In a world of Wordle and Scrabble and other things like that, it’s just a good game to play with friends. I will send you a copy up to Vancouver so you can play it with people on breaks.

Craig: That’s fantastic. I love that. I’m looking at your website. By the way, the artwork and the style of the name is adorable and catchy. Well done there.

John: Thanks.

Craig: This looks like a great game for an airplane. This looks like such a good airplane game. Very cool. Exciting.

John: Things have been getting done. Let’s do a little bit of other follow-up here. In Pay Up Hollywood over the course of years, we’ve talked about the need for assistants and support staff to be paid a living wage, pushing up to $20 an hour, $25 an hour. There’s reasons why it’s impossible to actually live in Los Angeles at California minimum wage. Hilary wrote in with her experience, which is unfortunately not what we want to see.

Drew Marquardt: Hilary writes, “I’ve been working as an assistant for two years now, and I’m also a screenwriter. I finally purchased a Premium membership, and upon diving into the glorious backlog of episodes, I was enraptured by your discussion of assistant pay. Unfortunately, not much has changed. I can tell you both that I am still not making $20 an hour as a busy, dedicated, hardworking literary management assistant. I love my boss, and I like a ton of parts of my job, but it’s quite harrowing that I’m stuck at $19 an hour as I see my friends at some other agencies in other roles taking $23 an hour or more.

“I started at $17 an hour two years ago when I came on board, and there were assistants making less than me who had been there for years. Now the tides have changed, and newer assistants are making more than me. We’re lucky that our company pays for our health care. I know of another management company that offers their assistants either a higher hourly rate with no insurance, or insurance with a lower rate. At a year or so, it’s traditional to get a bump, but there are other rules and politics that have kept me from asking for more. The higher-ups take note and do look down on you for asking for said raise. I have to say, I still consider myself one of the lucky ones, since my boss is so wonderful, but god, it sucks being paid so poorly.”

John: Oy. Hilary, this is not exactly advice, but I want to contextualize what you’re feeling. To be frustrated at being paid $19 an hour is genuine and real. You should be paid more than that. The fact that you’re getting health insurance is a really good thing. I’m sure that’s what you’re weighing is how much per hour is that health insurance worth for you, is it worth searching for a different job that could pay more per hour but wouldn’t give you health insurance.

If you’re 19 years old, that’s great. You’re at this period in time where you can live a ramen lifestyle. But the point we’ve been trying to make with Pay Up Hollywood throughout is that this shouldn’t be survival work. This should be the first rung of the ladder that lets you start climbing. It doesn’t feel like you’re being paid enough to start climbing.

Craig: Hilary, I’m glad you’re listening. Now I feel bad that you’re paying $5 a month. I’m glad that you listen to those back-episodes. We never thought that we could impact Hollywood in such a way that every employer would hit the $20. I think we were saying $20 an hour was what we were going for. But I think a nearly direct result of our work was that the large agencies did increase their rates. Yes, when you know the other agency’s $23-plus an hour, that’s a sign that things can change, because that was not the case, what, four years ago, five years ago. The fact that assistants that are coming on now are getting higher rates, also a sign that there’s positive change.

I’m a little concerned that you find yourself in a strange nook. You’re a little circumspect about it. It’s hard to tell why you just mentioned politics and other rules.

But I think it’s fair to say, “My boss is wonderful, but also I should get paid more.” If your boss really is wonderful, she or he will stick up for you. Here’s the deal. If you’re making $19 an hour and you’re looking for another $4 an hour, and you’re working let’s say 60 hours a week, that is not an amount of money that is going to send your employer into red ink. It’s just not. I think it’s a fair thing, especially because you’re hurting. It’s not even just financially hurting, Hilary. I can tell that you’re also just – this doesn’t feel fair. That’s going to impact also how you approach the job and how you work there.

You can say you’re one of the lucky ones, but I don’t think we should say, “Hey, my boss is a good person. That makes me lucky.” That’s supposed to be standard.

John: Agreed. It’s a good reminder though, so I thank her for writing in, because it’s a reminder that things can improve. It doesn’t mean it improves for everyone. It doesn’t mean improves across the board for all parties.

Craig: That’s right, especially, as is always the case, the smaller employers are always going to be the harder ones to get. There’s downsides to working for large mega corporations like CAA or something like that. But on the plus side of the large mega corporations, they probably do pay a bit more than some of the mom-and-pop shops.

John: Hilary was looking through the back catalog. We’re doing the Scriptnotes book now, which is a look through well over 13 years of Scriptnotes, and putting it in book form. Craig, at some point when you are done shooting your show, you will get the whole manuscript to read through and do your edits upon. I thought I might take advantage of your intention at this moment to just do a little bit of a live edit of one of the chapters, so we can talk through how we go from transcripts to actual prose and sentences that make sense in a book. I’m going to share a screen here. This is going to be your first time looking at the chapter.

This chapter comes from a couple different episodes we’ve talked about. In the book, we’ll probably link in a little sidebar to what episodes this came from. This I believe was a topic that you really wanted to focus on, because one of your frustrations has been that so often we talk about character as if they are a person by themselves, when really it’s their relationship that we care about. I would say maybe do you want to start reading and then we’ll stop at some point where you have a thought?

Craig: Sure. “Harry and Sally. Buzz and Woody. Watson and Holmes. Indiana Jones may have his name in the title, but it’s his relationship with his dad that carries us through the third film.”

Oh, right there, for instance, I’d probably say, “Indiana Jones may have his name in the third Raiders title.” Oh, I see, “carries us through the third film.” I see. There’s something odd about two names, two names, two names, then one name all of a sudden.

John: Oh yeah, I see that.

Craig: “A dozen different things can convince us to sit down and watch something, but we stay in our seats for the relationship we see on screen.” Then there’s a quote from me. Should I read the quote?

John: Read your quote.

Craig: “So often when I skim through screenwriting books, they talk about characters and plot. They don’t talk about relationships. I don’t care about character at all. I only care about relationships, which encompasses character.” Continue. I was just wondering, should it be “which encompass character.”

John: It’s one of the continuous choices Drew and Chris and I are making as we’re going through even our direct quotes, because you say things differently than you would actually write them in. “Which encompass character.”

Craig: Yeah, I think so. You can think of a relationships as a singular concept and then it’s okay. That’s probably what I was doing when I was talking. But this feels a little neater.

“Studio executives make this mistake.” I would say, “Studio executives make a mistake.” “Studio executives make a mistake when they talk about character arcs. I hate talking about character arcs. The only arcs I’m interested in are relationship arcs.”

John: Do you stand by that sentence?

Craig: I do. Then it continues off the quote. “Consider the word chemistry and how often we apply it to the actors performing these relationships.” I don’t know if you can perform a relationship.

John: Embodying these relationships?

Craig: Engaging in these relationships?

John: Yeah, but it’s-

Craig: But they are performing it, aren’t they?

John: But they are performing it.

Craig: How about this: “How often we apply it to the actors bringing these relationships to the screen.”

John: “To life on screen.”

Craig: Yeah. “When chemistry is there, what do we… ” Oh, that should be, “How do we describe it?” “How do we describe it? Sparks. We feel that energy bouncing back and forth between them. And when it’s not there, we feel nothing. Chemistry is fundamentally the combination of elements that by themselves would be relatively stable. When you put them together, they create something volatile and new. That’s what we’re really talking about in relationships, that fresh substance created when characters are interacting and challenging each other.”

That’s pretty good. Not all chemicals put together create something volatile, but I think they certainly create something new. If you were stuck with actual commenting – it depends on how far you want to extend the metaphor. I get what’s going on here. I think maybe some chemistry teachers in high school might get a little grouchy, but that’s fine.

“Writers are emotional chemists. We select and combine characters and scenes, then apply heat to create something exciting, unstable, and potentially explosive.”

Maybe I would add in heat “or pressure.”

John: “Then apply heat and pressure to create something new.”

Craig: Yeah, “and pressure,” yeah, because sometimes it’s heat and sometimes things are squeezing them. That’s good.

John: You’re feeling a good launch into the relationships chapter?

Craig: Yeah, this feels great. Should I finish with the rest of the page?

John: Sure.

Craig: The next thing says, “Establishing relationships. How do you get the audience up to speed on relationships that began before the movie started? Literally, how do you let the audience know the way these two people are related?” I don’t know if we need the word “literally.”

John: Unfortunately, without the “literally,” we’re starting two sentences with “How.” You see that stack there?

Craig: Mm-hmm. Let’s fix that. “How do you get the audience up to speed on relationships that began before the movie started? What methods do you use to let the audience know the way these two people are related? Are they siblings? Are they friends? Are they a couple? Are they ex-spouses?” Should we say “partners”? Is that more inclusive?

John: Spouses can be partners too.

Craig: I’m with you.

John: It’s not gender-specific.

Craig: Couple of married guys are like spouses.

John: Spouses.

Craig: “We have this wonderful opportunity when a movie begins. The audience is engaged. They’re leaning forward in their seat. They haven’t yet decided that this movie stinks. This is your invitation.” That sounds like it’s an invitation for us as opposed to the audience.

John: It’s an invitation for the screenwriter to have fun.

Craig: “This is your opportunity,” I think, “to have fun, to tease, or misdirect what relationships are.” Probably “the relationships,” right? “And then reveal them in exciting ways. Too often, as we read through Three Page Challenges, it feels like the screenwriter is working hard to establish relationships when it could be done more effectively visually.” It’s always tough when you got two L-Ys next to each other. “Could’ve been done more effectively-”

John: “Through visuals.”

Craig: “Visuals” is always tough. Maybe, “When it could’ve been done better visually.”

John: “When it could be done better visually.” That?

Craig: Yes. That’s parallel, “When it could be done better visually.” “Consider the following snapshot. You see four people seated at a table in an airport restaurant. They’re all African American. There’s a woman who is 35 and putting in eyedrops. There’s a man who is 40, a little overweight, who is trying to get a six-year-old boy to stay in his seat. There is a girl who is nine and playing a game on her phone. Your default assumption is this is a family.” I would probably put a “that” instead of a comma.

“Your default assumption is that this is a family. They’re traveling someplace. That’s the mom, that’s the dad, those are the kids. That visual gave you all that stuff for free. Therefore, you can spend your time in dialogue doing interesting things with those characters, rather than establishing that they’re a family.” Maybe the word “now” instead of “therefore.”

“You don’t need to have a character say ‘Mom’ or ‘Son’ or any of those annoying things that hit us over the head.” This is going to be a very good book, I think.

John: I think this is going to be a really great book. What I wanted to talk for a minute is how we go from you and me having a conversation to something that feels like a synthesis of both of our voices, because there’s moments in here which I read as your voice and a little bit more my voice, but we’ve tried to find an effective middle ground. Things like, “They haven’t yet decided this movie stinks,” that was your voice. That’s literally taken from transcripts, from you. But on the whole, I think it feels like a synthesis of both of us talking.

Craig: I agree. This feels informative. I can see here that this book is not trying to do what the transcripts do or what the podcast does, which is for two people to relate to folks at home in a personal way through conversation. This is a proper book that has, we’ll call, a neutral teacher voice. This is good. This is a good book.

John: I think it’s going to be a good book. Even as you’re going through your edits there, what you’re finding is those moments that feel like that’s a little bit too much spoken John or Craig and not quite the written version of John and Craig. That’s really been some of the slog of this.

This is a chapter that I’ve been poking at for two or three days to get – not full-day sessions – but to get stuff feeling right. Chris and Drew and Megana have done a heroic job assembling stuff together in a flow and a document, but then actually getting it to read like us is a more challenging thing. That’s been most of my job here.

Craig: You guys are doing great. Finally, there’ll be a good book on screenwriting.

John: I’m excited. This draft that we’re talking through right now is going in to the editor on Monday. Then we’ll get notes back from that. There’ll be more revisions. But the goal at this point is August 2025 for a book in people’s hands.

Craig: That’s amazing. What you’re saying is Christmas 2025. What a great gift.

John: Part of the reason why we picked August 2025 is it’s a good time for this kind of book, but we also believed that it’s going to be a time when you’re going to be available to promote it and I should also be available to promote it, because we would love for people to actually buy the book.

Craig: I will indeed be available to promote it. What do we do to promote a book? I’ve never done that.

John: We do some live events. We’ll probably do a live show where people can buy a ticket and they get a book as part of that. We might do a live show in Los Angeles. We might do one in New York. We’ll probably guest on a whole bunch of other people’s podcasts. We’ll do stuff to get it out that will try to seat it with the right smart people, who will review it and give us good reviews.

One of the things we talked about off mic is who are we going to get to write the introductory chapter, the little preface from some other famous person. We’ll find who that person will be.

Craig: I had some ideas.

John: We’ll continue to discuss. I don’t want to spoil them on the air when we don’t get James Cameron to do it.

Craig: He’s not going to do it.

John: I don’t think he’s going to do it. We haven’t even gotten him on the show yet, so that’d be hard.

Craig: He’s busy.

John: He’s busy. The ideal person would be somebody who was like, “Oh, wow, they got that person,” but also who would listen to the show or at least know about the show. Craig, how often do people that you talk to in professional settings, they’re like, “Oh, it’s so weird hearing you in person, because I listen to you on Scriptnotes,” or, “I love Scriptnotes.” Do you get that a lot?

Craig: I do. I’ve said this many times. Every time it happens, I’m shocked. I will be forever shocked. People generally seem to now know my face a little bit better.

John: Yeah, also because when you do the after-the-episode interview things, that’s how people recognize you.

Craig: Yeah. Now I’m quasi on TV for a little bit out of the year, so people are familiar with my face now. I never know how to take that. It’s probably not good. You remember when everyone was wearing a mask, we would just emotionally, mentally, visually fill in a blandly handsome or beautiful face?

John: Yes, totally.

Craig: Then you would see somebody without their mask and go, “What the hell?” I feel like that’s probably…

John: Your mental auto-complete was much better than the actual text underneath that mask.

Craig: I think people’s mind-image impression of you and me, it’s probably a disappointment when they meet us.

John: I’m more often recognized by voice in those situations. We’ll be out at breakfast someplace, and I’ll be talking with Mike, and he will clock somebody who will turn in their seat like, “What?” He’s like, “This person’s coming over.” They’ve heard my voice, and they’re coming over to say hi, which is fine and lovely, all good.

But then I’ve also been on a lot of Zooms lately with executives who I’m meeting for the first time. It’s like, “Oh, it’s just so weird seeing a face with a voice.” Like, “Yeah, there’s actually a human being here. Now, I’m going to pitch you a movie. Please buy my movie.”

Craig: It would be nice if the romanticization of you carries over and they just start writing some checks. You like my voice so much, wait until you see my writing.

John: I think I did actually say on a pitch this last week, I was like, “Yeah, and now I’m going to use that voice to tell you a story.”

Craig: Nice.

John: Let’s answer some listener questions that will probably be in the sequel book.

Craig: Great.

John: We’ll start with Carly, who asked a question about personal stories.

Drew: Carly writes, “I have recently started writing a series based on my own life events. It’s not exactly the same but includes some similar themes and such. I’ve run into the problem of who the other characters will be in this series. I’m finding it a creative struggle to make up brand new characters and relationship dynamics. Alternatively, if I choose the similar-to-my-life route, I worry I may accidentally paint real people in bad lights. I feel very inspired to write this series, but this debate has been getting in the way of my brain. Do you have any insights?”

John: Craig, always valid to write about your own experience. But your own experience doesn’t involve people around you, and so you have to make choices about how much you’re going to portray them in any story that you’re telling.

Craig: Carly, you’re right to be a bit terrified here, because you have two obligations. You have an obligation to the people that are around you. You also have an obligation to the truth. Truth is obviously something that goes through a process when you’re fictionalizing something. But you’re still going to have to see somebody, look them in the eyes, or if they are no longer with us, look their children in the eyes, and say, “I did this.” It is very tricky to do.

I think everybody’s followed the hoopla and controversy surrounding the Netflix series Baby Reindeer. We especially now have to be concerned about this, because back in the day, you’d put a movie out, “Oh, it was real,” and then 20 years later somebody would write an article in The Atlantic saying, “Not really.” 20 minutes after something becomes popular, people are investigating.

It is a very tricky thing to do. I would start with the question, am I sure I need to do this? You may be inspired to do this, but do I need to do this? Am I maybe giving this extra weight because I feel like I know a lot of it already because I’ve lived it, as opposed to trying to do something else? I would weigh it very carefully. Then if you commit, commit.

John: We’ve had some great guests on previous episodes who I think are worth going back to revisit. I’m thinking about Mike Birbiglia, Alex Edelman, both talking about how they use their own stuff that actually really genuinely happened to them in their writing, in their work, and yet they’re also careful to keep their own real-life people out of their stories to the degree it makes sense to. They’re also up front about the fact that they are re-framing certain events to have them make narrative sense. They’re not trying to be documentarians. They’re not trying to fact-check every little thing. What they’re really doing is they’re telling a story that is inspired by things that actually happened to them. They’re not trying to literally do journalism. That’s the balance you need to find there.

What is it about this story that’s inspiring you to tell it? Is that central character, your protagonist, really you or is it a person who is like you? If it’s not literally you or a person like you, likely the people around that central character are not going to be the same people that existed in your real life. Just give yourself permission to let go of some of those anchoring points of, this is exactly how it really happened.

Craig: It sounds like Carly’s struggling with that very issue. She’s struggling to figure out how to fill in those gaps where she removes the reality of what occurred and replaces it with, as she says, brand new characters and relationship dynamics. It can very quickly turn into this strange fish with feathers. It’s real. It’s not real. It’s partly real life. People will be able to tell if there are seams between what feels effortless and true and what feels contrived.

All I can say is I commiserate. I’ve thought about writing some things that are connected to my personal experience. I’ve had the same debate in my brain. This is a natural thing. I would think twice, measure quintuply, and cut once.

John: Corey has a question about cold opens.

Drew: “Over the weekend, I saw two summer movies. Both had me thinking of how features use cold opens. One starts with a five-minute montage establishing the protagonist’s family history and life-changing moment that defines her character flaw to be overcome. The other took an hour before the lead actress appeared on screen to drive the film to its narrative end. This left me thinking, how much backstory is too much versus what’s essential to get to the film’s main story? Also, are there any screenwriting tools or tips or tricks to make sure we’re not bloating our story with unnecessary context or visuals or what have you?”

Craig: John, it’s an interesting question Corey’s asking, because there’s two aspects. One is, where should the backstory go? The second question is, how much is too much, and how do we slip that stuff in there in a way that feels informative and valuable?

John: I wonder if Corey is mistaking backstory for really the first act. It says, “It took one hour before the lead actress appeared on screen to draw the film to it’s narrative end.” I doubt there was really a full hour of backstory. It was a first act that took place in the past, but it was the same character moving forward, and that was the nature of how it works.

At a certain point though, you have made a contract with your audience that this is the story I’m telling you, that this is not just the past, but it’s actually the question I’m proposing to you. This is the thing the character’s going after. You’re saying this is the engine of the movie, and you’ve revealed that to the audience.

It’s not going to be generally an hour into your movie. It’s going to be pretty quick in, because we’ve talked so much on the podcast about how you have those first 10 minutes or so where the audience will go with you anywhere. But at a certain point they’re going to say, “I don’t know what’s happening here. I don’t know how to watch this movie.” Too much backstory that feels like it’s not connected to a forward-moving plot, it’ll become a problem.

Craig: I agree with you. I think Corey is conflating a couple of things here. There’s background, which is different than backstory. Background is, okay, what is the context of this person’s life? The first 10 minutes of a movie, traditionally, you meet the character in their normal life. You get their background. Shrek begins with an understanding that he’s an ogre, he was driven away, he lives in a swamp, he’s alone, everybody hates him. That’s background. Backstory to me is something that is told to you after you already know somebody, and then they reveal something about their past that recontextualizes for you who they are right now. That’s very different.

Screenwriting tools, tips, and tricks. The number one tool, tip, and trick I have for you is to make it interesting. If it is interesting, then people will like it. It will be particularly interesting as backstory if it makes us see somebody in a very different way. I wrote an episode of Mythic Quest called Backstory.

John: Yes, and starred in it.

Craig: I don’t know if I would say starred in it, but I had a small part. But the purpose of that episode, Rob McElhenney wanted to tell a story about a character who is part of the comic cast, one of the broadest characters they had. That’s an interesting idea, to take somebody that really does work as a full joke character who doesn’t have dramatic stories built around them, and then go, “Let’s actually tell a dramatic story about this person.”

We have a running joke about how he’s an alcoholic. We have a running joke about how he lives in the office, in a closet. We have a running joke about how he’s basically an emotional wreck and lonely. Now, what if we took that all seriously? We certainly have this endless joke that he’s a pompous writer who is obsessed with giving characters backstory in a hacky way.

That inspired the idea of saying, okay, what if we told the story, so the next time you see that character, as ridiculous and over the top as he is, you’ll see a human being there. That’s interesting. It’s less interesting to get backstory on people that you know plenty about.

John: Agreed. I think one of the reasons why backstory gets a bad name sometimes is that, done poorly, it has just stopped the forward momentum of the plot and the story. It’s just like, okay, we’re going to take a pause here and just watch this thing and then come back to where we left off. If it has not changed the dynamics of the present tense, there’s really no reason for that. It’s not serving a purpose in your story.

Craig: That’s right. Typically, backstories are relayed from one person to another. It’s not done as a little mini movie. You’re on a date. You’re walking around. You say, “I never told you about blah da da da,” and that’s relayed. But there are times where the backstory is kept from other characters and is only relayed to us in the audience. None of the characters on Mythic Quest were there to see the backstory of that character. We were. We have a privileged view at that point forward. We feel a little bit more sympathetic or empathetic with that character than everybody else around them.

John: We have a question from Football Dummy about sharing credit.

Craig: Great name.

Drew: Football Dummy writes, “I recently pitched a show to a major studio, and they want to move forward with developing and purchasing the show. The idea is one I conceived about a decade ago and have been nurturing it over the years. But at a certain point, I recognized that I needed a potential collaborator due to the fact that it is partially set in the world of football, which I am not well versed in. But the other aspect of the show is loosely based on personal experience, which is really the heart of the show.

“My collaborator has been great, and he asked if I’d be willing to share a co-created by credit with him. The truth is the football beats of this pilot do need to be punched up. Should I share this credit with him? I’m having a hard time quantifying how a 10-year endeavor can be shared with someone who’s just been in the arena with me for a year. I’ll say that he has been instrumental as a producer in moving the show forward and aligning me with the studio to begin with.”

John: Fundamentally here, the question is, at what point is someone helping you out versus being a fully ampersanded collaborator that they deserve co-created credit with you on this thing. There’s no magic formula. This isn’t even an arbitration-able kind of situation. This is what is the nature of your relationship? Are you boyfriend and girlfriend? Are you going to get married? What is this thing between the two of you? You have to make a decision. They have to make a decision. You have to figure out together, is this a partnership you want to fully engage in to make this into a show?

Craig: There are a lot of ways to go about this, but boils down to basically are you the sort of person who’s going to go along to get along, or are you the sort of person who’s like, “No, that doesn’t feel quite fair.” The problem that you have, Football Dummy, is that you do need help. You can’t do it on your own. You cannot create the show on your own, because you’re missing quite a bit of knowledge and insight about something essential to it. It’s set in the world of football.

Let’s use the example of Ted Lasso. If you have an idea about a positive person coming into a workplace and using the power of positivity to inspire people around him, even though the traditional environment in those situations is someone abusive and demanding, and you want to set it in the world of soccer, but you don’t know anything about soccer, it’s probable that, yeah, the person that comes to help you set it in the world of soccer is co-creating it with you.

It’s important to understand, co-creator is a credit that’s there and then it’s just sort of there. But it is not an ongoing writing credit. The scripts will need to be written. There is going to be an executive producer or many who are running the show. Also, as is the case with almost every television show, one or two people ultimately will be recognized as the prime movers of the show, regardless of the credits. For instance, if I were to say, “Who are the co-creators of Silicon Valley?” you’d probably say Mike Judge and Alec Berg.

John: Berg, yeah.

Craig: But they’re not. The co-creators of Silicon Valley are listed as Mike Judge, John Altschuler, and Dave Krinsky. But shortly after the act of co-creation, John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky I think left, and Alec Berg joined. Alec and Mike ran that show, wrote lots of episodes, directed lots of episodes from that point forward. It’s a credit that indicates the moment of birth.

I’m not sure in your situation it’s worth going to war over this. Feels like this person is a good collaborator. They are helping. The fact that you worked on it for 10 years – you said, “It’s an idea I conceived about a decade ago,” and then you say “a 10-year endeavor.” It’s not quite the same, is it? Then also, “someone who’s just been in the arena with me for one year.” One year’s a lot. Also, this isn’t a quantity game. It’s a quality game. My instinct would be to be generous here.

John: I think generous is the right instinct here. We don’t have all the information about who this collaborator is. If this person is not really a writer but is actually just a person who knows a bunch about football but cannot write a scene, that gives me a little bit more pause. The fact that Football Dummy pitched and set up this show without this person does make it a little more cleanly his or hers, but I don’t know. I think you have to really look at what is going to be the right choice for you and for this show. My instinct is to probably be generous. If you think this person has been helpful not just to this point, but helpful going forward. A question from Daniel.

Drew: Daniel writes, “As someone who’s just had their first taste of professional success writing a feature for Lifetime, I’m fearful of mismanaging my next moves and stalling out or getting trapped in a loop of financing my own short films in between non-union romantic comedy rewrites. How can I capitalize on this minor inertia I’ve generated for myself?”

Craig: This is an interesting one, John, because Daniel’s defining a loop that I didn’t quite know was a thing. But I guess the bigger issue is he’s done a feature for Lifetime. How do you convert? How do you capitalize?

John: Listen, you’ve had something made. You’ve had something produced. It was for Lifetime, but still, it counts. Your name is on a screen someplace. When you’ve just written scripts and nothing’s been produced, it’s like, can my work even stick to the screen? There’s this weird sense of am I even producible? You now know you’re producible.

It sounds like you’ve made short films yourself. You presumably have reps. Talk to them about what rooms they think they can get you into, who you can be meeting with so you can get that next job and the next job and the next job, in places that can be beyond the Lifetime. Get into the Netflixes. Get into the other places, because having some success, a little bit of heat is really good. This is a moment to capitalize on it.

Craig: I would suggest, Daniel, that it’s important to stop doing non-union work. First of all, you really aren’t allowed to. Pretty sure. So stop. If you are in the Writers Guild, you are not allowed to do non-union writing in areas that the Writers Guild covers. If you want to go work on an animated film, sure, the Writers Guild doesn’t have full jurisdiction over stuff like that. But romantic comedies that are made for television or film, if they’re being done here in the United States, you in fact are definitely not allowed, per the Writers Guild working rules, to do that stuff. Step 1, don’t work on non-WGA stuff. It’s bad for you, and it will undermine your professional status.

John: Absolutely. We’re assuming, Daniel, that you are an American writer working on a US-based production. If you’re Irish and you did an Irish movie for Lifetime, different rules.

Craig: Different deal. Then the way to capitalize, I guess, on this minor inertia is to use the opportunity now to show people some of the things you’ve written. Hopefully, you’ve written some other things.

If you need to pay your bills, as almost everyone does it would probably be better – hang on, Daniel, get ready – to write another feature for Lifetime than it would be to finance your own short films or work on non-union stuff. Financing short films is a fantastic way of lighting somebody on fire. We’ve talked about the short film thing before. If you can make a little short film and it costs you, I don’t know, 1,000 bucks, and you happen to have 1,000 bucks, great. Spending real money of your own on a short film, that’s bad.

John: I think you have to look at anybody that’s spending on a short film as like, “This is money I’m spending that I know I’m not going to get back, in the pursuit of some greater goal.” If your greater goal is to show that I can direct, then that’s a valid goal. But as a way to show my writing ability, no.

Craig: I agree. Also, Daniel, again, hang on. You wrote one Lifetime movie. The next one will be better. There is no shame in any Guild-covered work, as far as I’m concerned. Your craft will get better. You probably learned a lot seeing your first work on screen. It will make you a better writer. Convert that. Make some money. While you’re making some Lifetime money, use the fact that you’re a working writer now with representatives, that are probably pleased with the fact that you’re generating income for them as well, to try and get some of your own work through the door or get some pitches in or get some open writing assignment meetings and just work it.

John: My friend Rex writes children’s books. He writes middle-grade and some young adult fiction. One of the things I admire so much about Rex is he has his list of here are the 30 things, here are my 30 ideas, here are the 30 books that I want to write. He will, with his reps, go out and figure out homes for each one of them. He’s always stacked up with four books he needs to write. But he gets some written and he gets them in, there’s always something under his fingers.

That maybe needs to be what Daniel is thinking about is, what are the movies that I want to be writing? Who are the places I should be meeting with and just going in there and systematically finding homes for those movies. Because if you have written a thing for Lifetime, Lifetime seems like its own brand, but Netflix has a whole department that is just that. If you get in there and you’re talking with them, you have five things to pitch them. Find the one that they want to hire you to do, and do it for them. You may not want to do this for the rest of your life, but getting a few things under your belt to show that you can make stuff is going to be a huge service for yourself.

Craig: Agreed. Agreed.

John: Let’s take one last question. Zach in Toronto.

Drew: Zach in Toronto writes, “Have you ever written a script where you strongly disliked your protagonist or one of the major characters of the piece?”

John: Craig, I can think of one example of this. It’s a movie I wrote for the wrong reasons. I wrote it just out of pure anger about some career stuff that was happening and as a middle finger to certain forces around me. I really did not like the central hero. I was trying to prove that I can write in a genre that I was not being considered for. I guess I did dislike the protagonist. Spoiler, it didn’t turn out great.

Craig: Was it me?

John: Yeah, I think it was. Actually, it was all about how Craig disappears off the grid for a while, then he comes back, yes.

Craig: That MF-er. I have to say, Zach, I don’t think I have. I have written some characters that are awful. Thinking, for instance, of the character of David in Season 1 of The Last of Us, who’s just horrible.

It seems to me the only way to write any character to be engaging and interesting and challenging is for that character to believe in what they’re doing and saying. They need to make an argument. They need to make a good argument, at least an argument that feels correct to them. They need to be committed. That means as I occupy that space, I turn certain values off and I turn certain values on.

There are people out there that are wearing MAGA hats and stuff – a lot of them. I don’t like that. I’m not like them. I don’t want to be like them. But I can write that character. I could get in their head, and I could turn things off and turn things on. Of course, as a human being, I know that in almost all cases, when they put the MAGA hat on, they’re not doing so out of this dry political analysis. They’re doing so out of emotional response, needs, and drives. That’s universal to us all. How does the fear in you turn into putting a MAGA hat on? It’s not even a question of like or dislike your protagonist or the antagonist or any character. You have to be that person when you’re writing them. You just have to be them. It’s funny; I’m not a good actor. I’m fine.

John: You’re a fine actor.

Craig: I’m fine. No one’s nominating me for anything. I watch good actors all day long up here on our show. I’m watching Pedro Pascal. I’m watching Bella Ramsey do what they do. I’m watching Kaitlyn Dever. They become people in an incredibly thorough way, in an incredibly believable way. I can’t do that like them. But I can do it with words. That’s where I do it.

I would say, Zach, if you strongly dislike your protagonist, I think you may have not gotten under the hood of why they are who they are and why they want what they want.

John: I also wonder, why are you writing this? It’s such a fundamental question. Why did you choose to write this thing with this character you don’t want to be with? Because you’re going to be with that person for months and months, you’ve got to learn to find what’s interesting about that, watching and having a space with that character.

It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article that I was going to save for a How Would This Be a Movie, but there’s not a story there. But it’s really interesting. This is Max Bearak writing for New York Times. Headline is “AI Needs Copper. It Just Helped Find Millions of Tons of It.” It’s about this new deposit of copper ore that they were able to find in Zambia. It’s a mile underground. Copper is, of course, essential for making all the electronic stuff that we need to make a lot more of; for batteries, for computers, for everything else we need to do. The article talks through how they’re actually tracking muons, these subatomic particles that pass right through the earth. But by looking at how they’re displaced, you can find big sources of underground metals, including copper.

We crap on AI, I think reasonably, for all the crappy things it does. That’s generative AI that is taking potentially work of writers and artists for their own purposes. But the truth is, AI can be really good at finding patterns in things that humans can’t spot. This AI system can find these weird fluctuations that reveal, oh, there must be a giant pile of copper a mile underground, and now we will find ways to dig it out.

All that said, this is in Zambia, which is one of the poorest nations on earth. It’s a real question, how do people of Zambia benefit from this giant amount of copper that was found in their land. It embodies all of the issues of the future and the past and colonialism, all in one nice little bundle here. The article scratches at it, but it’s just a fascinating space I think to look at this moment that we’re in.

Craig: First of all, I guess, a tip of a hat to this company’s name, KoBold.

John: That’s the other reason I want to talk to you about this. KoBold, of course, is the mining character, the little mining monsters in Dungeons and Dragons lore.

Craig: These guys are clearly dorks, although we knew that already, because they were using AI to track muons to find copper, but certainly our kind of dorks.

I think the use of AI here feels like an extension of the kind of analysis that we first were able to do when the original computers were set up. People were running punch cards into computers to get things done faster that in theory could be done if you had a billion years. That makes sense to me.

It’s really interesting to see – just looking at the images in this Times article, you are immediately struck by what’s going on here, which feels like an all too familiar story. There are fresh-faced White people looking at computers and screens and whiteboards, and then there are Black people who are lugging stuff around. They don’t look like they own anything, nor do they look like they’re going to benefit at all.

The state of Zambia owns 20 percent of this mine. But African governments are not generally known for their stability, nor their service to the people that they govern. The article is questioning how that 20 percent ownership – 20 percent of what they’re saying could be billions of dollars – is in fact going to benefit the people of Zambia, or will it merely benefit the people that run the government of Zambia, or at least the state mining company. If past is prologue, this is not going to go well. But maybe, fingers crossed, it could work well for the people of Zambia. It is a very poor nation.

John: For a different project, I was having to do some research on copper mines. The copper mines are fascinating, because it’s not the surface strip mine thing that we’re used to. It’s a very, very deep shaft. It doesn’t actually require that many people. There’s a lot of automation behind it. It’s not going to be a great work-maker for the people of Zambia. It’s really going to be about the ore coming out and the money coming out that’s going to be benefiting the country, rather than people with jobs.

Craig: It literally would be, “Okay, we’re going to use all this money to build better schools, better hospitals, raise the wage, the minimum wage for people who do work, and just improve quality of life.” It wouldn’t take much in a country like Zambia to do that. I hope that the people that run KoBold are, like so many of us who play DnD, kind.

John: Craig, a little sidebar here, KoBold, which is the name of this company but is also the little lizardy dragon-worshiping creatures in Dungeons and Dragons, you realize that KoBold is actually the same word as “goblin”? They’re actually etymologically the same way. In certain countries it became goblins, and in certain countries it became kobold.

Craig: I only knew this because you’ve told me this. You’ve told me this before. That’s fascinating. It’s also a little upsetting, because kobolds and goblins are not the same.

John: They’re so different. They’re little creatures, but they’re very distinct in DnD lore.

Craig: Different stat blocks, guys.

John: Different stat blocks.

Craig: Different stat blocks, linguists. But it makes total sense.

John: What do you got for a One Cool Thing?

Craig: John, every now and then, I do a little One Cool Thing for my diabetes friends out there. Protein bars are often disgusting.

John: They can be.

Craig: But they’re very useful. The useful kinds for people who are trying to manage their blood sugar are the kinds that are, of course, low in sugar. Those are the ones that taste the absolute worst. There is one brand – and I don’t know if this is in the US, but it’s definitely here in Canada – that is fantastic, I think. I think the brand is Love…

John: Love Good Fats, I think.

Craig: This bar that I’m looking at is Love Good Protein. It’s cookie dough flavor. It’s actually really good. You can hear the wrapper going crinkle, crinkle.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: When we look at the nutritional information, in one bar there are 21 carbohydrates, but the good news is that two of those carbs are fiber, 16 of those carbs are sugar alcohols, which are altered sugar molecules that we cannot digest. There are two grams of sugar in this bar, which is negligible. It actually tastes good. I don’t know how they do it. Sometimes when I eat these things, I think we’re going to find out later. But this one is-

John: The input is delightful; the output is not.

Craig: I haven’t had stomach problems. It’s really good.

John: Good.

Craig: If you’re watching your carbs for any reason, Love Good Protein, cookie dough flavor, outstanding.

John: Sounds great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Tim Englehard. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@dev.johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions.

You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and hats. They’re all great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. If you want to get a copy of AlphaBirds, you’ll find that at alphabirdsgame.com.

You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on card games. Craig, it’s a pleasure having you back.

Craig: So good to be here.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, so this topic, in a roundabout way, came because I finally got a Steam Deck, which you had recommended a Steam Deck, because there was a Steam game I wanted to play, that I could not play on the Mac, or I couldn’t play on the Mac without terrible black magic stuff that I did not want to do to my Macintosh. I got a Steam Deck so I could play on it.

It’s actually a card game that I’m playing on Steam called Balatro. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it yet. It is a fun card game that is taking the hands of poker but using them in a very different way. You’re trying to build all these poker hands and collect points from it. It’s a very smartly done game. But I realized that you and I have not talked about card games ever. We play DnD every week, but other people play poker, they play hearts and rummy and euchre. What is your history with card games?

Craig: When I was a kid, I would play gin rummy with my grandmother. That was her game. She played that with my grandfather. They lived with us. As far as I could tell, my grandparents spent their retirement just playing that one game. They would keep track of who won. I don’t know what for. I don’t know what the ultimate point was. But it was so much fun to go down there and play, particularly with my grandmother, who would get so flustered when she lost. It was fantastic. Grew up playing that.

When the poker craze hit, I started playing poker, and I played a lot. There was a game with some friends. We played every week. I would play online. Mostly hold ‘em, but also variants. Omaha hi-lo is a fun one.

I also learned to play bridge. My wife taught me. Then we would play with her parents, who were extraordinarily good bridge players. In their day, they actually were part of some circuit. They were just frighteningly good. I would usually pair with her dad, and she would pair with her mom, and then off we would go. I got super into bridge for a while.

If I go to a casino, usually I’m going to want to be social and play blackjack. But I’ve gone and sat down at a hold ‘em table and played. It’s fun.

John: I grew up playing Casino with my mom, which is a pretty simple card game. It’s not trick taking, but you’re taking what’s on the table. We would play also gin or cribbage, another fun building up to fives kind of game.

Then a certain point I learned to play pinochle. I would play it with my mom, my dad, my grandmother, my nana when she was around, my brother. Pinochle’s a great game. I’m not quite clear that we played the rules everybody else – I guess we did play the rules everybody else played, but I would look it up in books and it would seem vastly different. It wasn’t until the pandemic that I would play pinochle – Mike and I played pinochle with my mom online – and realized this is actually exactly the game that we played before. Pinochle I’d highly recommend to people who have not tried it before. It’s a very smart game.

In junior high we would play hearts sometimes at lunch. Hearts is another fun trick-taking game.

Craig: I love hearts.

John: Love some hearts.

Craig: Spades?

John: Spades I didn’t know so well, but we loved hearts. Then in college, for the first time, I learned euchre, which is a very Midwestern thing. Do you even know what euchre is?

Craig: I do, although I don’t think I’ve ever played it. But it’s one of those forerunner games like whist.

John: Absolutely. This coming week we’re actually having a euchre party at a friend’s house. Megana will be joining us, because also, as an Ohioan, she was indoctrinated into the cult of euchre. We’ll be playing that with her.

Craig: Is that the game that her mom plays with all the aunties?

John: I don’t think so. I think it’s probably a different game. But I’ll check with her to see what the game is that she plays with her-

Craig: Maybe they play mahjong. It might be mahjong.

John: They might play mahjong. Here, as we talk, I’m going to text Megana and see what game they play. I’ve never played bridge. My parents played bridge growing up. I always admired what that was like, because they would have bridge tables, card tables they would set up, and then they would have six different couples over. It was the most social I ever saw my parents be. Other than Friday night bowling, it was the most I saw them hang out with other adults.

Craig: I think you would love bridge. It’s a little intimidating at first, but it really shouldn’t be. In its own way, it’s a bit like chess, in that, okay, this does this, this does this, this does this. Great. Then you start playing and you start going, “Okay. Okay, I’m starting to see the interesting ways this works.” I think you would be very good at it. You have the right mind for it.

John: Absolutely. I know basically in bidding you’re trying to communicate information to your partner with a very strict set of rules behind it.

Craig: There are conventions.

John: There are conventions. That’s right.

Craig: There are certain bids that mean exactly what they mean, and then there are certain bids that mean I need you to bid something back that tells me information. There are contrived bids that don’t mean anything, other than to say, “How many aces do you have? How many kings do you have?”

The fun in bridge really is at some point you’re doing some kind of mind reading with your partner, that plus a little bit of luck, and then careful management of where you start. When you’re in charge of the board, and you’re going to play a card, do I play it from my hand or do I play it from my partner’s hand, if they’re the dummy?

It doesn’t take long to learn. The other thing about bridge which is similar to blackjack is you got a cheat sheet. You can have a cheat sheet. There are these place mats they make for bridge, where you can just go, “Okay, here’s how I analyze my hand. Here’s how I bid, based on this or this or this. Here’s what their response means. Here’s what I should do then,” which helps a lot.

John: I texted Megana as we were talking. She says gin rummy.

Craig: Oh, gin rummy, so what I was playing with my grandma. There you go.

John: Global sensation. Craig, always nice to have you back.

Craig: Great to be back. Thanks, John.

John: Thanks.

Links:

• AlphaBirds
• #PayUpHollywood
• Scriptnotes Episode 427 – The New One with Mike Birbiglia and Scriptnotes Episode 640 – Can You Believe It?
• A.I. Needs Copper. It Just Helped to Find Millions of Tons of It. by Max Bearak for the New York Times
• Love Good Protein
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram, X and Mastodon
• Outro by Tim Englehard (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@dev.johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 650 – wow – of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you rewrite without overwriting. We’ll discuss tips and techniques for not bogging down your script. We’ll also look at a bunch of items in the news, including the sale of Paramount and a potential IATSE deal. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll discuss the Recording Industry Association of America’s lawsuits against the AI music generators like Suno and Udio about copyright infringement and how this might relate to folks who write movies and TV.

To help us do this, we welcome back a very, very special guest, the creator of The Good Place, and all-around good guy, Mr. Mike Schur. Mike Schur, welcome back.

Mike Schur: I’m honored to be here for number 650. Nice round number.

John: Round numbers are our specialty here. We just love when we hit them. Chris McQuarrie always comes back for every 200 episodes, which is exactly how much you want Christopher McQuarrie. No more, no less. I could have you back every 50 episodes, it’d be great. Basically a yearly visit.

Mike: Could I come back every 650th episode?

John: Good lord, that would be a lot. Episode 1300, we’ll book you.

Mike: And 1950.

John: Drew, make a note now. Somebody will contact us down the road saying, “Hey, you said that Mike Schur would be back on Episode 1300.” We’ll try to hold to it.

Mike: God, that’s so many years away.

John: That’s 12 years away. That’s a lot.

Mike: I’ll be ready.

John: You’ll be ready. Let’s get into some news here. Mr. Mike Schur, you were on the WGA negotiating committee with me. We talked through a lot about all the stuff in the WGA strike and of course, SAG-AFTRA strike. IATSE was the next big union up. It looks like they may have reached a deal.

Mike: Yes. This is very exciting. Tentative congratulations to IATSE leadership and also all IATSE members. This was the last big piece of the Hollywood union labor negotiations that had to be completed. There’s a lot of consternation about whether or not there would be another strike at a fragile time in the business. It seems like they have reached an agreement, which is wonderful. I hope all IATSE members are happy with what they’ve negotiated.

This is an especially tricky one, trickier even than SAG or the Writers Guild or the Directors Guild, in part because IATSE itself is comprised of so many different sorts of people. It’s an all-purpose trade craft union. It represents a lot of different folks who do a lot of different jobs on movie sets and TV sets and stuff like that. To find an agreement that satisfies everyone is a very difficult task.

I don’t know if you’ve talked to folks about it. Anecdotally, the folks that I’ve talked to seem to generally be pretty happy with what was achieved. Is that your experience too?

John: That is my experience. As we’re recording this just yesterday, the full details came out, so I don’t know that people had a lot of time to parse every little bit of things. But let’s talk through some of the top line stuff that they’ve told us.

If you’re on a set and you’re working more than 15 elapsed hours, you move into triple time. This is an effort to combat the endless days of production. It’s a bigger penalty if you move into 15 hours. Now, there’s been some push back saying 15 hours, it still means that you’re working crews 15 hours. That’s still the problem. There was a desire for a hard cap on the hours, and they didn’t get that. But triple time should incentivize, hopefully, productions to stop at a certain sane hour.

There’s new protections around artificial intelligence. Obviously, that’s a thing we’re very focused on in the WGA negotiations. There’s new language that says that employees cannot be required to provide AI prompts in a manner that would displace a covered employee. That sounds complicated. But it was always going to be complicated with such a broad cross section of members who were doing this stuff. The AI concerns of an editor are not the same as the AI concerns of costume designer or a production artist. They’re all doing very different things. As a general solution, maybe this is helpful. Have you talked to any folks about the AI concerns here?

Mike: Yes. Your point is well taken, because just as one example, I’m finishing a show now that I did for Netflix. It’ll be on in November, I think. I was talking to one of our sound engineers. We’ve recorded a scene at Pier 39 in San Francisco, famous location in San Francisco where sea lions come and they hang out on these docks. It’s very cute. The problem with sea lions when they gather en masse is that they bark a lot and they make recording dialogue extremely difficult.

We looked at the first version of the scene, and it was nearly inaudible. Two actors are talking, and all you hear is “arr arr arr arr” in the background. I was like, “Oh my god, we’re screwed. We’ll never be able to use this.” The sound engineer, he’s like, “Give me four hours,” and sent it back, and it was completely audible and the sea lions were gone. I said, “How did that happen?” He was like, “We have tools for that now.” Those tools essentially are AI tools. It’s like this extremely powerful computerized program that finds the wave form of a certain sound, combs through the track, and removes it.

There are aspects of AI that these folks use in different capacities in different jobs that are wonderful, that are beneficial to productions, that help everybody. They help actors. They help writers. They help productions. Then there are ones that are meant to essentially replace those people. The idea of trying to legislate at this moment in a time a rule or a series of rules that does nothing but help and doesn’t hurt is a very tall order.

Again, we are just now going over the details of this agreement, but it appears that what IATSE has done is not that different from what we did in the WGA, which is to say we tried to put up some guardrails, we tried to put up some fences that loosely captured what it was that we were trying to preserve, and largely kept out what we were trying to keep out.

In places where it’s impossible to get granular and really pin down exactly what we’re talking about, we just reserved our right to continue to fight in the future. That is a huge key. That was a huge key for us in the WGA negotiations was that the staff did so much work in crafting language that essentially reserved our rights to continue to try to legislate what we thought needed to be legislated. It appears to me, at least from first glance, that that’s what IATSE did as well. Is that your read on the situation?

John: It is. Earlier this summer, I was at a conference in Italy, and I was on a panel talking about AI. I was the lone voice, weirdly, who had to defend, like, okay, we need to make sure that the AI that’s coming online is being used by workers rather than to replace workers. It sounds like that what’s they’re trying to go for here. Your example with the sea lions is exactly that. We want to make sure that this is a technology that’s being used in the furtherance of a person’s career and profession rather than to replace that person or profession.

One of the things I try to always underline when I talk about AI things is I try not to use the word tool, because tool is a positive term. No one is anti-hammer. But tools can be used as weapons. That’s why I always try to make sure that I’m saying technology, because technology is a more neutral term, and recognize that you can use technologies for good means or for bad means.

As people who are negotiating on behalf of workers, you want to make sure these technologies are being used by the workers in the furtherance of their job. It feels like that was the spirit of these AI protections. Again, language similar to the WGA, in the sense of they cannot require you to use AI technologies, and they may prohibit you from using some of these AI technologies, because they’re concerned about things like copyright infringement. Just like as we get into in our Bonus Segment, that’s going to be a real worry.

If one of their concerns is going to be like, okay, what if a director or a production designer uses one of these technologies to generate some image? That image ends up becoming ruled as being infringing on copyright. Yikes. There’s all these concerns they have too.

Mike: For the record, I am deeply anti-hammer. Nothing good has ever happened with a use of hammer.

John: Mike, your position as being team screwdriver is really well known. This is where it’s gonna go from here on out. Like all negotiations, they got wage increases, so percentage increases on the basic rates that go up. Theirs matched pretty close to what SAG-AFTRA got, which is great. It’s a bigger bump in the first year, smaller in the next two years. They got additional money for their health plan, which is important. Their streaming residuals, it’s important to understand, doesn’t go to the person itself. It goes to fund the underlying health fund, which is important. Keep them solvent.

Mike: I have heard a couple folks say that there was some ongoing debate and maybe a little bit of dissatisfaction – and I hope I’m not speaking out of turn here – regarding specific details of the VFX editors wing of IATSE. This is a big thing, because obviously, there are entire movies now that are essentially being made through the hard work and labor of visual effects editors.

I don’t think I can speak authoritatively about what exactly they got and what they didn’t get. That I would assume though will be something that is revisited in pretty much every IATSE negotiation going forward, because I don’t think that VFX editing is going to get less important over time in the movie industry specifically. But again, in the handful of folks that I’ve spoken to who are covered by IATSE, some costume designers, some hair and makeup folks, some editors, people generally seem to be pleased with the gains that were made, which is wonderful. I hope that that’s not a non-representative sample of the membership. I hope that most of the folks…

Like in anything else in the WGA, negotiations, for example, in SAG, there are always going to be some folks who end up feeling like they didn’t quite get what everybody else got. I think that’s doubly or triply so for IATSE, because again, you’re talking about grip and craft service and art directors and costumers and all sorts – studio teachers is one thing – groups covered by IATSE at all of these different individual important parts of the engine that drives the locomotive.

The thing that people should understand about IATSE is these groups of people are all individually vital to a production. It’s very hard to imagine making – take your pick – Bridgerton without costume designers. That’s not possible. It’s very hard to imagine making the Three Body Problem without video effects designers. Individually, all of these people are absolutely vital. It’s just that they are all collected into one union, and so it’s going to be very difficult at any moment for IATSE to reach an agreement that every group of people feels that their needs are addressed.

But importantly, it feels like this was a big step forward for them, especially compared to previous negotiations they’ve had that have left I think more people dissatisfied with the result than are currently dissatisfied with this one. Congrats to them again.

John: There are people out there who are trying to sell the narrative that the WGA strike and the SAG-AFTRA strike were basically giant wealth transfers from hardworking writers and industry people to Netflix and to AI, and that what should’ve happened is that the WGA should’ve partnered up with the studios to take on the AI companies, and it was idiotic to have ever gone on strike. Your opinion there, Mike?

Mike: A couple things. First of all, I think IATSE would be the first to say that a large reason that they got what they got was because of the strikes, because the WGA and SAG drew a line in the sand and said we’re not going to just take these minimal gains in the basic salaries of our employees, but rather, we’re going to fundamentally try to shift the way that studios think about compensating the labor who work for them. It’s a completely false read to say, “Look, IATSE did it. Why couldn’t you guys do it?” Because IATSE did it, because we did it. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is partnering with the studios to do anything is a pipe dream. It’s not like the studios are like, “Guys, please, I beg you, come partner with us to take on AI companies.” It’s quite the opposite. The studios are deeply interested in AI, for a number of reasons, some sinister and some not sinister, which I think you and I both learned.

I would say for those of you listening out there, John was the AI expert, so to speak, of the WGA negotiation committee. You were the guy I think who understood what AI was and how it was positioned to affect us as a union, and all unions, better than anybody. We all took our lead from you. I was very grateful for that. I think you educated a lot of us over the course of many months about what exactly AI was and what it was trying to do.

AI went from a thing – when we first got together to discuss our agenda, it was 23rd on the list of things that we felt was important. There were a lot more big, famous problems. So-called mini rooms were a huge problem in television. Free work was a huge problem for screenwriters. Minimum guarantees of duration was a huge thing for late-night and variety writers. Then 23rd on the list was like, hey, we should do something about AI. By the time I’d say we were deep into negotiations, right around the time when negotiations fell apart, most of us in the committee had come around to a position of like, oh, wait, AI is maybe the most important thing, or at least it’s a top five issue I think facing labor.

Part of the reason for that was that we came to realize through those negotiations how much it mattered to the studios. That was something that I don’t think we totally understood. But we were told flatly, “Stay away from this. Guys, don’t try to do anything with AI. That’s a nonstarter.” When your adversary in negotiations says don’t try to do anything with this issue, that’s how you know it’s a really important issue.

The idea that it is as simple as labor unions saying to studios, their employers, “Hey, let’s wrap our arms around each other and take on this other adversary,” that’s absurd. That’s such a facile way to try to understand the role that AI is playing in the world and in Hollywood in particular. That’s not an option.

It’s not an option to go to the studios and say, “Look, I know that we’re on opposite sides of a lot of issues here, but why don’t we team up and fight these companies against their advancements in AI,” because the studios are deeply interested and invested, financially and otherwise, in what AI might be able to do for them. The whole point of our approach in the AI negotiations was to say, “Hey, if we don’t do something about this, this is what will replace us.” Anyone who believes that it was as simple as us teaming up with studios to fight the advancement of artificial intelligence does not understand what is happening in the world right now.

John: I’m not quite sure what the name for the logical fallacy is. It’s not a straw man, but it’s things should just magically be different, basically like, “Oh, you guys should’ve done this thing, which I don’t know if it’s completely impossible or not, but that’s what you should’ve done.” It’s like, “Oh, okay, great, we’ll do that thing that’s actually not even a possible thing. That’s what we will do.”

Mike: It is at least adjacent to the content of a straw man, because you’re basically just saying, “Why didn’t you just do X.” It’s like, because X is not possible. That’s why. The one thing that I will say about the Writers Guild staff, which is a tireless group of people who are largely anonymous even to WGA members, but whose only purpose in life is to protect writers and help writers get what they deserve, is that in the years of study that went into the negotiation in 2023, they did not miss something as simple as, “What if we team up with the studios to [inaudible 00:16:49] AI?” I promise you that in all of the if-then scenarios that they worked out, that was not available to us as an option. Saying, “Why didn’t you just do that?” is very silly.

John: Absolutely. I think the other criticism I’ve seen about the WGA and “the strike was a mistake” was about this was a terrible time to go on strike, because the industry was going through a change and transition, and so you just made it easier for them to make the cuts that they wanted to make, and the idea that you’ve hastened the inevitable thing that was going to happen. You can’t hasten inevitability. It’s a weird place to land. It’s like, yes, things are going through a transition, and that’s probably why it’s very important to take a strong stand and defend what you can.

Mike: Of course. The number of things that contributed to what has happened to the industry in the last five years is large. It’s a large number of things. COVID, for example.

John: Oh, god.

Mike: If anything hastened anything, it was COVID, in my opinion. There was an out-of-control land grab that was going on where these companies were all starting their own streamers and they were all making this transition from over-the-air broadcasting or cable broadcasting to try owning all of their content in perpetuity in every territory on earth. In order to do that, they had to build up their libraries. In order to build up their libraries, they had to throw a ton of money at a ton of people to try to make a ton of stuff very quickly. Then COVID hit, and it really shook everything up.

One person I remember I talked to, a high-placed industry type person I was talking to right after COVID started, and I said, “What does this mean for us?” This person said, “It means Netflix wins forever.” The reason that they said that was that Netflix had a lead in the race. Disney Plus was racing to try to catch up. But in the race to be essentially everyone’s number one option for entertainment, they had such a huge lead. Then when COVID hit and everyone had to stay in their houses, the other companies hadn’t yet been able to get to the point where they had the same amount of stuff that Netflix did. As a result, everyone watched Netflix, and Netflix became even more indispensable to people’s lives.

That one thing that no union had control over led to the companies really taking a step back and saying, “Okay, wait a second. Are we gonna ever be able to beat them? Should we even be trying to beat them? Can we find another niche or another avenue that we can drive down in terms of making our in-house streamer more viable or more attractive to people?” Not to mention the fact that also coinciding with that was all production stopped for a very long time.

The same kind of person who says, “Why didn’t you just partner with the studios in order to team up against AI?” would probably say something like, “Why didn’t you guys just stop COVID? If you had just stopped COVID, then-”

John: 100 percent.

Mike: There were things that were completely out of anyone’s control, including the studios and networks. The correction that was happening was already deep into its history by the time that we were even able to begin negotiating. It’s also worth saying that a lot of the stuff that the Guild tried to do and accomplished in 2023, our original plan was to do it in 2020. We went into that negotiation saying, “Look, things are already changing. Because they’re already changing and we see where this is going, we need to make some moves here.” Then COVID hit. You can’t go on strike when you’re not allowed to leave your house and collect in large areas and have big discussions when there’s no cure for a very deadly disease that everyone’s afraid of.

Both WGA and I think SAG did what we did as quickly and efficiently as we possibly could have. It is not the case that there was an easy alternative to what we did either temporally or structurally. I was and will always be very proud of the union and proud of SAG and all of the other unions that fought for what we fought for. I don’t believe that there was any strategic mistake in what we did, in terms of when we did it or how we did it.

There’s always going to be naysayers or folks who look back and go, “You just should’ve done this.” But the number of moving parts here, the number of variables and difficult-to-control aspects of this situation that we all found ourselves in was so numerous, so enormous, that any reading of what we did, what all of the unions did, that falls into the category of like, “Why didn’t you just do X?” is just facile and unhelpful.

John: 100 percent. I think as listeners are hearing people give the, “They should’ve just,” or, “This was a mistake,” or, “This cost the industry X number of dollars,” just remember these were necessary things that were done in the time they needed to be done, and the gains that were made last for the next 50 years. Yes, there was short-term pain, and the pain was real. The strike lasted as long as it did because the studios chose to not come to the table and make a deal. That doesn’t mean you can just magically wave it all away. There were real, important things to be fighting for. Most of the things we fought for, we ended up winning.

Mike: That’s another important part of it, I think, is part of those arguments amount to, “Here’s how much you lost, and here’s how long it will take you to recoup it.” That is a classic management-side argument for why unions should never strike is, “You’re just gonna lose this and it’s gonna take you that long to get it back.” That’s true. That’s 100 percent true. The point is if you don’t give up those contemporary gains for future gains, that’s in some ways-

John: We would have no residuals. We would have no health plan. All of the things we have are-

Mike: All of the stuff we had were because people made short-term sacrifices for long-term gains. It’s a classic argument made by the folks who own stuff to the folks who don’t. That’s what they say is, “You’re just gonna lose all this money right now.”

I’m a big sports fan. I know folks who have worked in the management of sports unions. I talked to them a lot during the buildup to the strike and also during the strike about the similarities and differences. One of the things that I was told repeatedly was, one of the reasons it’s so hard, for example, for the NFL players union to go on strike is that NFL careers are so short. The average NFL career is a year and a half long. Guys wash out. They get hurt. They wash out of the league instantly. They’re always being replaced every year by younger guys because that sport is so brutal. A huge reason that it’s hard for them to have a massive labor action is that what you’re going to give up in terms of what you’re gonna have in the future, that could be literally the entirety of the earnings potential of a significant part of your union. It’s a much bigger problem.

It’s always a problem for a union. Always. The pain is real. The pain that was suffered by Writers Guild members was real. We knew it was real. We knew how serious it was. We thought about that probably more than anything else, I would say, while we were negotiating. But unlike NFL players, hopefully a writer’s career is more than one and a half years long, which is what it is in the NFL.

That was our job and the job of leadership was to weigh those things against each other, to say is it worth the pain, the real pain, the potential loss of apartments and houses or cars or people having to move or having to get other jobs? All that stuff that was very, very real and very painful, we’re weighing that now against what we want the union to get out of the next 25, 35, 50, 75 years. It’s a very difficult calculation to make. The Guild what not have done what it did unless we really felt like it was worth it.

John: In addition to sometimes calling for strikes, WGA also does things in between those periods, including going after people who violate the MBA. An announcement this past week that the WGA reached a settlement for a total of $3 million for 24 affected writers for CBS shows who were having writers doing writing work, covered Article 14 work, during times in which their writers’ rooms were officially closed.

This is a thing that the Guild does all the time. They’ve collected more than $100 million through enforcement of the contract over the past two and a half years. This is just another example of going after situations where writers come to the Guild and say, “Hey, they’re having me do this stuff. They’re saying it’s not covered work because the writers’ room’s closed.” The Guild won here.

Mike: I don’t understand why we didn’t just partner with the studios to get this money more easily.

John: Exactly. We could put up a phone call, say, “Hey, guys.”

Mike: “Guys.”

John: “You really should be paying them for this. You should be paying their weekly pay, their pension, their health, the parental leave contributions you owe. You should really be paying these things.”

Mike: I do a presentation every year at the Writers Guild Showrunners program, which is a wonderful program that helps people who are maybe just about to take over their first show or have recently become a showrunner for the first time. It amounts to just epigrammatic wisdom that has been passed to me from all of the people I’ve worked for and with over the years or spoken to.

One of the things that I like to say is that you need to think at all times when you’re a showrunner about to whom you are loyal. You have a loyalty to your show and the characters in that show and the writers who work with you and for you. You need to be loyal to the studio that’s paying you and the network that’s airing your show. But also, you need to be loyal to your union.

By the way, the point of this is sometimes those loyalties come into conflict in that moment of decision that you need to make about, “Where is my loyalty right now at this moment? Is it to my employees? To my studio? To my network?” Whatever.

The reason I add the union into the equation – there are many reasons, but one of them is decisions like this, because without maybe knowing it directly, or without closely following it, the union has your back all the time. It is constantly doing things like they just did, which is to say identifying places in which the studios have cheaped out, have tried to skirt the rules, have gone through the back door and are trying to get work out of you and your fellow writers that they’re not paying for.

I don’t even blame them. You don’t blame a snake in the wild for attacking its prey. That is just what it’s designed to do. These companies are designed. Their only loyalty is to their shareholders, really. They’re a capitalistic entity, like a company. Its only job is to figure out how to make more money and spend less money. They’re constantly probing and testing at the boundaries of what they’re contractually obligated to do, and figuring out ways to not spend money.

The union is the safeguard against that. That’s why we have a union is for things like this, where this staff put together this incredibly difficult presentation and arbitration case to say, “This is what they’ve done. This is why it’s not legal. This is how much they owe us.”

At the end of the day, it’s really wild. If you look at it, it’s one company – one of the many companies that employ writers – owed $3 million for this one thing. This is one aspect of the MBA that they were skirting, and it’s $3 million. $3 million for CBS, Paramount, whatever they are now, Skydance, I suppose, that’s a rounding error. That’s an accounting error on their annual report. But for the writers-

John: 24 affected writers. It’s not gonna divide evenly between them, but that’s serious money.

Mike: That’s serious money. That’s yearly income that makes an enormous difference in the lives of them and their children and their partners and their lives. Again, the reason that folks in this guild have to remember and keep in their brains that they are loyal to their union is because this is the function, the raison d’être of the union, is to find these places where writers are getting screwed and try to unscrew them. It’s really wonderful. Congratulations to the staff and the Guild in general.

John: These 24 affected writers first off may not have been aware that they were owed this money. But individually, they had no leverage to get this money. Their agencies weren’t gonna be able to get this money for them. Their managers couldn’t get this money for them. That’s the job of the union is to say, “Here’s the contract. This is the violation. Pay up.”

Mike: Yeah, and they did. The great thing about decisions like this, or the Bird Box decision, which was another huge win for the Guild in terms of money being denied screenwriters, is that now there’s precedent. Now, it becomes much easier to go to the other companies that are trying to pull similar shenanigans and say, “Listen, we know what you’re doing. We fought it once. Here’s what happened. Just don’t fight this. Don’t pretend like you’re not doing this. We know you’re doing it. Here’s how it played out. In the other case, save the money that you’re gonna give to your lawyers and just instead give that money to the writers like you should’ve the first time.”

John: Absolutely. You hinted at it, but the other big news of this past week is that Skydance has apparently purchased Paramount. The deal is so complicated. I’ve read a couple of explainers talking about how Skydance bought National Amusements, and based on voting shares and who has voting stock and non-voting stock, and there are three steps they have to go through. You have to close your eyes and turn around four times. But at the end of this, Skydance Corporation will in theory own Paramount, CBS, Viacom, which I think to me is really good news.

Of all the outcomes of this, I was happiest about this. I want to make sure that the Paramount brand stays. I want to make sure that not just the mountain logo but the idea of what Paramount is continues. It feels like this was the best way to see that happen.

Mike: I totally agree. Paramount is iconic in this town. It’s where Peewee Herman ended up in Peewee’s Big Adventure. It’s in Hollywood proper, which I think symbolically matters. It’s right on Melrose. Those gates are iconic.

John: Those gates in front of which you and I both picketed quite a lot. We had many conversations in front of the gates of Paramount.

Mike: We did. That was our home base during the strike. But I think more than symbolically important, this is important because among the many scenarios that we heard as possibilities were an extant studio buying Paramount and just folding it into – is Warner Bros gonna somehow borrow even more money and buy Paramount? Is Comcast gonna buy Paramount? Whatever.

The reason that that would have been worse is because consolidation is bad for labor. Consolidation means that there are fewer individual places who have the means and opportunity to buy scripts from screenwriters and from TV writers. Skydance, which has been their partner on some of their biggest movie franchises in their history, Top Gun and Transformers and-

John: Mission Impossible.

Mike: … Mission Impossible and stuff like that – the fact that Skydance is actually the company that’s buying them means that they stay an option, another option. It’s hard enough right now to sell anything, a TV show or a movie or anything. If Paramount had essentially been absorbed by one of the other places that buys stuff, that just means there’s one fewer place that buys stuff.

The independence of Paramount as a buyer and the installation of showbiz veteran types to run it would send the message of like, “We’re in the business of Hollywood. We are gonna keep buying stuff and making stuff.” That is only good for the writers and actors and directors and IATSE members who are hoping to have viable careers in the industry.

John: I’m excited to see what’s next. I’m excited to keep Paramount around as a company, as a brand, but also as a buyer, as you said, because it’s not a theoretical example. When Disney bought Fox, a bunch of people lost their jobs, but we also lost a major buyer. Yes, there are still things that are put out under the Fox brand. Great. But it’s not the same. We’ve lost a huge place to develop stuff.

Mike: You could argue that we lost more than one, because when Disney bought Fox, we lost Fox in general, but also Hulu became completely controlled by Disney-

John: Totally.

Mike: … where it hadn’t been before. I would have to think back, but I’m sure there were projects that I took out to the marketplace where I pitched individually to Disney, Fox, and Hulu, and then suddenly all three of those were one thing. You’re pitching just to Disney. If they want to buy it, they might say, “This is good for Fox network,” or, “This is good for Hulu,” or, “This is good for Disney Plus.” But it’s all one person. If that one company decided they didn’t want to buy it, it took three options off the table. That is nothing but bad.

John: I remember going back even further, there used to be a brand called Fox 2000. I remember projects which we pitched to Fox, Fox 2000, and Fox Searchlight. The fact that they’re all folded into one amorphous mass now is not good. The more buyers, the better.

Mike: Exactly. I’m happy, happy, happy that this worked out the way it did.

John: Drew, let’s have you hop on for a second, because I wanted you to talk about Weekend Read, because you are the person, along with Jonathan Wigdortz, who’s been assembling the scripts for people to read in Weekend Read. For folks who are not familiar with it, Weekend Read is the app our company makes for reading scripts on your phone. Makes it handy. But what you do, Drew, is pulling together a list of new scripts every week on a theme for people to read if they’ve not had a chance to read these scripts. Tell us about what you put into Weekend Read this week.

Drew Marquardt: This week’s theme is Frankenstein’s monster. I was thinking about all the different iterations of that myth or character. We have, of course, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Young Frankenstein, but also Edward Scissorhands and Poor Things and Ex Machina, Stranger Things, Rocky Horror, Weird Science, all that good stuff.

John: Fantastic. If people want to read these, Weekend Read is in app store. Just download it on your phone. Also works on iPad. You can take a look at all these scripts, which is great.

Drew, while we have you, last week on the show we asked if any of our listeners were experienced WordPress developers, because we were having a problem with the Scrippets plugin we use on johnaugust.com. Sometimes we want to put little short snippets of scripts in a blog post, and we developed this thing called Scrippets, which is no longer working within most recent versions. You guys are of course fantastic as always. We got, what, six or seven people write in to help us out.

Drew: Maybe more. Maybe a dozen.

John: We are good. We have solved the problem. Thank you to everybody who wrote in. You guys are the best. We have the plugin fixed. I want to thank again our tremendous listeners for getting that figured out.

Let’s do some more follow-up here. Back in Episode 646 we talked about script revisions. Drew, can you help us out with what our writer said here.

Drew: Unlocking the ADs wrote, “I’m producing an indie feature right now. As we’re shifting from blue pages to pink, lo and behold, the writer director did not lock the script pages when they made revisions over the weekend. So the second AD is kvetching, ‘In the production trailer, the pages won’t line up. Everyone’s gonna have to get a whole new script.’ I tried to broach the subject. ‘But aren’t the scene numbers still the same? Does it actually matter if the page numbers change? Who uses the actual page numbers?’ Needless to say, I got my head bitten off by the whole AD team, because it’s the way it’s done. However, I didn’t get an answer as to why it’s the way it’s done, and certainly no answer as to who uses the page numbers. If or when this comes up again, how can I approach this to try and convince some folks stuck in their way?”

John: Mike Schur, let me get you up to speed. When Craig was on the podcast most recently, we were talking about locked pages. Craig said that he is done with locked pages and that he believes that we should just stop doing that. For next season of The Last of Us, he says, “We’re not gonna lock pages anymore.” You just finished production. I assume you had locked pages. You were a traditional show. Tell us about that. I saw your reaction there when I said not lock pages. Tell me what you’re thinking.

Mike: I don’t know what it’s like in the movie world. In the TV world-

John: We lock pages in film too.

Mike: Right, but what I was gonna say is, I don’t know how you feel about it. I feel Craig here, because it’s basically this aspect of getting scripts to the set to be actually produced, where when you make a change, you end up with… Let’s say when you lock a script, you make a change. You add a back and forth in the middle of the scene. You end up with this weird thing where there’s one line and the rest of the page is completely blank.

John: With a giant Sharpie X across it to really show that it’s blank.

Mike: Yeah. It has always been a mystery to me of what the big advantage is. It has been explained to me before by ADs and by script coordinators. I have at various times been like, “Okay, yeah, I guess I understand what that means.” But it makes everything look chaotic to me, and odd. You end up with a lot of pages of different colors mixed into these scripts. It makes things look more – I don’t know if the word is unprofessional, but it makes it look like someone made a mistake.

John: Exactly.

Mike: It is one of these “this is the way things have always been done” old saws that you hear about all the time. I can’t argue for it. I really can’t. You should have a script coordinator or an AD come on and make the argument for locked pages. But to my mind, it seems like it creates more confusion than it does clarity.

I will say this though, to argue the other side. My first job was at Saturday Night Live. There was a Microsoft Word template that we use to make our scripts. That was a huge improvement over the previous version, which had been that writers in the early ’90s wrote their sketches longhand and then gave them to assistants who then typed them into the format. Writers in the early ’90s apparently didn’t even have computers in their offices. By the time I got there in ’98, we at least had computers in our offices. We all had this really primitive Microsoft Word template that we used.

There was this bananas system, because you talk about a show with a lot of changes. There’s changes happening 10 minutes before a sketch is made. The process by which we made changes in scripts or rewrote scripts or then handed those scripts to the script coordinators and script assistants, who then went over those changes with the cue card folks, it was so primitive and so bad. It was like, “Please, someone has to change this.”

The argument not to change it was, this show is chaotic by its nature. We have all learned this system, and this system, just barely, works. To change it or to try to improve it, the stakes of it were so high, because if it didn’t work on the season premier and everything was chaos and the cue cards didn’t get written properly, then it’s live TV, and everything would fall apart. The argument not to change it was, “Look, it’s not perfect, but everybody knows what this is and everybody functions with this system in place. And so we’d rather leave it in place than change it and risk complete collapse of the system.”

I don’t know if that’s why we do it this way still or whether an AD or a script coordinator would tell us right now, “No, you guys are idiots. This is the real benefit of this.” I don’t know which of those things is true, but one of them is true, or perhaps both.

John: So many things to respond to here. First let’s talk with Saturday Night Live, because we had Simon Rich on the show this last week, and he was talking about his time on Saturday Night Live, which I think was after yours. My belief is that the current system in Saturday Night Live is that they’re using Final Draft for most of the show, but the Weekend Update segment is being done in Scripto, which is the system that’s used to do a lot of late-night shows. Colbert actually I think owns or is an investor in Scripto. That’s the online-only software for writing that stuff, because basically, it’s like a big Google doc where everyone can throw in on the same thing. That segment is written in there.

But then as we look at normal scripted film and television, I really wonder whether we’re keeping this metaphor of colored pages, because they’re not really colored pages anymore and locking pages from a physical paper type of universe. We’re trying to drive this into this digital world that we’re in, because Craig says on his show there are no printed scripts. Everything is always a digital thing just for security purposes.

I really think we could probably break with this. Would it be an adjustment? Yeah, but I think we’d come out the other side better and we’d actually save money and save time, and there’d be less confusion rather than more confusion. I really think we can do it, because even the script supervisors, maybe some of them are still using paper, but from what I’ve heard, they’re all using iPad version stuff that they’re using to track what’s actually being done.

Mike: This show that I just finished the first season of on Netflix was the first time that I, when we would rehearse a scene, almost all of the actors who had scripts that they were referring to had them on iPads. A lot of the writers, most of whom at this point are way younger than I am, are following them on iPads and making notes on their iPads.

It was the first time that it really felt to me like I am officially a dinosaur, because I can’t do it that way. It’s too deeply ingrained in me. I have to be holding a script. I have to be able to flip pages. I have to be able to make notes on a piece of paper. Now, it should be noted in other areas of my life. I refuse to read books on a Kindle. It’s very hard for me to read on my phone. Just too many years of physical paper to make this change now. Just put me on a raft and shove me off the shore and let me float away and die, is the way I feel.

But when I saw the actors using the iPads to keep track of what they wanted to do, that was when I felt like we have crossed the Rubicon here. We are now fully in a digital world on the physical set of the show. It did make me feel like the idea of like, “Hey, can someone print out copies of these changes I just made and get them to me?” was extremely antiquated. I might as well have been saying, “Could you please shovel a shovel full of coal into the steam engine so the locomotive can move down the tracks?”

I think you’re right. I think that we’re probably two years away from most productions saying, “This is pointless. Why are we printing out these pages? Why are we locking these pages at all? Why aren’t we just refreshing the Google doc or the Scripto doc or the Final Draft document?” We’re just gonna text it to everyone, email it to everyone, and then everyone will have it on their individual device. Then we will know definitively. We’ll just timestamp it and everyone will know. “Okay, everyone refer to Scene 326, Version 6.4,” is what we’re doing now. That will probably ultimately be how it lives forever and ever afterwards.

John: How do we make this transition happen? I’m wondering whether we could actually just get together a group of showrunners and ADs and maybe some scriptees and other folks who really are affected by this and say, “Hey, what if we were to just actually stop doing this? How would this change your lives? What things do we need to be aware of?” Because maybe there are some aspects of that. I’m always mindful of the Chesterton’s Fence metaphor. Things were built a certain way for a certain reason. Don’t tear down that fence until you know why it was there. But I think we know what the fence was for, and I think we’ve realized we don’t need that fence anymore.

Mike: Saving paper is the 1,000th most important benefit of this, but it’s not nothing. Paper does clog up people’s lives. I have in my office still at Universal, stacks and stacks and stacks of scripts that I just don’t need and never really needed. It would’ve been a lot easier. I think probably the reason for the system remaining in place is just stubbornness or habit and that there is a better workflow.

I think it’s probably the case that if the show that I worked on were to go to a second season, I would probably sit down with the ADs and with the scriptees and with everybody, with the actors to some extent, to say, “What’s a better system we can devise? There must be a way that we can all get on the same page here.” The thing is, that better system will still allow – the folks who want to have a paper script can still have a paper script. You can still print out individual scripts. It’s just that the workflow will probably be streamlined a lot with a better, more digital system.

John: I’m finishing edits on the Scriptnotes book. One of the things I’m wrestling with is we have a little chapter about rewrites during production and A and B pages and how not to lose your mind doing this. I’m reading these paragraphs like, “Should this even be in there? Should this whole idea just go away?” Because no one benefited from A and B pages. It was a hack for a physical time that we’re just not in anymore.

Mike: You’re probably right. It’s a little bit sad, because there is something magical about holding a script in your hand. I honestly think that to me – and this is, by far, not one of the 25 most important aspects of the process – but I really like read-throughs with physical scripts. I think there’s something magical about holding a tangible product in your hand as the rubber meets the road, as it comes out of the theoretical work of the writers’ room and becomes the literal work of the whole staff of people, the actors and all of the department heads and everybody else. I think there’s something wonderful about holding that product in your hand tangibly.

I have this thing I do at the end of every table read. We get to the end, and I say, “End of episode,” or whatever, and everybody claps. I flip back to the front and I write my name on the front, which I started way back at I think Parks and Recreation, because I remember thinking there were so many copies of this script. I had made notes in mine, and I just wanted to write my name on the front, so that I could easily identify it in case it got lost in a shuffle. I get up and I hug people and I shake people’s hands and then I can’t find my script. I just wrote my name on the front right after we were done. I’ve done that every single read through of every single of episode of every single show.

I would be a little bit sad if I were doing that with an Apple Pen, flipping back to page 1 of a doc, of a pdf. But again, that is just habit. That’s not making anyone’s life easier. I think it’s probably time for all of us who live in this dinosaur age that I live in to give up on some of the little traditions or habits or whatever you call them, to make the workflow go a little easier for everybody.

John: Let’s get to our main topic for today, which is rewriting and overwriting. This comes from a friend of the show. Drew, would you mind reading this for us?

Drew: “I’m rewriting a project, and I am resistant, not because I don’t want to write more, but because I’m not sure that the rewrite is going to be better. It’ll just be different. How do you weigh that? I’ve watched a couple friends who have producers attached to projects, and they’ve taken on so much feedback that at this point in their rewrites, I’m like, this has lost the pacing and weirdness of your voice. It feels overwritten. In TV I’ve been in writers’ rooms where there’s also this balance of, we’ll write this thing for the executives and take it out later. So sometimes overwriting seems strategic. I’m curious to hear your take on how you’d weigh that as creators.”

John: Overwriting. I’ve definitely felt this in my own drafts at times. I’ve felt this in other people’s drafts too. I haven’t gone through and produced a lot of people’s stuff that wasn’t my own. But in looking at people trying to incorporate notes sometimes, they’re both trying to incorporate the new notes and preserve everything else that was in there. You just feel like a bunch of stuff is wedged in there that is not helping to serve the story. Mike, do you see this in TV happening too?

Mike: This is a huge thing in TV. Yes. A couple different things are being raised, I think, by this question. The easiest one to address is the thing of, “We’ll write this in for the executives and take it out later.” That’s not overwriting to me. That is strategic management of your relationship with your studio or your executives. I think that’s a separate issue.

The overwriting thing is a real problem. I think one of the most important skills you can learn as a writer and as a showrunner is the art of the surgical fix. Most of the lessons that I’ve learned about writing came from The Office, which was my first sitcom job.

I worked for Greg Daniels, who is a true genius of the genre. He’s got an enormous, juicy brain. He’s the guy who sees the matrix code of scrips and of storytelling. But he also has this thing where he would become fixated on a problem in a script and he would spiral. He would be like, “Oh, no, we’ve ruined this somehow. We did this. This character’s motivation is unclear,” or, “The plot doesn’t make any sense if you have this scene in it, because this is what the characters are going through.” Sometimes he would get so spirally that he would just lie down on the floor, and on the dirty, disgusting carpet of the office we were in.

There was this one moment in particular where we did a readthrough and it went really well, but this one piece of the story was, I would say, overwritten. There was too much stuff in it. He was a character who had a motivation. I don’t remember the details. There was a character who had a specific storyline, a specific motivation. We had written in this scene for this character where he was saying something to someone else that muddied that motivation. There was too much going on. We had added too much stuff.

Greg was really freaked out by it. It was late on a Thursday night. We were starting to shoot it on Monday. It was like, “Oh, god.” We were all texting our husbands and wives and loved ones and saying, “I don’t think I’m coming home for dinner.” Greg was expounding out loud, as he lay on the floor, the exact specific reasons why this scene was screwing up the story. I was like, “Oh, boy, we’re really screwed. We’re going to be here forever.”

Then I said out loud – and I thought I was being stupid – I was like, “What if we just cut those two lines?” There was a beat, and then Greg was like, “Yeah, I think that’ll work.” He just popped back up and he went into the script and he cut the two lines that we were fixated on. I was like, “Oh, okay. Thank god.” The surgical fix is a key weapon for writers, especially in TV, because I think a lot of overwriting comes with good intentions.

John: Totally.

Mike: You are trying to make everything really clear to the audience. Especially in comedy, clarity is vitally important. People have to know what the characters are thinking and feeling and why they’re doing what they’re doing in order for the jokes to land. Sometimes when you add a bunch of stuff to try to make it more clear why they’re doing what they’re doing, you end up with a bunch of just muddy, mushy stuff that actually does the exact opposite. The surgical fix, the, “Wait, these six words in the middle of this sentence are making everything muddy and stupid,” and if we just remove them, then you’ll breathe a sigh of relief, because the scene will flow so much better.

The fix to an overwritten scene, in my experience, can often be fixed with a good analysis of what’s wrong and a surgical strike on the dialogue. That’s my instinct every time I feel like something is overwritten, is to try to say, “What are the clauses or phrases or sentences that are making us feel this way, and what happens if we just remove them?” Very frequently, that seems to be the answer to how to fix it.

John: As a feature writer, a lot of times I’ll get a script for a rewrite, and it has been through multiple writers before. One of the things I’ll notice is it’s overwritten because the writers before me, with very good intentions, were trying to address the notes and problems of the script that they were handed, what they were being told to fix and to rewrite. They’re addressing those problems, but those problems aren’t the problems of the script right now. There’s all this digital crap in there that can just go away. What I’d love to be able to do is just go through and do a clean pass that just takes away all this cruft that’s built up over the months or years or drafts that this script has been around. When I give the script to the people, like, “Oh my god, this reads so much better.” It’s like, “Yes, because I took out all your dumb notes from all the previous drafts, because they were not important.”

Especially I think in feature land, so often you’re doing a rewrite, you’re doing a polish, you want to show how much work you’ve done. You’re making changes that show the work you’ve done, because literally, it makes a little star in the margin to show, “Look how much I did.” Often, the stuff that you’re doing is not actually really improving stuff. It’s just adding. When you talking about removing clauses, removing sentences, in a lot of cases I’m removing scenes that just don’t need to be there anymore. They’re repetitive. They’re not speaking into the actual story we’re trying to tell.

When it’s your turn and when you’re getting notes to address a thing, I really look for what are ways to do things in a better or different way that’s not adding stuff to it. How do you make sure that you’re best addressing both the note and what the movie wants to be, which could mean scrapping that scene that you have and doing a different scene actually to use these goals, rather than trying to graft on this idea to a scene that really wasn’t built to support it. It’s being smart. You say surgical, but sometimes it’s just rebuilding a thing so it can actually support this note, rather than trying to adapt what’s there.

Mike: There’s two things that I think are really important. One of them is, there’s different kinds of overwritten. The kind that you’re talking about is a bunch of different people have given a bunch of different notes, and a bunch of different people have then gone in and tried to address those notes. As a result, you get this mish-mosh of stuff.

The question that kicked off this discussion is that sometimes those rewrites, those endless patches that people have put onto scenes, have made it so that it doesn’t seem like there’s a voice in the script. You don’t get the sense that this is the result of a person’s idea or work. Those rough edges, those uniquenesses, are what can often make the difference between a movie that you as a viewer love and respond to emotionally and make you feel something, and a movie that feels like a processed hot dog that’s just bland and mushy and not very interesting.

Look, different movies have different objectives and goals. If you’re making a $300 million summer blockbuster, the goal isn’t to celebrate the uniqueness of the artist’s voice. The goal is to just make a giant, loud, fun, entertaining thing. But the movies that I think we as viewers really just connect with or respond to are the ones where it feels like, wow, one specific person did this one specific idea and executed it.

I don’t know, I think of Nicole Holofcener’s movies, which I love. No one can write a Nicole Holofcener movie except Nicole Holofcener. Part of the reason is because there are rhythms and specificities to her voice that make it unique. If someone came in and took a Nicole Holofcener movie and took a bunch of notes from the studio and addressed them, it would just smooth everything out and make it bland. There’s that kind of rewriting or undoing of overwriting, which is like, let’s try to get back to the feeling that this is a unique idea from a unique artist.

There’s another thing that happens in comedy, and it happens in comedy movies. I’ve been a part of a number of comedy movie rewrites. But it happens within writers’ rooms too. The people who are writing jokes for a TV script or a TV movie script when there’s a rewrite, like a round table rewrite, are coming into that process bringing with them the most recent shows that they’ve worked on.

You have a comedy movie, and you get a writers’ room together. The writers’ room has writers from Barry and then The Bear and The Great and whatever, Everybody Loves Raymond, going back as far as you want. When you’re going through a scene and you’re pitching different jokes for a different scene, those writers are going to write jokes in the style of the kinds of shows that they have recently worked on.

As a result, when you sit back and look at the entire script, you’re going to be like, “This is a joke from The Great, and this is a joke from Everybody Loves Raymond, and this is a joke from The Office, and this is a joke from Rick and Morty.” It’s going to have no thematic consistency to the humor. It’s going to be just this crazy hodgepodge of whatever tone and style was the funniest in that moment. Sometimes you’ll see a comedy movie script where that’s the problem. It’s not just that it’s overwritten. It was overwritten by people who had very different senses of humor.

The hardest thing to do as a comedy showrunner, or I would imagine as a comedy screenwriter, is to remove a joke that you know is funny because it doesn’t fit the tone of the project you’re working on. It’s a really hard thing. I have had to defend that decision to a number of writers in TV writers’ rooms over the years, like, “Yes, this joke is funny, but also, it’s tonally off,” or it’s a character-damaging joke. Suddenly, this character takes on a color that we don’t want him or her to, or it just screws something up.

The point of a comedy show isn’t to just make as many jokes as you can, regardless of what their tone or style is. The idea is to have the show feel holistic and feel like there is a singular humorous voice at work. There’s room for variance within that, of course. Part of the real joy of working on a TV writers’ room is that you know Megan Amram is going to write a very different kind of joke from Alan Yang or Andrew Law or Jen Statsky or whoever the person is. But all of those jokes have to feel like they’re part of the same general holistic crew of humor writers. If they don’t, if those jokes are too crazy, then they just shouldn’t be in the script.

A big part of undoing overwriting to me sometimes in comedy rooms is saying, “Is this joke funny? Yes, it’s hilarious. Should it exist in this script? Should it be said by this exact character at this exact moment? Maybe not.” It’s painful, because jokes are hard, man. They’re hard to come by. Removing one that you know is funny is a very hard task. But I think when you are the steward of the show, of the tone of the show, of the style of the show, it’s a decision you have to make a lot.

John: You and I both live in Hancock Park. Some of the streets in our neighborhood are traditional asphalt, and some of them have been replaced by concrete. The concrete streets are really, really nice. The problem comes though if they have to cut into the street or if there’s some damage to the street. They fill it with asphalt. Of course, other neighborhoods, you might have just potholes and things like that too. So often, I think when you run into overwriting and things that [inaudible 01:02:31] it literally is, you fill that pothole. You took out that hole, but the patch is really not feeling great.

I think what we’re asking for is – it sounds like a lot of work to actually go through and repave that street, but you gotta repave that street. You gotta make it smooth, because ultimately, you’re trying to deliver a nice, smooth experience for the reader and ultimately for the audience with this scene that you’re writing. Just avoid filling the potholes, if you can.

Mike: This is one of the most difficult lessons that I learned. I have to relearn it again and again and again. When you read a script through, which in the TV world you’ll read every script through 75 times. Every time you go through it, every time you do a readthrough, but then you do a rewrite or you’re reading it at home or whatever, there are moments in the script where you get a little feeling in your chest, where you’re like, “Eh, there’s something wrong with that. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay.” Then you keep going.

You can convince yourself that that pothole was filled in the right way, but you’ll just keep having that feeling. If you don’t fix it, if you don’t do the work to really dig up all of the surrounding area and cut out the part that’s mushy and replace it with something more sturdy, you will have that feeling all the way through shooting, all the way through editing, all the way through sound mixing. You’ll never get over that feeling.

Paying attention to that feeling when you have it is a really good skill to develop, because you can convince yourself, because it sounds like so much work to dig up that whole scene or throw away that whole scene or conceive of a new scene or conceive of an entirely new chunk of a script. It sounds like so much work. If it’s a B-minus patch, it’s very easy to convince yourself that everything is fine. But if you have that feeling, that feeling is never going away. You’ll never suddenly read that part of a script and go, “Yeah, no, I was wrong. Actually, it’s totally fine.” You will always feel like it needed to be fixed. The sooner you fix it, the better off you will be in the end.

John: To continue this metaphor, there’s a hole in the road and you see it coming up there. One of your strategies might be like, “Okay, I’m going to just put up some cones and drive around that hole.” You can feel that. That often feels like, “Wait, why are we doing this thing? Why are we zigzagging around this thing that’s a natural place to go?”

I think what we’re urging you to do is – probably the goal is to drive through that place and build a new thing that can go through that. But if that’s not really possible, you probably need to back up and just take a different road. Rather than try to do a little zigzag around it, actually just take a different route to get there, because maybe there’s no scene that can actually do what you’re trying to do here and you need to just find a different way to approach it.

Mike: This metaphor is surprisingly resilient.

John: It really is.

Mike: It’s really holding up under the stress we’re putting on it. But yes, it’s a perfect way to put it, which is to say, if every time you drive down a certain route – which is to say get to a certain part of your script – you find yourself having to dodge and weave, and you’re barely hanging on as your car wheels around in this complicated way. You got to where you were going. You reach your destination on the other side. But you have to just understand that there is a better path.

I don’t know how far we want to extend the metaphor. But there’s no GPS. There’s no, “Hey, find me the best route here,” which is what makes it so annoying, because it requires you to erase six pages of your script and then pace around your room and think, “Okay, here’s where I am. Here’s where I need to go. How can I get there a smoother way?” It’s really annoying. It’s one of the most annoying parts of rewriting.

I would say that, going back to the original question, oftentimes the reason that there’s a problem in the route to begin with is it’s been overwritten. A bunch of different people did a bunch of different things and patched this route together. Someone needs to come in and say, “Wait, I’ve got a better path here.”

John: You also will recognize that there’s times where you read through the script, you’re like, “Wait, you actually took a whole loop there and then you finally made it. In trying to get around this problem, you went way out of your way to get there.” We feel that as an audience. We feel like we are repeating this moments. “We already saw that house before. Something is deeply wrong here.”

Mike: I will say, on the plus side, there are few things in writing as satisfying as realizing that you can cut-

John: I love it so much.

Mike: … six pages of a script and replace it with two lines. The earliest lesson of show business that anyone remembers is leave them wanting more. You would always rather do something more quickly, unless the whole point of it is to be patient and deliberate. If you’re talking about plot mechanics, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line is a good adage to remember. If you’re finding you’re taking this crazy, loopy journey to do something that isn’t that hard or shouldn’t be that hard to do, try to find that straight line. I think that’s a good lesson.

John: Cool. It has come time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things. First off is the book Project Hail Mary, which is by Andy Weir. He’s the guy who wrote The Martian. I’m reading it right now, and I’m really enjoying it. I debated whether to read it or not, because it’s being made into a movie right now. Drew Goddard wrote the script. Chris Miller and Phil Lord are directing it. They’re all friends. They’ll all come on the podcast hopefully to talk about it. I could just wait and see the movie when it comes out. But I’m excited that I’m reading it now.

I’m going to encourage listeners to read the book, because it’s going to be a challenging adaptation. I’m really curious what they’re going to do with things that appear in the book and how they’re going to make it all work. I think if you read the book now, yes, you’ll be spoiled a little bit on some of the surprises that happen in the movie, but I think you’ll also be delighted to see, “Oh, they made this choice. They made that choice. This is what they did with point of view on things.” It can be a good exercise to have read the book first before seeing the movie. That’s my recommendation for that.

My second One Cool Thing is a game. It’s a game that we actually made here in the office. Pretty much every Friday we play this game called AlphaBirds, which is a word game. It’s like Boggle or Scrabble but much easier and simpler. You can drink a beer while playing it. Years ago, we printed 100 decks and sent them off to some friends and left it at that. But enough people asked for it that we actually went through and printed a whole bunch more. We got the proper trademark on AlphaBirds with a little TM at the end, so we can sell them legally. They’re now available to anybody. If you want to play this game, it’s a fun little card game. It’s available on Amazon, or if you go to alphabirdsgame.com, you can buy it through there. There’s a code, Scriptnotes, that saves you five bucks off of it if you want to play AlphaBirds. It’s a great little game that Drew can testify is quite a bit of fun to play.

Mike: It sounds like a fun office. You guys have a fun office.

John: Every Friday after 4:00, we stop and we play some games and drink some beers.

Mike: That’s fantastic. My One Cool Thing is when I was making the show The Good Place, we had a philosophical advisor who is a professor. His name is Todd May. He actually appears in the finale of The Good Place, playing himself. He’s the best kind of philosopher to my mind, which is to say he’s a philosopher whose writing you can actually understand when you read it. It’s a very rare thing in the world of philosophy. Todd has a new book. It is not out yet, but it will be out within a month. I think August 6 is the publication date. The subject matter is wonderful and hilarious. The title of the book is Should We Go Extinct? A Philosophical Dilemma for Our Unbearable Times. He is literally answering the question of would the universe be better off if humans just went extinct.

What’s great about him as a writer and what attracted me to him to begin with is he takes on these incredibly huge, thorny problems, but he writes about them with a tremendous amount of empathy and humanity, in a very clear and straightforward way that anyone can understand. You do not have to have studied philosophy in college or any other place in order to understand it. He argues the pros for us going extinct. He argues the cons for us going extinct. He makes compelling arguments on both sides. I read the book. He sent me a copy of it when it was in galleys. It’s 176 pages long.

John: Love it.

Mike: It is not overbearing or exhausting. I encourage everyone to check it out when it comes out next month.

John: Mike Schur, you introduced me to Todd May years ago. I just emailed with him this morning.

Mike: Really?

John: There’s a thing of mine that he’s reading through which is philosophically oriented. He’s giving me some notes and thoughts on that, so thank you for making that introduction.

Mike: Absolutely. I hope you enjoy his book. It’s really great.

John: I’m looking forward to it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, with help this week from Jonathan Wigdortz. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Vance Lovett. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@dev.johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today.

You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and glassware. They’re all cool and great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on AI music. But Michael Schur, what an absolute pleasure having you back on the show. Thank you so much.

Mike: It is an absolute joy to be here. I will see you for Episode 1300.

John: I’m so excited.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Mike Schur, we’re springing this on you. But about two or three weeks ago, the Recording Industry Association of America filed these two lawsuits against these AI music producers called Suno and Udio over copyright infringement. I was a little skeptical at the start, because in general, I think the music copyright stuff has been overblown and overdone.

I remember the Blurred Lines lawsuit. I thought that was actually crazy, because did the song Blurred Lines feel like a Marvin Gaye song? Yes. But did it actually infringe? Can you actually say this is the same notes, the same thing? Could it be mistaken for a specific Marvin Gaye song? I think not. I was skeptical of this lawsuit, and then I listened to some of the examples. Let me play a few samples here from this lawsuit.

(AI song samples)

What we just listened to, obviously, that sounded like Mariah Carey singing All I Want for Christmas is You. But that was not prompted for Mariah Carey. It was basically like, give me a Christmas song that’s a pop song that’s in this style, and that’s what it generated was something that was basically-

Mike: Whoa. Really?

John: Yeah, really.

Mike: Oh, no.

John: The prompt did not even include the words Mariah Carey. It just generated this. Apparently, for the one that sounded like Green Day there, “A reproduction of a nostalgic acoustic ballad by a pop band famous in the 1990s whose name rhymes with mean nay, whose lead singer has a name that rhymes with Millie No Marmstrong, with a sense of musical urgency.” They’re really trying to tip it in there. But for the one that sounded like the Beach Boys, it didn’t reference the Beach Boys at all, and it comes up with Good Vibrations.

Mike: Wow. That’s intense. I had not heard those before. That American Idiot is just the song American Idiot which a very slightly different chord progression, it sounds like. The Mariah Carey song was just the Mariah… I thought you were playing the Mariah Carey song so that you could then play a song that was a ripoff of the Mariah Carey song. I didn’t know that that was the ripoff. That’s intense, man.

John: What the lawsuit brings up, and I think what we’re grappling with, is it infringement to make these things or to use these things in other ways? Is the copyright infringement the existence of a model that could create these things, or is copyright infringement only when you use these things to create a knockoff of a song? I think that’s not quite clear where we’re at there, because it’s clearly not copyright infringement to listen to a song. If you then, having listened to that song, make a song that is functionally identical, that’s the problem.

Mike: I would say this entire conversation has to be prefaced, at least on my end, by saying, boy, am I not a lawyer and do I not know what I’m talking about. But this was the fear that the Writers Guild had. In fact, the two main fears I would say that the Writers Guild had were, one, how is the work that we have written being used to train AI, and two, what is AI going to do with that work?

The nightmare scenario is that they feed all of our scripts into a machine, and the machine breaks them down into their component parts and understands the mechanics of storytelling and so forth. Then someone says, “You know what we need next summer is a romantic comedy set in New York, featuring a character who is a police officer and a character who works in an advertising agency, and the meet cute is that the police officer arrests,” and then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then the computer searches the database and finds 600 romantic comedies, Nora Ephron’s and yours and whoever’s, and spits out an entire script in .01 milliseconds that is a fully realized screenplay with story beats and moves and characters and jokes and whatever.

What has happened is a bunch of human-designed material has been mushed around and muddied up, and then something is spit out that is entirely derivative of that work. No one whose work went into the programming of that computer gets paid for it. Also, no one wrote that script really, and so they don’t have to pay anybody. That’s the nightmare that we were addressing.

The thing about songs that I think is different is that there’s only so many variations on a three-minute pop song. I think we’ve all had the experience of hearing songs and going, “You know what this reminds me of is this.” That doesn’t mean that the person who wrote the second song was consciously thinking of the first song. How many songs have the same chord progression? Thousands and thousands and thousands of songs.

John: Absolutely.

Mike: There’s a fundamental difference, I think, between pop songwriting and screenwriting. But at essence, the questions are the same. The questions are, should the people who are the humans who create these things be compensated for some way when those things are used to program a machine that could spit out versions of them that the people didn’t write themselves.

John: Absolutely. To that extent, I say A, yes, they should be compensated, but B, there’s this larger existential question of what are we losing. What are we losing from the fabric of being alive on earth? If we outsource the work of creativity to machines that are only creative inasmuch as we have programmed them to be creative, that’s the part of it that really makes me not sleep well at night is I don’t know what humanity is.

If the most fundamental work of humanity, which is to say artistic endeavor, is outsourced to a machine that only exists because we built it and we fed all of our previous creativity into it and asked it to kick out new versions of things, that’s the part that is so unsettling, so uncanny valley, and so unappealing to me. I think without being a lawyer, without knowing the legitimacy of these claims, I wholeheartedly support the idea that the recording industry is trying to stop this from happening.

John: So many different threads we can pull at. I’m going to try to pull at a bunch, and it’s going to probably be a very messy sweater by the end. As we went into the WGA negotiations, we talked about the Nora Ephron problem. Basically, if you train a model on all of the scripts of Nora Ephron and you ask it to generate a new Nora Ephron script, who should get credit for that? Literally, who should be credited as the writer of the screenplay? But also, shouldn’t she or her estate have some ability to determine how that all works?

Looking at the parallels between songwriting and screenwriting, one of the things about these examples we just played, All I Want for Christmas is You, it’s so clear that this is the same thing. It’s based on the same thing. Or even American Idiot, we can see this is the same thing. But that analogy does not hold especially true for movies, because so often, movies are referencing each other.

These movies are similar, but rarely do we have a situation where you say, “That movie is actually just this movie.” We will have lawsuits saying, “Oh, this was actually based on my screenplay,” or there was some sort of chicanery happening behind the scenes, but almost never do we say, “This movie is exactly the clone of this movie,” except for weird cases where it was some Nigerian knockoff of Star Wars, which we love for its just sheer ballsiness.

That’s not a thing that we’ve had to worry about so far, but in theory, we could be worrying about this, where the version of this software that’s not making songs but it’s making video could just say, “Make me a Star Wars,” and it just goes off and it makes you a Star Wars. That’s coming eventually. Music is always the canary in the coalmine for where these things are.

I want to play a little devil’s advocate here, because we say that these things are trained on all of the stuff and then they are generating new stuff based on what they’ve done. That’s also the process of culture. The process of culture is reading and watching everything that has happened out there. Then a human being or a group of human beings takes that and synthesizes it and creates a new version of it. I think our concern is that there’s not a human in the mix, and also that the new version in this case isn’t new enough. It’s not original enough. It just feels like a shitty copy rather than something new and a synthesis that actually pushes stuff forward.

Mike: This is the philosophical question involved in all of this, which is right now the technology in its nascency is bad, in the sense that if you say, “Give me a song that kind of sounds like a Christmas song with female voice,” it literally just spits out All I Want for Christmas is You by Mariah Carey.

Now, given the ways in which computational power advances, the speed at which software gets better, the difference between the iPhone 2 and the iPhone 15, which didn’t take that long to get from A to B, you would imagine that in three years if you say, “Give me a Christmas song with a female voice,” it’s going to just generate a Christmas song. There will be new lyrics. It won’t sound like Mariah Carey. But it will be the result of Mariah Carey’s work and the work of a lot of other artists, a lot of other songwriters, a lot of other performers.

Right now we are able to hear those clips and say, “Oh my god, this is horrifying.” In three years, I don’t think we will, because it’ll just play a song, and we will say, “I like that song,” or, “I don’t like that song.” But it will just be a song. It won’t be so obviously derivative and ripped off.

The philosophical question that we’re really asking, I think, is do we want to live in a culture where we are no longer allowing or relying on human ability and instinct to be the primary generator of pieces of art, creativity? I think there will be some people, some futurists, and some folks who are like, “Who cares? It’s art. It’s art. Art is art. What does it matter?” Maybe they’ll think, in a post-modern Banksy way, that it’s cooler. Was it really art when, who was it, Duchamp put the urinal in the museum? Is that art, or is it just a urinal that he threw into a museum? I’m not unsympathetic to that argument.

I think there’s an argument to be made that says this is where we are in 2025 and going forward is we as a species have invented these powerful machines. The powerful machines have capabilities because we programmed them to have capabilities. You could make the argument that it is no less valid a piece of art to have a person program a machine that looks at the history of songwriting and generates its own songs than it is to have a human generate those songs. I don’t think that’s an invalid argument. I think there’s something to that.

We always talk about what separates us from the animal, like it’s our ability to cognitively reason or it’s our ability to maintain complex relationships with other members of our species. I have always felt like the thing that separates us from the animals is art. It just is. There’s occasionally a story about an elephant in Thailand who can paint, and that’s really cool and awesome. There’s occasionally a story of a crow who will create a sculpture by picking up little buttons and pieces of metal and making them into something. Yes, fine, the exception that proves the rule. There isn’t a hedgehog that wrote Casablanca.

When I get into this discussion, and we had many of them over the course of the WGA negotiations, the thing that I feel the most deeply – not that I reason out the most or that I focus on in contractual language the most – but the thing I feel the most is, I fear the loss of something fundamentally human when we have gotten to a point where anyone can say to a piece of software, “Hey, give me a two-hour movie about a guy running a bar in West Africa during World War Two.” Then you get a pretty good screenplay. I fear what that means for us as a species. That’s not an argument that we could make to the folks that run movie studios. It’s not an argument that could be made to the folks who run AI software companies that generate pop songs, because their response will be like, “Sorry, man. Sorry that you fear this, but whatever.” It’s the philosophical component of this that makes me lose sleep at night.

I think there is a difference between someone looking at the world that they live in and painting Guernica or putting a urinal into a fine art museum, and a piece of software saying, “Here’s a random object that represents a sort of unpleasant part of humanity. I’m going to just install that into a museum and call it art.” I think there’s a fundamental difference when you insert the middle man of technology between the artist and a thing they’re creating.

John: One of the things you’re pointing to is intention, is that Duchamp has an intention behind that, Picasso has an intention behind when he paints Guernica, and the AI does not have an intention other than to please the person who typed in the prompt. I think another thing you’re getting to is, in the WGA negotiation, the WGA is negotiating with the studios, and that is the one place we can negotiate. We had to really draw lines around what our relationship with them was going to be like in terms of AI.

With something like this, it’s like, yes, you can say maybe it’s governmental reaction to AI companies or what the laws are going to be, but it’s really societal, because it goes beyond our borders. It’s just like, what choices are we going to make about what is okay and what is not okay? Collectively as a group and individually, what do we feel are the right paths through there?

As I look at AI in my own life, I’m always thinking about is this use of AI replacing a person’s work that I would otherwise be going to? Going all the way back to your example of taking the sea lions barking out of the back of this audio, there are other ways they could’ve maybe addressed that without AI, but it would not have as successful or nearly as efficient to do it.

Mike: Efficient, yeah.

John: This was a right choice, and I feel like very, very defensible. But I think we have to ask ourselves, any time we’re using one of these technologies, is this the right use of this? If it’s to create a knockoff Mariah Carey song, I think the answer is no.

Mike: Just to go one step further – and again, these are philosophical arguments. I’m not sure that they would sway a lot of people, but they’re how I feel. The process of making something like a TV show or a movie, it amounts to 10 phases of creativity with 10 different groups of people.

In TV, the final phase is a sound and color correction mix, where you are in a room in a dark studio and there’s a group of people around you and those people all have different jobs. There’s dialogue mixers. There’s sound effects mixers. There’s a music editor and a composer who’s composed music. You’re putting the final ribbon on the thing that you have spent months, if not years, creating. It’s incredibly collaborative. It’s really magically a team sport at the end.

By the way, every one of these phases is a team sport, regardless of whether you’ve written something completely by yourself or with a group of people. They’re all team sports. The shooting process is a team sport. The editing process is a team sport.

Its final phase is one of my favorites, because we are now done with everything. We have edited the picture the right way. We have chosen the right takes. The actors have done their jobs. The costumers and props people and art directors and caterers, everyone has done their jobs as well as they can do them. We’re at the very end. Now we’re going to make sure that everyone who watches this gets the best possible viewing and auditory experience. Every phone ring in an office comes at the right exact moment. Every little bit of dialogue. Maybe the actor got a little choked up when they said this line, and we want everyone to see exactly, hear exactly how they got choked up. It’s like painting a grain of rice. It’s like a group of people all coming together to paint this grain of rice and get it perfect.

When the sound editor presents that cleaned-up audio of that scene in San Francisco, and what he has done in this case is remove the stuff you don’t want to hear, so that you can hear the stuff you do want to hear, he has used AI to do that, and he’s used a computer to do that. But he has been there the whole time, combing through every moment, just making sure that every single little thing is exactly right, and by the way, at various times, has put some of those seal noises back in. When you cut to a shot, there’s a moment where you cut to a shot of the sea lions. At that moment, he undid what the AI had done, so that you could hear those seals barking, because we want the audience to hear them bark at that moment and not at other moments.

What I’m getting at here is that yes, that software program made his job a lot easier and a lot more efficient, but it’s still his job. He is still doing the work of going moment by moment and examining every nook and cranny of that scene with his headphones on, staring at wave forms on a computer and getting everything exactly right. That is not a thing that you could tell an AI to do. It’s impossible, because that requires the observation and thought and careful work of a human being observing what you’ve made and thinking, when we do we want to hear what and when and how and why.

I find that in other words, if you told me that right now we could replace all of the people in that room with software programs and that the process of sound mixing and color correcting an episode of TV could be 10 minutes long instead of four hours, which it often is, that sounds horrible to me. That sounds awful. That’s a worst-case scenario for how you complete the final phase of the thing that you spent so much time working on, because what I want it to be is a group of people who are thinking about doing what they’re doing and have, like you say, an intention. The intention is let’s make this piece of art as good as we can make it.

I think that the philosophical argument becomes pretty non-philosophical when you think of it that way, when you think of it as, what do we want this to be. We want it to be the product of a group of people who are all thinking really hard about how to make it as good as possible. Thinking really hard about something is not a job for an AI. It just isn’t.

John: Mike Schur, thank you so much for all your philosophical musings on this topic and everything else. I’m going to let you get back to that sound mix and be done with those sea lions. Absolute pleasure talking with you.

Mike: Thank you, buddy. Talk to you soon.

Links:

• Mike Schur on Wikipedia
• Weekend Read 2
• IATSE tentative basic agreement
• David Ellison’s Skydance Taking Over Paramount After $8 Billion Investment by Dade Hayes for Deadline
• WGA West Reaches $3 Million Settlement With CBS Studios Over Writer Fees and Benefit Payments by Cynthia Littleton for Variety
• Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
• Alphabirds
• Should We Go Extinct? by Todd May
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
• John on Mastodon
• Outro by Vance Lovett (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Jonathan Wigdortz. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@dev.johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.