Drew Marquardt

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you are listening to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, agents and managers. How do you obtain them? How do you work with them? And if necessary, how do you fire them? To answer these questions, we will be traveling back all the way to the start of this podcast to search for the answers. That’s right, it is a compendium episode, where you’ll hear three segments with me and Craig back when we were much younger and still full of umbrage. Drew, tell us about the clips that you’ve picked and what we’re going to hear today.

Drew Marquardt: We’re gonna start with Episode 2.

John: Episode 2, god, yeah.

Drew: At the very beginning. That’s how to get an agent or manager. No two writers get their reps the same way, but this is about finding how to get the right agent or manager to notice you.

John: I feel this kind of PTSD from those very early episodes, because I was cutting them all myself in Garage Band. Now we have Matthew. But it was a very manual process for me.

Drew: You guys sound so laid back in the early ones.

John: It’s very nice. Now we’re just all stress.

Drew: Then we’re going on to Episode 172, which is the perfect agent. Do you remember the Perfect series? We had all of that. The perfect agent, it’s now you have an agent and how does this work. How does this relationship work? What do you expect from your reps? How do you build and maintain that relationship?

John: Great. For sure. Then our final segment?

Drew: Is firing a manager.

John: Which is one of Craig’s favorite topics.

Drew: Craig’s favorite. He’s historically brought a lot of umbrage to this. I went all the way back to Episode 7 for this, because this is his first whack at the subject, and it’s his most balanced on it. It’s much more tact than umbrage.

John: That’s great. We’ll listen to these three clips, and then we’ll be back here at the end for One Cool Things, boilerplate and all the other stuff. But do stick around if you’re a Premium Member, because I will be talking through my big change, which is for the first time in my whole career, I now have a manager. Just a couple weeks ago, I signed with a manager. I’ll talk about why and what that process was like hiring a manager and what’s been interesting and good and different about it.

Drew: I’m excited to break it down with you.

John: Cool. Let’s travel back into time, and we’ll see you there at the far side of these three great clips.

[Episode 2 Clip]

John: I think we should focus on something we do know a lot about. We’re going to rip off the band-aid this week and we’re going to talk about something that in six years of running the blog, I’ve never actually written a post about this because it’s just such a dreadful morass of something to talk about.

Craig: It’s the worst, it’s the worst.

John: It’s the worst, and at least 80 percent of the questions that come into the site are basically this question. You’re ready? I’m going to paraphrase the one question that I’ve heard my entire blogging career.

Craig: Just do it, do it fast.

John: “How do I get an agent and/or manager?”

Craig: Oh, God. Now, let me just say, just so that anyone out there who is struggling to get an agent or manager doesn’t think that we are mocking your pain.

John: No, not at all.

Craig: We’re not. Really what we are embracing is the pain of the question itself because here’s what’s difficult, guys. If you really get down to what John and I know about getting an agent or a manager, what we know is how we got an agent in 1995. That’s what we specifically know.

Some of the pain of this question is it’s like a 15-year-old boy coming to you and saying, “How do I lose my virginity?” I could tell you how I lost my virginity in 1986. I just don’t know if it’s going to be applicable to you.

John: I think I do have a little bit more experience just because I’ve gone through generations of assistants who have become writers themselves and have gotten agents, so I’ve seen their process.

Craig: Good point.

John: Yeah. It’s not identical to what my process was and a crucial thing for framing this whole discussion is that there’s not one way it happens. Just like everyone does lose their virginity in a slightly different way, everyone gets to an agent or a manager in a slightly different way. We can only talk about general systems for success that people tend to find when they’re looking for agents and managers. I think we need to start by talking about what the hell an agent or a manager really is, because they’re used interchangeably and they’re actually different things.

Craig: Very, very different, yes. There’s something called the Talent Representation Act or Talent Agency Act, I can’t remember quite the exact name, but it’s California state law. Basically, the law says if you want to represent artists of any kind as an agent and procure them employment – that’s the big one – you are regulated. You have to be licensed by the state, you cannot charge more than 10 percent of what they earn, and you also can’t own any of it. For screenwriters, what that translates into actually is that agents cannot produce your material, because producing is a kind of an investment in the material itself.

That was the way it was for a long, long time. Then came the rise of managers who are not beholden to that law and they can, in fact, charge any percentage they want, and they can also produce your material. Technically, however, they are not allowed to procure you employment.

John: Now, procure sounds like a very legal term. Obviously I know that there’s a lot of overlap between what an agent does and what a manager does, but what is the difference between procure? The manager is not allowed to say, “Pay us this amount of money.”

Craig: The manager I do not believe is allowed to directly negotiate the terms of employment, I think. I’ll have to check on that one. By the way, as a general note, if there’s anything like this where I’m not quite sure, I can always lob a clarification on your blog when you put up the link. I know for sure that managers legally can’t seek employment. In other words, they can’t field requests for employment. They certainly can’t call up and say, “My client is available. Do you have anything that they might be interested in?”

Essentially, the manager is supposed to manage. Again, this is all the technical side of it and then there’s the real side. Managers are supposed to handle your day-to-day life. They help you develop material if that’s the way you want to use them. They help take care of your day-to-day needs when you’re working on a project. Let’s say you’re out of town working on something and they help facilitate your life. They’re not supposed to actually go out and get you a job.

John: Right. Now, it’s not an either/or situation. Many writers will find they have both a manager and an agent, and in many cases they’ll have a manager a year before they have an agent. It feels like there are many more managers in the business and that they’re easier to gain access to than an agent.

Craig: I agree.

John: Agents tend to be gathered together in very big, powerful agencies. There are certainly smaller boutique agencies that represent writers. Managers tend to be in smaller shops where they’re representing a smaller group of writers, or directors or other talented people and focusing on them. Managers, in general, might read every draft, and an agent very likely would not read every draft. A manager might give you notes. An agent would be much less likely to give you notes.

I approach the conversation with a dim view of managers, and this is just my generational bias. I’ve been called out for my generational bias because when I started in this business, the writers who had managers weren’t getting a lot out of their managers and they were just looking for the excuse to fire their managers. Now, more writers who are working regularly are talking about having success with their managers and keeping their managers as an active part of their career even after they’ve had a few features produced.

Craig: Yeah, I’m with you in the generational bias. I’m somewhat suspicious of managers. I had a manager for a long time, and in many ways it was a good thing, and in a number of ways it wasn’t, and it didn’t end particularly well.

I think that there are basically three reasons that writers gravitate toward… I’m going to give myself a fourth reason. One is, as you pointed out, sometimes they’re the easier representation to get, just to start with. Two, managers are much more willing to help you develop your material. If you’re the kind of writer who actually wants to bounce material off of somebody who isn’t a writer or a producer, a manager can help with that. Three, I think some writers feel, “Look, I can’t have two agents at once. I can’t be represented by CAA and UTA, but I can be represented by CAA and Three Arts. That’s twice the bang for the buck.” I wish I could remember what the fourth one was, but that was probably the most important one of all.

John: Those are three good points. To bounce off your third point there, being represented by two different people gets you exposure to more people who you could potentially be working with. And so even though the managers aren’t supposed to be out there giving you employment, they may be sending you out to meet with somebody, and that someone they have you meet with ends up becoming an important link for future employment.

Craig: Yeah, that’s absolutely true. I don’t have a huge problem with… If you love your manager, awesome. New writers who are seeking desperately for representation, and understandably so, I think can actually benefit a lot from a manager. But just be aware – this is the great currency problem – when you are a new writer without a track record and limited earning potential, you’re going to get a certain kind of manager. As your career advances, you owe it to yourself to fairly evaluate whether or not your manager is appropriate for where you are in your career if you advance.

John: Yeah. Let’s start the next part about what is an agent or a manager actually looking for. Let’s stop looking at it from the writer’s point of view. I need someone to represent me, to take me in and introduce me to all the right people and get me jobs. What does an agent want?

Craig: They want to make money. Bottom line.

John: They’re there to make money for themselves, for their agency. They’re there to try to get their clients hired and working continuously in the business. From that perspective, if they’re looking at a range of possible writers who they could represent, they’re going to look for the ones they believe are talented, the ones they believe will work really hard, the ones who can actually land the job – which means going in there to the meetings, for the nine meetings, and convincing a bunch of people that they are the right person to be hired for the job – the ones who are going to deliver. If an agent has a client that can land a job but then won’t actually turn in the script or finish the script or will turn in a really substandard version of what the script should be, that’s going to hurt.

The agent has a limitation of time. The agent can only represent so many clients. There’s only so many hours in the day. They can only put up so many clients for jobs. Taking on a new person is bringing a new person into the fold, someone they have to introduce to everybody, someone who they have to try to keep employed, someone they have to be talking on the phone all the time and trying to get them hired.

Craig: Also, just as an extension of that too, when an agent takes on a client that client is an extension of their reputation. I’m vouching that if I’m an agent I have a brand just the way that you and I have a brand. We’re known for writing certain kinds of things. Agents are known for representing certain kinds of people. They take on the wrong person and that person craps out, that’s an uncomfortable phone call for that agent. That damages their standing and that’s going to hurt them. There’s a ripple effect. When writers approach getting an agent and they look at this incredibly steep wall and the barrier to entry and they go, “Why? Why is this so hard to do?” It’s because of that.

John: Yeah. It’s important to remember that screenwriting is about pushing those words around on the paper and it’s being able to write a really good script. Screenwriting, the career of screenwriting, is also the ability to land a job and to get paid for what you are doing.

An agent is excited to read a really good script. They’re not going to sign a writer, in general, without sitting in a room with that writer and making the judgment call, could I send this person out on a job and get them hired to do something? They are measuring the social skills of a person who they are going to be possibly be representing.

Craig: Yeah. That’s right. You can definitely be a complete weirdo if you are just killing it on the page. If you are what I would consider a conventional screenwriter writing conventional material and you’re just a zero in the room, it’s going to be tough. I have to say that part of the business is unfair, but it’s real.

We can’t deny the fact that part of what we’re offering the people who hire us is a sense of comfort that we’re going to deliver and everything’s going to be okay. They’re just as scared as we are. Everybody’s scared.

John: It’s very much a business of trust. As the person hiring you, I am trusting that you will actually be able to deliver me this script. I base that trust on the things I’ve read on the paper but also looking you in the eye and seeing, “Okay, he gets it. He gets what it is we’re trying to do here.”

Yes, it’s incredibly important when you’re talking to the writer you’re bringing in for a million dollars to finish the script that’s about to go into production, but it’s also important just the scale job that you’re trying to get made. Every step for one of those executives is important.

Craig: All right. Then here’s the big question as we hit the midpoint of our podcast. Everybody’s been really patient. They’ve listened to us talk about uteruses and the law. John, how do these people get a manager or an agent? We ripped the band-aid off that 15 minutes ago. We’re still dancing around it, aren’t we?

John: I think you get an agent or manager through… I can think of three ways. The first is a recommendation. Someone has read your work, has met you, and said, “This guy is awesome. This guy should be writing movies for Hollywood. I’m going to take this script and I’m going to take you, introduce you to this agent or manager, and say you should represent this person because this person is great.” If that person has the ear of the right agent or manager and there’s already trust and taste being established between them, that agent or manager will read your material, say yes or no, and be interested and excited about possibly representing you.

That’s how I got my agent is a friend took the script I had written to his boss. He was interning at a small production company. The boss liked it, wanted to take it to the studio. I said, “I really need an agent. Can you help me get an agent?” He said yes and he took it to an agent he had a relationship with. The agent read it, because this guy who he trusted said that it was worth his time reading. He took it, read it, he met with me, and he signed me. That’s a very, very common story for how writers get represented.

Second way I would say is agents read material that they found through some sort of pre-filtering mechanism. A pre-filtering mechanism could be a really good graduate school program. If you graduated from a top film school and you were the star screenwriter of a USC graduate film school program, some junior agent at an agency is likely reading those scripts and saying, “Oh, this is actually a really good writer. This is a person we should consider.”

Even without that writer hunting down that agent, the agent was looking for who are the best writers coming out of these programs or the best writers coming out of a competition. These are the Nicholl’s finalists. Those scripts get read and those people will be having meetings with the people who think that they are potentially really good clients.

Craig: Makes sense. What’s the third one?

John: Just scouring the world to find interesting voices. I don’t know how much of this story is really accurate, but the apocryphal story of Diablo Cody is here’s a young woman who’s writing a funny blog. An agent reads the blog and says, “This woman can really, really write. She’s funny. She has a voice. I bet she could become a screenwriter.”

I don’t think all those details are quite accurate, but there’s always those writers who, they were doing standup and they’re clearly very funny and someone sees their act and says, “I think that person is a performer, but I also think that person is a writer and there’s something there that’s worth pursuing.”

Craig: I like those. Of course, all of them are predicated on you being a good writer and writing a good script, as is always the case, but those all make sense. I actually asked an agent at CAA named Bill Zotti. I gave him a call earlier today and I asked him the question. Of course, he groaned, because it’s that question, but he had a couple of pieces of really good advice that I figured I should pass along.

One is to make sure that if you are specifically pursuing an agent, to really know who they represent and ask, is this agent appropriate for my material. He said one of the most frustrating things is when he’ll get query letters or log lines for the kind of movies that his clients just don’t write.

Right now there are a lot of resources out there that are relatively inexpensive, like IMDb Pro for instance, where you can actually see… Let’s say I write movies like Judd Apatow. “Who represents Judd Apatow? Let me see.” I write movies like John August. “Who represents John August? Let me see.” Okay. If I send that person a query letter and say, “Listen, I’m a huge fan of John August. I’m aspiring to write like John August. Here’s my log line,” you might have a shot. Whereas if you send it to a guy that represents writers who write rated-R broad comedies, that person’s going to go, “What do I care? It’s not for me.” Do your homework. If you’re going to go through the effort of trying to break the rocks to get a rep, do your homework about the rep.

The other advice that he gave that I thought was pretty smart was to get a job in the business, which seems so blindingly obvious, but yet so many people resist it. I know why, because it’s hard and it involves a commitment that you may not be willing to make.

He said, “Listen, 80 percent of the people in the mail room at one of the big talent agencies are not really interested in being agents.” They’re there to learn the business because they want to do other things. They want to produce. They want to write. They want to direct. When you work in that business and you work in that place, you get to know the other people there.

You work next to a guy who suddenly is now an assistant to an agent. You say to him, “Listen, I’ve written a script, and I’m going to tell you what the idea is.” If he loves it, he’s got a chance now to impress his boss with a great piece of material, so he’s going to read it. These personal connections are invaluable. It’s nearly impossible to do that kind of thing from Rhode Island.

John: Yeah. I would also say what your example stresses is the horizontal networking. Everyone always thinks that to become successful you have to meet more powerful people and get more powerful people to love you. It’s really not that case at all. It’s been my experience, but it’s also been the experience of all my assistants, the way they got to their next step was by helping out everyone else at their same level.

They were reading other people’s scripts and giving them notes. Those same friends were reading their scripts. Eventually, they wrote that thing that was, “You know what? This is really good. This is the script I’ve been waiting for you to write, and I think I know the right person to take this to.” It’s always been those people who were doing exactly the same stuff you were doing who were the next step.

Craig: That’s right. That’s exactly right. I think people should think, as they are horizontally networking, about how to market themselves, because the funny thing is Hollywood with one hand is saying, “Get out, stay out,” and with the other hand is saying, “Please, somebody show up,” because they’re hungry for new talent. They’re desperate for new talent. Nothing makes them happier than a writer that’s better than a guy who makes a million dollars that they don’t have to pay a million dollars to.

They’re actually looking, believe it or not. If you can market yourself properly… For instance, we have a couple of friends who wrote a pretty crazy script and just put it out on the internet and marketed it as this insane thing, and it caught on.

John: You’re talking about the Robotard 8000?

Craig: I’m talking about the Robotard 8000. You may say, “Why would you put your screenplay on the internet, and why would you say it was authored by the Robotard 8000?” Why? Because they have agents at CAA and they’re working. It really got them a lot of attention. Also, it didn’t hurt that other writers that people trusted were saying, “We read this script. This was really funny.”

Similarly, I’ll tell you, if I were 22 again and I were in a writer’s group, I would say – and you and I didn’t have this in the 90s – “Let’s get a web page for our writer’s group, and let’s just start blogging about the experience of our writers group. Let’s track the progress of our scripts and the log lines and the rest of it.” If one of us catches somebody’s attention, suddenly our writer’s group has a little bit of buzz to it. “What will this writer’s group come up with next?” That’s why that Fempire thing was so cool, with Diablo-

John: Dana and Lorene.

Craig: … and Dana and Lorene. It was like, okay, there’s a group. Now, it’s not really a group. They all have to write their own scripts. But something about it, there’s a little bit of sparkly dust to it. It’s interesting. How do you make yourself interesting? Maybe then somebody will be attracted to your script.

John: We talked about marketing, but it’s really almost positioning. People need to know how to consider you or what to consider you as.

Here’s a terrible way to go into your first meeting. You wrote a really good comedy script that people like, and so they brought you in. A manager and agent sat down to meet with you. They say, “I really liked your script. It was really funny. What do you want to write?” It’s like, “I mostly want to write period detective stories with monsters.” The manager is going to hem and haw and make conversation for about another 10 minutes, but they’re not going to want to sign you, because they were thinking about you as a comedy person. Let them pigeonhole you for five minutes until you can actually get something going. They need to know how are they going to make the next phone call to somebody else, saying, “This guy has a really funny comedy script, but he’s exactly the right person to hire for your period action movie.” That just doesn’t make sense.

Craig: It doesn’t. Listen, these guys, what is their training in? Managers and agents are not there to tell you what to be. Their expertise is watching trends and patterns and pulling people out that fit what they believe is going to generate cash. They can’t tell you who to be. What they can do is see who you are and say, “That looks like money.” So know who you are. Go in there and be who you are.

It doesn’t mean that you have to go in there as Michael Bay. Not everybody has to make $200 million movies. Not everybody has to sell $3 million scripts. To be successful in this business, you just have to work. If I could walk into an agent’s office and say, “I will never make more than $200,000 a year, but I will make $200,000 every year for the next 20 years and I won’t bother you a lot,” that’s an instant signing. Why not? That’s great.

It’s not about how much you’re going to do, but just will you do. If you walk into an office and you say, “Look. I wrote this script and this is how I want to come off. These are the movies I love. This is the niche I want to fill,” if they feel like that’s a real niche and that niche needs filling, that’s a big deal. But they can’t tell you who to be.

John: Exactly. You have to be able to come to them with material that shows what your talent is, and a story, or at least a way of presenting yourself that leads them to believe, “Yeah, I see what he’s going for and I think he or she can achieve that.”

Craig: People have to understand that agents and managers – let’s call them representation – they’re never going to be your mommy or your daddy. They’re not your savior. They’re not Superman. What they are, essentially, are the vanguard of the endless decision process that leads to a writer being hired. They’re the first people in line to say, “OK, I’m willing to take a shot on you.” You still haven’t made a dollar when you get an agent. But it all is driven by you.

John: I always get the question of, how do I get an agent or manager? Generally, it’s the person who’s like, “I just finished my first script. How do I get an agent or manager?” That’s like, okay, you wrote a script. That’s great. After your second script, then I’ll believe you actually can write a second script. Or they’re like, “We just started working on our first script. How do we get a manager?” It’s acknowledging that part of the process is the ability to prove that you can actually do this repeatedly.

A thing I think we’ll probably say endlessly in the series of this podcast is that the career of being a screenwriter is not about one script. It’s about being able to write 50 scripts. While there may be one script that really gets representation’s attention, they’re really signing you for the next 30 things you’re going to write. They would love to be able to sell this one script. They mostly want to be able to sell you every year to different clients, to different producers, different studios, to continue generating cash flow and continue making movies.

Craig: Yeah, there’s a certain naiveté about the question in and of itself. Again, why we hate the question is just that some people are asking it and they haven’t quite earned it yet. “How do I get an agent or a manager?” Maybe the better way to phrase it is, “Which agent or manager should get me?” Start thinking that way.

Then if you think that way, you realize, “I’d better have something worth getting. I’d better know who these people are. I’d better know what I want and where I want to work and what kind of movies I want to be known for.” It’s the American Idol syndrome. “I go on TV, they like me, they pick me, I’m a star.”

John: The lottery mentality, which kills me about screenwriting, is that, by writing this one script, I will sell it for X dollars and then I will be set and everything will be wonderful and happy for here on out. It rarely happens that way.

I really liked the way you rephrased it, and I’m going to rephrase it again slightly, is, “How will the right agent find me?” If you can think about it in that perspective, a lot of things become more clear. How do I make myself visible enough that the right agent will recognize my talent and my determination and say, “This is the client I have to represent.”

What you may discover in that process is that – I say “the right agent find me” – the right agent probably isn’t the superpower agent who has Judd Apatow. It’s more likely the guy who has just a couple of clients, but they’re really good clients.

I left a bigger agent and went to a smaller agent right before Go. I made the change because I needed somebody who was generationally closer to me, who was hungry in the same ways that I was hungry, and I could grow with. I get frustrated when people aim too high, too fast. You want the person who can grow with you, ideally.

Craig: So true. The only thing worse than not having an agent is having the wrong agent, because then you feel like you are represented and everything’s going to be fine, but it’s a mismatch, so you have all of the lack of benefit of no agent, but none of the drive to get a new one, because you think you have one. That’s the worst situation.

I don’t care about the size of your agent, how big they are, who their clients are. If you’re just starting out and you’re lucky enough to attract the eye of a very powerful agent, you should ask, because it’s going to happen anyway, that they assign a junior agent as well to you, because you’re going to need more help, and you’re going to need more attention. They’re going to be busy talking to people that earn $20 million a year. They have directors and actors who out-earn every screenwriter. They just won’t talk to you. Get the right guy or girl.

John: And if you get the wrong guy, you can tune into a later podcast in which Craig will tell you how to fire your agent or manager.

Craig: It’s the best.

John: It’s actually one of Craig’s specialties. It’s one of the things I think he’s best known for, is really how to sever ties and move on with grace. I’ve seen him do it for many, many other screenwriters. It’s a master class.

Craig: I’m the Kevorkian of talent representation.

[Episode 172 Clip]

John: Last week we talked about the perfect studio executive. This week let’s talk about the perfect agent and what makes the perfect agent, what that person should be doing for a screenwriter, what our expectations should be when we’re talking to an agent. Craig, get us started.

Craig: I think that we do have quite a few agents and agent assistants who will soon be agents listening to us, so hey, lean in, listen carefully. I’m very simple about what I look for in an agent. Primarily, let’s talk about the real simple stuff. Call us back.

John: Always good.

Craig: Call us back. Don’t be impossible to reach. Call us back within a reasonable amount of time. That’s the big one.

John: Let’s define reasonable amount of time. A reasonable amount of time is 24 hours at the outlier, and if it’s not 24 hours, then it’s some communication that acknowledges, “Got your message, I will get back to you ASAP.”

Craig: Yeah. My feeling is if I call before lunch, I get a call before the end of the day. If I call after lunch, I should still get a call by the end of the day, but if not, first thing the next day and an acknowledgment that the call was received. That’s a real simple thing. I know that this is something that is talked about a lot in the agency hallways as a kind of nuts and bolts things. I cannot stress how important it is. Ultimately, the constancy of communication is the glue of the agent-client relationship. It’s as simple as that.

The other thing I look for in an agent is clarity. When a writer asks an agent, “What should I do? Should I do this job or this job? Should I pass on this? Should I accept it? Who should we give this to? Is this the right producer?” what we want desperately is the same thing that the people that hire us want: clarity and comfort. We want our agent to give us an answer. If there is no answer, then explain why there’s no answer, and then explain that either way will be okay. But this wishy-washiness or asking questions back – we’re not looking for an Ericksonian therapist to just rephrase our questions. We want answers.

John: When you proposed this topic, I went through and sort of made my list of archetypes of sort of the things I think about when I think of an agent. And not all agents are going to be all these people, but generally these are the kind of roles an agent fulfills in a writer’s life.

One is as adviser, which is just what you described, is the person who has an informed opinion about what should be done on a project, in a situation, what is the overall shape of what this experience should be.

Secondly is as kan advocate. You want your agent to be someone who is like on your side. And so when people are pushing you around, they’re pushing back. And that’s a really crucial role because sometimes the agent has to be the bad guy. The agent has to say, “No, he delivered. Pay him.” And convince on the next step if you want the next step. That’s a critical function of an agent and sometimes one that they are reluctant to perform because they’re trying to maintain all these other relationships. But from the writer’s perspective, we just need you to stick up for us.

Third archetype is sort of the connector. And really good agents are smart at being able to put people together who they think can work well together. That’s putting writers in rooms with studio executives who actually know what they’re doing, setting up a lunch between a writer and a director because there’s probably something they could work on together, bringing the right material to the writer, because this is a book we have and we think you would probably like it. That’s a crucial function of a good agent.

Craig: Let’s stop there on that one, because a lot of these things are sort of constitutionally required for agents. Some of them are things that agents have to earn their way towards. The truth is that we want from our agents a certain amount of connectivity. And there are all sorts of words for this, juice, or whatever you want to call it. We want our agent to be able to get the people we need to get on the phone on the phone. And if you can’t get those people on the phone, then you need to have a relationship with a senior agent who can.

John: That’s a crucial point, because a lot of times as newer writers, you’re going to be working with a junior agent, someone who doesn’t have all the history and all of the contacts and all the access that the top people have. But in some cases, those younger agents have tremendous numbers of contacts, they’re just at a lower level. And those can be incredibly valuable, and they can actually be faster than some of the very top-tier people can actually get that information. That can be really useful.

Obviously, if your agent is plugged in at CAA and they have this vast knowledge network of how everything is set up, that’s awesome. But even if your agent is at a smaller sort of boutique agency that deals with just TV writers, that can be exactly perfect if that’s what you’re trying to do.

My first agent was just a terrific agent, but his client list was mostly very esoteric indie writer-directors. He was really good at dealing with sort of specialty film arms of things, but that wasn’t who I ultimately was. And it got to be very frustrating, because he didn’t know the people who I needed to be in rooms with. And that’s why it didn’t last.

Craig: Exactly right. There’s another thing that I think the perfect agent is capable of doing, and that is switching their tone from every kind of communication they have, except for their communication with their writer clients, and the communication with the writer clients. We know when we’re being agented.

So, what is being agented? It’s being handled, cajoled. There’s that agent talk that’s smooth and fast and all facts have suddenly become fogged by war. And everything gets twisted around. That’s what they do. And they need to be able to do that. When they’re dealing with other agents, when they’re dealing with producers, when they’re dealing with studios, when they’re dealing with business affairs, they need to agent people. That’s their job.

But when you’re talking to us, before you get on the phone with us, take a breath and say this: “This person I don’t agent. This is my client. This person I can just calm down, relax, and be honest with.” I know. Sounds crazy. But we actually appreciate honesty more than anything. Don’t hide bad news from us. Don’t sugarcoat bad news. Don’t flimflam us. And if we challenge you on something and we’re right, don’t think that by saying, “You know what, that’s a really good point, you’re right,” that it makes you weak. It doesn’t. It makes us like you more. Save a certain tiny nugget of honest, normal you for us, and agent everybody else.

John: Part of that honesty is being honest about why a project is coming to you or why a project is not coming to you. And that’s a very difficult conversation to have.

Craig, you will be able to better articulate what the legal definitions and differences are between an agent and a manager. But my perception is that any time somebody comes to my agent with, “Here’s work. Here is work we would like John to do,” I think he’s legally obligated to tell me about it. Is that correct?

Craig: It is. Yeah. A lot of times they will glide over that, because they know that you’re busy and unavailable and wouldn’t want to do that. I don’t need my agent to call me up and say, “Hey, listen, we got an offer. You just started writing a script. We got an offer for you to do an episode of an animated program in Albania.” I don’t need to hear about it.

John: Yet I think one of the crucial things is – and this is the conversation I have quite often – in one of those sort of check-in calls, there will be like four things we’ll talk about, and the last thing will be, “Oh, and I got this thing for you. Here’s the project. Here’s the producer. Here’s why I think it’s a pass.” And that is just a godsend when you hear what that is.

Agents are fairly describing what it actually is and why it’s probably not interesting. And sometimes I’ll say like, “Actually, that does sound really interesting,” or like, “I’ve always liked that person, so I do want to take a look at it.” But a good agent is able to say, “This is why it’s probably not going to be right.”

In some cases, especially for a newer writer, they might say, “Okay, there’s this project over at this studio and they’re meeting with writers. They asked about you. I think it’s a fishing trip. I think they’re just basically bringing a bunch of people into the room and seeing what might stick. And you could be wasting a tremendous amount of your time.” I so appreciate that. And as a young writer, I might be panicked, like, “Wait, I’m not going to go for this job?” A smart agent might say, “You know what? I don’t think anyone is ever going to get that job. I think it’s basically just a let’s see what sticks kind of situation.”

Craig: Yeah. For sure. There’s another nice benefit to letting your clients know when you’re passing on things for them, in that it makes them feel good, that people want you to work for them. Look, if you say don’t do something, we’re not doing it. We’re very simple that way. We want to do everything. We want you guys to be able to help us say no to things. It’s obviously a very valuable part of this. Sometimes as agents, you will smell some blood in the water and we won’t smell the same blood.

I’ll get a call, “Something came up at the agency. Our biggest movie star is excited about doing this thing. It’s a book. And everybody is running around like crazy. But I put your name in and they really responded to that. This could be huge.” Look, again, we’re being agented there a little bit.

John: Yeah. But at least you’re being candid about what’s actually happening there.

Craig: Right. Exactly. And it’s good to know. And then if we don’t smell the same blood and we go, “You know what, I get why they would love that. I just don’t think it’s for me,” then you let it go. That’s okay. Just don’t jam us in, because we’re not dumb, we know how the agent business works. You guys make 10 percent of what we make. The person who makes the most amount of money, that’s the most important person. We know that. And it’s okay to shepherd us all together. That’s part of your job. But then if we don’t get it and we don’t want to do it, just be respectful and let us not like it. That’s okay.

John: That shepherd function is really crucial too. When Aline was on the show last, she talked about how her agent of many, many years, they were on a phone call and Aline was venting her frustration about this project and these people and the people being impossible. And the agent basically pulled her aside and said, like, “Get over yourself. Call me back tomorrow. And figure out how you’re going to actually do this project, because you’re being crazy.”

And that’s a crucial thing. That shepherding role of saying like, “You know what, you’re not actually being reasonable here.” It’s almost like a parent. Like, you know, reminding you, “You know what, this is your job. Your job is to write this movie. Write this movie. Get it over with. Get it done. And move on.” And that’s a crucial thing to have happen too. Sometimes you as the writer are the problem, and a very good agent can find the right way to tell you, “This is a you thing. Get through it. And let’s get onto your next project.”

Craig: No question. Yeah, Aline and I actually have the same agent, and I can hear him saying all that. And frankly, we want that specificity. It goes back that we want to be spoken to honestly and we want clarity. If the clarity is you’re being insane, if my agent ever said to me, “You’re being insane,” I would think I’m being insane.

A good agent should not be afraid of his client or her client. If you’re an agent and you’re worried that your client is not going to respond well to the truth, so your job is to somehow figure out how to hide the truth in a thing, like the way that I feed medicine to my dog by putting it in pudding, we’re going to know. Don’t be afraid of your clients. If your client can’t handle what’s true, then they’re not going to be able to handle it with their next agent or their agent after that. Truth is a great defense.

John: I absolutely agree. The last thing I would say about the great agent is, the analogy I think I’ve often made is that if you’re having heart surgery, you don’t want to go to the woman who only performs heart surgery three times a year. You want to go to the surgeon and she performs it seven times a week. You want the person who is the pro at doing this thing.

And sometimes as a writer you have to step back and realize, like, “Oh, you know what? You actually do this job. You’re actually the person who makes this deal. I’m not going to sort of worry about every little step of this process. I’m going to let you and maybe my lawyer go off, make this deal, figure out all that stuff, and then report back to me what the results are. And I can say yes or no.” But I see sometimes, especially newer writers, freak out about each little bit of a deal, and that’s not generally a helpful thing.

Craig: It isn’t. I totally agree. There are times when we have a disagreement. And what I end up saying is, “Listen, let me tell you why I don’t want what they’ve offered, even though you think it’s good, because of this and this. It’s important to me. It’s important enough that I’m willing to say, no, I don’t want to do this.”

And a good agent hears that and goes, “Fantastic news.” As long as you’re in sync with your client and they’re saying, “I don’t want to do it. I would rather not do it than this,” that’s empowering, and don’t fight anymore. Now just go with that, unless you feel that they’re being insane. Then tell them they’re insane. There needs to be that just honest communication. The most important advice I can give to you on your path to becoming a perfect agent is to not agent your client.

John: I think that’s great advice.

[Episode 7 Clip]

John: Question for you. When you get an email from somebody you don’t know, do you google them?

Craig: It depends on the content of the email. But if it intrigues me in any way, yes.

John: The reason I ask is because I wanted to start today with a question, and it’s clearly a genuine question. This person put in enough work to the question that I don’t think that this was any sort of scam deal or anything. But as I looked up this person’s name – I didn’t recognize it, so I googled it – it came up as an adult film star.

Craig: Oh, cool.

John: I don’t think it’s actually the adult film star who was emailing me. But it’s a person who, because of the nature of the question, chose to use a handle, which was the adult film star thing, so that I wouldn’t actually print it. But of course, it was a female adult film star, which I would have no idea if it was actually a female.

Craig: If you said the name, I would pretend that I didn’t know it.

John: Oh, very nice. That’s the lovely thing about an audio podcast is no one can see your facial reaction. I’m going to choose to name this person Tina, which is not the name that originally came on the email. Let me read it to you:

“About a year ago, a manager from a reputable company contacted me because they were a fan of my online videos,” which I presume were not adult videos. “I agreed to work with them. Unfortunately, this manager also represents people with lots of IMDb credits – big people, mostly actors though, a few writers. Over the last year it has become painfully obvious they have zero time for me and have put zero effort into helping my career get off the ground.

“Any general meeting I’ve gotten over the last year has been a direct result of my own efforts. I am beginning to realize that this manager and I don’t agree on anything creatively. Their notes are contradictory and vague. When they’re not, I find them to be flat out wrong.

“My question is, if I cut ties, I’m back to square one with no other representation possibilities on the horizon. At the same time, this manager has made it clear I’m last on their list of priorities. Even if I weren’t, the difference of opinion on everything seems counter-productive. Is it worth just keeping the manager or risk going it alone?

“I’ve actually spoken to my manager about this. I asked him if he had the time for me. He said if I didn’t, they could maybe pass me along to someone a little lower at their company who may be able to champion me a bit more.” It’s a confusing note. I think it’s actually the writer saying that, so the writer suggesting that. “They said, ‘No, no. I have the time. Don’t worry.’ Well, I’m worried.”

Craig: This is, talk about a softball question. 90 percent of the question is really an explanation of how poor of a job this manger is doing and how bad of a fit they are, and then 10 percent is generalized anxiety disorder. The answer is cut ties, of course.

John: I may disagree with you on this.

Craig: Let’s go. Let’s do this.

John: I don’t want to be the serial monogamist of these relationships, but I feel like it may be a situation where she needs to find the next manager before she leaves this current manager. I don’t know that being free and clear and floating in the Hollywood ether is going to help her any more than being with a manager who, while not helping her, isn’t an anchor in any way to her.

Craig: Well, here’s where I would disagree. It is difficult to switch representation without actively trying to do it. That is to say, without actively trying to get a new representative. It’s a very small community. As bad as a manager may be at their job, every manager seems to be amazing at sniffing out when their clients are trying to leave them. It becomes difficult to do a full-court press on your own behalf.

If there is any opportunity that this writer has to find a better manager, that opportunity doesn’t disappear simply because they don’t have this person. This person’s literally a zero. That’s what the question stipulates. In my mind, I think by cutting ties you give yourself every opportunity to get out there, do a full-court press and not run into anybody that said, “Oh, I would, but your manager is a friend of mine,” or, “We share a client,” or, “I don’t want to poach.” Just get rid of him. I don’t know, that’s my feeling.

John: Devil’s advocate, I will say that there’s other people who this writer could be bringing into his or her team who may be helpful, and the manager could actually be an asset getting them to it. I feel like you maybe go to your manager and say, “Hey, look, I really want to try to find an attorney. Can you give me some suggestions of people I can meet with who are good attorneys?”

It could help open the doors to some of those things which aren’t a huge burden on the manager’s time. Then you have a pretty good attorney. And then when it’s time to leave this manager, you have a pretty good attorney who can help make the next set of connections.

Craig: But it’s difficult to get an attorney if you’re showing up with no opportunity for lawyering.

John: That’s true. You’re not going to get a lawyer unless there’s actually some contract to negotiate.

Craig: Right, and that seems to be precluded by this relationship. I don’t know, I guess the underlying sentiment behind my advice here is that we as writers tend to project an enormous amount of power onto these representatives, fueled by our own anxiety that we will never love again.

But the truth is you’re not being loved now. It’s a bad marriage, get out of the bad marriage. Look actively and wholeheartedly for a new marriage. You found this person. You’ll find another one. I also feel like a bad manager is worse than no manager, because while you have your bad manager, you’re hamstrung and you can’t do better.

John: Craig, you are going to leave this manager. You’re going to advise Tina that she should leave this manager. What does Tina say to this manager?

Craig: Really simple. You call the manager up, no need to make a big production out of it. You lead by saying, “Listen, I made a decision to let you go. I’m going to end our professional relationship.” You start with that, right off the bat, really dispassionate.

Just say, “Unfortunately, things haven’t quite worked out the way I would’ve hoped. I had a certain series of goals for the two of us. They haven’t quite gelled, I’m sure you would agree. We’ve been together for X amount of time. It hasn’t resulted in employment. And frankly, it just doesn’t seem like you have the time for me or the attention that I would’ve hoped. The decision is final, but I do appreciate the fact that you took a shot with me to begin with. I wish you nothing but the best, and I hope you understand.”

John: That sounds reasonable and mature and grown up. I will say that when I left my first agent, I didn’t have that level of sophistication. I felt the need to actually pick a fight and be able to have the reason for why I was leaving. He was genuinely a friend. He was just simply the wrong agent for me to be with, and so I felt the need to pick some sort of fight that he wasn’t doing a good job with me, so he would get angry with me, and therefore I’d angry with him and say, “I think I need to go find another agents.” The whole time, I had actually already started the whole process of figuring out who I was going to meet with next.

Craig: Right, that works. Look, the most important thing is that whatever method you employ, you employ it post-facto to the decision. You don’t use this breakup speech to build up to the decision. You lead with it. The decision should be unilateral. It should be a fait accompli, and then you roll out your dismissal plan.

John: What I just realized is that I led this conversation with talking about googling people, and I just googled my old agent yesterday, because I was curious. Someone said, “Whatever happened to him?” And I didn’t know what happened to him, and he’s fallen off the radar.

Craig: You mean the Google radar?

John: He doesn’t seem to exist in the last several years.

Craig: Is it possible that he never existed and this is like a Beautiful Mind thing?

John: That would be kind of amazing if he never existed. You go back through all those old contracts and those phone calls, and you see the other side of it, and I’m just talking to myself. I basically rented this empty office, and I would go there.

Craig: This is the moment where Agent Kujan drops his coffee mug on the floor.

[End of Clips]

John: We are now back here in 2024, or whenever you’re listening to this podcast. It could be 2054 by the time you’re listening to it. My One Cool Thing is also time-travelly. This is the 25th anniversary of Go this year. GQ magazine had a great oral history retrospective of the making of Go. I was interviewed, along with Doug Liman, the director, Sarah Polley, many of the other actors. Desmond Askew I’ve not seen since we actually shot the movie. It was great to get this retrospective on how we got the movie made, how it almost didn’t get made. Paul Schrodt did a great job putting together this oral history.

Drew: I loved hearing from William Fichtner. I know he’s in that movie, but he just seemed to have such love for it and such passion for it, even though he’s in it.

John: I was genuinely surprised, because I would say during production, he was just always annoyed by me. At least that was my perception, because it was a really chaotic production. If you read the piece, you’ll see that it was a chaotic production. I was always meddling with things, but I needed to meddle with things, because Doug always had the camera on his back. Conversations that would’ve happened over in video village had to be right in front of the actors, because Doug had the camera on his shoulder.

Drew: He was rigging a light on Breckin Meyer.

John: Yeah. But I’m glad he had a great time it. Actually, it was a very difficult shoot but a really fun shoot. It really captured the joy of making and putting that movie out there in the world.

Drew: Cool.

John: Cool. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that. That is our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Drew, thank you so much. Edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by James Llonch. 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.

You will 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. They’re great. You’ll 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 my signing with a manager.

Now, Drew, before we go though, quite crucially, I wanted to talk about a traumatic experience you had this week and maybe talk through this a little bit. As everyone knows, we are a Highland house. All of our writing is done in Highland, which is the app that we make, and it’s what screenwriters should be using. But you this week, for a different project or something that’s going on, you had to use Final Draft. Tell us about Final Draft.

Drew: You don’t pay me enough. You don’t realize how good you have it until you go back to Final Draft, because god, what a nightmare.

John: You were discussing just putting in a parenthetical was…

Drew: Yeah. In Highland, all you have to do is type a parenthetical and it automatically formats. In Final Draft, you have to hit tab twice. If dialogue gets caught in an action line, you’re screwed. You have to retype all that.

John: It’s a really different thing. I’m sure if I had to do it, the muscle memory would come back, but I’m so happy not to be thinking about… Just don’t have to touch that tab key.

Drew: You’re very lucky.

John: Brutal. Thank you for all the hard work you did and in putting together this episode. In tribute to all your hard work, this outro is especially applicable.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Drew. We’ve talked about this on the podcast, that Craig and I have never had managers. We didn’t grow up with them. It wasn’t such a big thing when we started in this industry. Craig especially was always very suspicious of managers or the need for managers. I have always tried to keep a more open mind. But I definitely thought of managers as being a thing that newer writers might need, because they needed more hand-holding. They needed somebody to walk them through the process. They needed extra bubble wrap around them to help them do their thing. That was not what I needed, because I’m a very established writer. I didn’t need that extra point of entry. But as you, master of the calendar, saw, I ended up having six manager meetings and I went and met with a bunch of managers.

Drew: Yeah, six, which felt like a lot. Yeah, it’s surprising.

John: The reason why it ended up being six is, when I started making the decision to look for a manager, I went to Ken Richman, who’s my attorney, to get suggestions for who we should meet with. He had good names and good numbers. I couldn’t stop at one place.

But it also reminded me of when my daughter started looking for colleges, that yeah, you want to take a look at certain schools, but really you’re looking for types of schools. When we did our first college tour, we were looking for, okay, this is what it’s like being at a big school in a big city, versus a big school in a tiny town where the college takes over the town, or what it’s like to be a small college in a little, small town. What’s the right fit? What’s the right vibe gonna be?

These were actually six very different types of managers to meet with. I needed a sense of what is it gonna feel like, as much as how specific those individual managers might be.

Drew: Did you go into it knowing what you were looking for, or did you have an idea?

John: To get into it, I guess we should start with explaining why I was even looking for a manager, because I’m a very experienced screenwriter. I didn’t need a lot of help on the screenwriting front. But I’m not a very experienced or established director. One of my priorities the next couple years is to do more directing. I needed a manager, I felt, to shepherd that part of my career, and so really focus on that. That was one of the things I was really looking for.

As I was sitting down to meet with these managers, I would talk about what my priorities were for the next couple years ahead, what was working great and what I felt could work better. You sent through a list to all these managers beforehand of, like, “Here’s all the stuff I’m working on. Here are my priorities for what I want to spend my time doing.”

When I actually sat down to meet with these places, you realized they really were so different in how they worked and how they functioned and how they felt, because some of them were really small. One was a single manager. Some were really small, little, boutiquey kind of places. Some were producing shows and they were doing a whole bunch of stuff and they had a bunch of different clients. They had sports people, and they had their own research department and all this stuff. Some felt like they were as big as the big agencies, like the CAAs or the WMEs. There really was a huge range of things.

I asked similar questions of all the places, but it was also fun to hear their explanations for why they were set up the way they were set up. The places who don’t produce would say, “We don’t produce because we want to focus entirely on client service, really that old agency model, just focusing on what our clients need.” The places that did produce would say, “Because we’re out there producing, we actually know what it’s like to produce, and we actually get a lot of firsthand experience on what it takes to make something this year, next year, or the year after. We’re much more in contact with the places that you’ll be working with.”

Drew: What is the argument for the client services then? Because as we just talked about in the episode, I know there’s a workaround, but managers can’t legally represent their clients in a contract situation. What would they be doing? How would that be working?

John: I’m so happy we’re recording this without Craig, because right now Craig would be tearing his hair out, because one of Craig’s great frustrations is that managers should not, under California law, be doing some of the stuff that they end up doing, which is figuring out what the actual deal is. Managers can put you in the room, but in theory it should be your attorney and your agents who are doing that stuff. Some of my big writer colleagues don’t have agents anymore. They just have their managers, and it’s working out great for them. So it’s certainly a possibility.

I did think about, if I were to have a manager, would I still need an agency? Some of the conversations I would have with these management companies is, “How do you work with agencies? What is the overlap?” because there is overlap. Different explanations, but some would describe it as being like the manager is the general leading the charge, but you need the army, and that army is often the agency. The manager might be the person who’s saying, “Okay, there’s these 15 calls we need to make. I’m gonna make these 10. Can you make these five?” They can be the CEO of the representation of that one client.

Drew: Does that make it in any way awkward with your agents?

John: It can, and so I had conversations with agents too about, “How do you feel about working with managers?” Some, they would say, in quite polite ways, that there are certain managers they love getting on the phone with and certain managers they dread getting on the phone with, and that sometimes it feels like it’s interfering with their ability to represent the client.

In most cases though, managers represent many fewer people than an agent would. An agent might have 100, 150 clients they’re supposed to be repping, whereas a manager is focused on just a much smaller list, and so they can provide a little bit more direct attention to what that person needs that day and the day after and be thinking about a year down the road, what’s best for the client.

Drew: You picked a manager. How’s it going so far?

John: Good so far. What I would say is I found that the manager is more likely to be on Zoom with me. For example, we had a Zoom with the foreign finance people at the agency. It was good to have that manager there to ask the extra questions that I wasn’t thinking about.

It’s been nice that they have different connections than my agents might. Even just on an email chain, a manager could say, “Oh, we rep them,” or, “I know that person, and so let me make that introduction, and that’s a thing that could work,” or, “It’s not public knowledge yet, but they’re gonna be busy for the next 18 months, so I don’t think that’s a good person for us to pursue next to direct this project.”

That has been good and useful to have one outside person and an ability to reach outside the silo of… Part of the reason I was looking for a manager is because if you’re at an agency, yes, they in theory could work with everyone, and they should have information on all the stuff, but it’s hard for… If you’re at CAA, it’s a little bit weird for them to reach out to WME about one of the WME clients, whereas a manager can just pick up the phone and do it.

Drew: That seems like a huge… Obviously, you have a giant contact list, but your contact list expands exponentially, and knowledge too with that.

John: Yeah. All that said, it’s new and it’s different and it’s a little bit weird. As we established on the podcast, I kind of like being a little bit uncomfortable and trying things that are outside of my comfort zone. For me, for that, it’s been good. It’s a change. It’s a development. It’s fun that we’re doing this episode now, looking back 12 years to when we first started the agent and manager conversation, for me to suddenly have a manager, which I’ve never had before.

Drew: I’m excited. I think it’s a cool new chapter.

John: Cool. Drew, thanks for getting this episode together.

Drew: Thanks, John.

Links:

• Episode 2 – How to get an agent and/or manager
• Episode 172 – Franz Kafka’s brother, and the perfect agent
• Episode 7 – Firing a manager, and trying new software
• How ‘Go,’ the Wildest, Druggiest, Horniest Cult Movie of 1999 Got Made (And Almost Didn’t) by Paul Schrodt for GQ
• 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 James Llonch (send us yours!)
• This episode’s segments were originally produced by Stuart Friedel. 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: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, if one were to eavesdrop on the conversations happening at Los Angeles restaurants or the chatter occurring on Zoom meetings before everyone gets there, you might assume things are pretty rough in Hollywood these days. Today on the show, we’ll look at what’s going on in the industry, its historical analogs, and some suggestions for what might fix it.

Craig: I’m sure that they’ll listen to that, right? We’ll suggest what to do.

John: We’ll suggest the things.

Craig: And then they’ll do it.

John: The industry bigwigs will do it.

Craig: They’ll do it.

John: It’s not even just the industry bigwigs. It’s really the structural fundamental changes that will happen, or maybe we don’t need to do anything. It’ll all sort itself out.

We’ll also answer listener questions. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, what happens after we die. No, Craig, we’re not talking about the afterlife.

Craig: Thank god.

John: What specifically happens to all of our accounts and passwords and other aspects of our digital lives and what preparations should we make, should Craig or I or Drew, for that matter, suddenly keel over and all our stuff is there.

Craig: Sweet release. Yes.

John: Sweet relief for us, but not for our heirs, not for everybody else.

Craig: No, everybody else is gonna have a mess to clean up. But we will be free, released-

John: Free.

Craig: … back into the simulation.

John: Clear.

Craig: Yes.

Drew Marquardt: No.

Craig: No.

John: First we have some follow-up. To start us off with, Javier in Peru apparently has some corrections about our Star Wars beer ads.

Drew: The Star Wars beer commercials were real, but not in Peru. They happened in Chile.

Craig: Ah, all right. Then apologies to Isabela Merced, who is Peruvian, and ha ha Pedro Pascal, who is from Chile.

John: Love it all. But apparently, that was not the only mistake Craig made in Episode 641.

Craig: Oh, good.

Drew: Daniel wrote, “Craig referred to the birthday paradox and got it wrong in the same way that Johnny Carson famously did. The paradox is not that if you have 23 people, there’s more than 50 percent chance that at least one will have your birthday. In fact, that’s very unlikely. The paradox is that in a group of 23 people, there’s a more than 50 percent chance that at least two of them share the same birthday. This is actually a simple calculation, as it’s one minus probability that they all have different birthdays.”

Craig: You know what, Daniel? Absolutely correct. This isn’t me being defensive. I knew that. I think I just said it wrong. I misspoke. But yes, I did in fact know that that was what it was, so you do get the gold star for the correction. I have no problem saying oh, darn it, I blew it, but in this case, I just misspoke. I did know the nature of that.

John: Now, apparently, Craig was not the only person who made a small mistake or a small issue of disagreement in 641. James wrote in and actually send audio. I think because of the nature of this, we’re gonna play James’s audio, which is fantastic. Let’s take a listen to James.

James: In addition to the email, John, I thought you ought to hear from a native New Yorker. I was born in Brookdale Hospital. My father was born in Brookdale Hospital. We are still here. Our accents are still here. I’m a Black dude, so you gotta throw in the AAVN, whatever. My parents are from the South, so I got New York, I got down South. But I always tell people either go from y’all or yous, depending on who I’m talking to. You know what I’m saying?

I understand what you saying, but Brooklyn has more people than Philly. We gotta stop seeing four or five gentrifiers in Bushwick, Greenpoint, and they represent Brooklyn. No, they don’t. They will be in another city in five years. My mother is buried in Brooklyn. I’m just saying that to say that we still here. You gotta move around.

I don’t know where to send people these days to find a real New York accent. But it’s not the vegan dude with the mustache and his stupid lumberjack, whatever that is, that nonsense. He wasn’t wearing that in high school. Come to Brooklyn, he gonna change all of a sudden. Whatever, dude.

But like I said, the Brooklyn accent is still in effect, no question about it. I’m writing characters. All my stories are set in New York City with real New York natives. I gotta hear that accent, because like I said, people only associate the accent with white people, to be honest with you. But like I said, we out here. It’s funny, because whenever rappers from New York go anywhere, the first thing they talk about – these are Black rappers, of course – is our accent, because they know where we from: New York.

Craig: Oh, man.

John: Oh, man.

Craig: I love James so much. I just want to hug him. That is the sound of my youth. James, Brooklyn-born Craig over here. Absolutely. There’s a generational thing. There are different kinds of accents inside of Brooklyn. What we think of as that classic Brooklyn accent, I would say it’s an accent that was predominant in the mid-20th century and mostly among white people. Very specific things. For instance, my grandfather wouldn’t say “toilet.” He would say “TUR-lit”. The TUR-lit. That is a specific thing. But Black Brooklyn accent is also a specific thing. That was awesome. That was a great example of it.

There are all those different accents. What he’s referring to as, I guess we would call them the hipster Brooklyn people, I agree. My mom grew up in Bensonhurst, and she still has that accent. The mid-20th century Brooklyn accent’s very strong.

John: It’s fantastic to hear James’s voice. On 641 I talked about how the fact that when casting breakdowns say they want Brooklyn accents, what are you actually talking about? They probably honestly really want James. But if you actually look at who’s living in Brooklyn right now, you can’t guarantee that a person that you pluck off the street in Brooklyn is gonna have that accent. I was just in Brooklyn actually this whole last week. I was there for the Brooklyn half-marathon, which was really fun. I got to run through all the neighborhoods of Brooklyn. It was fantastic, and I loved it. James also makes the very good point that Brooklyn is huge. Brooklyn would be the fourth biggest city in America if it was its own city.

Craig: It’s massive.

John: It’s nuts how huge Brooklyn is. In that giant not-quite-city. You’re going to find all sorts of different accents, but this is the one that I think people are really talking about. We just need to actually denote specifically what you want when you want to hear James, because we want to hear James.

Craig: I’m gonna go ahead and put an R rating on the episode here. Hannibal Buress has one of the funniest things. He’s talking about these people in Brooklyn that James is referring to with their lumberjack shirts. I’m paraphrasing, but he’s like, “I don’t mind if you want to wear a lumberjack shirt and have a waxed curly mustache, but don’t talk to me like you aren’t standing there looking like a carnival face motherfucker.” Carnival face is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.

John: So good.

Craig: Carnival face. We are so far past the whole hipster thing. We’re probably 12 generations of pop culture cycle hipsterism now. God only knows what it’s up to now. I sure do like James for just being as real and true Brooklyn as possible. God, I hope he’s a Yankees fan. I don’t know what to say. If he’s a Mets fan, it’s gonna break my heart. James, can you just let us know, Mets or Yankees.

John: I want James making movies too. I’m glad he’s listening to the show. I’m glad he’s writing. I want to see what he makes.

Also in Episode 641, we talked about gendered words. We’ve talked about blonde with an E versus blond without an E. Ian wrote in to point out that there actually is a male equivalent. The male word for brunette is brunet. Really, it’s without the extra T and the E on the end. I’ve never seen that used in English. Have you?

Craig: I have not, but it’s certainly consistent with the way French works. Brunette is not a word that I ever use anyway.

John: Yeah, it’s weird.

Craig: What’s wrong with just brown? Brown hair?

John: What is wrong with brown? It got me thinking as we had this discussion. Why don’t we just use the Anglo-Saxon word for blond? Because there were Anglo-Saxon blonds. Why don’t we use that? I looked it up, and the Anglo-Saxon word for blond is whitlock.

Craig: Great. Let’s use it.

John: Which means wheat-haired. Whit is wheat, and lock is that… I had a friend, Paige Whitlock, who I went to college with, who had blonde hair.

Craig: Wow.

John: Her name was Paige Blonde.

Craig: That’s on theme. Also, there’s towheaded, which we usually use for children. My oldest kid was a towhead. I guess that’s a slightly different meaning. Yellow isn’t really a great descriptor of what blond hair is, because blond hair is more of that kind of lightish brown. To me, truly yellow is you’ve dyed your hair.

John: There are people who are almost just platinum blond, but it tends to be really young people, who have strikingly blond hair.

Craig: Towheads.

John: Towheads.

Craig: Towheads.

John: Also in 641, we asked people who had to deal with putting in the act breaks and streaming shows if they had firsthand experience to write in. Somebody did.

Drew: JG writes, “I have a few features running on services like Prime, Tubi, and Roku. The service that distributes those movies to those sites, Filmhub, requires that you provide metadata with commercial breaks for each movie. Their rule is you have to offer a break every 12 minutes or less, but not more. As a producer submitting the movies, it’s my job to go in and fill in the time codes for where each commercial breaks will take place. My goal was always to find the best or least intrusive spot for the breaks. But I suspected if a producer didn’t provide the metadata, the system would randomly insert the commercials within that 12-minute framework. It was a frustrating and time-consuming process, because as we know, movies aren’t designed for ad breaks. I know I opted for more breaks than I might’ve needed in order to put breaks at what felt like the most opportune moments.”

John: This feels like delivery requirements. We probably have talked about this on one of our 642 episodes before this. If you make a feature and you are delivering a feature to the buyer, they will have a whole long list of delivery requirements, which is not just, “Here’s the finished film,” but, “Here’s all the audio. Here’s all the paperwork that shows that we actually control all the music in this.” Delivery requirements will also be apparently now this metadata for where the commercial breaks should go. Not surprising that they’re asking for it, but JG had to do this him or herself.

Craig: Yeah, that’s actually a good point. I don’t think we’ve ever talked about delivery requirements. We’re so focused on how do you write a screenplay, how do you get something made into a television show or a movie, but there is a kind of industrial aspect of all this, where what you provide needs to meet legal requirements. It is a product to some people.

We think of it as art, but there are people who must make sure that there is some sort of quality control and product uniformity. That means there is a minimum run time that it must hit. There are long lists of requirements for credits. How large are the credits? Where do the credits go? How big are the credits? Is that per individual deals? Is that per union bargaining agreements? There are certain delivery requirements in terms of sound levels. There are delivery requirements in terms of the fidelity of the image. Do you have to submit in a certain resolution or more or less? Do you have to supply it with sound that is capable to be both stereo only or surround? Is it full surround? Is it 5.1? Is it 7.1? Blah blah blah blah blah. All that technical stuff, there are just entire departments working on that, to make sure that when you and I get our job done, that wherever it ends up, it’s theoretically hitting some minimum level of quality.

John: Where our listeners are gonna probably run into this is that if you go off and make an independent film, you’re like, “Great. I spent the money. I made this independent film. I maxed out my credit cards. I’m selling it to this company.” They say, “Great. Here are the delivery requirements.” Suddenly, you have tens of thousands of dollars more expenses you have to incur in order to deliver the thing that they are buying. That could be a real drain. On my movie The Nines, we had to deliver in this format and that format and the other format. We had to deliver a cut negative. There were things I required.

Craig: Negative cutting, there’s something that no one worries about anymore. Hey, kids. Listen up. You would film on film, and then by the time you and I were working in the business, the images would be transferred to video using something called a Telecine. Then that video would be digitized into your digital editor, your Avid probably. You would edit on that. That would create an EDL, an edit decision list. Every single shot has a frame. Then when all that was done and the picture was locked, they would send those just reams of paper with all of the ins and outs of every single shot. Then negative cutters would take the negative of the film and a splicer and a chopper, and they would begin to assemble it painstakingly over the course of I don’t know how many days, creating one long Frankenstein negative that was the edited film. That was then run through and reprinted onto a single negative. Then that was the thing that they made. I believe that’s how that worked. Then we ended up with a DI, digital interpositive, and all that other stuff.

Now the workflow, unless you’re dealing with Christopher Nolan or a filmmaker that’s really committed to physical film, all that’s gone. There is no more negative cutting.

John: Yeah. Not only would you need to deliver a print or something else that could be distributed, as Craig was saying, the sound has to be in this format versus that format. You had to deliver a print that has the sound printed on it. There were all these requirements. Some of those have gone away. As JG is saying, now there are new requirements.

I didn’t have to, at that point, supply where the commercial breaks are. With my movie The Nines, one of the things I was required to do was to deliver a broadcast-ready version of the movie, basically a sanitized version of the movie that could be aired on, realistically, cable. I remember talking with the company who was doing that, and here were their suggestions for how we were going to get that done. It was crazy. As far as I know, it hasn’t ever aired on basic cable, but there is a cut someplace that could do it.

Craig: Somewhere. We went through this on Season 1 of The Last of Us. We had to go through a delivery process that held two weeks to convert the image into HDR, high dynamic range, which some televisions can make use of. That two weeks was brutal actually, because we were right up against it to try and get things done. A lot of movies and television shows are right up against it because of the proliferation of visual effects, how many visual effects there are, getting those visual effects delivered in time and then shoving it through the rest of the sausage factory, including things like HDR and all that other fun stuff. Yay the people that do the delivery stuff, because god knows I would butcher it.

John: Oh, yeah, also because it’s a job that you are doing once. You are doing maybe once or twice a year if you’re just doing a lot of stuff. You would need a person whose job it is to do that every day, who actually understands what these things actually mean on paper and what they actually take in time. That’s why you have post-production supervisors and-

Craig: Sure do.

John: … contractual obligation people who oversee stuff, people who are figuring out what the credits are, what that run is. It’s a lot.

Craig: There’s a reason that there are all those names in the credits.

John: Now, before we get on to our main topic, a few episodes back we had Ken White come on, and he did a great job of talking through the realities of the law we see on TV and the lawyer-client relationship we see on TV versus realities. I was thinking we should do that for some other professions, because there’s professions we see all the time in film and television, and we don’t know what the actual realities are behind that. This is a thing where our listeners may be able to help us out.

Some things we would love to be able to talk with people about. A private investigator. If you know or are a private investigator who does the kinds of things we see on TV but the reality version of that, we’d love to talk with you. A military specialist. We see all these military actions in film and television. We don’t know what the realities are behind that. Public school teachers, especially in high school. There’s a whole genre of teacher movies. We could talk a little bit more about teachers. Police officers, of course. We see cop stuff all the time. Be curious to see what the realities are there. Then we have a few more long reaches. We have an astronaut on deck. We could talk about that.

If you have suggestions for this is a person who actually does this job who could be a great guest on Scriptnotes, write in to ask@dev.johnaugust.com, because in the weeks ahead, we’d love to do more of those kind of episodes.

Let’s get on to our main topic here, which is, man, things are just terrible, or they feel kind of terrible. Literally, at dinner last night, I was sitting with a group of other writers and filmmakers. It’s really tough to set up a project now, to sell a project right now. Craig, you may be a little bit insulated from this, because you’re up in Vancouver, you’re doing your TV show. Your head’s down, doing your work. But for the rest of us who are down here in Los Angeles, it is really weird and tough in a way that is just different than previous years.

Craig: Insulated though I may be, because I have a television show that’s on and running, I hear about it all the time. There’s no part of me that’s like, “I don’t know. I don’t know what everyone’s cranking on about.” No. There has been a significant – I hesitate to use the word correction, because that implies that things were wrong prior. There has been a significant change in both the quantity of shows that are being made, the way they’re being made, the amount of episodes that are being made, the costs of those series. Everything has changed in such a way that there’s a squeeze now.

I think that a lot of the issues that we’re dealing with were anticipated by and partially addressed by the strike. The things that the Writers Guild were looking for dovetailed entirely with the problems that we see now. What’s important to always keep in mind is the Writers Guild negotiates a collective bargaining agreement for people who are hired. The Writers Guild, even with the minimum guaranteed room size, that’s not going to be something that keeps 9,000 people at work if there aren’t 9,000 jobs. It’s just not how it goes. There is no way to insulate the workforce from a contraction like the one we’re seeing right now.

John: Yeah, for sure. We’ll put links in the show notes to two different articles. The one that had the most people talking about it the last couple weeks was one by Daniel Bessner, he was writing for Harpers, called The Life and Death of Hollywood. It’s really recapping what’s been happening over the last few decades and how we got to this moment. For a lot of people, it’s gonna be very familiar territory. But there were a couple of quotes and interviews in there that stuck out.

The first one I want to talk about is Alena Smith. She wrote and created the series Dickinson for Apple TV. She says, “It’s like a whole world of intellectuals and artists got a multi-billion dollar grant from the tech world, but we mistook that and were, frankly, actively gaslit into thinking that was because they cared about art.”

What’s she’s saying here is that we did, with a rise to streaming, just get suddenly a whole bunch of new opportunities to make weird, cool shit, but we shouldn’t ever confuse ourselves that they wanted to make the weird, cool shit because they wanted us to be artistically satisfied. They were chasing audience. They were chasing just esoteric, strange audience. Their whole goal was to get as many people as possible to subscribe to these shows. They really weren’t that obsessed with how successful any individual show was. Now, the correction is that they really want those shows to be hits, and that is likely largely driving some of this contraction and this retreat to safety that we’re seeing in the things they’re actually choosing to make.

Craig: I think the phrase “too good to be true” comes to mind. You said they were chasing an audience. I’m not even sure they were chasing an audience. I don’t even know what they were doing. In terms of the amount of content that was being created, it seemed like they were trying to build overwhelming libraries of stuff. Instead of saying, “Hey, come to our new store, because if you like pants, we have pants,” they were saying, “Hey, we built a new Walmart. We have literally everything you could possibly ever want. Go wander the aisles.” It’s Costco of stuff. What they weren’t doing, and I couldn’t understand it, was having any concern whatsoever with who, if anyone, was watching some of these shows.

When the Warner Bros-Discovery merger happened, there was this immediate convulsion, because under the direction of the CEO, they took off a bunch of things from the streaming service. In the articles, there were these little mentions that some of the things that they had taken off were being watched by tens of people, so in a statistical sense, unwatched. There was so much stuff. Because everything is expensive when you are creating demand, high labor demand, the cost of things, not necessarily of the writers, but the cost of production and key actors start to go up. Everything inflates. What we ended up with was a bubble.

The only thing that I would say to Alena is that the studios and networks have been actively gaslighting writers forever. This is not new. They are constantly lying to us any time they say, “Hey, we love you. We love your mind, and we love what you do.” They’re lying. What they’re saying is, “We hope to god that whatever it is that you do, which we may not even understand, people become obsessed with and pay us to watch.” That’s all they’re ever saying. That’s all they’ve ever said. That’s all they ever will say. But they dress it up in all sorts of alluring phrases.

What changed during the bubble time was they actually didn’t seem to care about anything. They just wanted stuff to get made. It was almost like in the late ’80s and early ’90s when home video made it so everything was profitable. In this case, profit didn’t matter. Therefore, they made everything.

John: I’m really glad you brought up the difference between audience and just doing stuff to do stuff, because it reminds me of criticism I see of web traffic. For a long time, these websites were generating huge numbers of eyeballs. People were seeing stories on these sites. Everything was about chasing views. But there’s a difference between views and audience. An audience actually likes the thing you’re doing and wants to come back and see it again. They actually really engage with the content you’re making, versus someone who drops by your site and then immediately bounces back off and leaves. Many websites are having to retool and really think about who do we actually want to attract to what we’re providing, and how do we keep them engaged and involved.

That does feel like the same kind of distinction we’re seeing here is that they were trying to build these megamalls and recognizing that most of these stores that they were opening up, no one wanted to walk into.

Also in this article, they were talking about the short-termism that happens is because once you actually start just looking, like, quarter by quarter, how much are we growing these things, when you have investors really wanting to see, “We have to have a return on investment immediately,” that’s not a very good way to make movies and TV shows. You need to be able to think a little bit longer than just the next quarter for how you guys are doing and then to try to correct out of the situation, you end up making these gargantuan cuts that are so brutal.

Craig: We are getting pretty violent pendulum swing/whiplash syndrome here. A healthy industry does make money, because if they don’t, then they fall apart and they stop hiring us. We have a vested interest in a healthy industry. If the industry decides, “We actually don’t care about profit anymore. We’re just gonna borrow crazy amounts of money and spend crazy amounts of money with no goal in sight,” then it is inevitable that they are going to then pendulum swing back to keep themselves alive. The pendulum swing will be too much of a squeeze, too much of a minimization, because they are now trying to pay back their own bad decisions.

But ideally, this whiplash pendulum effect settles down and we find ourselves back in some kind of healthy balance, where the studios are making money, don’t feel like their backs are against the wall, are no longer in a wild cocaine spree of spending, and then hopefully are able to go back to the way it used to be. “Here’s some safe stuff. Here’s some slightly risky stuff. Here’s a little bit of this. Here’s a little bit of that. But overall, we have a balanced slate.”

John: There’s a quote here from Jason Grote, who is talking about prestige TV. He’s really talking about the HBO model of prestige TV, so like The Sopranos, and when you suddenly got like, “Oh my god, we have this really good TV.” He’s pointing out that it wasn’t about a bunch of new people coming into Hollywood. It was a bunch of people who actually really knew how to make TV shows, who were suddenly given the opportunity to make the TV shows they really wanted to make. That feels like a crucial distinction. It’s not just about newcomers making brand new stuff. It was actually like, “Oh, let’s actually take some chances on some people who actually know what they’re doing.”

Craig: Yes, and I’m a beneficiary of this. No question. There are a lot of people who worked for a long time, making the things that they were told to make, the way they were told to make them. They had to fit in a certain box. There had to be ratings. There had to be this. There had to be that. It had to be for a particular budget, repeatable for 22 or 26 episodes a season. All of those restraints suddenly disappeared. You did get remarkable stuff. Now, there are some things that are excellent that also get huge audiences. There are things that are excellent that don’t.

I think a lot of those things in part suffered more from where they were and how they were, or often, not even, marketed, because in the crazy gush of content, it was almost like nobody making the stuff had time to even tell you about it. They threw it in your face as you were walking by. Maybe you took it, and maybe you didn’t, and then you just kept going.

But that’s absolutely true. Vince Gilligan is such a good example. He was making great network television. It was standard network television. But when you said to him, “Hey, do what you want.” Same thing with David Chase. Charlie Kaufman worked on – was it Alf? I think it was Alf. When you let certain writers go free… But no question; it wasn’t like prestige TV helped, for instance, under-represented writers. It didn’t.

John: Wrapping up on Bessner’s article here, I think his last suggestion is frustrating, because he undercuts it immediately after he says it. But he’s talking about, oh, the one change which would actually make a big difference is if we let these writers control the copyright on the things that they make. As we’ve talked about since probably Episode 1 of this show, there’s a reason why that doesn’t happen in the U.S. It’s because that’s what lets us have the powerful union that we have. The other good counterexample is, in lots of other places in the world, writers can control the copyright. It’s not like it’s awesome for them there.

Craig: No. When you see somebody suggesting that the answer to a screenwriter’s ills is retaining copyright, you know you’re dealing with a tyro or somebody who is simply from the outside and doesn’t get it. It is a nonstarter and it’s a bad idea. You’re absolutely right.

We can simply point to the rest of the world and say, “Show me in the rest of the world where writers for television or film are being compensated the way American writers are. Show me in the rest of the world where writers for television and film get a pension the way American writers do, get residuals the way American writers do, get credit protections the way American writers do.” You can’t. You can’t. The copyright suggestion just falls apart anyway, because we don’t publish screenplays to be read by people. It is a part of a composite work. That’s kind of a huge red flag that maybe somebody didn’t do the research they needed to do.

John: The second article we’ll put a link in the show notes to is One Weird Trick for Fixing Hollywood by Max Read.

Craig: I like this.

John: He starts out by talking about how among his screenwriter friends, it is just really tough. It’s the same conversation you and I have about our screenwriter friends. The only things that are getting made, in his case he’s hearing about ultra premium limiteds, which are a six-episode miniseries that has an A-list star. I would say even that is very hard to shop and get made right now. No one wants to buy those things. I’ve been out with things like that, and it’s still really tough.

The number of projects that have, “That’s a great writer,” the script’s already written, there’s a director on board, there’s an actor on board, the number of those that have not sold in the last six months is just mind-boggling. There’s no guarantees about what’s going to happen.

What I did like about Max’s article is that he points out the bigger issue that the industry as a whole is facing is that we have a lot of new competition for the amount of time that people would normally spend watching TV or going to a movie, and that’s because we have phones, we have other things that are going to keep our eyes entertained during the day. That’s time that we’re just not gonna be watching TV. The amount of hours viewed of the television that’s being made or the movies that are out there is gonna suffer.

Craig: This is an odd argument to me, I have to admit. Billions of people are watching things that are on Netflix and Amazon and Max and network television, which still earns millions of viewers a week. The old stuff, Suits and Friends, these things get recycled again and are watched by millions and millions of people and then discussed on TikTok. TikTok, in fact, is where a lot of these shows get their popularity in the first place.

You and I talked about how our kids got caught up in this crazy TikTok phenomenon of watching Criminal Minds, a show that was never intended for 16-year-old girls to watch, and yet there was this massive wave of girls one summer – mostly girls as far as I could tell – watching Criminal Minds and discussing it together on TikTok.

I don’t understand, A, the argument that the problem with television is that people aren’t watching it. They are. We have fragmented the audience across 4 billion shows. At peak TV, the John Landgraf phrase, I think there were over 600 television shows made in a single year. The audience probably grew, but it was spread out over 600 shows. This is a division problem. It’s not an addition problem.

Second, I don’t understand how to solve Hollywood by going off and supporting or helping YouTube and that. That’s not Hollywood. That’s a different thing. We need to protect this business as it functions here, because what people do on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and Twitch and Twitter is not Hollywood. It’s its own thing, which is massive and incredibly profitable and valid, but it’s different.

John: It is different. I’m gonna make his argument that I don’t fully endorse, but just so it’s actually made. His metaphor would be, let’s say you are a home builder who’s building apartment buildings, and then a few blocks away you see there are these hobbyists who are building things that are basically like buildings, that are competing for the housing of people around you, but they’re doing it much cheaper and without any of your protections. You would be thinking about that. You would be looking, like, “Shit. How am I going to be competing against them if they are doing it cheaper?”

Craig: If I bought into the premise that we’ll call the paramedia is limiting the audience or ruining the audience for what Hollywood does, yes. There’s an argument to be made that the theatrical experience has been permanently damaged by both the pandemic and the paramedia, but not the streaming business. The streaming business was damaged by the fact that the business plan made no fucking sense. The streaming business was damaged by the fact that they were spending more than they could ever hope to make back, with no end in sight. All of them decided they should try and outspend each other.

But the viewership is enormous. Enormous. We’re talking about tens and tens of millions of people in the United States alone, much less the rest of the world. Netflix has an audience that has, I don’t think, ever existed before in terms of size. I include them, of course, as part of Hollywood. I don’t buy that the audience is being taken away.

My concern about the way things have been going is that none of it made any sense. It all felt a little bit like MoviePass to me, where you and I would look at it and go, “You spend $80 billion try and get $5 billion? Why?”

John: The answer is because there was a time when tech companies could do that, and sometimes it had great outcomes because of that. Google was an example, or Amazon was an example of companies that burned money until they became incredibly profitable. I think there was a thought that these legacy studios could burn money and then suddenly become profitable. Netflix was able to do that. In order to compete against Netflix, we need to become Netflix. It didn’t quite work out that way.

Craig: It didn’t work great. I think that there’s been a settling in. We do have some more convulsions on the way, because Paramount is clearly up for sale. As we’re talking, maybe it’s already been sold. I know Sony has put in a bid. Disney bought Fox. Let’s say Sony buys Paramount. We’re now squishing ourselves down, but in a way also getting back to the number of things that we used to have, because if you include Amazon and Netflix and Apple, those are three big studios. We’ve lost Fox. We’re about to use Paramount. We’re getting back almost to the same number of studios that have always kind of existed. It will be interesting to see in the years to come if we can achieve some kind of stability again in our business.

John: In talking with agents and managers and other folks who are on the sale side of stuff, they will agree that this is a really tough time. But there are some, I won’t say brighter spots, but there are some areas that are less affected. There’s still money to make indie features. That pool of money is still out there, and there’s still a market for that. There’s ways to do that, especially things that come to a certain price.

I was talking to a documentary filmmaker who said that he’s been working on this thing that he was originally gonna pitch as a three-episode documentary series. You can’t do that now. People aren’t gonna buy that now. But he can make it as a documentary feature, so, “Great. I’m gonna pivot. Same story. I’ll do it in 90 minutes versus I guess 90 minutes in three episodes.” It all works out. The same thing happens for narrative features as well.

I also think we just need to be mindful that, the classic truism, you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take. People can be so gun-shy to actually try to do something that they’re looking past simpler things they could try to do. If these $200 million movies are not working out for you and you’re losing money on them, maybe take a look at the Anyone But Yous, smaller movies that are successful, and just try some of those, because there may be some different ways and different kinds of movies and series you can make that are gonna be cheaper, that can actually give you the outcome you want.

Craig: This has been going on for quite some time. The squish of the small movie preexists all the Netflix stuff. It preexists the pandemic. The chasing of massive things really accelerated with the Avengers. You can draw a line where the Avengers came out, did what it did, and everybody said, “Okay, I guess this is our business now, because the amount of movies we have to make and the amount of swings we have to take to match one of those.” One of those gets you four more of those. That keeps your business afloat for years. Years.

John: We are making some big, expensive movies that pay off. Dune 2 was incredibly expensive. It paid off. It’s not going to generate a bunch of more Dune movies, most likely, but it was great that it happened. We of course had Barbenheimer, was a great success for both of those films. Those films were very profitable and big successes. I think what we’re urging this industry to do is to take a look at what were the things about those films that were successful. They were made by great, visionary filmmakers who were swinging for the fences and doing interesting things. It wasn’t a retreat to safety that made those things giant hits.

Craig: I’ll point to a movie that is one of my favorite examples. I think the budget was something like $60 million. This movie was from 2019. In 1990 or 2000s, that would be the classic $35, $40 million movie. Joker. Joker was a hard R. It was kind of an art film. It borrowed a little bit of comic book shine, but barely any. There were superpowers. There were really no action scenes. It was an art film. The box office for Joker is $1 billion. Joker: Folie à Deux is coming out. That is the kind of bet that I think is well worth taking and is terrifying.

John: Let’s also talk about Joker is that not everybody liked it. In fact, a lot of people hated Joker and to this day hate Joker. You know what? That’s okay, because it doesn’t have to appeal to everyone in order to be a giant success.

Craig: People talk about the four-quadrant movie. There are movies you can make that everybody likes. There are very few movies you can make that everybody loves. But what you can do are make films that some people love so much that they will evangelize them, they will market them for you, they will see them multiple times, they will buy them again when they come on the streaming service. Joker is a great example of that and the definition of a risky pitch. By the way, the sequel looks just as risky to me.

John: Totally.

Craig: Good for them. It’s a big budget.

John: Here was the bet. The bet was that there wasn’t an audience for it. It wasn’t the bet that everybody in America will want to see this movie. It was that it was talking about there’s gonna be an audience, and that by definition of audience, people who will genuinely love this movie.

Craig: Yes. That kind of artistic risk taking, which I think you could also see with Barbie… There’s so many ways to make Barbie bad. There are about a million ways to make a bad Barbie.

John: Oh my god. Almost every way is to make a bad Barbie.

Craig: There’s pretty much one way to make a great one. Trusting somebody like Greta Gerwig, that’s risky. It is. They used to just have a bland filmmaker deliver a bland script for these things, to hit the thick middle and hedge their bet, and they didn’t do that with that one.

Oppenheimer only gets made because Christopher Nolan is the kind of filmmaker who gets to do stuff. That’s it. Again, nobody’s sitting there thinking, “Oppenheimer’s gonna make a hell of a lot of money.” How much did Oppenheimer make? $965 million globally.

John: Love it.

Craig: That’s insane. That’s insane. That’s a biopic of the guy that ran the nuclear program. We’ve made movies about the nuclear bomb before. We’ve made movies about the father of the nuclear bomb before. Universal said, “We will take this huge bet. We will spend $100 million on this.” An algorithm most likely would say, “Oh, that’ll get you $30 or $40 million.” But instead, they made almost a billion dollars, because it’s a quality film. What’s the bet there by Universal? Good movie, people will come and see it. That’s old-school thinking. Really old-school thinking. You know what else we see out there that’s old-school thinking? Ads on television shows.

John: It’s craziness.

Craig: We may be hurdling ourselves backwards to 1988. Let’s find out.

John: Craig, a term I heard this last week, I saw it in a blog post by Hannah Ritchie, who writes about environmental issues, was the Moloch trap. Have you ever heard this term, the Moloch, M-O-L-O-C-H?

Craig: I only know that from the Bible and Watchmen. What is the Moloch trap?

John: The Moloch trap, it’s these forces that coerce and cause competing individuals to take actions which although are the best for them individually, ultimately lead to situations where everyone is worse off. It’s almost impossible to break out of that cycle. Tragedy of the commons is kind of an example of that.

But there’s a lot of things in environmental science that are Moloch traps, because, okay, I recognize that burning coal is bad for everybody and it’s bad for this, but if I stop burning coal, then other people are gonna burn coal. It’s very hard for any one individual to make a change or any individual nation to make a change, because the forces force you to do that.

I do feel like there’s a Moloch trap happening with the streaming wars, because it was like everyone was trying to do this thing. I think everyone recognized this thing we’re doing is unsustainable, but if I don’t do it, then I’m worse off.

Craig: Right. Basically either we’re all sinking together or one or two of us need to sink. I don’t want to be one of the one or two that sinks.

John: It’s hard to break out of the Moloch trap, but you do it by basically changing your motivations, by embracing innovation. The case of environmental science, it’s now cheaper to make power without burning things, which is great. Now it’s like we’re out of this cycle because we just don’t do those things, because it’s actually cheaper to build solar panels or turbines or other things. We’re not competing on these limited resources anymore, because we can just do stuff, and we actually think about abundance rather than limitations.

I do wonder whether there’s some way we can be thinking about changing our motivations and our goals here to break out of the cycle. Instead of always thinking about subscriber numbers or this or that, really thinking about what are the markers of success that we want for this. Profitability, sure, but with ads or with other stuff. Is there other ways we can think about how we’re judging whether this project was worth making, that are not purely based on the impossible metrics?

Craig: Hollywood is not a great place to try and metric yourself to success. The reason is, unlike basically every other industry, there’s something going on here that is incredibly unpredictable and also incredibly attractive. Our business creates culture, which is exciting and alluring, and predictable, sort of, a little bit, sometimes, but mostly not. Betting is really on human beings saying to you, “The thing I love and like, a lot of people will love and like.” You don’t know if that’s true or not. Your gut may not be particularly good or it may be okay. Your job basically rests in their hands.

Hollywood will always frustrate the modelers and the quants. It’s why I think people that just want to make money don’t bother with Hollywood. But if you want to make money and be part of something exciting and meaningful, yeah, Hollywood.

John: That’s why people make Broadway theater. That’s why people invest in independent films. The last point I’ll make here is that I think we’ve talked about the quants. They are doing these calculations that are incredibly esoteric, and it’s really hard to know what is the purpose behind, that they’re basically the navigators in Dune who are adjusting this device to get them from one place to another place. But this is not Dune.

I think there was something really good about the simplicity of Nielsen ratings and box office weekend grosses that lets you know was this a successful thing or was this not a successful thing. During probably five years of streaming, no one knew. We never knew, was this successful, was this not successful. I don’t know what actually worked. I think that by making it so opaque, we were really hurting ourselves.

Craig: It’s a really tricky thing. Have we talked about the new subscriber data thing on the show?

John: The WGA one?

Craig: I don’t think it was a WGA thing. It’s more a method of measuring, because one of the questions is, if you put all this stuff out there on your streaming service and it says, “We have a whole bunch of subscribers. Lots of them watch this,” did that show keep them subscribing? Hard to say. In fact, impossible to say. But one of the things they look at is, when we put a new show on, are there new subscribers? Are the new subscribers clearly coming in for that show? Now, it’s impossible to draw a perfect line, but you can kind of see these waves.

They are trying to find ways to figure out which of these shows is actually contributing to the subscriber money and which are not. It’s hard to say, because let’s say you make a show and you put it on your streaming service and not a ton of people watch it, but those people are subscribing to your service only for that show. That’s valuable. Then you could have a show that a lot of people watch, but nobody’s gonna cancel it if the show gets canceled. Then what is that worth? These are very tricky things to figure out.

John: They are tricky. I can see why an individual service might want to look at those numbers, but I don’t think it does the industry as a whole, or certainly the filmmakers they’re working with, all that much good to just trot out these weird, esoteric numbers. Tell me, is this show a hit? How many Americans or people worldwide are watching the show? Because that’s what really matters culturally is knowing this a very popular thing. There’s a reason why – what is the new Netflix series, Baby Reindeer?

Craig: Yep.

John: It broke out. We know it broke out because people are talking about it. They can also tell us that the numbers are really big. It’s great to see. That’s also again an example of a weird show that shouldn’t work and does and a risk that somebody took and it paid off.

Craig: We used to have a line we could draw between watching and money. Like you said, people bought tickets. Every person that came to see the movie put money in your pocket. When there were ads, every single person that watched the show put money in your pocket. When you take away the ads and you take away the tickets and you just have a store that people can wander through and it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet, how do you know that people are paying for the buffet for the shrimp or the salad? You don’t. You just don’t know. Even in success, I think a lot of times these people might be going, “Okay, but is this success meaningful?”

Let’s go back to the quote we got from Alena Smith, who said we were actively gaslit, because they don’t care about making an impression on culture, actually, I don’t think. I don’t think they care. I think what they care about is money. I think they are deeply confused about what is actually putting money in their pockets and what isn’t. They’re looking for something to hold onto, but it’s a lot of sand. It’s not that I’m gonna go so far as to say that I sympathize with the people sitting in the rooms trying to figure the math out. But from a problem-solving point of view, it’s a tricky one.

John: The only point I’ll slightly push back against is you said they only cared about money. I think one of the issues was they weren’t caring about money for a number of years.

Craig: Correct.

John: They were just caring about growth, and then they realized. “Oh, and money will come at some point.” It’s like, but will it? That’s not sustainable.

Craig: No. That’s a classic Silicon Valley think. Hollywood of old, those people were like, “I’m not making a picture unless I know it’s gonna make money, and that’s it!” I like talking like Tony Shalhoub from Barton Fink. That was the way it goes. Then suddenly, there were these other people like, “We got a better idea.” Silicon Valley is remarkable. They do these things that sometimes turn into these world-changing, axis-shifting, gabillion-dollar businesses.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Sometimes they just set massive piles of money on fire and dance around it. It’s so bizarre. I don’t know what’s going on up there.

John: We got our Quibis.

Craig: We got our Quibis. We got our FTXs. We have our things that just were like, what in the hell is it? But hey, man, you know what? We just write them.

John: We just write them.

Craig: We just write them.

John: Let’s answer some listener questions. The first one here is from Ellie.

Drew: Ellie writes, “I’ve been receiving some incredible feedback on the first draft of my screenplay. However, I’m finding that I’m now super scared to move forward with any rewrites or editing things that I know that I have left to revisit on the second draft. It’s like the excellent feedback has made me feel scared and completely frozen. I literally feel tense. It’s quite a timely story, so I really feel I want to get this out in the world ASAP. Perhaps I’m also afraid of the unknown of what I’ll do with a second draft. Ach, help. How do I unfreeze myself?”

John: I hear you, Ellie. That’s a familiar state, because here’s the thing. Your first draft, it wasn’t perfect, but it was complete and full and you loved it. It was an expression of what your original intentions were. You get this feedback, and they’re describing something that’s maybe even better, but you don’t know that you can actually do it. That’s probably a fear, a perfectionism. There’s all sorts of things that are holding you back. Man, you just gotta go for it. You gotta jump in and I would say pick some random moment in that thing and get going.

Craig: I too have had this, Ellie. You’ve described it so well that it’s making me feel tense, because I’ve been here so many times. I’m gonna say something that is maybe a little bit scary, but there’s some sunlight at the end of it. The second draft is usually worse than the first.

John: It is.

Craig: It’s just part of the process. This is one of the reasons why. Your first draft was knitted together, and now you’re starting to pull stuff. You know that you have to change things, and you know that there are some things you want to change. But now when you pull stuff, you’re gonna make wounds, you’re gonna diminish some things. You might step on something that it turns out was incredibly important.

Allow yourself to write the second draft that is worse than the first draft, as long as you can say to the people you’re working with, “I’m gonna go for some stuff on the second draft. This one will be a little messy.” The third draft is where it’s all gonna happen, because that’s the one where you get it back and then some.

John: Ellie, a technique that might work for you, and this sounds counter-intuitive, but actually start with a blank page. You might want to just open up a new document, and in this new document, type bullet points of, like, “These are the new scenes. This is the new stuff that’s happening.” Start to write those new scenes. Then from your old script, copy through the scenes of the moments that are actually gonna come through unchanged, where you’re not doing anything, because that may actually help you avoid the problem of just like, “Oh, I don’t want to damage this perfect thing that I built,” because you realize you’re damaging it. Think of the second draft as a new thing that gets to pull from your first draft. You approach a new thing differently than a rewrite. By letting it be a new thing, it may be actually a little less scary for you.

Craig: Yep, that may work. Basically, try anything you want and give yourself permission to suck. It might suck. That’s okay. Third draft is around the corner.

John: We have a question on a different kind of paralysis. Here’s Richard. Let’s take a listen.

Richard: Hello, guys. Richard here from the UK. I wanted to ask you something that seems to just steal so much time for me. I’ll set the scene if I can. You’ve made a really promising contact, and they’ve asked for some work, and you’re readying an email, a one-pager, and maybe even, say, a script. You reread your breezy yet professional email about 17 times, and then you worry that maybe the one-pager has got a typo, so you go through that a few times, and then the script, scanning for mistakes that may have eluded the 27 rewrites that you’ve already done. Then obviously, you better reread your email with fresh eyes, or maybe, oh, we should change that word. Then you think, oh, if I’ve spotted a mistake in the email, then maybe there’s one in the one-pager. Before you know it, four or five hours have just passed and it’s time to pick up the kids and start their dinner.

Both of you have obviously had to send some super important emails to some super important people. Can you give me any advice on how to cut out this excruciating ordeal. Thanks, guys. You’re the best.

Craig: We are the best. Thanks, Richard. I wonder how long Richard worked on this.

John: Absolutely. How many times did Richard rerecord his question to us?

Craig: Here’s some good news, Richard. Yes, we have certainly written our fair share of emails and documents and things. The fact is if you look at the emails you get back from these people, you will find all sorts of mistakes in their emails. You are dealing with an illusion that our minds create whereby all of our decisions are important. Emails are glanced through, scanned, sometimes barely. The documents that you send will have moments in them that make people sit forward and go, “I want to make this.” You can have an entire sentence missing. If it’s working for them, that’s okay. If you are riddled with spelling errors and typos and you’re actively putting forth the attitude of carelessness, that will call things into question. But ultimately, the quality of things is what matters. If you find yourself in a loop, just stop the loop and send the email.

John: You’re in an anxiety trap. You’re anxious because you’re anxious. It feeds upon itself. It’s real. It’s natural. You gotta get out of it. What might help you out would be to literally set a timer for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever, and take a reasonable amount of time to reread the email, take one last look at the document you’re attaching. When the timer goes off, press send and walk away from your computer, because you’re not doing anybody any favors by obsessing over things that are not important and not worth obsessing over.

Craig: There’s a feeling sometimes when you send these things. You’re about to hit send, and you think, “I’m sending you me.” You’re not. That’s the scary part is I’m sending you a document. I’m sending you an email. This is me to you. If there’s a flaw in it, there’s a flaw in me, and I will be rejected. None of that is true. It’s a way for us to imagine a control we do not have over people’s impressions of us. You could be given a year to perfect an email and a document in terms of editing, the surface editing you’re describing, and it would not change their opinion of you or the work in any significant way.

John: For our Premium Members, we sometimes send out emails about live shows or other things coming up or Three Page Challenges. In Mailchimp, the service we use, there used to be this thing right before you sent the email. There’d be this animation of a big monkey finger, a sweaty monkey finger above this red button for pressing send. It’s very effective and really anxiety-producing, like, “Oh, shit. Is it really ready? Is there anything left to fix?” They got rid of that image, because I think they probably did some surveys and realized that’s actually making it worse for people. It’s too true to the experience. It no longer says that. Now you can send it out more willy-nilly and it doesn’t do that, freak you out.

Craig: Do you really want to send this email?

John: Really want to?

Craig: I mean, I’m a monkey, but I’ve read it. Do you really want to send it? I mean, if you want to, but I wouldn’t.

Richard, you’re gonna be all right.

John: He’s gonna be fine. Let’s do our One Cool Things, Craig. My One Cool Thing is this artist named Lola Dupre. I have no knowledge of who she is. I just know her artwork is just so effing cool. I’ll put a link in the show notes to her archive, her gallery. She makes these portraits of animals and people that are collages, and so they’re distorted. It’s an image of a thing that’s just been distorted and pulled into different directions. They’re all really, really cool. Craig, you’re looking at this now too. Help me describe what you’re seeing.

Craig: There are images of let’s say cats, and it’s somewhat caricatured, but most salient, the cats have 20 eyes or there are painted images of people and the length of the face is really distorted. One of these is wonderful. I might just get that. It’s an old-school Mac with a keyboard, but the keyboard has like a thousand buttons on it. This is amazing. I love that one.

John: It’s all great. They’re done through collage. Basically, she’s starting with one original image, and then just by overlapping and overlapping, she’s distorting the dimensions of it in ways that are just really, really cool. It just made me happy to look at and just things I would love to have on my wall. Lola Dupre, an artist. We’ll put a link in the show notes to her shop and her gallery.

Craig: Very cool. Looks like most of her stuff has been sold. You’re doing great, Lola. I have two One Cool Things, because sometimes I have none, so I’m trying to make up for it. First is Codenames Duet. We’ve talked about Codenames.

John: Which I’ve played. It’s so much fun.

Craig: It’s so much fun. Codenames Duet, I played with Melissa. If you just have two people, you can’t play against each other, of course. The idea is you both have the same board of words. You each have different words on that board you’re trying to clue to each other. You need to work cooperatively to get all the words uncovered by a certain number of turns. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a very clever way for two people to play Codenames, and it’s just as interesting. There’s something nice about the cooperative experience. As opposed to the, “I beat you,” it’s more like, “We beat it.”

John: Now, Craig, we haven’t talked about the new Scrabble, and so all the controversy over, in Europe they came out with an alternate version of Scrabble, which is a cooperative game rather than a competitive game. There was all this Sturm und Drang about like, “Oh my god, they’ve ruined Scrabble.” But it actually reminds me of these cooperative games like Codenames Duet, where basically you’re trying to work together to get a thing done.

Craig: I don’t know why people would be annoyed that there’s a version of Scrabble that people can play cooperatively. Who cares? Just play your regular Scrabble. It’s still there. It’s not a problem. I think sometimes people are just looking for stuff to get angry about. Scrabble is made by, what is it, Mattel? They’re a company. They’re trying to make money. Who cares? Do you know how many versions of Clue have been made?

John: One or two.

Craig: Yeah, like 400,000. My other One Cool Thing, I landed on this because I was talking with somebody about the Bible and weird Bible verses. I thought, “Oh, I bet you the internet has a great collection of weirdest Bible verses,” and they did. They had lots of them, but there was one that I loved so much that I need to read it. This is my new favorite Bible verse. This is from 2 Kings Chapter 2, Verse 23.

“From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. ‘Get out of here, baldy!’ they said. ‘Get out of here, baldy!’ He turned around, looked at them, and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled 42 of the boys.” There’s so much going on here-

John: There’s so much.

Craig: … that I love. First of all, at first I was like, you can’t kill kids because they called you baldy, although I was not aware that people were yelling “baldy” back in, whatever, 300 BC, but fine. But then I was like, wait a second, 2 bears mauled 42 of the boys. That means there’s more than 42 boys. Now, that’s a riot. That’s 70 boys now following you screaming, “Get out of here, baldy!” I’m afraid.

John: I don’t understand the bears’ agenda. It’s [crosstalk 01:04:16].

Craig: The bears don’t have an agenda. The bears have been sent by the Lord. But this is the next mind-blowing part. He only sent two bears. Two bears mauled 42 boys. That’s 21 boys per bear. Let’s say these bears are real quick. It takes maybe five seconds to fully maul a child. You got 21 of them. That’s almost a minute. After 30 seconds of watching your friends being torn apart by bears, how are you not running?

John: Run away.

Craig: Just run. Why only send two bears? Also, I like that there happen to be woods nearby, and also that the Lord was like, “Oh my god, no. You can’t call my guy baldy. Oh, bears, that’ll work.” Bears.

John: Bears.

Craig: It’s just such a great verse. “Get out of here, baldy!”

John: I’m looking it up on Biblia, which is showing me the different translations of that same section, because I was wondering was baldy just one esoteric choice that one translator chose to make. But no, baldy is common in most of this.

This is from the New International Readers version. It’s slightly different. “Elisha left Jericho, went up to Bethel. He was walking along the road. Some young fellows came out of the town. They made fun of him. ‘Go on up. You don’t even have hair on your head,’ they said. ‘Go on up. You don’t even have any hair on your head.’ He turned around and looked at them and he called down a curse on them. He did it in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods. They attacked 42 of the young fellows.” It’s not just a weird translation.

Craig: That’s what happened. That’s the story.

John: That’s what happens.

Craig: That is the full story of what happens when you start saying “baldy.” Is it possible that the two bears were just large, hairy gay men? Because now this is getting good.

John: Now it makes more sense.

Craig: Now this is getting good.

John: Could they really maul these? Maybe they were carrying a maul. They were carrying a giant hammer.

Craig: We know they’re big. We know they’re big guys.

John: They’re big. They’re big guys.

Craig: I just love this verse. I think it’s “baldy.” Ultimately, it’s just-

John: “Baldy” is pretty great.

Craig: That is a word that you’re not imagining people in the time before Christ or even shortly thereafter saying “baldy.” It’s so mean. As a bald person, I’m in love with this.

John: I’m thinking of our D&D Zoom group and just how many bald heads there are. We would all be subject to these taunting youths.

Craig: “Go away!” Why do they care? Why are they so mean? Anyway, they got what was coming to them.

John: They do. That’s a lesson learned. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt-

Craig: Baldy.

John: … and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: Baldy.

John: Our outro this week is by Ben Singer. 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. We love when you send little audio clips, so keep doing that. 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. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to do about all of our digital stuff and what to do with it after we die. Craig and Drew, thanks so much for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you.

Drew: Bye, baldies.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, so as we’ve established well on the show, you believe we’re living in a simulation, so therefore your death has no impact on you, because you’ll just return to the cloud. But your loved ones will still be around. Melissa will have to deal with, oh my god, all of Craig’s computers and stuff like that. Have you done anything to help her out in this situation, or, god forbid, you don’t die, but you’re in a coma, and she has to deal with that stuff, what are you doing to make her life better and easier?

Craig: I have thought through all of this, and I think everybody should. Of course, Melissa and I have done some estate planning, which you do not need an estate to do. You just need something. You own a spoon, you can do estate planning. We have provisions should either one of us die or become incapacitated medically. Because I use 1Password, she has access to my 1Password, which means she has access to all of my passwords. If I drop dead, she can use that to basically get into any account that I’ve created and cancel them, or perhaps cause mayhem.

John: Absolute mayhem.

Craig: What about you?

John: I had to deal with some of this when my mom died, because she was the last of that stuff. We had a bunch of her accounts and things like that. To her credit, she made good lists of where her physical bank accounts were and that kind of stuff, and I had to deal with all the closing off of her estate. For the digital stuff, because my mom was not technically all that sophisticated, I just had a list of all her passwords anyway, so I could get into her Gmail and all that stuff and deal with those situations that came up.

With Mike and I, we have similar situations where that stuff is in 1Password and most stuff will be pretty easy to do. I was reading a blog post this last week that was talking about, it’s one thing to have all the accounts, but that doesn’t tell you what a person actually needs to do. This blog post is recommending a document that’s like, here’s how to be me, basically just talking through, like, this is all the stuff that I’m actually doing on a daily, weekly, monthly basis that’s keeping stuff going, because Mike is paying a bunch of our bills that I don’t really know about. Here’s where this thing is. This is the phone number for the tree guy, because I don’t know who that person is. That kind of stuff we haven’t done a great job of sharing, and we probably just need some sort of shared document for that. God forbid something happens to both me and Mike, because Amy has no idea where any of this stuff is kept.

Craig: Yeah, that probably would be good to have somebody be able to provide her that. We have a trust set up. If the two of us go down, then there is an executor of the trust who has to operate with the fiduciary responsibility to the people who are assigned stuff, like our children. They would help them. That would be their gig. Part of the trust is making sure that those people are compensated fairly, so they’re not working for free.

But yes, there are ways to make sure that your kids are helped. I never had this issue, because my mother is still alive, but my parents didn’t have really much in the way of assets for me to worry about. Same for my grandparents. I didn’t have to think about it, but certainly my children will.

John: Drew is reminding us here in the Workflowy we did talk about some stuff on this area back in 594. Drew, remind us, what did we actually get into?

Drew: We were talking more about what happens to the things you’ve written after you’ve died. We had a little bit of estate planning. That’s always good.

John: In terms of the stuff we’ve written, I guess there’s all the things that I’m halfway through on. I have just a big Dropbox full of the finished projects and the stuff that was started that never got finished. I have a Notion database of my 36 projects that are in some form of active development in my brain. But that’s not gonna be so crucial. It’s worth something, but it’s not gonna be worth a lot. The Big Fish musical that I did with Andrew Lippa is an asset that I do control copyright on, and that will be a thing that my heirs will have to be thinking about and thinking about future productions and what changes they will allow to make to that down the road. But that’s not gonna be a, “Oh crap, in the next 24 hours, what stuff do I need to get done?”

Craig: It is gonna become an issue going forward. There’s an entire generation of old people that are on Facebook, and no one knows their passwords for anything. They barely know their passwords for stuff. When they die, there are just gonna be all these just floating accounts of dead people just hanging out.

John: Closing those accounts is an important thing too, or arguably, it’s an important thing. I think zombie stuff out there is gonna be bad. You don’t want people to be getting emails from dead people about stuff. There was a service – we’ll try to find a link to it – that basically checks in that you’re alive on a regular basis and then has a plan for if you don’t respond in a certain period of time, it starts closing things down, which could make sense.

Craig: I think Facebook has a, “Hey, here’s a thing to fill out for when you die.” They’re aware of it. Probably costs them money. All these dead people hanging around on our Facebook. I’m sorry. Meta.

John: Meta.

Craig: Meta.

John: But then I feel like in the not too distant future, we’re also gonna have to worry about, what about the AI versions of ourselves? Do we want to continue after we die versus not continue after we die? I think it was Laurie Anderson, the performance artist, was talking about, I don’t know if it was her husband or some other person, that she has basically an AI representation of their work as a chatbot. She finds it therapeutic to chat with this representation of a friend or husband or somebody. Yes, and also, should I have the ability to say no, you can’t do that? It’s weird.

Craig: If they make an AI chatbot of me, it’s mostly just gonna be saying the following to people: Get out of here, baldy!

John: With that, another Scriptnotes is resolved. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.

Craig: Thanks, guys.

Links:

• The Life and Death of Hollywood by Daniel Bessner for Harpers
• One weird trick for fixing Hollywood by Max Read
• Moloch Trap
• Lola Dupre
• Codenames Duet
• 2 Kings 2:23-24
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
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• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
• John on Mastodon
• Outro by Ben Singer (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

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You can download the episode here.