664 - Hollywood Got Old
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Hello and welcome. My name is John August. My name is Craig Mazin. And you're listening to episode 664 of Script Notes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do you handle the anxiety of uncertainty? At times in life, particularly in this industry, you're waiting around for an answer that's going to have a direct impact on you. We'll talk through strategies for navigating those situations. Then, Craig, do you want to feel old? The president of production at New Line is 27.

That guy at Fox, the one person, 28. Paramount Studio Chief is 31. And by the time he's 35, he'll be the chairman of Disney. Craig, does that surprise you? It doesn't surprise me. It delights me because the odds that all of those people have been listening to script notes for the last 10 years is pretty high. I've always said.

This gig is our best job insurance. Well, Craig, unfortunately, we have traveled back in time secretly because that was actually true in the 80s and 90s because all those people are well-known names you recognize like Jeffrey Katzenberg or Mike DeLuca. Those folks were all running these studios when they were in their 20s and early 30s and they're no longer doing that. Now Hollywood is run by folks in their 50s, 60s, 70s. So basically nothing changed. Those people that came along...

You know, John, when we started in the 90s, it did feel like there was, maybe it's generational, there was this group of 20-somethings coming in and going, That was my start class coming into the industry. Everybody get out of our way. We're taking this. And then we kind of did. And we haven't apparently let it go. We have certainly not. So we want to talk about the impact of that generation and sort of how it influences what gets made and who gets to make it. We'll also ask the question, Craig, is development wage theft? Yes.

Oh, well, strictly speaking, those aren't wages at all. Yeah. Because unemployment is independent contracting. It is, yeah. I mean, it is technically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We will talk through those and answer some of the questions. And in our bonus segment for premium members, which aspects of pandemic life are we still practicing in 2024? Hmm.

That's a thought. Yeah. But first, we have some actual news. We have some events coming up. We have our live show, December 6th at Dynasty Typewriter here in Los Angeles. Tickets are now on sale for everyone. That's great. Now, we don't have guests to yet announce. Not yet announced. We have one who's confirmed who's fantastic. I'm very excited about that. And so we'll match folks in.

who will be great and equally fantastic. I mean, we've never failed to get great guests. Yeah. Even when we had trouble, we were going to have the Larry Kasdan on and then he was not feeling well and so we just...

threw in some Jason Bateman and some Benioff and Weiss. We can do things like that. So I'm excited for our live show and excited for our guests. I'm also doing a second little event on November 22nd, 6.30 p.m. at Village Well in Culver City. This game we make, Alpha Birds, they're having a night which is just like playing Alpha Birds. And so we'll be there. So folks can have a drink and play some Alpha Birds. We'll show you how to play it. I love a game store. Yeah.

Game stores are good. So game stores with a liquor license, even better. I mean, I was kind of confused there, but if they can afford that, amazing. Yeah, good stuff. So you'll find links in the show notes to both of those events if you are in Los Angeles and want to come to those. Now, Craig, we are recording this episode on a weekend. Dream.

Drew is not here, so it's just the two of us. Finally. We have no supervision. We can just do whatever we want. Yeah. Instead of mommy yelling at us. This episode will come out on Tuesday, which in the United States is election day. Yeah. Yeah. We're not going to talk about the election, but I do want to talk about anxiety as a general phenomenon because independent of what

or what's happening in the world, there are moments, especially as a screenwriter or someone working in this industry, where you are waiting around for an answer to come, for something to happen. So it could be that you've turned in a script, you're waiting for notes,

You are waiting for the results of a medical procedure. And sometimes those are worse than the actual news itself is the anxiety that builds up about waiting around for that. So I just want to talk through some general strategies you've learned over the years and things I've found to be useful. Sure. Well, you put your finger on one of the biggest challenges we have as human beings, and that's uncertainty. We really struggle with it. And what we try to do, I think instinctively, is solve it.

So there's a problem. I'm scared of blank. It always starts with fear. I'm scared of blank. How do I solve that? Well, maybe if I just ruminate and perseverate and think it through and seek reassurance, which is our number one strategy, then I can make the fear go away. But in fact, reassurance seeking really is just pointless. It's not going to change the reality of what happens. Yeah.

Well, I think let's look at it from a point of view of screenwriters, because as screenwriters, we are problem solvers. We see situations out there in the world. We've created these situations for our characters or in our scripts, and we are looking for what those solutions are. And we talk about on the podcast, like, well, sometimes you just need to stop and think and actually work through it and figure out what that is.

That is true and useful in fictional worlds in which we're creating where we can change all the rules. But in this real world, we can't change those rules. So I think, Craig, one of the things you're saying is like, we are trying to solve a problem that we cannot solve by accepting that there's not a solution to the problem that is in our control is a crucial first step.

And it's hard because you're right. We are used to being in complete control of the narrative. We can go around and change things and do whatever we want. And we are all of us living inside a reality that we narrativize, but it is not a narrative. And we just don't know. The things that we don't know we don't know are vast. So you and I have been in positions before where

We may see people worrying about something that we're making. Yeah. It hasn't come out yet, but they're worrying. They're worrying because they care, which is a good sign. It's better than them not caring. But sometimes they will express their fear in statements of certainty. Yes. Because they're looking for certainty. And it is sometimes easier for them to say, you know what?

This is going to be bad and I'm going to hate it. I'm not going to watch it. I'm not going to care because the alternative, which is to sit in my uncertainty for months and months and months is intolerable. Yes. But what we know on our side of things is, hey, we actually made something good. Wish we could show it to you right now to calm you down. Can't. But we will. And I think sometimes that's how things work with politics. All we see is what we're shown. Yeah. But...

We don't know. No. We don't know what they know. Absolutely. And so in pulling it back to sort of more our industry,

You know, we are waiting for an answer sometimes from a decision maker. And that decision maker is also facing uncertainty. That decision maker is like, am I making the right choice? Am I not making the right choice? What is the safest course? What is the most likely course that it's not going to result in disaster? And so recognizing sometimes from their point of view, they kind of don't know either. It can be frustrating, but also reassuring that we're all kind of feeling our way around in this situation. We want to believe that the people that control things are safe.

supremely confident. They're not. Nor are they perfect. Nor may they even be confident in what they are doing. And they may also be struggling with those problems that we don't know about. They may want to say yes. The problem is they've been told they're not allowed to say yes currently because they're in a fight with somebody over something they just said yes to. And how that all functions and flows is really hard to comprehend. Yeah.

So don't. Don't bother. The waiting in and of itself disappears as waiting if we just stop waiting. Don't wait. Just move on with your life.

Yeah. So let's talk about the moving on of it all because there's the moving on you can do with the actual situation you're faced with. So with the project that you're waiting for an answer from this one person, it's worth interrogating like, okay, am I actually waiting for this person? Like, does that yes or no really matter? Or could I be doing something else that's useful and productive on this? Am I waiting for this person to give me a thumbs up or thumbs down? Or should I be showing this to other people? Because that may be the smartest thing to do.

Or should I just be working on that next project? And that is often really the best choice. You can't go wrong doing more work. Yeah. That's generally speaking...

I think that agents and managers who listen to this are probably very familiar with the feeling of a client calling saying, why aren't we doing anything? And the answer is there's nothing to do. But that's not a great answer to give a client because A, they're looking for reassurance, reassurance through action, the notion that we are in control of things if only we did A, B, or C. And also, it's not an easy thing to say to a client that right now you have no utility to them. So,

This is something that I think representatives struggle with a lot of times. They know there's nothing to do. Or they know that maybe there will be something to do, but in a month. And the stuff, again, that we don't know. What we don't know is that five days from now, somebody's going to mention this to somebody who's going to mention it to somebody who's going to mention it to Tom Hanks. And Tom Hanks is going to say, what?

Let me read that. And reads it and says, I want to do this. And then everything changes. We have no way of seeing any of that because it's in the future. It hasn't occurred yet, nor is it predictable. So we have to unfortunately accept...

that we are only in control of what goes on the page and very little else. For sure. What I don't want anyone to take from this conversation is the sense of that you have no agency, you have no control, you have no ability to make decisions yourself. You absolutely do. And so if you are getting no answer from an agent or a manager over a period of time and they seem to be doing nothing and you write in a letter saying, like, my agent or manager seems to be doing nothing, that is...

And so then you should bring up that concern and consider looking for new representation. That's a story as old as time. What we're, I think, trying to stress is that

It's worth asking, what is the roadblock? And when you sort of find out what that roadblock is, you realize there's nothing I can do about that roadblock. I have a project right now that we should kind of be going out to the town with, but there's a roadblock based on the rights holder that has to be resolved. And there's nothing I can do to force that to happen more quickly. Exactly. There is nothing you can do. The people that work for you, you do have control over. You pay your agent, you pay your manager. That is an enormous amount of control. And if they're not...

fulfilling what you think is a service that you're paying for, then you fire them and you find somebody else.

But the people that we're asking money from, and I don't know if you've, I think you must have experienced this. As time goes on, we get more and more comfortable with the practice of submitting something and then literally forgetting you submitted it. Because there's something else to do. And when you get called about that thing, it is a pleasant surprise. Yes. But if you have kept yourself moving, if you get a call that's an unpleasant surprise, well...

Let's now talk about what else we can do there. Or do we just end it? Either way, I'm moving forward. I've already been moving forward. What I haven't been doing is sitting by the phone, chewing my fingernails. Yeah, for sure.

There's a general framework in terms of thinking about what's on your side, your circle of control. What are the things you can actually control versus your circle of concern? So there are things in the world that you are concerned about. You have strong opinions about things you want to see happen a certain way. The health of your family, the environment, you know, sort of our general political system. Those are issues that are well within your circle of

concern, but they're not necessarily in your circle of control. There's not a thing you can do specifically to solve that problem. So it's worth interrogating, well, what are these small actions I can take that will sort of advance that goal? That's great because that'll make you feel that you have some

and some agency in that cause. Tomorrow I am phone banking and phone banking is like, listen, I might talk to three people and nudge them on, but that's great. It's gonna make me feel better and could potentially be helpful in a swing state. It's recognizing that there's limits to what I can do. There's no more big checks I could write that would actually have an impact. Yes. And I think often of the lesson that our grandparents must have faced is,

when they lived through a war, which you and I have not lived through. Not on the scale of World War I, World War II. We were barely alive for Vietnam. We weren't around for Korea.

And the wars that followed, the engagement by United States forces were so limited compared to those. No drafts. There hasn't been a draft since the Vietnam War. So we had 9-11 and it was the closest we had to sort of like an assault on us. And 9-11 actually in and of itself is a pretty interesting lesson in uncertainty because if someone had said two weeks earlier,

something horrible is going to happen on United States soil and we're counting down and you won't know what it is, that would have been a horrible two weeks. But the fact is, the act itself would have been no different. So anticipation and uncertainty in and of themselves are a kind of torment. We are capable of withstanding a lot of it. Yeah. More than we think.

But part of withstanding it is recognizing for what it is, something over which we have no control. Yeah. Well, let's talk about why we worry and why anxiety exists, because I think it is a useful evolutionary function. And so we have it, other mammals have it, clearly other things can be stressed out about sort of the future. We have a much, as humans, we have a much stronger vision of the future. We can narrativize these things and catastrophize these things.

But in some ways that helps protect us and helps keep us alive. The challenge is it was designed to keep us away from predators. It was not designed to deal with sort of weird nebulous existential threats. Yeah. We have a system in place neurologically that keeps us alert and creates a state of vigilance. Yeah. And vigilance on some level is important. If you cut yourself and then just ignore it, your arm's going to get infected. Gangrene will set in. You'll either die or lose your arm.

If you get a sense that your spouse is spending a whole lot of time with someone else and it's, you may want to investigate that. There are reasons for vigilance, but hypervigilance over your life is toxic. I know this because I've literally had to deal with this in therapy, the notion of overvigilance in a sense that if you do not

provide Ryan Reynolds style maximum effort to self-examination and the state of your career, your life, whatever it may be, that it's all going to fall apart. Yeah. Problematic, not helpful, doesn't actually keep you any safer. No. Just sort of blows those circuits out and you end up spending all of your time scared. Yeah.

So I think it's worth thinking about how we put some limits on the time and space we're allowing ourselves to worry or sort of like letting ourselves worry at places and then also not worry about places. Things I do for myself is I basically will not look at social media on my phone after 8 p.m.,

Just because I know that I recognize that creates a pattern of a doom loop that it's hard for me to sort of break out of. Rachel Bloom in her special on Netflix, she talks about the huge grief she was going through and the fear about her daughter and her daughter who is being born right at the start of the pandemic and losing Adam Schlesinger. Her therapist will say, like, have a room in your house where you can go and cry and cry in that room and give yourself that space.

but then leave that room and leave all that anxiety in that room, which is a useful way of thinking about it. Just actually like sort of put that in a place and recognize that that's the place for that, but don't let it infest the rest of your world. Yeah, you need a chance to feel what you're feeling. You can't beat anxiety by yelling at it. Yeah.

But putting it in perspective, which is what that sounds like, is sort of what you need to do. Part of it is just recognizing what it is. It's a bunch of feelings that are happening, like having to cough. If you have to cough, cough. Get it out. But while you're coughing, don't think, I'm dying because I'm coughing. Or I'll never stop coughing. I guess my life is now coughing. It's not how it works.

It's also worth recognizing that sometimes you feel a physical thing and then you sort of reverse engineer that to say, this is anxiety. So last night, I was like, oh my God, my anxiety is off the charts. And I was like, oh no, I'm actually just cold. I haven't turned on the heat in the house. I'm actually shivering because of that. That's actually what's doing it. But it felt the same as my anxiety felt. So I put on a sweater. Yeah. I mean, my version of that is sometimes I get

that butterfly in the stomach feeling, jittery. And I presume immediately that there's a reason I'm scared. What is the reason? Why am I scared?

I'm not scared. I'm experiencing a physical symptom of fear because some adrenaline squirting out errantly happens to me all the time. I've come to notice there are moments where something suddenly triggers, quote unquote, fear in me that is nothing. Like looking at a tree and suddenly something's wrong. And I've come to understand, no, nothing's wrong.

something hormonal in my body just went, yep. Yeah, it's not, I don't have a good alarm system. My alarm system is broken. And in fact, and I don't know if this is true for you, since we both suffer from anxiety, where I excel is when there really is trouble. Oh yeah. In those instances, I am incredibly calm, clear, direct, problem-oriented, no panic, nothing. It's the tree itself.

Or, I don't know, something, a smell that just suddenly makes me think, oh no, I'm dying. Yeah, it's more like, how could I have possibly said that thing to that person 20 minutes ago? Or 20 years ago. Yes. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I mean, that's, listen, we also have shame loops that go on in our heads and all that stuff. It's just, we have to deal with it. And when we're

When we're talking about writers, people who are, their brains are attuned to imagination and whose brains are attuned to finding horrible things. Yes. That's what we do with our imaginations. Horrible psychological things, emotional things, incidental things.

you know, then yeah, surprise. We don't feel so good sometimes when we have to fill a space of unknown with potentials. Yes, people are sitting around right now thinking, well, if the person that I don't want to be president is president, I am imagining the following horrible things happening. Our imagination in that fear is not particularly useful. What is useful is just good old fashioned, dispassionate planning, preparing, helping, strategizing. Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. And last little thing is I'll say is if you do find yourself in that sort of doom spiral loop,

some tricks to get out of it. And you can Google other ones too, but things that I found are useful. Literally dunking your head in ice water sounds crazy, but it kicks off this primal, like, I don't know if it's drowning in the sink, but there's some sort of primal thing it kicks off. It can snap that for a second. I will listen to my political podcast while I'm running because it just doesn't have the same balance when you're running. Just things that you can do to sort of make sure that you are in

inoculating yourself as best you can from sort of those ups and those downs. Yeah, I'm not surprised that that's the experience you have when you're running because perhaps the single most effective anxiety breaker is oxygen. Yeah. We stop breathing. And as you experience a kind of minor hypoxia, the panic will increase because your brain is also designed to have you panic if it thinks you're drowning. So as stupid as it is, deep breathing. Yeah.

100% of the time. It is so frustrating that that is the case. And while you're doing it, it's not working until suddenly it's worked. And it'll be a minute, maybe. Or someone tells you to drink a glass of water and that's the stupidest thing ever and yet it still does help. There are these things because what we're experiencing is a simple mistake in the wiring. And we don't like thinking that we're that dumb of a machine, but we are. We are that dumb of a meat machine. Yeah, for sure.

All right, let's move on to our next topic here. This is inspired by an article by Mia Galupo, writing for The Hollywood Reporter. Her article is titled, The Big Squeeze, Why Everyone in Hollywood Feels Stuck. But what it's really about is this sense we were talking about in the lead-up here, is that when we were entering the industry, it felt like there were a lot of young people, a little older than us, but sort of our age, who were suddenly running the town. They were presidents of production, they were heads of studios, they were doing all those jobs. And

Over the years, we talk about the ladder. We talk about the importance of making sure those lower rungs of the ladder are actually available for people who are entering the industry. But I don't think we talk enough about the upper rungs of the ladder. If people are just staying on the ladder, there ends up being no place to climb to. And so when we see executives who are now

Turning 70, running those jobs, the people who used to be 35 in those positions are now in their 50s and 60s. And it creates this log jam where there's not a space for the folks who should be climbing to climb to. Well, there is a space. The space is the same that was always there. The space is, I'm going to kick this old man out and take over. That's why CAA exists. Yeah.

Four agents said, we're leaving William Morris. Screw this old man. We're starting our own place. We're taking all these clients with us. And now CIA is the biggest agency in the world. I think after a bot, I see him. It's at least maybe endeavors. I don't know. They're up there. Yeah. Point being, they were called the Young Turks. They were.

They are all not young. So one of the things I'm wondering about is the state of ambition. Yeah. And along with ambition is its opposite, which is, I guess I would call despair or helplessness. The sense that what you're trying to get is impossible to get, that you're trying to break into an impervious vault. Sometimes I wonder if it is generational because when you and I started

Our ambition was to be something in the entertainment business. What we didn't have was the distraction of everyone else's life on 24-7 in a reality show. We did not have any need nor ability to document our lives for other people.

to see what other people were doing. There are so many distractions. And in a way, I think also, are you familiar? We talked about this with Rebel Wilson, tall poppy syndrome. Oh, for sure. Tall poppy syndrome, I think grows pretty well in social media. The sense that

oh, someone's getting too good or too fast or they're too ambitious or whatever. Let's knock them down. Yeah. And that becomes an ingrained feeling you have when you enter a business like, oh, we're all, we should all just sort of be leveled out here. Whereas when you and I started, it was a law of the jungle. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Thinking back to sort of like when I was entering the industry, there was a bunch of, you know, it felt like it was musical chairs and there were actually just plenty of chairs. Like there was space for everybody who sort of entered into the industry as things were expanding and things were, more opportunities were opening up. Television was expanding. The boundaries between film and television were collapsing. There was opportunities to do new things. And I do feel like that,

Time is also kind of happening now in terms of whatever you want to say about YouTube or sort of all the creator-generated videos. There's a whole sort of side industry that's there and it's actually successful. What is different about the industry now versus when you and I started though is even though the big corporations...

had boards of directors and they were publicly traded companies, they weren't publicly traded companies in the same way. Disney was not as big as it was. Warner's Discovery was not as big as it was. And there wasn't the expectation that the people who were at the helm of those companies had to be

titans of industry for Wall Street. Right. So the latter ended at a certain spot and that spot was movie mogul. I'm in charge of the studio. And now you're absolutely right. I think when Sony came in and bought Columbia, it was the beginning of something. Although Gulf Western Oil had bought Paramount.

But still, when you read about the creation of The Godfather and Charlie Bluthorn, who's going back and forth from East Coast to Hollywood and trying to broker peace between all these people and Bob Evans and everybody, yes, it definitely had a little bit less of I'm trying to run for president of this nation-sized corporation. But still, we make more television now than we ever did before. I think where the squeeze happened...

is mostly in the area of producing. So when we started, there were 4 million producers and all of them had a deal somewhere because the way the business worked was there were five executives who couldn't handle everything and then there were 100 producers on the lot. All of them shoved into some space with an assistant and a creative executive team

all of them absorbing massive amounts of money and almost all of them worthless. So that is an area where contraction occurred and did eliminate a lot of paths for people to excel because a lot of people went to those useless places, clearly outshone the people that had hired them and went on to bigger and better things. And so now a person who is like...

who enters the industry saying, I want to make movies. If they're not there to be a writer, director, if they're there to, because they want to be a producer or they want to be a studio executive, I think that's a very different and very frustrating path ahead for them versus like my star class when we came out of there, that was technically a producer's program. We had like four people who, you know,

really became producers quite quickly. Others who became agents. And there was just a sense of like, we are going to take over this part of the town. And it's so much harder now. And yes, there's other paths. There's independent film. There's ways to make things that are exciting. You're not entering into the classic system to make a thing. Yeah, I think management, the rise of management companies has largely replaced the massive tide of...

questionably valuable production companies. So now managers are producers as well, and there are more of them than ever. And managers seem to want to take on writers sooner than agencies would. And so if you wanted to be a manager, I suppose that there are a lot of, you know, find your way onto a desk, work your way. But I do, I talk to agents at all the agencies. And when I'm talking to senior agents or partners and things, there is a theme.

It's not from all of them, but it's from some of them. And the theme is we're worried. Well, let's get back to anxiety about the future because the people who are coming in don't seem to have the same kind of insatiable hunger for success that we had. And we're not sure there's any way to succeed in Hollywood if it's not with an insatiable hunger. You can't kind of half hunger your way to success in Hollywood. Yeah. So I think I hear that sometimes with a...

a sense that a generation wants permission to do a thing. They're always looking for approval rather than just like, screw you, I'm going to do this thing anyway. And I was watching Saturday Night, which is the Jason Reitman movie about sort of the creation of Saturday Night Live, the first episode of Saturday Night Live. And what is notable about that is that everyone in that story is like in their 20s. Oh, yeah. Which is absurd. And it seems really crazy now that you would trust a person in their early 20s with this big slot of television and live and it's a big risk. Yeah.

And the movie posits that there was a calculation behind that that made sense.

I do think that the equivalent person now is not trying to do that on NBC. They're doing something completely different on YouTube or whatever. And as I was talking to two friends this week who I ended up connecting, one of whom works in the YouTube space and works with a bunch of creators and they can just make anything. They can do anything. They have money and they're successful and they can do stuff. He's like, oh, I need to hire a showrunner for something. I'm like, okay, well, tell me what that means. He was describing this thing. It's like...

That's not actually a show. I think you want like a non-writing producer who can sort of godfather and sort of be a creative liaison. It's like, oh yeah, I think that's what it is. And so I talked to my friend who was probably the right person for that, but it comes out of

The classic studio system. And so I had to warn both of them, like, make sure you actually are figuring out what your common language is, because I don't think you're using the same terms for nearly anything. And I do wonder if it's going to be a really parallel thing that's going to rise up and we'll have to figure out how it fits back in. Well, and it might not. Yeah, it might not. And of course, you and I don't need to figure it out. Other people do.

But there is a question of what is it that people do want? So the insatiable hunger people have reasonably, I think, drifted to a place where their hunger will pay off quicker and perhaps more. I don't know if it will stay there

as steady as some Hollywood success can stay. So if you really can find your way into this business, prove that you have great value, you will have length. It's hard because a lot of people who I think are worthy just can't get to that place where they're able to Velcro on. Um,

But in YouTube, yeah, I think it's a little trendy, you know, so people light up and sometimes they explode. Yeah. Because of bad behavior. I mean, we see that quite a bit. And sometimes they just...

people just start laughing at them. You started as something, you became a discovery, you became super hot, you were an incredible trend, and then the memes began. And now you're a joke. And that cycle is going to have to happen a few times for people to start to question whether or not it's worth it. The amount of money that can be made does seem to make it worth it, but...

There is something about the legitimacy of what we do in Hollywood. The world still takes it more seriously. Yeah. There's no question about that. Well, you look at like, you know, the success of Mr. Beast and sort of like what he's able to do and sort of you have the spotlight on you. And so you as an individual are such a focus, but he's both like the star and the Jeffrey Katzenberg of this, you know, this studio that he's built. Yeah.

And there's something very great about that. It's something that kind of an older person in their 20s is able to do. And that's notable. It's a question of like, is that sustainable? Is it repeatable for other people? Well, right now, he's in some trouble. Yeah. And this does seem to happen quite a bit. And I'm not surprised because...

People are in their 20s. This often happens to them in Hollywood as well. Mike DeLuca is a very interesting story because in his 20s, he was suddenly, boom, running something. And then there was some scandal and there was a bit of an explosion and he crashed to earth and then got himself well, did the work. It was decades. Yeah. And now he's one of the people that runs Warner Brothers. And-

That can happen, but there are also some really tough stories out there. Maloney and other guys like that. It was Maloney, right? Jay Maloney. Just superstar agents, Don Simpson, superstar producer, kind of went kaboom and that was that. So I don't think we have a great takeaway for this segment other than to recognize that

The individuals who would have been the executives in Hollywood just, I think, recognized that there wasn't a space for them there. And I found other industries. I found other places to do it. I think tech took a lot of them. Tech did take a lot of them. But I do think still there are people in our industry who are in their 20s are perhaps a little over intimidated because of the size of our business. They feel like it's impossible to slash and burn your way to the top.

It's not. Somebody has to. I recommend ambition. I recommend thinking big. It's the only way it's going to work. When you have a system where everyone gets comfortable with 32-year-old assistants, well, that system is broken. Yeah. All right. Well, let's talk about this next article. This is from Elaine Lowe writing for The Ankler. The provocative headline is development is wage theft. But let's talk about what we mean by development. Development is...

I am bringing in a writer and talking with them about this project that we want to do together. So we might be developing it internally and then we're going to go out and take it on the town and pitch it. Or it's a project that we're developing internally to the studio. We own a book and we are going to figure out a way to develop it into a TV series, into a movie. That's classically development. Development can be paid. Development largely classically was paid where there was a sense of, okay, we're going to

go through multiple drafts on this thing and get it to a place where it can fill in as a director. But there's a lot of unpaid development which happens because you're figuring out what is this thing that we're then going to pitch up to my bosses, to other people. This article is really focusing on the collapse of the traditional TV cycle where we announce these are the fall shows and then in the spring we go through a cycle where we have

have people write a bunch of pilots and then we shoot some of the pilots and we go through without all collapsing the time spent in development on stuff has just escalated beyond the normal boundaries of how much time writers are supposed to be working on things

Yeah, so there are so many different aspects of development. Let's talk about the kind of pre-sale development. Is pre-sale development wage theft? No, because you are creating intellectual property yourself. Nobody gets paid to imagine, dream, or write anything.

They get paid when they license it for publication or they get paid when they transfer copyright to somebody. That's how that works. So there are no wages to steal there. Nobody is entitled to be paid while they think of maybe something that could be a book. When it comes to development under employment, now the company owns the copyright. And now you are going through drafts of things. In movies, we've always had this issue.

because we were paid for a draft. We used to be paid for two. Then they started saying, well, we're just going to guarantee you one. And then you would do a gazillion drafts before you turn that draft in, mostly for one of these useless producers, all of whom were terrified that if this movie didn't get made, they were never going to get paid anything themselves. In certain cases, when people weren't paid very much...

When you broke it out over the course of weeks, yeah, they were dipping below WJ minimum. And we've been struggling with that since as long as you and I have been in this business. Yeah. It helped a little bit. You know, it's something that I've been pushing since 2004 when I was on the board. And now if you are near a certain amount, you get a guaranteed second step, which is

Yeah. Television suffered a far more serious situation where the advent of mini rooms, which is the stupidest name to describe what that is. I'm going to stop calling them mini rooms. Let's call them development rooms. Let's call them pre-green light rooms. Yeah. So the network or streamer is saying, yeah, we're going to pay you. We own this idea now. We're not sure if we're going to make it. So you guys go work on it for eight weeks. Yeah.

And then we'll decide if we're going to make it. And at that point, we'll probably fire seven of you. And the one of you that's left will write this thing. Is that wage theft? Not necessarily. It's wage limitation. It's a lack of job security. But that one person who's left over now may have so much time to work on stuff under one aspect of like, okay, that yes, it can turn into wage theft. But what the Writers Guild needs to figure out

and this is where we are complicit, is how to solve the problem of writers being paid like producers. Because we don't have any control over that. And for the longest time and continuing, networks and streamers say, we're going to pay you Writers Guild minimums, or roughly minimums, to make sure you get healthcare and pension. The rest of all the money we pay you will be as a producer paid.

And that's the Wild West. And writers and agents have generally liked it because it means they didn't have to pay as many dues. So while you and I were paying 1.5% of every dollar we made on movies, people who are making $50 million a year were paying less in dues. We still have this problem. So we're complicit. And I don't know the answer to this. Yeah. We talk about mini rooms and sort of how they, you know, divvy up the labor in ways that is so frustrating. But the other problem is just time.

And classically in television, because there was a cycle, you knew when you were done and you just don't know when you're done now in television. Because, okay, so we're developing this thing, but we don't think it's quite ready yet or it's not the right time to go to this thing. So you're just being strung along for a long time on a project in ways that is familiar to feature writers, but is new to TV writers. And so these TV writers are like, okay, well, I have this thing that looks like it's maybe going to happen.

But is it going to happen? Should I try to staff on another show? What should I do? And it's creating these impossible situations where you're trying to figure out, I want to be available to actually run my show should the opportunity come up.

but I don't know whether this is going to happen. And so year-round development makes that much trickier. And there's generally not a clock on these things. It doesn't stop at a certain point. No, the season still exists for network television because network television is relying on ads and that's when the ad cycles start.

New cars come out in the fall and all that. But the vast majority of streaming is not on any kind of calendar. There is no predictability. The Writers Guild has done some good work in helping writers not get trapped by exclusivity. Where you say, I'm going to be exclusive to this thing.

For as long as it gets developed, and then the development phase stretches out in an insane way, and you're sitting around doing nothing, but you can't go anywhere else. Yeah, so you're not contractually barred from doing that thing, but there's a soft way that you're stuck to a thing. And we're trying to work on that, right? But I think also the businesses, the business, our representatives aren't stupid. They are trying to make money too. So what happens is, what I think is going to start happening is a little bit like when you get...

on a Southwest flight from Burbank to Las Vegas and they get on the thing and say, oh, we have overbooked this flight. We're going to need two people to volunteer to get the F off this flight. We're going to overbook people. It's inevitable. We're going to overbook people because this is the behavior it is. And then because they've created that situation.

If you are successful enough to have multiple people interested in you, that's what's just going to happen. You're going to have to double book stuff. I don't know how else to get around it. Yeah. And they're going to have to deal with it. If you are, however, a writer that is psychologically relying on the notion of a cycle, well, it's over. So welcome to the world that you and I lived in and continue to live in, which is there is no cycle. There is no calendar. There is a constant entrepreneurialism that is required. Yeah.

It's a hustle. Let's answer some listener questions. The first one comes from a person you and I both know, but we're not going to use their name. M writes,

Our script at Studio B is dead as far as we know. In fact, the division it was written for no longer exists. If we were to get this rewrite job at Studio A, I imagine that we will be borrowing certain themes, ideas, jokes that we used in our old script for Studio B. Are there any legal issues we could face doing that? Should we inform Studio A about the situation? And if so, can we wait until after we get the job? Any thoughts, Craig, would be appreciated. Well, it is something that should be disclosed. If you do it after you get the job...

you can still get in trouble because everybody's contract very clearly states that you aren't. This work is wholly original that you're going to do. So it is important, yes, to disclose it. I don't think it would be anything anyone would be scared of, but the studio and business affairs would need to take a look at that other script to make sure that in the new script, you're not taking anything that is intellectual property from that first one.

If it's possible to go and buy that one from the defunct or whatever the inherited company is, that might be one way to get around this. But personally, I think it needs to be disclosed because the worst possible situation would be to get all the way to a movie about to come out. And whoever does own that script, they're just waiting. If they see this happen, they don't do anything. They wait forever.

They're waiting for the moment of maximum leverage, which will be three weeks before your movie comes out, and then they will file an injunction.

And now everyone's in trouble. And Studio A is going to have to pay a ton of money to Studio B to shut them up and let the movie come out. And you will be blamed. So let me, I think, Craig, you're envisioning a scenario which you are actually taking, like you're taking stuff from the other thing. You're recognizing that there's things that are going to be naturally lifted from that first script into that second script.

I think I'm seeing this in a different way. So it's like we wrote a baseball movie for Studio A and now they're hiring us to write a baseball movie for Studio B. Do I need to disclose I've ever written a baseball movie before? No, I don't think so. Yeah, if it's that broad, of course, no. I mean, I've written, okay, I wrote a comedy for this, but I can write a comedy for you. I can write 12 baseball movies. Ron Shelton has written dozens of sports movies.

But this sounds a little more specific. So the thing that kind of made me nervous was when they said jokes. Yeah. When you're talking about stuff that is a unique expression in fixed form, you're now talking about material that is copyrighted. Yeah. And then you do have a problem. Furthermore...

People don't need to have an airtight case to sue. They just need a good enough reason to sue. And I would be concerned enough to just say, actually, we want to be fully forward about this. We did this. We can't use any of that. What we can do, however, are things that aren't copyrighted. Theme, ideas, of course. I would personally, I would disclose it. I think...

I don't know who their lawyer is, but...

If your lawyer says, no, don't disclose it, okay. They're a lawyer. They know better than I do, but I would. Yeah. So the reality is, as Craig says, you can get sued for any reason. Sure. And so Ron Sheldon could get sued by someone saying, this baseball movie you wrote for us is too much like the baseball movie you wrote for somebody else or something like that. It can happen. It's not likely to happen. I mean, every time something happens that's successful, somebody sues somebody. Mm-hmm.

That's inevitable. But most of the time, 99% of the time, it's just, you know, dumb fishing expositions that get chucked out of court. You and I have reported so many times on these things, not once, not once has anybody won one of these things.

That's different than a studio suing a studio. That's a very different thing. When studios sue studios, they have a case. They do. And that means there's going to be some sort of settlement. And the closer it is to that moment where you are going to suffer tremendous financial loss, if your movie cannot actually be shown in theaters on the weekend you booked, you're going to pay.

Can you think of any examples where a studio has sued another studio over the months? I don't remember a specific case of a major studio suing a major studio openly. Yeah. I think there have been situations where major studios have called major studios and said, we're going to sue you. Let's start talking about this before we file an injunction and so forth. But major studios have sued small studios repeatedly. Yes. Repeatedly.

And it's because smaller studios, and when I say, I'm not talking about independent studios making art films like A24. I'm talking about, for lack of a better term, schlockmeisters who are selling ripoffs anyway. Yeah. Well, you can rip off to a point. And then when you get into that area of intellectual property, that's when they come up for you and that's what they get you. And they typically win. Yeah.

Let's try one more question here. This is from Michelle. She's writing, I would love to hear more about the pros and cons of the cost plus model and how it's calculated. I've heard general discussion about lack of residuals, but I don't understand how the math maths. Is it more money up front? Does this help shows with modest viewership but hurt big hits? If Netflix takes the risk on whether it will be a big hit, is it helpful to the average show or new writers? Does this affect writers differently from actors? It sounds like the industry was hoping that Netflix would change its model but didn't.

What does someone like Shonda do? Well, Shonda is certainly in a different situation. Yeah. Because Shonda is getting paid an enormous amount of money just to be there at all. Yeah. The cost plus model basically says we're going to give you the amount of money required to make the show. And then we're going to give you a certain amount on top of that to put in your pocket. And that's the last time we're going to pay you. Yeah.

Cost plus models is a lot of general contractors will use this. They come to say, okay, here's the budget for your renovations. It's going to cost $300,000. We're going to charge you $350,000 and you're never going to see a penny more. That's it. Unless you change something significantly, that's what we're going to be. Rather than coming to you in the middle and going, the price of wood just went up. Yeah.

The problem with the cost plus model is that it limits the upside dramatically. And it's particularly punishing on those runaway hits. Yeah. The question is, is cost plus good for us? Well, if Netflix wants to do it, then the answer is no. If a corporation is really dead set on imposing a financial model on artists...

then it's not good for artists. Otherwise, why would they want to do it? Of course, it's beneficial for them. Of course, in the long run, they've run the math.

And they know they're going to save money. It's a question of gambling. Like, okay, we can let everybody play these slot machines and pay one person a million dollars every week when they hit a jackpot. Or we can let everyone play these slot machines, guarantee that almost all of them will walk away making $10, and we win. Cost plus is not...

Anything that anybody in the creative community wants, the agents don't want it, the managers, nobody wants it, except for people who are thinking to themselves, this is going to be a loser. And then, sure, you know, like, I think this is bad. We got away with it. We'll take the, you know, whatever the... Yeah. I mean, it has perverse incentives. There's no incentive to make something...

because it's the success on the streamer that does not reward you. It rewards you with future projects down the road. It's only your own reputation that's going to succeed or fail because of it. And so that's the...

the basic complaint against this cost plus model. Now, when Netflix was first starting out, I can understand why people would sort of take those deals and why can't they make those deals because like, we didn't know like, what is success? We have no idea what success is. Is that backend going to be meaningful at all? Yeah. So those first couple of years, I get why we're just, we're going to overpay people basically and do it that way. Yeah. And we did,

I'm not sure how it's working out so far, but the Writers Guild in the wake of the strike and then the contract that ensued did get some kind of method for success-based payments and streaming. They're hard to hit. The success has to be really big.

So my guess is we probably haven't even started to generate enough data to see how that's working out. Yeah. But I think also by breaking through that seal, it also means that superstar actors and directors and other folks can start to get paid some kind of backend that's independent of residuals based on huge success. I mean, what Netflix has started to do is create a...

sports style model of free agency where what you do is you reward people that are creating things that are very popular with an enormous amount of money just here like boom here Shonda boom here Ryan Murphy boom here Ryan Johnson boom yeah

And then everybody else is just kind of, it doesn't matter whether you do well or not, that individual project, whatever money they make from that, they take that money. And then you're just sort of waiting around for them to go, okay, we've decided now you're so valuable to us, we're going to give you this big dump truck of money here. Boom. That is not helpful for most people. And it doesn't seem like it's sustainable anyway. Right.

I think Netflix has probably left the era of that kind of payment. I don't think we're going to be seeing the billion dollar deals or the $500 million deals anymore from them. I don't think they can sustain that. I think they know that. So then the question is, how do we maybe start breaking through more on that cost plus thing? And what it comes down to is basically whether or not other streamers can effectively compete to the level that they have the financial security to lure people back. Yeah.

HBO has made an investment in me and that's great. But I mean, Max is not the size of Netflix, right? So like they can't do that with 12 other people. And that's where it's gotten interesting. I don't know how this will all work out other than to say that agents seem to always win in the long run. And let's see if they can beat Netflix. I don't know. Right.

It is time for our one cool thing. I have two uncool things this week. Okay. First off, Craig, do you like tower defense games? Do you know the genre of tower defense? I do and I don't. Yeah. The general idea of tower defense is that you are trying to protect some area, generally the center of your map, and there are invaders and you're trying to set up obstacles in their way and towers that will shoot them down before they... Very anxiety-based.

I'm playing a new one called Isle of Arrows, which is not actually brand new, but it's new to me. And it's roguelike in the sense that after every round, you have cards, you can draw it, and you can set, like, now I can set a path, I can set a tower, and you're really constrained in how you can do it. It's also roguelike in the sense of, like, this is too hard, and so you're like, why can't I win? And then you realize, like, oh, that's actually... That's the point. That's the point. It's like, you get better, you accumulate better cards along the way. So I'm enjoying that a lot.

The other thing I'm enjoying a lot is this book by Tony Tula-Tamute called Rejection. It's a collection of four or five short stories, all on a theme of a character who has a worldview and about sort of how the world should treat them and they are wrong and it pays off in great ways. And it reminded me of our conversation last week at the live show. We were talking with...

Rachel Kondo, about how the ideal short story has that sense of surprise and inevitability. Yeah. And these stories are delightfully that. Oh, I love that. So it's really fun. So it's described as a comedy and it's like the stories are so, you win so much that it's almost not a comedy, but they are very well done. Cringe comedy. Cringe comedy. Cringe comedy. Yeah. My one cool thing this week is a documentary series. I believe there are, let's say five episodes, possibly six.

It's on aforementioned Netflix, and it is called Mr. McMahon. I don't know what this is. Mr. McMahon is a documentary about Vince McMahon, the impresario of...

professional wrestling WWF WWE all that's various names let's get ready to rumble the trademark phrase well let's get ready to rumble yes I mean there's some of that is in boxing and UFC which they ended up buying I'm guessing you didn't watch much professional wrestling I did not yeah and all that nonsense right

An enormous business. Huge. But what it is he's studying is a... Well, I'm just going to go out on a limb here. He seems like a sociopath. Yeah. And what he locked into...

for the first time made me kind of go, I think now I understand the whole Trump thing. Okay. Not obviously not in support of Trump, but rather like trying to figure out like why? Like why is everybody falling for this, right? And Vince McMahon lays out this remarkable point of view that entertainment and engagement with people comes down to causing real emotion in them.

And disgust, hatred, rejection, betrayal, those work just as well, if not better, than positive emotions. And in fact, what he did was, as his business was being challenged by another wrestling organization, he began to create himself as a character in WWF called Mr. McMahon, who was a villain. Mm-hmm.

and did everything he could to make people hate him. And the more they hated him, the more into it they got. Yeah. And it is pretty startling to watch how brilliant and terrifying he is. The context for the whole thing is that all the interviews with him and all the interviews with everybody else occurred before, I believe it was February of this year, when Vince McMahon...

it was revealed that is he's under investigation for sex trafficking and the specific allegations are horrendous horrendous this by the way not the first time that he had been accused of sexual assault or coercing employees or anything this was like the 19th time but these allegations are so lurid and barf worthy and you realize okay actually he is a villain

But man, he encapsulated something about American culture and how to get people to get into you that is so horrifying and insightful. Well worth watching. And you don't need to know anything about wrestling to watch it. It's kind of a slow motion horror movie. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Maybe not this week, but another week out. Yeah. Let's see maybe if next week's okay. Yeah. And that was our show for this week. Scriptress is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Cialoli. Our outro this week came from Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. We get so many great outros, but we always love more. So please send them through. Ask at John August is also where you can send questions.

You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at JohnLux.com. You can find links there for our live show, which is December 6th, and for this Alphabirds Play thing that we're doing in Culver City.

It's also where you'll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and such. They are great. You'll find those 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 record on things we learned during the pandemic that we are still doing. Craig, thanks for a fun show. Thank you, John. Thank you.