Shownotes Transcript
Hello and welcome. My name is John August. My name is Craig Mason. And you're listening to episode 681 of Script Notes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, what do you do when the answer isn't yes or no, but an extended and interminable maybe? We'll discuss strategies for coping and navigating periods of frustrating ambiguity as you're trying to push projects forward.
Then it's a new round of the three-page challenge where we take a look at pages our listeners have sent in and offer our honest feedback.
And in our bonus segment with premium members, how do you know when a movie or TV show has had reshoots or significant re-tinkering? Craig and I will spill the secrets to help us notice that things have changed there. Let's ruin it for everyone. Absolutely. That's why I put it in the bonus segment. So if you don't want to be spoiled, you can just go to the bonus segment. Yeah, we're going to spoil everything. The tricks, the tips, the everything. But first, we have some follow-up. Drew, help us out.
Sure. Elizabeth writes, can you please ask Craig to stop joking that nobody in post reads the script supervisor's notes? My notes are nearly always utilized by the editor and post team, and the role of script supervisor has been dismissed, disrespected, and marginalized for far too long by directors and producers.
Okay, Elizabeth, this feels like manufactured outrage. I'm literally expressing an opinion in support of script supervisors and the way that their work is overlooked. And your reaction is to say, stop dismissing us. Here's the reality. You're not in the editing rooms. I am. And I'm telling you, after 30 years, it is extraordinarily rare for the editors or the post team to refer to the notes.
Take my word for it. It's extraordinarily rare. And if you're frustrated by that, imagine how frustrated I am about that. I'm not saying it never happens. And clearly you had a nice experience where it happened at some point. But Elizabeth, hear me out. I'm on your side. That's why I'm saying this. I want editors, especially up and coming editors who listen to our show to read the effing notes. Yeah.
Yeah. You have sung the praises of the script supervisor on The Last of Us so many times. So many times. And apparently he's fantastic, which is great. Chris Roofs. Great. I will say that even if those notes are not being used for the editorial process, I suspect there have been times where you needed to refer back to those notes because you're doing inserts, pickup shots, you're reshooting some things, you need to figure out like what was it that we were doing here? So that's a separate thing. And in the...
crazy list of things that the script supervisor is responsible for. It's the Swiss army knife of crew members keeping track of inserts that we owe as one of them. And that is a separate list that is generated and shared with the post-production supervisor and the producer and the editors so that everybody's on top of that and the ADs most importantly to make sure that they're scheduled. Yep.
More follow-up. This one is from AI Guinea Pig. Is this a real person or an AI Guinea Pig? This is a real person. This is a real person. So, Drew, it's a long story, but I think it's an interesting story because it feels like, oh, there's a bellwether of things that could come. Oh, boy. In 2023, I had a script make the annual blacklist.
The script led to the proverbial water bottle tour and eventually an option offer. The offer came from a producer with many produced credits on movies and shows over the last two decades. And as my reps and I asked around, we also learned that he had a good reputation, both as a person and as someone with a knack for getting things done. What's more, his pitch was compelling. He claimed to have access to financing, didn't hurt that there was money on the table with the option agreement. I was going to become a paid screenwriter.
My lawyer negotiated the option agreement, I signed it, the check cleared, and we were off. The producer and I had our kickoff call, and this is how we opened. So, how much have you played around with AI? The producer, as it turns out, was intending to launch a new AI studio, with my script as one of the headliners of its slate.
After no mention of AI during our initial conversations or negotiations, I was now being told my project was going to be made using generative AI. What's more, I came to realize that the producer's so-called access to financing was not access to financing for traditional film production. It was for this technology specifically. I tried to give the producer the benefit of the doubt. I expressed my many ethical and creative concerns around AI production. I asked if there was still a possibility of traditional production with a real live cast and a real live crew.
The producer paid lip service to this idea, but once the announcement of the AI studio went public, it was clear to me that it was only ever that.
I quickly got on the phone with my reps and my lawyer and asked out the option agreement. I would gladly send the money back if it meant keeping my script and my soul intact. And surprisingly, the producer did not push back. It's probably not a coincidence that the other movies in the announcement slate are all from unproduced screenwriters. So, what's the lesson? We now live in a world where we can't take traditional paths to production for granted. We need to ask a prospective partner's feelings about AI and even bar it contractually if we can.
Yes, this producer kept their intentions hidden, but there was also nothing in their filmography or reputation that gave soulless AI tech bro vibes. Next time, I will definitely be asking.
Wow. Wow. So a whole journey there. So usually people are writing in for advice. In this case, the person is giving advice. But I thought it was good to keep all the context in there because this is a real thing that writers will be facing. You and I may not face it directly, but I think a lot of our listeners could be encountering this where in a general case, you enter into an agreement thinking you're making one kind of movie, like a live action movie with actors.
but you find out, oh, it's animation or it's generative AI where there actually is no, there's no people behind it. So I'm guessing this wasn't a WGA agreement. There's nothing prohibiting that. Oh, I thought, oh, it's just that it prohibits AI as literary material for the purposes of credit. So,
The good news here is this was an option. Therefore, copyright had not yet been transferred, sold. There was no work-for-hire agreement in place. You didn't even have to give the money back. You could just let the option lapse. Well, the producer could have exercised the option and he would have lost it. They don't have the money.
I'm just going to say flat out, they don't have it. But true. And hopefully the money wasn't a lot for the option. I guess, you know, it's exciting when you get money for an option. It's not so great when you have to give it back or you need to give it back. In this case, brilliant maneuver to get out of this mess. Let's talk a little bit, John, for a moment about there's something, a phrase that popped out here. And that is there was nothing in his resume or past credits that would indicate AI Tech Bro.
Probably there was. So we need to think about producers in a different way than we think about writers and directors and actors. Because no matter what the quality is, if you get a writing credit, you wrote. Directing, you directed. Acting, you acted.
There are 12,000 flavors of producer. There are so many different kinds of producers, including producers that routinely do nothing, that the producers themselves had to invent a fake guild, of which I am a member. I love that they call it a guild. It's not. It's an association. It's a trade association to self-regulate which producers actually warrant...
the Best Picture Award. So one thing is to look at the credits. If in movies you see a lot of executive producer credits, well, that's different than producer. And in television, if you see a lot of producer credits as opposed to executive producers the other way around, that's also possibly a red flag that what this person is, and there's no shame in it, is somebody that puts projects together but isn't necessarily making them. And those people over time...
like water, find the path of least resistance to escape and head towards money. In this case, it sounds like this guy thinks it's AI. Yeah.
It's entirely possible that this producer, who has a lot of credits, rarely has that PGA after their name, which would indicate that they really did produce the movie. But let's assume maybe for sake of argument that they did produce those movies, and they're in a place right now where they're finding it very hard to make movies. And so some tech people show up saying like, hey, we have this generative AI technology to create the video basically on demand. And so we can film things without a studio, without people, without anything else.
I could imagine them going to a person who has some respectable credits who actually knows how to make some movies and convincing him to do this. And so that's also possible that it is a legit person who's just at a certain point in their career realizing, okay, this is the thing I do next. Yeah, and that's another tricky one. When you are...
coming up and you're trying to get your first thing out there, you sometimes meet people on your way up that are on their way down. Very true. You find everybody's in the middle of the ladder and figuring out who's on their way down can be very difficult to do. And producers are extraordinarily good at convincing you that they're amazing. That's part of their job. It's part of their skill set.
In this case, what is so startling to me is that this producer thought they were going to get away with it by not saying anything until after the deal was signed. So I'm going to go with idiot on that one. But great warning here, and let's just get this out to all the lawyers around town. This should be standard now in option agreements that this material will not be used to assist lawyers
In AI, it will not be a springboard for AI. There will be no AI development of this. I think that clause now needs to just be in there. Well, let's talk about the difference between generative AI as a technology versus animation or motion capture or other things that are different ways to do stuff. You know, you had a good initial meeting with this producer and you were talking about a vision for the movie, but apparently it was describing a false vision for the movie or like it was being so vague about sort of what it was he was trying to do that's frustrating. Yeah.
listen, would I fault Guinea Pig for making a deal with this producer that was going to try to use this AI thing? For a feature film, I think kind of yes. I think that's a bad look. If it was for like a short film where they're going to hire you on to do this little experiment, that's a choice you make whether you're going to do it or not do it. But it's their original material. Yeah. It just feels like if you're going to go through the misery of creating something original...
Why then hand it off to robots to do what they do? The whole point is that you're trying with your first thing to explain to everybody that you have value. If you immediately let them feed it into AI, you're saying, I don't. So I think a very wise choice here. I think everybody should be looking out for this. Also, I sure wish we could just say who these people were. We don't happen to know who this producer is.
But this is the kind of person I'd love to bring on the show and just say, okay, let's talk. Yeah, absolutely. Not to beat them about the head and shoulders, but just to say, what is going on here exactly? And get under the hood of this. Yeah, I do wonder how this conversation will age 10 years from now. And because there's the boundaries between like, what is using generative AI to do visual effects versus to film a thing and to replace the crew. And those are the first principles I think we sort of keep coming back to is that like,
Are you making this choice so you can avoid hiring the people whose job this normally would be to do things? And this does feel like that situation to me. There are situations I feel where AI is replacing what I would call rote work. So if the job is to take this peg and put it in this hole 4,000 times a day,
Well, automation has done that. And that's been around forever. That's not AI. That's just industrial automation. When the robots came, people in the auto industry were very concerned, but repetitive rote tasks are ultimately going to go to machinery. But words? No. But words and the idea of
putting together a crew to film something or a crew to actually animate a thing, to make those fundamental choices, that's really what we're pushing back against. You and I both discussed, if we are using AI tools to clean up audio in the way that we would normally have used other digital tools, I don't see that as a crisis. No, that is using a calculator instead of an abacus, and I'm okay with that. And I think with things like animation, it's quite likely that
we will progress to a place where an artist is creating the first frame,
of, you know, a two-second shot and the last frame, and then there is some interpolation, and then choices are made, which one of these interpolations do I want? But it will make things go faster. That's sort of inevitable. But the key choices, I think, need to stay with us. Or else we will end up with a whole lot of what the kids online call AI slop, which is a wonderful phrase. I'll try to find a link to this to talk about it. But there was a study that showed that
You have people look at a bunch of poems, and some of the poems are the actual real classic poems, and some are like in the style of these things. And people inevitably prefer things that are in the style of the thing that they're doing with AI. And it's just like taste is a weird thing. And there's a reason, I don't know, there's a reason why people sometimes want the slop. Oh, yeah. Well...
We know, so we play D&D every week. And as is tradition, I try as best I can to provide Cool Ranch Doritos at every session. When they came up with the Cool Ranch powder in the laboratory... The geniuses. Geniuses. And that is synthetic and that is short-circuiting a lot of work that our brain normally has to do to get that rewarded. Yeah. You know, when we were kids, you would get like...
Banana-flavored taffy. Well, that's an ester. It's a chemical, and it certainly doesn't taste like banana. It tastes like something else. But it goes right into happy center in your brain way faster than a frickin' banana would. Oh, yeah. AI is artificial flavoring, and it is chemicals. And yes, it can do those things. But at some point, somebody does still have to make new stuff. Yeah. I continue to believe that as we move into this next decade and more...
synthetic things become synthetic entertainment becomes online I do think there will be a gravitation towards some live in-person things artistic plays that are staged in front of you feel like this is actually really happening I'm not being fed a thing this is a real moment absolutely yes spontaneity and connection will not go away agreed
All right, let's get to our first topic today, which is something that I realized this past week was a thing I felt a lot at the start of my career. And it never really went away. It just changed a little bit. But I want to describe early in my career, and I'm sure you will recognize what this feels like. I remember waiting for...
word back from an agent who was reading my script at CAA. And so I would come back from work every day and look at my answering machine, which was actually a physical box answering machine to see if there's a blinking light, if there's a message from this producer, whether this agent at CAA had read it and hopefully liked it. And I'm waiting for like a month every day looking for that thing. And there's just a constant waiting. And early in my career as well, my scripts were being sent out and it was stuff like I was waiting to hear back from stuff.
But then this last month or two, and I'm being a little bit vague on some of these projects, but these are the kinds of things I was encountering, which was on one project waiting for the big boss to sign off on making my deal because it's a lot of money. But there's a lot of speculation around town that this person may not be in that job anymore. And so like, oh...
Does he actually have the power to sign off? Do you even want him to sign off or do you want to wait for the next person? Because if he goes, then it becomes a project under the old regime. Sure. I like the race between pay me and get fired. Yes. Which will win. That's exciting. Yeah. Another example of waiting is waiting for notes on a draft because the director is off busy shooting another movie. Yeah. Waiting to take out a project because the rights holders have another franchise that they're currently out shopping and they don't want to confuse the market. Oh, yeah. Waiting for the company boss to
before taking out a different pitch because their attention is divided. So I just want to talk about waiting and sort of the frustration of a screenwriter is that you're generating work, but you're also waiting for results and for other people to do stuff. It's incredibly frustrating. And having now been on both sides of that ball, I can say that the waiting is worse. The making people wait is a kind of constant thing
churning guilt. Yeah. But at some point, there is kind of your limit for attention and your ability to focus on things.
Because there's a lot. The people who are making these decisions typically have too many decisions to make, too much stuff to read. And then the waiting happens. And also, in our business, crises tend to occupy everyone's time all the time. So if you're not a crisis, you just sort of fall back to, you know, secondary position.
And so we have to make peace with this horrible feeling, what Melissa calls sitting in your discomfort. Yes. So we have to sit in our discomfort, which is awful. And it is the most brutal indication that we are not in control of anything at all. Let's talk about control because I think one...
One of the real gifts we have as writers is unlike actors and other people who make movies, we do have the agency to just go off and do other stuff. And so we're not waiting for someone to give us permission to do our trade. A director needs to be hired on to do a thing. An actor needs to be hired on to perform in a role. We can just do new stuff. And so obviously the simplest advice is, well, go off and write the next thing and don't spend too many brain cycles worrying about that other thing.
But I don't want to let us off completely there because I do think there is a responsibility for checking in and reminding people and finding ways to check in without being so annoying that they hate you.
Most times they won't, but you are sometimes creating a bit of guilt so they actually do pay attention. Yes. And there's a balance between how often you should do it and how often your reps should do it. And I think one of the things I've learned over the years is how to stagger it so that the reps check one week and I check the next week. Sure. Little pro tip for reps out there, and I'm sure they all do this.
One of the things that happens with people whose attention is very divided is that they will swivel towards the potential for a loss as opposed to looking for the potential for a win.
If a rep calls and says, hey, just reminding you, my client wrote this great script. You really should read it. That's the potential for a win. And they're like, oh, I'll get to it. Hey, the script that we sent you, we would really like for you to be this person's agent or this producer. Heads up, a couple other people now are on top of it. And we're getting a lot of incoming calls. Just doing you the courtesy of letting you know.
There's heat now. Oh, I might lose something. Oh, here we go. So a little bit of a psychology there. And it is much harder to do as the writer than it is. And this is why reps are useful. Yeah. Well, one of the reasons, I would say. Agreed. And sometimes that ticking clock that you're putting on there is John's not going to be available anymore. Like basically like you need him to do this next draft. Yeah.
We're past the reading period and now it's time to go on to the next thing. We should talk about, we should describe a reading period. And so in our episode where we talked about your contract, for each step in your deal, so writing a first draft, for example, there's a certain amount of time for you to deliver that first draft. You turn it in and then it starts a reading period. Reading period is often four weeks, could be longer, but it's negotiated since it's written down in your contract.
they will ignore that. Yep. Expect that to be the minimum amount of time it will take them to read this and get you back to notes. Yep. But it's useful that it's in your contract because then if they come back to you after that time and say like, hey, we need to start this next thing and they pass the reading period, you've got some negotiating room to say like, okay, well, he's actually doing this next thing first because we missed this. Yeah. And...
It's also an invitation for your reps to call when that reading period is about to be over and say like, hey, just so we know this is the thing. Occasionally, I've even been able to get people to commence me on the next step, even though they really haven't given me notes. Right. Because... Well, what happens is there's a point where whatever the optional is for the next step, that number, that pre-negotiated number only applies for a certain amount of time. Yeah. And if they miss that time, and this happened to me earlier in my career, where they blew past it, didn't realize it.
Then they greenlit the movie. Then they said, okay, it's time for you to do your optional polish. And we were like, what optional polish? And now it's greenlit. We have a gun to your heads. And I ended up getting paid more for that polish than I did for the first draft because they blew through it and they screwed up. Patience is one of those things that is highly recommended only because we aren't in control and we don't know where the ball is going to bounce. We think...
that we are responsible to force the issue. But the answer, whether it's I like this, I don't like this, I want you to be my client, I want to make this or I don't, is actually fairly unpredictable. And the factors that lead to that decision are far beyond simply the writing. So,
If you wait three more days, something crazy can happen and now everybody wants to do it. You wait three more days, something horrible might happen and nobody wants to do it. Your specific movie about this one person and this one Tom Cruise just signed on to do the same story somewhere else, you're done. And there's no way of knowing. So I think...
And distressingly, zen is called for here. So don't be passive. Don't give up. But also be aware that whatever you do, maybe you can impart about 10% of spin on the ball and the rest of it is up to fate. The other thing I want to make sure listeners hear out of this is sometimes that...
The waiting, the maybe, the sort of like, you know, we'll see, is actually just a soft pass. No one wants to say no, and they can't say yes. And so they say maybe, but really it's no. And so sometimes when you're not hearing back from people, it really is that they passed, they moved on, they're not thinking about it anymore, but they just don't actually want to officially say no. And that's why I'm always so grateful when people are very upfront about like, this is what's happening. Sorry, this is not, this is where we're at. And so there've been times where I've,
vehemently disagreed on the decision, but totally respected the person for actually having courage to say, nope, this is where it's at. Exactly. And maybe without conditions is no.
If it's maybe the following three things need to happen, but if they do, then yes. And you understand those three things? Yeah. Okay. Let's see if those three things happen. Now, sometimes because people don't like saying no, they'll say maybe these three things have to happen. And one of them is Jesus needs to come back. Like, okay, if you create an impossible condition, then it's no also. Yeah. We're waiting to see sort of what the market's like in a month or two months. It's like, right. It's complicated.
kind of a no. And it could potentially come into a yes, but it's not likely to be a yes. And you really should not pin any hopes on that. And typically, when we're dealing with large companies...
The amount of money that we're talking about here is not enough to rattle a stock price, nor is it an amount that gets shaken loose by the market. They have it or they just don't want it, you know? Because if you said, okay, we can wait for the market. Just FYI, Spielberg wants to do it over there. So let me know how the market is by tomorrow morning. Otherwise, we're going with Spielberg. They'll buy it before you hang up the phone. So, yeah, only...
almost, well, as we often said, almost everything but money is no. That's how it goes. Certainly matched something you brought up early on. We recognize that sometimes we are that person who is sort of being ambiguous or is in the maybe situation. Yes. And that's why I try to be that person who gives a clear, quick answer on things. And so if somebody sends me a thing for a possible adaptation or whatever, is this of interest to you? I will try to take a look at it like that day. And I'll try to get a no as quickly as possible. If it
probably is a no. Like on a call, I will pass on something on, you know, like they sent it to me and five minutes later, I'm emailing back, not for me, thanks. There are situations where I have sort of like, I need to sort of stew and remit it on things or it's like, it's a big book to read and it's like, I'm interested and it takes a while. I just try to make it clear that this is how much time it's going to take me to do it. This is why I'm thinking about doing it and,
not hold up the gears because I've recognized over the years, sometimes I've been that person. Sure. Just sort of ambiguously sitting out there. We also have an advantage to decision-making, which is that we are the people that make stuff. So we're not really operating according to heat or market interest or any of that stuff. We're just sort of going by instinct. One of the things that you do have to do is accept that you may be
not want to do something that literally everybody else does want to do. You need to be okay with that. So I'm just thinking of, there was a book that is not yet published, but it's in galleys and went around and I looked at, and it was a proposal. Yeah. And I understood the story behind it and I read the proposal and I thought-
yes, this will probably be quite good in adaptation. I don't want to be the one to adapt it. Now I need to make my peace with that because I'm pretty sure in about three days, I'm going to read that somebody incredible is doing it. Yeah. Which is exactly what happened. Yep. But I was okay with that because I made my peace with it. I think it's harder for the other side because they panic. I mean, there have been situations where, you know, people call back and they're like, wait, did I say no? I meant yes. No.
No backsies. No backsies, yeah. No backsies. Yeah, that FOMO, getting over that fear of missing out. FOMO. Yeah, that's really what it is. And I've also been in that situation. And when I feel it, something that's helpful for me to say is like, is to give my back and say, this is going to be such a great movie. I cannot wait to watch it.
I'm not the person to do this. I'm sure you're talking to X, Y, and Z. They're going to kill it. It's a very reassuring way to say it's no, but it's obvious you guys aren't going to be left here with an unsold item. It's going to sell. It's going to sell to somebody great. So good news. You don't have to worry about me being the person. And always thank you so much for consideration because it's true. It's very lovely to be considered for anything. On the other side of things, I think
For those of us who are stuck in limbo, waiting for things, creating a little FOMO, probably better than being thirsty. Absolutely. Let's wrap up this topic. Just getting back to what Melissa said is that making peace with the uncertainty, with the discomfort. And I think sometimes just like recognizing it, labeling it, naming it. So like this is an open loop that I have no control over. It's there, I see it. And now we're moving on and we're doing other things. And it was in that sort of
weird storm of uncertainty that I ended up writing Go. It was actually a very productive period because I was just waiting on other stuff. It's like, I had the agency to do it and so just take advantage of what you can do as a writer, which a lot of other folks can't. Yeah. I mean, if you can forget that you're waiting, you win. Yeah.
All right, let's get to the three-page challenge. For folks who are new to the podcast, every once in a while, we put out a call to our premium subscribers saying, hey, send us the first three pages of your screenplay, of your pilot. We will take a look at this on the air. We put out a URL, so it's johnaugust.com slash three-page, all spelled out. People fill out a little form. They say it's okay for us to talk about this on the air.
Everything we're saying here is because people sent us these things and asked for honest feedback. So we are not being mean to anybody. Have people been suggesting that we're being mean? I think some people get uncomfortable with our, you're picking on them. They need to sit in their discomfort because we are actually so much nicer to
than what we have had to deal with. Yeah, well, the thing is, we're actually saying stuff whereas other people were just like, eh. Or if people are paying you. Oh, yeah. Brutal. Yeah, that can be brutal. Brutal. Brutal. Yeah. Now, Drew, help us out here because you put out the call for folks to send in these submissions. You sent out an email through the little system. Talk to us about what happened there. Oh, yeah. So we got 250 submissions in less than 48 hours. It was amazing. And it was really good work. Sheesh. My eyes are...
burning right now. You read all of them? Basically. I mean, yeah. My God, 750 pages. Now, so the filtering mechanism you're using is we only want scripts that like don't have like obvious typos that feels messy in a way that's like we're going to have to talk about the mess on the page. Yeah. Typos are automatically out and multiple submissions. I've caught those before too. So I'll start reading and be like, oh, this is the same thing.
Okay. Now, any other patterns you noticed in this tranche of scripts? Yeah, actually. This one, I've been seeing several scripts where character age and gender are sort of in like message board formatting, if that's the right way to put it. So like F24 or M30 or something like that. Right, right, right. Which is new, but it also, it's sort of like
sense? I don't know. How do you guys feel about it? As long as we understand what it is, I mean, as long as it didn't stop me, I'd be fine with it. It also reminds me of like sort of a advice column, like me, female 35, and my partner, male 26, are doing a thing. So yeah, I get that. F number, M number, sure. Anything else you've noticed, Drew? We had a few scripts with email and contact info directly under the author name. So it was...
titled by this person, then it was sandwiched right up. And I don't know if people are doing that for the three-page challenge, but... Yeah, I feel like bottom left corner is a great place to put that. I like it better down there. Sure, but you know. It's not the end of the world. No, if I like the script, I don't care where the email is. Yeah, yeah. All right, let's start off here with a sample called Scrambling by Tanya Luna. Drew, if you could give us the synopsis for folks who are not reading along with us, but if you are reading along with us, you might want to pause right now. In the show notes, you'll find...
I'll link to the PDF. You can read the PDF and then hear what we said. But for Drew, everybody else, give us the synopsis. Veronica, 24, walks quickly through the financial district of New York City, staring at her GPS, totally lost. She asks a stranger for directions to Front Street, which all the pedestrians are happy to give her, but their directions become this confusing cacophony of words. We intercut this with moments from her childhood, lost in her school hallways. She imagines rolling fog and shadows until a teacher finds her.
Back in present day, when Veronica ends up on Fulton Street rather than front, she hails a cab, which takes her to her destination only a few seconds away. She enters the ONG building, where the guard asks her which suite number she's going to, and she's overwhelmed by the amount of words in front of her.
All right. So let's start with the title page here. So Scrambling is written in a jumble of fonts. I actually really like the look of it. Sure. It's fun. And then it says written by, and then it says Lania Tuna, and then it's stripped through, and it says Tania Luna underneath that. Fun. We're getting a sense of sort of what the underlying dilemma is here for this character. It's all in Courier Prime, which is a delightful typeface. I just always notice that. It all looks really good. We got the...
Email address and the phone number in the bottom left corner. Nothing on the cover page that concerned me. I had more concerns as we started going into this. So Craig, talk to us about what you're seeing as you enter. Well, let's talk about some good things first. These pages look great. They do. The way things are spread out is sort of the golden ideal of a blend of action and dialogue. There's some nice white space throughout. It was very easy to read, moved across it nicely. The sentences were all well put together. Yeah.
The first thing that jumped out was this description. They walk fast, but Veronica, all caps underlined. I'm fine with that. Sure, why not? Veronica, and then in parentheses, 24 mixed race is faster. I'm not sure mixed race is enough. Yeah. Because that's a very generic way to describe somebody's ethnicity. You're going to make a point that it's mixed race.
Shouldn't we know what the mix is? Yeah. So in the next paragraph, we're hearing like long, straight black hair, yellow backpack bouncing as she walk runs. But yeah, we're not finding anything more about her. And so giving us just...
Basically, it was like saying Veronica 24 won't tell you what she looks like is faster. That's kind of what it felt like to me. So either don't or do. Yeah. But the kind of halfway seemed a bit odd. Now, what happens here over these three pages appears to be the demonstration of somebody struggling with some kind of information processing disability. Yeah.
And the glimpse of her struggling with this as a kid was sort of interesting, but possibly out of place in this kind of frantic opening. Yeah. The biggest issue I have here, and this is as far as these three page challenges go, this is a fairly high level one. So that's kind of good news because I think that Tanya Luna can write fairly well here, is that if you're demonstrating that somebody has a specific processing disability,
don't show me them doing something that I think they would be able to do regardless. If you're 23 years old and you know that you have some issues processing information, directions, street names, things like that, and you're going for a job interview, you will prepare. You're not going to be helpless. You're not going to wake up that morning and go, oh, right, I forgot I have extreme dyslexia or extreme dysgraphia or I cannot remember names or places or I'm face blind. You know these things. Mm-hmm.
Would it not be more interesting to meet this person in a situation where they did feel self-assured because they had prepared and then something happens that they weren't expecting and then we see the expression of this disability and what it means for this person? Yeah.
I think my frustration with the three pages on the whole was that it was three pages of just getting somebody to an office in a way that didn't feel like I didn't learn that much about Veronica over the course of these three pages. I didn't know anything specific about what she was. I sort of knew, I didn't get a sense of what her issue was. It's some sort of information processing issue that to
She was overwhelmed by this scenario, but I didn't know much specific about her. And that started with not getting a clear visual of her at the start. I want to talk about just like the very first lines here. We're in the New York City Financial District. Skyscrapers jetted out of concrete like shiny Lego towers made by a kid without much of an imagination. I didn't really, I don't see that specifically. It's also unnecessary because we know what skyscrapers are. Yeah, we know what New York looks like.
Cabs honk as they whiz by, a few make your trees, leaves yellow, dot the sidewalk. Not helping me get so much. Here's my concern. Tourists, so many tourists wander amid the locals, business suits, business shoes, business expressions. I don't associate a lot of tourists with the financial district. No. So I think highlighting that there are people in business suits like doing Wall Street work and that Veronica is maybe not part of that is actually more useful to us than sort of the
the confusing thing of the tourists in there because I don't understand who Veronica is in relationship to people she's walking around. Yes. The GPS on her phone, GPS just feels, it makes me think like, oh, are we in the 90s? Right. It's an incredibly ambiguous concept. It's a technology that underpins all the other things we have. But we don't say, we refer to it as a separate thing anymore. Is she using Google Maps? Yeah. Is she using Waze? Is she using Apple Maps? What is she? No. Yeah, it's not, GPS is like a Garmin device. Absolutely. So call it the map on her phone, which is fine. Yeah.
Beyond that, I sort of mostly get it. I just don't think cutting back to the elementary school was probably not the right choice for cutting back and forth in these first pages.
leads me to think that we're going to do this all the time in the movie, and that's not my friend. I get a little bit nervous about jumping back to the grade school so much at the start. And if you do jump back to the grade school, I need to know that it's her memory. Otherwise, it's the movie doing it. Yeah. In which case, I'm just frustrated. And I feel in this case like the movie just said, oh, now, here's her as a kid. Not, okay, on her face, panicked, sweaty, depressed.
There's this memory of her being panicked and sweaty in a hallway. And you're absolutely right. Where we place her in the beginning, none of those things are in service of her character. They don't create specific obstacles. It isn't a question that we almost missed her because she wasn't interesting, but then we realized that's part of the issue. It wasn't that she was moving faster than everybody or getting jostled.
Why the street? Why the here? What's going on? Why not just both panicked, running? I want to get back to the thing you said early on. A person with this situation, this information processing disorder, would have a strategy going into it. They'd have a plan for coping ahead. And that might actually be a more interesting thing. If we're going to cut away from the moments, it might be more interesting to see what her plan was for that day and then watch it fall apart. Yes, exactly. So,
You sit there and you make a plan. If I'm watching a 23-year-old young woman at night in her apartment practicing, practicing the map, practicing the movements, I would be so curious as to why. And then when I see her the next day moving and I'm like, oh, okay. So she has some issue. That's why she prepared this. And then...
oh, Con Ed has closed the street off. You can't go that way. Oh, no. Yes. Then I'm connected to her panic because I'm experiencing it. I'm part of it because I've been prepared for it. So one thing to consider, and I don't know if Tanya has this processing disorder or not, but one thing I would suggest, Tanya, is to think, okay, sometimes reality gets in the way of what we think would be dramatic. Don't worry.
Better to be realistic and then say, well, then what is, what are the pettier, the smaller, the more mundane obstacles that will be unique to this situation? As you were talking, I was thinking about, let's say she's coming from uptown to the financial district. She gets on a train that she assumes is local and it's going to stop, but it turns out to be an express. And so she goes like three stops too far. We've all been in a situation where like, wait, you just saw the stop go past you.
we can handle that. We have an expectation of how we can handle that. But if we then cut back to sort of her planning for how many stops it's going to be, and you realize like, oh, this is a much bigger deal to her than it would be to me, we're leaning in. We're curious. Yes. So if we replace this character with a blind character, we would not accept an opening where this blind character is moving through the New York streets with their cane,
completely unaware of where they are. You would prepare, but we would be very invested if, for instance, like what you just said happened and you realize, oh, my preparation is useless now. Now what do I do? That creates connection with the character. So what we don't have here is a rooting interest because we're just sort of watching. We're not invested. Agreed. But,
I will say, like, the ability to put sentences together, to lay things out in a interesting way, read, it was smooth as silk. So it's all promising. Absolutely. We're sure pitching a better version of what's already solved. Which we usually don't have the opportunity to do. So that's a good sign. It is a great. So, Drew, our writer also sent through the logline to explain what's happening in the full script. Tell us what else is happening in Scrambling.
So the logline is, a dyslexic woman with a wild imagination accidentally lands a high-stakes job and must scramble to prove she belongs in a cutthroat corporate world that wasn't built for her to succeed. Yeah, that's right. It's Working Girl. It's great. Love it. Sure. Let's move on to our next script by Leah Newsome. This is Lump. Drew, help us out. A desert town in the year 2140. Very pregnant Ingrid, early 30s, is being given a cervical exam by a doula in an old, dingy motorhome.
The doula is feeling for something. She finds it, says nope, and ends the exam. Ingrid hangs her head. On her way out, the doula encourages Ingrid to go to a hospital across the border as their cleaner. Ingrid is reluctant. Driving home, odd beeps and screeching comes over the radio. Ingrid accidentally swerves into oncoming traffic but avoids a crash. At home, Ingrid makes tea but panics when she drops some of the water on the floor. Sean enters, informing her that the water filter was jammed and fence was cut.
All right. And so on the title page here, it says inspired by the medieval epic, The King of Tars. I've never heard of The King of Tars. I've never heard of The King of Tars. I believe it exists. It has to. It makes me curious. Yeah. Yeah. And I also like that you're saying the medieval epic because it's like nothing about this feels medieval. So great. Yeah. That's inspiring. Yeah. If you're just making it up just to pique our curiosity. I mean, brilliant. Brilliant. Actually a genius move. Well played. Yes.
All right, let me start us off here. So we are starting off with this Duelist Motorhome. I like the visuals that we've got here. I like sort of how we're being set up. The super title over it says the excised lands 2140. I bristled a little bit at the excised lands. It just gave me that sort of fantasy sci-fi thing. Slightly fan-fic-ish name. Yeah, fan-fic-ish. Yeah, it does feel a little bit like that. This is a small thing, but in the courier typeface,
dash dash there's no such thing as like a long em dash so whatever Lee is doing here to create those em dashes those long dashes in the first paragraph and second paragraph just a little bit weird it just it bumped for me I noticed it how did
Not a big thing. What is a little bit bigger of a thing for me is, fourth paragraph, she leans over Ingrid's legs, finding the right angle. The last person who's named was Ingrid, so I didn't realize it was the doula immediately. Just say doula. Just keep it. Don't do... It's that read to make sure that everything is unambiguous the first time you take a look at it. I was a little bit frustrated by the end of this first scene. Doula says, sorry, I wanted more. I felt you were being ambiguous for sort of
No purpose. The doula would have said more there. Yes, this is the reaction. So the doula is doing a vaginal examination to check...
What? Dilation, possibly? To see if it's time for the baby to be born? I mean, or it's a cervical exam. Cervical exam would imply, yes, that it is, we're checking dilation, right? But then the doula feels for something difficult to find. The cervix is not difficult to find. So now I'm like, okay, well, what is difficult? Is something else happening in there? Is something else happening? Okay. And we are in the future. Are we hoping for a two-headed baby? I don't know. But all I know is that the doula says, nope, which is very casual.
No? Sorry. And...
Ingrid drops her head onto the table defeated. It's a bit like, I didn't get the job. Not, my baby's dead. And if your baby isn't ready to be born, then that would be a different response. So I had no idea what I was meant to feel there. Yeah, and so here's why it matters. Because we've established she's very pregnant. We say that she's very pregnant. We were just seeing this exam. We're calling a cervical exam. And so then the idea that she's going to cross the border to do another thing makes me...
and not in sort of the right way, is to wonder sort of what's going to happen next. I feel like if she's close enough that she's there for this exam, that the baby's just about to come. Let's talk a little bit about the post-apocalypse, if I may. Do you have any experience about that? So when you begin...
It's important to introduce changes slowly. The things that are contrasted to our life are important, but you don't want to just pile on 12 of them at once. No. Because now nobody knows really what the rules are. Nobody knows quite what the connection is to the past.
There's so much going on here in this first scene that I don't... So they don't have stirrups. So she's got to like hold her own legs back. It's in a motor home. Yep. But they do have rubber gloves or latex gloves. Yeah. And then there's an oil drum fire pit, which I have to say, like, I have a rule on the last one. No oil drum fire pits. No...
Oil drum fire pits. It is the most possible cliche thing to do in the apocalypse. Where do we think... Was it Mad Max where we first established the post-apocalyptic oil drum fire pits? I don't know. Because they used to actually exist. Like, in the Great Depression, that was actually a way that people kept warm. From oil drums? Well, it was a... It was a metal thing. It was a metal bin. Yes. But, like, when do you find...
So oil drums exist. I mean, you'll see oil drums in the second season of The Last of Us, but not...
for braziers. It's rare to just sort of like see oil drums with the top lopped off that you can fill with garbage and light on fire and they're always on the street corner. I think it's because it's just they're easy to source for productions and they're at a height that makes it interesting. Yeah, yeah. Otherwise, people have to sit. So, I don't know. Anyway, but here's what I really don't understand. There's an oil drum fire pit and it's 100 degrees out. Yeah. What? What?
What? Yeah. What is that? They're playing a card game near the fire. Why would they be near the fire sweating through their clothes when it's 100 degrees? Now, that may be explained also, but then I want the script to tell me that's weird, at least to acknowledge to me, like, I'm supposed to note that that's strange. One thing I do think that would help this is if we took the excised land 2140 and
Moved it down a bit. I was about to say the same thing. So if that's, as she's getting back to her truck and everything else, that's when we're saying that, great. Because then also it makes that first scene clean and it can be about the doula's medical examination. We'll notice like, okay, is this just a, what's happening here? And generally, you want to put that title over the widest possible shot. Agreed. Where you get the full scope of the world and you go, oh yeah, it's not just that I'm in this horrible junkyard or a terrible mobile park.
look at the horizon, look at the sun, look at the sky, look at whatever.
I want to make a proposal for the second scene. So in the second scene, we're outside the motorhome and Ingrid is walking to her truck. She gets in her truck. I have a proposal that we start the scene a little bit later on because right now we have an action line. Ingrid pulls her keys out of her pocket. That's not an interesting line to give to itself. If she were to get into the truck at that point and the rest of the conversation is there, then we can end on the finally get the car to start, the engine rumbling to life. So I would say just get us into that car sooner. It's probably going to be your friend.
This is also a place where knowing where people are and how motion is functioning will help. Why is the doula following her? I didn't even know the doula was following her until she started talking. Is she trying to keep up with Ingrid? Is she worried about Ingrid? What she's saying here, I can't tell what the intention is. Is she worried for Ingrid's life? Is she just being just kind of...
A know-it-all? I can't tell because I don't know how she's moving with her. Yeah. So if that first line from the doula is like, listen, you could probably make it in time if you left now. If she was following her and that's the first line, you get a sense that she's restating a thing she said before. And also it says, exterior doula's motorhome day. The motorhome door slams behind Ingrid and the doula.
That's it. Well, who do who slam it? And then they don't seem to be walking. They're just standing there. So is the truck right next to the motorhome? Where is everything? This is the classic Lindsay Duran question. Where are they standing? Are they moving? Where is the truck? Where are the women relative to the motorhome? My instinct is they should be in motion as the scene starts. It feels like...
They should be in motion because I would understand that the doula is worried about her. But for the doula to be worried about her, I need to go back to the prior scene where Ingrid drops her head onto the table, defeated, then starts to get up and the doula goes, wait, wait, wait. Cut to, boom, hold on, hold on. Just because I don't know why this next bit is happening. Just thinking about how people actually function. They don't just do nothing and then suddenly appear together outside of a door and
Find the intention. Yeah, agreed. As we get into Ingrid's truck, she's driving back. I was confused by the radio voice because the radio voice to me feels like, at first I thought, is it a dispatcher? No, it's just convenient radio. It's the news. Telling us the news. So it's the news and I really struggle with this. Three arrested west of the former municipality of Phoenix. Now, come on. If it is 2140,
You're not calling it the, that's like us referring to New York as the former New Amsterdam today. It's, we don't do that. Right. Like you could call it West of, you know, Phoenix territory. Sure. Or West of, you know, fallout would call it new Phoenix. You know, that's what they do. New Vegas. Yeah.
But why is there just this casual, if you have this casual kind of news update, I feel like there's way more civilization going on than we thought there would be. But this last line, suspects were found with stolen rations on their persons, that feels police-y, that feels like, you know, police dispatcher. So finding the right level for that is interesting. It sounds like we're really harping on a lot of stuff.
I want to love this. I actually like the space of it. I love a pregnant woman in this same, in this space and trying to make a decision about what to do next. And we're about to get to Sean, who's apparently the father of the kid. We're about to meet him and like that scene is better. We don't know who Sean is. He's not giving anything other than an uppercase name. But,
I'm curious to keep reading based on what you've done so far. Yes. I mean, I love a scene that begins with a cervical exam. I mean, like if you start with a cervical exam, hats off, like good for you. Audacious, bold.
There is a lot of clunky, cliche, sci-fi stuff going on here that you have to be better than because you just don't want to end up in a Wattpad world with this stuff, right? Last thing is to just think about where everybody is. Give the audience a chance to visualize things. That means say less and make the things you say matter more. We are Interior Cat House Evening.
What does the exterior look like? Where is it? I don't know. I don't know what interior cat house means. I don't know either. Cat house could be whore house. Yeah. But then where's the... But then it says her house. Yeah. So I don't know what's going on. And then, listen, Sean is saying a bunch of things that I suspect are intentionally confusing. The filter, what is it? The fence, don't know. Something with the water, not sure. Yeah.
All fine. All fine. And he's entering in as if he's just continuing a previous conversation, which makes sense for people who know each other well. But she knows something from the doula. She hasn't told him. Am I looking at her face? Is she contemplating telling him? Is she worried about telling him? I don't know what she knows. I don't know either. All I know is that she doesn't seem to be concerned about it here anymore either. I think all this is to say to Leah...
If there's one word I could give you, Leah, as advice for this, it is to focus. Focus in on what you want me to see. Focus in on why it matters. Yeah. And focus in on visually. Yeah. On your frame, the movement, all of that. Yeah, watch the scenes. Watch the scenes. These feel written. They don't feel watched. All right, Drew, can you help us out? What is the log line? What else is going to be happening in Lumpf?
Over a century into the water crisis, a couple moves to the former state of Arizona where they're pulled into a violent and mystical cult of doulas following the birth of their lump child. Okay. Well, I mean, my interest is piqued. I never considered that there would be a cult of violent doulas. Mm-hmm.
That's hysterical. I don't know what a lump child is. Cool. But a lot of questions. A lot of questions. I would say I'm intrigued because the fact that the doulas are an important part of the whole story, I wasn't getting that out of the... Not at all.
I'm surprised that that thing we saw in the first frame is actually a crucial part of the whole rest of it. Well, because they showed us doula. Doula, yeah. Not doulas. Well, there were other dusty old women out there, but... But they were playing cards by a fire in 100 degree heat. The thing that I think is missing from that log line that I'd love to hear is some brief reference to why doulas matter most.
at all in this new world, or at least more than they did now, or why they would conglomerate into a violent cult in a world with terrible infertility problems, in a world where no new babies have been born yet, in a world where only one out of a thousand children survive. Something to create relevance so that it's not just, because you could take the word doulas out and replace it with janitors, bubblegum manufacturers, Girl Scouts. Well, the thing I was missing in that long line is
Ingrid must make a choice. Basically, what is the decision that this central character has to make? Yeah. Yeah. All right, let's get to our third and final three-page challenge. This is The Dread Pirate Roberts, written by J. Brian Dick. Drew, help us out. So we're dropped from space down towards Earth, specifically the Carolina coast, and into the middle of a 17th century naval battle between two ships, the Revenge, which is filled with pirates, and the Queen's Pride, which is a Navy ship.
The captain of the Queen's pride believes they're winning, sends his steward, Wesley, 18, to go get his victory snuff. But as he does, the revenge turns and rams the Queen's pride and pirates storm the ship.
Too scared to do it himself, the captain gives Wesley a dagger to cut them free from the pirates' grappling hooks. Wesley is quickly stopped by a pirate named Scars, who encourages him to jump into the ocean like the rest of the Navy sailors. Wesley pretends to run away, but grabs a rope and slingshots back and knocks out Scars to cut the rope. But soon, a pirate in all black soars over them all, swinging up to the crow's nest triumphantly, and a knife is put to Wesley's neck.
Now, for listeners who are saying, hey, that sounds kind of familiar, we should say that underneath the title on the title page, it says, A Pilot for the Lost Adventures of the Black Masked Scallywags from The Princess Bride, William Goldman's Timeless Tale of True Love. So this is literally fan fiction. Yes. And that's fine. Fine. Are you allowed to sell this? No. No.
Not without permission. Are you allowed to write it as a sample? 100%. Absolutely. Nothing wrong with that. I actually applaud this choice because if I needed to read a sample...
And I sort of know what the source material is. Can this guy write in this kind of a style? Sure. And I think actually J. Brian Dick did a nice job here. I enjoyed reading these pages. Yeah. The challenge with this is the bar gets higher. It does. Because everybody's aware that you're cheating, right? You're not creating new characters. You're not creating a new world. You're not creating a tone. You're building off of something. Therefore, a little more expectation because you haven't had to cook at all yourself.
And in addition, when it's something that's derived from a beloved movie like The Princess Bride that basically everyone has seen in our business multiple times, you kind of need to also nail it. It's not enough to be good. Yeah. This felt fairly, it felt good, but I wasn't delighted. It just sort of was a pretty typical naval battle. There wasn't anything.
I mean, listen, you're trying to write like William Goldman. I mean, what a target that you put on your back. I mean, it's confident. Yes. It's crackling. There was one moment where I thought, oh, there's a missed opportunity where the captain gets scared and sends Wesley. That felt like it could have been a little bit more of a Goldman-esque situation.
turn from overconfident bravery to, oh, you there. You know, I have a thought. It just felt so quick as to be almost arbitrary. And, you know, it's a naval battle. I will say, like, I appreciated that J. Bryan didn't bury us in action description. Like, the boats collide and side by side
Got it. Okay, I can do that math. Absolutely. And we were focused on characters during it, which was crucial. I did feel there was a missed opportunity with the captain who's just a captain. Give that captain a name that crackles. His first line is only okay. The first line is, these pickaroons will be food for the sea. Reload, make this pass our last. There's a better version of that first line. I like pickaroons, but these pickaroons will feed the sea, man. Something about that could feel fun. And
Let us also know this is a bit of a comedy, because I didn't feel like we were quite getting to the joke. Even though the captain is not going to be a crucial character, he's the first person who speaks, and that becomes important. Yes. And that's sort of the issue is...
everything has to be, you know, as good as the prince's braid. Reading this made me think back to Mindy Kaling when she was on the show. We were talking about when she's staffing for shows, she gets frustrated by reading original pilots because she's like, I really miss the day when you would read specs of existing shows because then you can see like,
can this person write in somebody else's voice? And that's obviously what she needs to know is can this person do somebody else's thing? And I think what's nice about this is as a sample would be like, oh, this person is adaptable and sort of can get a thing which is really useful. And in a weird way, I suspect that this
pilot script which you can't shoot if it's all at its quality and goes beyond its quality will be useful because it shows the ability to match a style that's not their own and this would obviously hinge on the relationship between Wesley and the Dread Pirate Roberts and the promise of that story is enough to keep me going one thing that's sort of important tonally
is that The Princess Bride was framed as a tale where a grandfather is reading from a novel to his grandson. And I think that that is kind of baked in to the world of The Princess Bride. Even if you just want to start inside of it, which I think is reasonable, here's what you can't do. On page three, Scars says, "'What'll it be, boy?' With that, young Wesley charges to the side of the ship."
Scars reacts. That was too easy. But young Wesley doesn't go overboard. He launches himself into a taut rope and slingshots back at Scars. And Scars says, oh, she... We don't curse in The Princess Bride. Ever. That's not a thing. We don't do that. And so understanding tone is massively important. Absolutely. So that oh, she could be a reaction from Scars. You could put that in italics after that, but we wouldn't say it. Yes. We just...
We just wouldn't, we would not say that. We would not say that. So that idea of do you, will J. Brian Dick adopt that framing that this is a tale being told within this? Maybe. And I can imagine at a certain point, I think something just stops and it's like, but what happened next? And sure. Absolutely. Yes. So promise of fun, zippy pages to read, not a ton of what I would call fresh invention here, but enough to make me wonder like, okay,
I mean, I will say like the great idea here is to meet the Dread Pirate Roberts because we never met him. Well, we met Wesley, but he was not the first Dread Pirate Roberts. Yeah, that's fine. For me, he was not the first. I think what's also helpful about this is like if you had to pick between like 10 things to read and you saw this one, it's like, oh, I know what this is going to be. There's something comfortable about that. Absolutely. Yeah.
Drew, help us out. What else is the long line for the rest of this pilot? Set in the Princess Bride world, the Dread Pirate Roberts TV series follows the adventures of each person who donned the black mask to sail the high seas and command the revenge. Oh, well, that's an interesting idea that it's not just Wesley. It could also be like the history of... But then why are we starting with Wesley? What, that he was the last one? Can we go backwards? Or...
Or maybe there's a whole cadre of other folks who are still around and allowed to- I don't want to watch that. And I'll tell you why. All right. Because television shows, unless they are anthology shows like Black Mirror where everything is a different story, it's about connecting with the characters and the relationships. I want to watch the Dread Pirate Roberts tutor this young lad to whom he says at the end of every day, well done, probably kill you in the morning. Yeah. And then doesn't.
I want to see that father-son relationship happen. I don't want to just keep meeting new Dread Pirates audiences. Yeah, I do. I guess the version of this I want is basically hacks, but it's pirates. Well, sure. But, you know, like, did you see Our Flag Means Death? I did not get into Our Flag Means Death. I mean, it's... Yeah, but it's in that same space, for sure. It is in that same space, although definitely a different tone. But what I loved is you got to meet this ship full of wackos. Yeah. And...
got under the hood of those wackos and it was appreciated. If I kept going to different ships and different people... I doubt that's really what's happening here. This reminds me of, because I was just editing the chapter on sort of what kind of story this is. Basically, we're talking through in this script in this book chapter, like, I have this idea. Is it a movie idea? Is it a TV idea? And so, there is a movie idea for the Dread Pirate Roberts where, like, it's all contained within one thing. Yeah. But,
But there's also the TV show version of this is fun in the same way that Cheers is fun, is that like you are following a group of people and sort of the adventures of the week. And they don't change. Exactly. They don't change. That's the key. So it's always, it's not like, and every week we meet a new bartender in Cheers. So that part, I do think it would be a wonderful movie. I presume that this would be a movie. Yeah. It feels like it should be a movie. So let's talk about just the final like,
could you actually make this thing? You could. If this were terrific and I don't know who owns the rights. Is it Castle Rock? Who would own this? Yeah, it's Castle Rock, but you know, you would probably need, yeah, you wouldn't need permission from William Goldman. No.
Unless you were... No, you might. Because of the underlying book. Because of the underlying book. Yeah, but I suspect in buying the rights to the book... They probably bought it all out in perpetuity across the universe for all time. So yes, you're probably right. Then it would be Castle Rock. Not impossible. But you'd have to know there would be a tremendous outcry. There would be. I mean, the standards would have to be really high. This is meant for, hey, I'm a good writer. Not, hey, make this show. Yeah, yeah.
I think it's a good writing symbol. We want to thank everybody who submitted, all 250 of you who submitted, especially these three writers for letting us talk about their work on the air. So, and Drew, thank you again for burning your eyes out to read through all 250 of these. Don't know how you did that. It is time for our one cool thing.
My one cool thing is a show that's actually kind of in the same space and it's a specific episode of a TV series called The Goes Wrong Show. So, Craig, you may have seen on Broadway there's a show that plays The Goes Wrong. Sure. And so there's also a TV series, which the premise is that it's a theater troupe that puts on a show for television each week.
And so a director explains what the goal was and also tells us what challenges they felt they encountered that week. But never mind, it's going to go fine for this live TV thing. And then, of course, things go wrong at the premise. That's it all appealing to you. The episode I recommend to folks is one called 90 Degrees. And so it's a Tennessee Williams type play. The premise of the episode is that the set designers...
mistook 90 degrees as instructions for how one set was supposed to be built. Everything is turned. It turned 90 degrees. And so the cameras also turn 90 degrees for it. And so you have characters who are trying to sit around this table and they're falling down and gravity just works against them.
them. And so it's incredibly dumb, but also just delightful. I love dumb. And so it's a thing you could also watch with your kids because it's just, it's absurd and it's completely safe. And where would I find that? I think we found it on Amazon Prime. I would just Google and see what servers you can find it on. Sure. All right. What do you got for us? Well, my one cool thing is someone I met in Austin. We were down there for South by Southwest.
And myself and Neil Druckmann and the many of the cast of The Last of Us got to meet Cookie Monster. Oh my God, Cookie Monster's the best. And Elmo. Yeah. No offense to Elmo. Elmo's great. But Cookie Monster has been there, John, for our entire lives. Yeah.
And it is so strange to meet a puppet as a 53 year old and feel like you might cry because it's like when you smell something from your childhood, it's just this instant thing of getting back. Now, one thing I noticed about Cookie Monster that I did not expect is he's enormous. Those puppets are huge. They're so much bigger than you think they are. They're so big. Um,
But it was pretty... It reminded me of how powerful Sesame Street is as a cultural institution. And to the extent that these kinds of cultural institutions are being assaulted and undermined, it's so distressing because it is just an absolute positive thing that has lasted. Yeah. And every generation of children that comes along magically loves Cookie Monster. Yeah. And...
the color of the blue just his blue made me so happy so um i just want to thank sesame street and cookie monster for welcoming us into their studio i still don't know why
But they did. Craig, tell me, so I've never interacted with Muppets. Was it hard to maintain eye contact with the puppet and ignore the puppeteer? No, because the puppeteer gets very low. So there's a camera that's filming things and the puppeteer gets very low. In fact, there's quite a bit of scrambling right before they roll, which is like, lower, no, see you, lower, up.
So they just, and so then, yeah, and that's why the puppet is so big. Yeah. Because it actually has to fill a lot of space below frame to make sure that the puppeteer is not in the frame. That's great. That is our show for this week. Yeah. Scriveness is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Cialelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnhawks.com. That's also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You'll find us on Twitter at
You'll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You will find them at Cotton Bureau. You'll find the show notes with links for all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you again to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this show each and every week.
You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we are about to record on the secret things we noticed that let us know that something has been reshot. Craig, thanks for a fun episode. Thank you, John.