Hey, this is John. A standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids. There's some swearing in this episode.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Um, my name is Craig Mason. And you're listening to episode 695 of script notes. It's a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Often on this program, we offer advice to young filmmakers and screenwriters on the next steps they should take in their career.

Today on the show, we're going to turn our attention instead to a young development executive or aspiring development executive and offer her our guidance.

How do you become an exec, an agent, a manager, a producer?

We'll talk about the first steps and next steps she should consider.

I also want to talk about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations and how they interact to form story.

With a specific example of the police procedural, to help us do this,

we welcome back Scott Frank, a legendary screenwriter and director, whose credits include out-of-sight, Minority Report,

Gins Gambit, and the new Department Q on Netflix. Welcome back to Scott Frank. Thank you for having me.

I'm mildly happy to be here. Well, that makes one of you. Yes, thank you. And so it begins.

And you actually had an agenda coming in here too

because you said you wanted to talk about how we're educating writers.

Get us a little sense of what you want to dive into.

Yeah, you know, I just noticed because I mentor quite a few writers

and I've been doing, as you've been doing,

the Sundance Lab for now, I think 30 years or something.

I'm only 25 years.

You got me there.

Okay, good.

So the thing I'm noticing a lot, at the labs, in particular, we get a lot of people post-film

...