Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

No, my name is Craig Mason.

And you are listening to Episode 727 of Script Notes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, what is work? What is free?

Putting those terms together, what is free work?

And how should writers think about the time and effort they're putting in before getting paid?

Or after handing in a draft?

We will offer some guidelines for both writers and those seeking work out of writers.

We'll also answer a bunch of listener questions.

And in our bonus segment from premium members, Craig, let's discuss how writers should think about portraying law enforcement in this era where previous assumptions do not seem to hold. All right, I'll follow your lead. Yes, we'll talk about cops and FBI and everything else. Nice. First, some news, Burtigo, which is the game I made with Corey Martin, is now on the App Store. So you can put it on your iPhone or your iPad, your Macintosh. It turned out great. It feels very native to these devices. We got featured by Apple as one of the Apple games we love. Nice. So if you're curious about it, it is free. So just put it on your phone and play it.

It's free. It's free. It's a free game. Is there any sort of an app? You can do one migration per day. If you want to do multiple migrations per day, it's a one-time purchase, four bucks, and everything else is in there forever. I like it when there's an option. I like when there's an option to kick a little money somebody's way.

There are no ads.

Oh, thank you for that. Yeah, there's just cute pudgy birds. You know, you may understand this because you create apps. So I'll play a lot of escape games. Oh, yeah. And there's like a lot of junky ones that are made, and they're just ads supported,

and they don't even give you an option to get rid of the ads.

And the ads are almost always for some other dumb game.

Yeah, it's a whole ecosystem.

And it's a specific kind of dumb game where you either are like mowing down waves of zombies

or you're like that.

Or you have to save the king some crap about

the king i don't want i don't care about the monarchy right why are we so like into that i don't know

yeah like oh my god i got to save the king no why don't we form a democratic republic i like that as a

choice yeah yeah so uh if you are playing vertigo and want to uh send through a screenshot your high score, your highest playing Word, I would love to see those. Those are always really fun. If you are playing it, please give us five stars and leave us a review in the app store because that helps people find it into the game. Another app is Weekend Read, and Drew, you have the award season scripts up in there, right? Yeah, I'm not doing Weekend Read much anymore. That's right. Of course, Chris is doing it now. But tell us about the award season. We've got all of the four-de-consideration scripts from 2025 in the 26 award season now on weekend read. So for the features. All the features. All the features. Yeah, so it's good. So you saw the movie in the theaters. You loved it. Now see what it actually looked like on the page and see what is the same, what change. I love that. And you can sort of see what it was like before it became the feature that you loved. Very important follow up. Craig, you have solved your email crisis. Well, somebody solved it for me.

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