Victoria Pynchon discusses negotiation tactics using the scene from True Grit (linked above) where 14-year-old Mattie Ross gets the better of a cotton trader who initially refuses to buy back horses he sold to Mattie’s recently murdered father. Pynchon breaks down the different pivots of who controls the conversation, and highlights the ways Mattie establishes and maintains her authority throughout the negotiation.
Jonathan Hughes and Danny Artel offer ideas for a granular approach to negotiations. They focus on considering details about who else outside the immediate negotiation might be a stakeholder, as well as expanding the scope to consider other benefits to both sides just beyond the original boundaries of the discussion.
Former hostage negotiator J. Paul Nadeau reviews hostage negotiations from film and television against best practices followed in the field. His main focus: How a negotiator needs to invest in the conversation and not just act as a stalling tactic for others. This lines up with former FBI Agent Joe Navarro, whose explanation of the different stages of a negotiation tie in to making sure the person you’re working with feels comfortable and finds ways to trust you.
The great British diplomat and writer Harold Nicholson believed there were two kinds of negotiators: warriors and shopkeepers. Warriors use negotiations as a way to gain time and a stronger position. Shopkeepers operate on the principle that it is more important to establish trust, to moderate each side’s demands and come to a mutually satisfying settlement. Whether in diplomacy or in business, the problem arises when shopkeepers assume they are dealing with another shopkeeper only to find they are facing a warrior.
–Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War
Daniel Shapiro lectures on “Negotiating the Nonnegotiable,” offering suggestions for how to break out of a tribal mindset and find the common ground between deeply divided parties.
Adam Richlin and Joe Astarita share their tips for negotiating with producers as members of the grip and electric departments on film and tv sets. It’s a look at how to get the best deal in terms of money, time, and safety.
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New to Discover in Weekend Read 2: Pilot Scripts
This week there’s a new batch of scripts to read in the Discover tab of Weekend Read 2: Our Favorite Pilots!
Whether you unlocked the Pro version or downloaded it for free, you can check out these pilot scripts and add them to your library.
Weekend Read 2 fits screenplays perfectly on your iPhone or iPad. No more squint, pinch & zoom when trying to read on the go.
This new update to Weekend Read also makes it easy to add and share notes on a script while on-the-go, and the Read-Aloud feature lets you go eyes-free and listen to your scripts narrated in a range of high-quality voices.
See for yourself—Download Weekend Read 2 from the App Store!
WGA Strike Reading
How did we get here? Josef Adalian and Lane Brown look for answers by investigating the rise of streaming media, and how it involved a departure from business models that valued making a profit off of selling entertainment and shifted toward a tech-focused model based in subscriber numbers and projections:
In 2017, Disney CEO Bob Iger told investors that he would pull his company’s movies and shows from Netflix, ending a lucrative licensing deal, to start its own streaming service. AT&T (which then owned HBO and Warner Bros.) and Comcast (which owns NBCUniversal) did the same. They willingly sacrificed hundreds of millions in revenue at the same time they were burning billions to make shows for their new apps.
This ties in with Tracy Durnell’s recent post about how this business model feeds a push toward pivoting to AI to more cheaply satisfy the need of a continuous flow of new content:
As Tim Carmody highlights, studios are barely entertainment companies anymore as they move into streaming, with the entertainment they make merely the hook for their real profit-centers. They make culture, but they value culture only insofar as it makes them money. The end game they envision is generating content for next to nothing; with an endless supply of content, everyone will find something good enough to watch, letting them maintain a vast customer base.
Towards that future, studios are self-cannibalizing their own industry by destroying career development for writers. They don’t value storytelling or recognize script-writing as a craft needing industry knowledge. As Dave Karpf writes, studios will satisfice their processes and products using AI if they can get away with it, accepting mediocre scripts as the price of profitability.
If you write for 60 minutes, I’ll write for 60. Deal?
Each week we post a comment thread for writers to meet up, cheer each other on, and put some words on the page with a Write Sprint.
What’s a Write Sprint?
John wrote up an explanation, but here’s the short version: Set a timer for 60 minutes, close down all distractions, and do nothing but write until that timer goes off.
Shout out to last week’s Sprinters Damian, Brian Matusz, Elyse Moretti Forbes, Mark Leiren-Young, John Harvey, and Aimee Link!
Previously on Inneresting…
In case you missed it, in last issue’s most clicked link Arthur C. Brooks explores how people with avoidant attachment styles are more likely to invest in parasocial relationships, and how this can trigger further distancing from the people directly involved in their lives.
Other Inneresting Things
Anne Helen Peterson dissects Optimization Culture, and the anxiety that comes with thinking there must be One Best Way:
Remodeling is the attempt to find “the one best way” with our physical spaces; wellness culture is “the one best way” with our bodies; productivity culture is “the one best way” with our work lives. And like all quests for optimization, they’re sinkholes. You think you’re standing on solid ground, just scrolling your phone dreaming about a steam oven and downloading a new list-making app and listening to someone on TikTok emphatically tell you you’re doing [blank] wrong, but then you look up and realize you’re not just trying to make a few things better, or easier, or more straightforward — you’re dissatisfied with your whole damn life, and have been for some time.
Jaya Saxena shares a look at a new, elevated take on American Cheese (yes, I’m serious), and a history of processed cheese dating back to 1911 Switzerland.
Animator Brett Foxwell uses 2,400 leaves to make this stop motion film:
Reading the room
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And that’s what’s inneresting this week!
Inneresting is edited by Chris Csont, with contributions from readers like you and the entire Quote-Unquote team.
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