Hello and welcome, my name is John Auguste, my name is Drew Markhart, and this is a script

note sidecast, a short episode about one thing.

I feel like so often on these sidecasts we're talking about the things you shouldn't do,

and I wanted to change around and actually talk about things you could and should and may

want to do more of during this strike period.

And today I want to talk about specifically reading, because reading is fundamental.

Yeah, every writer starts out as a reader.

And sometimes literally, like sometimes that's literally your job.

I was a reader at Paramount, as an unpaid intern, and then that's that way into a paid reader

job at TriStar, where I would get four scripts a week to read and write coverage on.

It was a factory and I learned a lot.

I read a ton of scripts, but even during the time I was doing that, I was also reading

stuff on my own, building up my collection of sort of like things I loved.

Now, did you ever work as a professional reader?

Not as a professional reader.

I was working as a development intern.

So I was much cheaper than a professional reader, but oh my God, same, so much coverage

and then reading.

And I feel like we read the time as we're first starting out, because we're trying to figure

out like what is this format, even like what is a screenplay, how does it translate from

what's on the page to what we see on the screen there.

But just because you learned it doesn't mean you stop learning and I feel like reading

...